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| Monday, 7 July 2025 | Dereel | Images for 7 July 2025 |
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Tidying up
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Topic: general | Link here |
Once again I'm behind on daily things. My mail queue, an indication of my overload, is up to over 80 messages. Spent some time today trying to tidy things up, and managed to get my mail queue down to 13. Some of those are particularly important ones that I have let drag for months.
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A new lagoon
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Yvonne's machine, lagoon.lemis.com, is seriously down-rev:
=== grog@lagoon (/dev/pts/9) ~ 2 -> uname -a
FreeBSD lagoon.lemis.com 12.1-STABLE FreeBSD 12.1-STABLE r355358 GENERIC amd64=== grog@lagoon (/dev/pts/9) ~ 3 -> l /boot/kernel/kernel
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 31,364,536 12 Dec 2020 /boot/kernel/kernel
I had started to upgrade it over two years ago, but somehow didn't finish. But now I have a new machine, the one I bought for running Microsoft Windows 11 a few months back, but which proved to be only marginally faster than distress. So I ordered a new SSD, found I had the wrong kind, returned it and finally got a functional one.
What a pain these Lenovo motherboards are! I've already been through all that when I got it, but I had to go through it all over again today.
Finally it was in place, and I was able to establish that the “BIOS” setup doesn't report it, at least not in any form that I can see. But FreeBSD finds it and was able to install on it. It also enabled me to check the speed of the “disk”. It's no speed demon: dd reported read speeds round 700 MB/s. To be checked again when the system is up and running.
Now to configure the beast. But where are my notes? They're not in my HOWTO page. Did a bit of obvious configuration to bring it into my network, but it looks like I'm in for another search for the notes that I know I made.
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Another gochujang-based chili sauce
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Seen in the New York Times today: a recipe for Gochujang Burger With Spicy Slaw. “Slaw" indeed! But the Gochujang proved to be a sauce very similar to my chili sauce.
How do I compare them? With difficulty. The ingredient table mixes the sauce with the “Burger”. Here's my best attempt to extract the sauce ingredients and compare with mine (first two columns):
| Ingredient | my quantity | NYT quantity | ||
| Gochujang | 100 g | 3 Tsp | ||
| vinegar | 15 g | 3 Tsp | ||
| sugar | 20 g | 1 Tsp | ||
| garlic | 25 g | 4 cloves | ||
| olive oil | 3 Tsp | |||
| sesame oil, toasted | 1 Tsp | |||
How does that compare? The olive oil looks wrong to me. The sesame oil is one of the ingredients in bibimjang that I deliberately omitted from the recipe when I derived this one.
And the quantities? Who can tell? How much does a clove of garlic weigh? I've established that it could be between 1.2 and 32 g. An average might be 7.5 g. And even the relatively straightforward ratios of 1 or 3 tablespoons say nothing about the weights. So if I do try it, I'll probably guess. Certainly the 1:1 ratio of gochujang and vinegar seems very acid, and surprisingly for a US recipe the sugar might be on the low side.
| Tuesday, 8 July 2025 | Dereel | Images for 8 July 2025 |
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Still more system installation
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Where did I put those notes that I made a while back the last time that I tried to formalize system installation? Spent some time searching my file systems and my diary, but I drew a blank. Gradually I had a recollection of a series of configuration files and Makefiles, but I couldn't find anything to match. Mañana.
I did, however, build a new world, and after that tried more speed tests on the SSD:
=== root@lagune (/dev/pts/0) /usr/src 28 -> dd if=/dev/nda0 of=/dev/null count=10000 bs=128k
10000+0 records in
10000+0 records out
1310720000 bytes transferred in 1.487479 secs (881168964 bytes/sec)=== root@lagune (/dev/pts/0) /usr/src 29 -> dd if=/dev/nda0 of=/dev/null count=10000 bs=128k iseek=10000
10000+0 records in
10000+0 records out
1310720000 bytes transferred in 1.143293 secs (1146443065 bytes/sec)
The speed difference was repeatable. Why should it matter where you read from?
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Buying wine on the web
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Topic: food and drink, technology, opinion | Link here |
Mclaren Vale Cellars have a special Sauvignon Blanc at the moment, with a whopping 43% discount for regular customers.
OK, check it out. How do I log in? There's a wobbling button saying LOGIN TO SAVE, but clicking on it does nothing interesting. But checking “My account” shows my previous orders, so clearly I'm already logged in. But the price stubbornly refuses to change.
Tried all sorts of things, to no avail. Finally clicked on “Chat”. And how about that, I got a response from a Real Person, whose name turns out to be Tom (Curtis? He didn't say). And he was interested enough to call me up and discuss the matter in some detail. We came across a whole lot of issues in the course of 25 minutes trying things out, and I nearly managed to get the correct price in my “cart”. But the price ($96) was under the magic $100 for free freight, so I added a bottle of another wine, and bang! the price for the first went back to $168 again!
What went wrong? I tried on firefox on hydra.lemis.com, Chromium on hydra.lemis.com and firefox on distress.lemis.com (Microsoft). The behaviour was different on Microsoft. I think I managed to log in, but that was the only difference.
In the end we gave up. Tom sent me an invoice for the correct price and all was well. But clearly they have a number of things to discuss with their web programmers.
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Spot that cat
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Topic: animals, photography, opinion | Link here |
Seen this evening:
There's Bruno hiding again. Where? Hard to see, but with some photo processing he's there:
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Hopefully he won't get hurt.
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Health care by script writers
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Topic: health, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
One of the more improbable German TV series is Bettys Diagnose, about the nurses in a clinic in Aachen.
This evening we watched episode 11/2, „Außer Kontrolle“. A person arrived with methanol poisoning. How could they tell? She was very drunk and saw double. Only those are not the symptoms: yes, methanol is very dangerous for the eyesight, but Google Gemini tells me the symptoms are blurred vision, Photophobia (sensitivity to light), "snowstorm vision" or "halo vision", decreased visual acuity, complete or partial blindness (often permanent), dilated pupils, optic disc hyperemia (redness of the optic nerve head) and retinal oedema. Seeing double is something completely different. And she had only drunk one glass of contaminated spirits, which wouldn't have left her seriously drunk the following day.
But then the script writer found something useful:
Methanol wird von der Leber anders verwertet als gewöhnlicher Alkohol: Es entsteht Ameisensäure und Formaldehyd.
“Methanol is metabolized to formic acid and formaldehyde”. Well, yes, though in the opposite sequence. But then the script writer seems to have lost interest in his sources:
Wir beschäftigen jetzt Ihre Leber mit Alkohol, damit diese das Methanol nicht umwandelt in Ethanol.
“We will occupy your liver with alcohol, so that it (the liver) doesn't change the methanol into ethanol”. Clearly he doesn't have the foggiest idea what ethanol is. One can only hope that people watching the programme don't believe the nonsense presented there.
| 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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