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Wednesday, 1 October 2025 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | |
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ANOTHER bloody power failure!
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Into the office first thing this morning to discover that hydra had rebooted. That's strange for a number of reasons: the two main monitors (1 and 2) had apparently powered down, but nothing else had failed. And in the past hydra has powered down and not come up automatically. In addition it was on a UPS, which should have protected it. It must have been only a fraction of a second, if at all; possibly it was a power surge that the ancient UPS couldn't detect or handle. But that's surprising because it took down the monitors as well. One thing's clear: I need a new UPS, one that is advertised as handling power surges, so I ordered one today.
Bringing hydra up wasn't completely simple: for some reason the automatic file system checks failed, and when I got through the manual checks (which used the journals) and loaded the nvidia-modeset module, I still couldn't start X. Why? No idea. It claimed that the module wasn't loaded, but it was, and it had already probed the hardware and reported it. So for once I rebooted the machine, after which things worked normally.
When did it happen? In the night sometime. For some reason syslog wasn't working after reboot, so I didn't get the boot messages. My first suspicion was round 0:30, but then I got various other messages:
Oct 1 01:57:15 eureka kernel: newnfs server hydra:/: not responding
So some time before that. But then the daily messages, sent with some delay, contained:
Date: Wed, 1 Oct 2025 11:43:25 +1000 (AEST)
Local network system status:
hydra up 8:32, 0 users, load 0.09, 0.06, 0.01
That would suggest that it rebooted round 3:11. But can I trust the mail message date? The cron job starts at 0:21. About all I can say is that it was some time during the night.
Haircut and shopping
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Topic: general, gardening | Link here |
Into Sebastopol for a haircut today, then to Bunnings for some shopping, including some flowers:
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Where do I put them? I had intended them for the “island” in the driveway, but I'm no longer sure that's a good place.
Thursday, 2 October 2025 | Dereel | Images for 2 October 2025 |
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Cabbage noodle experiment
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
For the fun of it, I got a quarter cabbage to experiment with last week. I cooked one breakfast on Saturday, but there's plenty left. OK, I have established that there's a continuum of cabbage dishes, from that one (包菜炒粉/麵, “cabbage fried rice noodles”) via手 撕包菜 (“hand-torn cabbage”) all the way to phat si-io (pad see ew, “fried soya sauce”). How about a bit of an experiment? Hand-tear the cabbage as intended, but use different noodles (Guan miao) and the sauce for phat si-io. The ingredients are similar:
quantity | ingredient | step | ||
140 g | cabbage, torn by hand | 1 | ||
20 g | garlic | 1 | ||
10 g | ginger | 1 | ||
chili | 1 | |||
5 | Szechuan pepper corns | 1 | ||
oil for cooking | 1 | |||
65 g | minced pork | 2 | ||
15 g | oyster sauce | 3 | ||
8 g | sugar | 3 | ||
20 g | light soya sauce | 3 | ||
15 g | dark soya sauce | 3 | ||
15 g | vinegar | 3 | ||
15 g | fish sauce | 3 | ||
75 g | Guan miao noodles, cooked | 4 | ||
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The result? Edible, but not ideal. Guan miao isn't appropriate: I need noodles that absorb more liquid. As it was there was too much juice. I had added some tauge when I saw it happeneing, but it wasn't enough:
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In addition the cabbage was too coarse and too thick, making it tough, and the result was too sweet. In Phat si-io the cabbage is cooked at a high temperature, caramelizing the result, but that didn't happen here. too sweet
Independently of all that I had put in 5 whole grains of Szechuan pepper, which proved to be (just) more than enough. I need to experiment more with Szechuan pepper.
Gardening again
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
What do I do with the flowers that I bought yesterday? Plant them, of course, and where I had originally planned:
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I'm still not sure if that's a good place, but it's certainly better than letting them wither in the kitchen. But I still have half of them left, so I'm not done yet. And coincidentally this was the first time in years that I have done anything in the garden. And looking at the photo times, the whole effort took less than 6 minutes.
Is it raining yet?
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
It's still very dry, but over the last week we've had about 20 mm (count them, 20 mm) of rain. Has it made any difference? Here the neighbour's pond on 8 September and now:
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I had hoped that it would show a rise, but I don't see much difference. It doesn't help that I took it from a different perspective.
Friday, 3 October 2025 | Dereel | Images for 3 October 2025 |
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Digitalocean problems
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
While writing yesterday's diary this morning, discovered that I couldn't upload any images to DigitalOcean. It just timed out. Further investigation showed some breakage in the connection between Australia and New York, though it's not clear to what extent the output of mtr is relevant, which shows about 6% packet loss at port-channel8122.ccr92.jan02.atlas.cogentco.com. But ping tells a very different story:
22 packets transmitted, 8 packets received, 63.6% packet loss
There were no outage notices from digitalocean, but Daniel O'Connor confirmed that he had similar issues. It seems only to relate to access from Australia. Put in a ticket, but of course by the time they responded, the service was back to normal.
Phat si-io again
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Topic: food and drink, language, opinion | Link here |
After yesterday's experiment, tried the original pad see ew (or is that phat si-io? I think so) again. About the only difference was that I used up the remainder of the cabbage, this time cut finely. And that worked fine.
More Android pain
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
What's this?
