Checking on the news this morning on albo.lemis.com, my mobile phone, I saw an
advertisement telling me to ditch my relatively accurate blood pressure monitor and use a
mobile phone app.
OK, I'll bite. How does that work? It even wants to measure blood sugar (but only in
unaccustomed mg/dl) and BMI.
Installed it, but I couldn't get it to work. Instead it was so full of advertisements that
I couldn't find out what it was supposed to do, nor whether it could do it. Somehow these
apps are getting so advertisement-oriented that they're completely useless. By the time I
gave up, I had accidentally installed 5 different apps, all of which were overloaded with
advertisements. One claimed, without reading, that my blood pressure was 119/79, and my
pulse was 69. Is that just guesswork?
About the only thing of interest was one that claimed to read my blood pressure via the
camera. Place your finger on the “camera”. Wait. Which camera? It turned on the light,
which I thought was what I needed, but no, it was one of the other lenses. And at the end
it came up with the decision that my pulse was 83/min.
And the blood pressure? Another dozen advertisements. And then, without any measurement,
it decided that it was 100/75, and my pulse was 70. Was that the same app? By comparison,
I measured 118/65 and a pulse of 87 (!) with a real blood pressure monitor.
So what's the point of these things? They're so inaccurate and hard to use that their
suggestion of ditching the correct equipment is just plain stupid.
Still more work on bde.lemis.com today. Yesterday I had established that the keyboard mapping still wasn't correct.
Off to compare what I had done. The problem I had was that the key at bottom left (marked
“ctrl” should be Meta. OK, check the keymap file
(/home/local/X/keyboard/default-map). xev tells me that the key has the code
37:
KeyPress event, serial 33, synthetic NO, window 0xc00001,
root 0x3ec, subw 0x0, time 93545014, (77,123), root:(726,147),
state 0x0, keycode 37 (keysym 0xffe3, Control_L), same_screen YES,
And what's in /home/local/X/keyboard/default-map?
keycode 37 = Control_L NoSymbol Control_L
OK, fix that then. But while checking, the key generated Meta_L. Where did that
come from? What am I missing?
What I did manage was to set up Nextcloud so that video and loudspeaker
worked, the latter very quietly. It's too polite to test the microphone, which has multiple
ways of describing itself. In the system probes I have
May 11 14:57:36 bde kernel: uaudio0: <C-Media Electronics Inc. USB PnP Sound Device, class 0/0, rev 1.10/1.00, addr 1> on usbus0
But that's not what the web browser wants. For some reason, despite my telling it to save
the information, it kept coming back with microphone 1, the one that didn't work. And for
reasons I really don't understand, it always comes up in laterally inverted mode. Why? I
can correct it, but why should I? It seems to be some kind of brain damage in this area:
Zoom does it too. But finally I
was able to get something like a test done:
Unfortunately, it's too polite to test my microphone. Fired up Zoom and confirmed that yes, it works. But
while looking at that, looked at the memory usage:
As the image shows, it's flimsy. I had great difficulties cutting the chips: the potatoes
seemed to be firmer than the cutter. And the results were less than encouraging. I had
gradually come to the conclusion that the thing was a waste of time and money.
But before finally discarding it, it occurred to me: these things cut two different
thicknesses. The one I had been using was the finer of the two, roughly 8.5 mm square (64
chips max per cut). But there's a second cutter, offering roughly 11 mm mainly square (36
chips, some rectangular cross section). Try that?
The good news: the potato cut with no trouble at all. And the results didn't
look that bad:
But they were still so dark that I pulled them out of the fat 1 minute before they were due.
And they weren't completely cooked. Clearly both the deep fryer and the chip cutter really
wanted me to use this size.
But why? I don't like the look of the chips, they don't taste any better, and they're the
wrong size for my taste. I won't throw the cutter away yet, but I don't see myself using it
again in the foreseeable future.
In passing, weights again: 206 g of potato gave 117 g of chips.
That's not decimation? It looks very much like decimation to me. From the Oxford English Dictionary:
The death or destruction of one person or thing in every ten; a reduction by one tenth.
Yes, there are other meanings, but that's closer to the original. OED suggests that one
might use the term “literal decimation”, but to claim that a reduction from 33 to 30 is not
a decimation requires either a singular lack of understanding or a singular pedanticism (30
> 29.7).
Despite Sunday's expectations, I didn't make the 1 TB download limit this month, only 994.93
GB. Yes, with the uploads of 207.11 GB I'm still over the limit, but somehow I feel that I
have missed out.
Today we had a number of left-over foodstuffs: some breast from an enormous chicken and a
jar of mixed “Asian” vegetables that I bought at ALDI for some reason. So this evening I
cooked a noodle dish from them.
What's unusual about that? I cook this kind of dish for breakfast all the time. But
Yvonne almost never eats anything like that. One obvious
difference is the absence of chilis. And Yvonne decided that she wanted the Guan Miao noodles that I haven't
eaten for some time. In the end we had:
And how was it? As expected, no surprises, beyond the texture of the Guan Miao noodles,
which is quite pleasant, and the lack of chili, for which I compensated with chili oil. And
as a substitute for chili sauce it's a bit strong. Next time I'll find a different way to
incorporate it.
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