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| Friday, 18 July 2025 | Dereel | Images for 18 July 2025 |
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Trusting digital devices
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Topic: health, general, technology, opinion | Link here |
My normal weight over the last few years has been between 87 and 88 kg. But a little over a year ago I was concerned that I was losing weight: it had dropped to 84.7 kg, enough of an anomaly that I talked to my doctor about it. He wasn't concerned, and over the next few weeks it returned to normal
But now, for some reason, I'm putting on weight. Nothing to be alarmed about, but between 88 and 89 kg. Until this morning, where my scales told me that I suddenly weighed 90.1 kg, the highest I have ever measured. Why? Weighed myself on Yvonne's scales. 89.1 kg.
What's wrong with my scales? It took a while to consider that it might be batteries. Yes, AAA non-rechargeable cells, showing 1.41 V. OK, put in some more. Oh, no more. Rechargeables? Yes. The scales were all over the place, going between 88 and 92 kg. OK, put in some Nickel-Zinc batteries. They seem to work, though it's interesting to see how the brightness of the display reflects the voltage of the batteries. But it's interesting to consider the difference between these scales and the good old mechanical ones. The old ones worked as long as they weren't damaged. Digital devices have so many potential sources of error that it's really hard to detect them. Time for a second set of scales for comparison?
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Power fail!
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
Grid power failure this morning, the first in over four months. But the inverter cut out for at least 15 seconds, possibly closer to a minute: I had time to walk into the garage and confirm the situation before it powered on again.
Why? The only explanation I can think of is that the inverter was overloaded. Looking at the inverter logs, this doesn't seem to be the case:
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The power (purple trace in the middle) was out from 10:37 to 11:03, but the highest power registered before the dropout was round 2.5 kW, tending less. It should handle 6 kW with no trouble. On the other hand, how reliable are these graphs? They show a minimum power consumption of 621 W while the inverter and grid were both out. It would only have taken the air conditioner to decide to turn on at this point and there would have been a spike over 6 KW.
OK, time to finally put that UPS back in circuit. Oh. It doesn't work. Connect to power, turn it on and it grunts to itself a couple of times before screaming incessantly, not responding to the RESET button (described as a circuit breaker in the manual). Dead already? It's only 2½ years old! Conveniently it had a 2 year warranty. Somehow that purchase was particularly bad. So I had to bring them up again without a UPS.
As it was, I had to restart hydra and eureka, not helped by cable issues: eureka is normally not connected to a monitor, and I had forgotten which of the two monitors had a cable to which of the four display outputs. Finally, after some searching, found that it was the wrong one, but that the cable had come loose.
Bringing the systems up wasn't that difficult. About the only issue was that hydra's syslogd wouldn't log to eureka. That seems to be related to the fact that hydra was up and running before eureka was listening, and for some reason syslogd had given up trying. newsyslog didn't help: I had to restart syslogd.
Then there were issues with mouse buttons. My script to do it failed because it was looking for a specific mouse. In principle it's simple:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/19) ~ 7 -> xinput
⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ System mouse id=6 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ Telink 2.4G Mouse id=10 [slave pointer (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)]
↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ System keyboard multiplexer id=7 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Power Button id=8 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ vendor 0x0430 Sun USB Keyboard id=9 [slave keyboard (3)]=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/19) ~ 8 -> xinput set-button-map 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 2 2
This sets the thumb buttons (8 and 9) to button 2.
And of course my cold start HOWTO was out of date. That's something that I really need to pay attention to.
But things still didn't work right! firefox hung after restarting. Other profiles worked, but I wanted to recover this specific session. Lots of searching before I got this popup:
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Bloody Adblock! Far from blocking all ads, it produces its own from time to time, and somehow this time it managed to break things. Goodbye, Adblock, and good riddance! On Juha Kupiainen's recommendation installed uBlock Origin, which confuses things by claiming not to be an ad blocker. We'll see how that works.
To add insult to injury, the messing around seems to have broken my firefox configuration. Text sizes, once almost under control, are now all over the place. Maybe it's really time to leave firefox and try to live with Chromium).
| Saturday, 19 July 2025 | Dereel | Images for 19 July 2025 |
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“Wise” transfers: the pain
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne has found a new horse training course, TRT Method. They want money for it, €197 (or, as they put it, 90% off €2142). Another scam? No, Jane Ashcroft and Shelly Cooper have both bought it and found it excellent.
OK, so I have to pay for it. More fun with this horrible Wise web site. I need to stock up my funds, involving transferring money from my bank. In the past that was so complicated that I created a (local, clearly) page with details of the hoops I had to jump through and the account to which I should transfer the money. But is that still valid? Their help told me to do the impossible, go to the home page (find your own way, we won't give you a link or any other help) and press on the + symbol. And there was none, just Send, Add money (huh?) and Request. On the face of it, Add money sounds the most likely. Click on that and it divulges no further information; first I have to “Enter the amount you wish to add”, not where it's pointing, but above the text.
But even then it wasn't clear what to do. Going through all the motions, though, and yes, I was able to transfer the money. And yes, the account details were completely different from the ones I had saved. Why do they make it so difficult?
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Goodbye ANZ, part 1
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Topic: general | Link here |
While fighting bank web sites, finally closed down my ANZ credit card, the one I have had since 1997. Once they were free, but now they cost round $300 a year. Why should I pay that? So for the first time in decades, we don't have any credit cards.
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Online courses: the pain
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Topic: animals, technology, opinion | Link here |
So Yvonne has her TRT Method course. Came into her office for something unrelated and found her cursing at her computer. They wanted her to log in, but it wasn't working.
Not her fault. It's broke:
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But surely they would have found that out very quickly. Much searching. It works with Microsoft! So it's a server issue—as the error display stated—and not a network issue. After much more grumbling, came to the conclusion that this was trtmethod's inimitable way of saying “Your browser is out of date”.
Guilty as charged. I've been working at a snail's pace to upgrade lagoon.lemis.com, but it looks as if I'm going to have to speed things up.
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The last steamboat?
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Steamboat again for dinner this evening, with the intention of using up some food that's been around for ever. In fact, we had much the same ingredients only 4 months ago. This time I found it alright, but Yvonne left behind all the delicacies that I had chosen. I'm disappointed. I wonder how long it will be before we each eat our own food for dinner. I have so many foodstuffs in the pantry that I can't serve to her.
| 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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