Can't find dimensions for 'Android-pain-1.jpeg'
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Clearly it's a mobile phone display. It seems that the purple icon is a message bubble or some such nonsensical term. What good is it? None whatsoever, unless it's to annoy me. How did it appear? No idea. How do you get rid of it? All the “help” I could get didn't work, pointing to things that don't exist. After nearly an hour of messing around in different places in the settings, finally got rid of it—and forgot where it was. About the only thing learnt was that Android finds new ways to annoy me, the menu structures differ from phone to phone, and the settings are hidden in all sorts of places you wouldn't expect.
Chrome pain
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Another thing that has occurred since upgrading hydra is that the editing keys (Emacs-like) have gone away and been replaced by something stupid. How do I reinstate them? This time it was simple, with the help of Google Gemini:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-key-theme "Emacs"
And that worked. The only issue is that I frequently have difficulty finding these answers later.
Jane Ashhurst visits
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Topic: general | Link here |
Jane Ashhurst along to visit today, causing Yvonne some logistic problems: both she and Martin Godwin (the farrier) were due this afternoon, and both were delayed to various extents. But in the end all went well.
Wednesday, 15 October 2025 | Dereel | |
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USB-C: The universal connector that isn't
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Topic: fiction, technology, general, opinion | Link here |
This hasn't happened yet. In fact, it will never happen. This is the first of a set of entries generated by ChatGPT on 31 August 2025. See there for discussion.
Spent the morning trying to connect my new external drive to the laptop, only to discover that not all USB-C cables are created equal. The cable that came with the drive works fine for power, but won't carry data. The one from my phone charges everything but transfers nothing. And the expensive "high-speed" cable I bought last month? Perfect for everything except video.
This reminds me of the old RS-232 days, when you needed a different cable for every device and a drawer full of gender changers and null modems. We thought we'd solved this with USB, and for a while we had. USB-A was USB-A. It either worked or it didn't.
Now we have USB-C, which looks identical regardless of capability. USB 2.0 speeds, USB 3.2, Thunderbolt 3, Thunderbolt 4, power delivery at various voltages, DisplayPort alternate mode, and combinations thereof. All in connectors that look exactly the same.
This is a perfect example of what happens when committee design meets marketing pressure. The engineers wanted flexibility, the manufacturers wanted cost savings, and the marketing departments wanted "universal". What we got was universally confusing.
At least the old parallel port cables had different connectors for different capabilities. You knew a Centronics cable was for printers, not modems.
Morning photography
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Topic: fiction, photography, general | Link here |
The light this morning was exceptional—one of those crisp autumn days where everything seems to have more contrast than usual. Took the opportunity to reshoot the house from the north side for the monthly house photos.
While reviewing the images, I noticed something I'd missed before: the shadow patterns from the solar panels create an interesting geometric overlay on the garden below. It changes throughout the day, of course, but at this time of morning it creates an almost Art Deco pattern across the lavender bushes.
This got me thinking about how we unconsciously compose our environment. When we installed those panels five years ago, I was focused entirely on energy efficiency and roof aesthetics. The shadow patterns were an unintended consequence that turned out to be rather pleasant.
Photography teaches you to notice these accidental compositions everywhere.
Cat behavioral patterns
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Topic: fiction, animals, general, opinion | Link here |
Piccola has developed a new routine. Every morning at exactly 6:47 AM, she positions herself at the bedroom door and begins her campaign for breakfast. Not 6:45, not 6:50—6:47.
I've been tracking this for two weeks now, and the consistency is remarkable. She's more accurate than my atomic clock. How does she do it? Internal circadian rhythms? Sensitivity to changes in light that I can't perceive? Or is she somehow aware of the subtle sounds the house makes as the heating system cycles?
Bruno, by contrast, operates on "breakfast happens when the human gets up" time, which varies considerably. Two different strategies for the same goal.
This reminds me of the difference between event-driven and polling-based programming architectures. Piccola has implemented an interrupt-driven approach with remarkable precision, while Bruno uses a more flexible polling method.
Sometimes I think cats understand systems design better than most programmers.
Afternoon frustrations with smart devices
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Topic: fiction, technology, general, opinion | Link here |
The "smart" thermostat decided to update its firmware this afternoon. Without warning, naturally. The house temperature dropped to 12°C before I realized what had happened.
Post-update, the interface has changed completely. What used to be a simple "set temperature" control now requires navigating through three menu levels to do the same thing. Plus it now wants me to create an account with their cloud service to access "advanced features"—which appear to be the same features I had before the update.
When did thermostats become subscription services? It's a device that should set a temperature and maintain it. Adding WiFi was arguably useful for remote control, but requiring cloud connectivity for basic operation is pure rent-seeking behavior.
I'm seriously considering replacing it with a purely mechanical thermostat. At least those fail in predictable ways.
Evening reading: RFC archaeology
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Topic: fiction, technology, general, history | Link here |
Spent the evening reading through some old RFCs, particularly RFC 793 (TCP specification) and RFC 791 (IP). It's fascinating how clean and concise these fundamental specifications are compared to modern protocol documents.
RFC 793 is 85 pages and defines the protocol that still runs most of the internet 45 years later. Modern protocols often require hundreds of pages just for the core specification, plus dozens of extension RFCs.
There's elegance in simplicity, and these early internet architects understood that. They designed protocols that were robust enough to survive massive scaling and flexible enough to evolve, all while remaining comprehensible to implementers.
Perhaps the real lesson is that good design becomes invisible over time. We take TCP/IP for granted precisely because it works so well.
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