|
| Greg's diary |
| recent entries |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Monday, 13 July 2026 | Dereel | Images for 13 July 2026 |
| Top of page | ||
| next day | ||
| last day |
|
Scales pain
|
Topic: food and drink, technology, opinion | Link here |
Time to make a batch of Penang laksa today. Nothing unusual: take the paste, tamarind and petis udang, add water to 1600 g.
But things aren't that simple. First, I didn't have enough petis udang. I needed 40 g, but I only had 30. Use that anyway? No, I only needed one portion of laksa today, so 8 g would have done it. But for the fun of it I tried without, and in fact it didn't make that much difference.
The real problem is that my scales are very inaccurate („vage“ in German), and I know that to get 1600 g in my 578 g pot I have to weigh 2200 g, and not the expected 2178 g. And after bringing to the boil and measuring again, the displayed weight had dropped to 2167 g.
OK, measure out 5 portions of 320 g each. But after measuring 4, there was only 296 g left! That's a total inaccuracy of 46 g (2.7%)!
That's enough. Buy some new scales, braving eBay to do so. Scales measuring up to 5 kg in 0.1 g increments? Probably the last digit is inaccurate, but that's more than enough. Only $9.99! OK, follow to the detail page and have to select a “color”. The scales I was looking at cost $56.49! Only a previously unmentioned cleaning cloth costs $9.99 (a hefty price in itself). When is eBay finally going to do something about this? This is just plain misleading. Advertise scales, offer a cleaning cloth. At the very least some kind of downvote should be possible, and eBay should remove such misleading offers. For me it's a reason to avoid the sellers zeeah85 and Exotic-Treasures81.
Much searching. If I had been working at the rates I used to charge, I could have paid for a number of different scales. As it was, I finally agreed on a “postal” scale weighing up to 40 kg in 1 g increments, along with useless (to me) things like price aggregation, for $32.16:
That's a bit over the top, but still cheaper than the other one I saw, and my hope is that the “postal” would signify a certain accuracy. We'll find out.
In the meantime, I choose PayPal every time because I don't trust eBay, who always recommend a different payment method. Today, for the first time in a long time, PayPal didn't recognize me on my “device” (teevee.lemis.com) and wanted to send me a confirmatory email. OK, fine.
But it didn't come. Checking my mail logs, found:
Jul 13 18:46:57 eureka postfix/smtpd[75599]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from www.lemis.com[45.32.70.18]: 550 5.1.1 <pally@lemis.com>: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in local recipient table; from=<service@paypal.com.au> to=<pally@lemis.com> proto=ESMTP helo=<lax.lemis.com>
pally@lemis.com? That's an old, worn-out email address. Where did they get that from?
|
Landscape change
|
Topic: animals, general | Link here |
The new owners of the property on the corner of Bliss Road and Stones Road (the “schoolyard”, since there really was a school there in the 1880s) have done a lot of work on the property. One just occurred to us today while walking the dogs: the garden arrangement that we have admired has changed. Here last October and now:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
Part of the difference is that last October some of the bushes were flowering, but more to the point, all the bushes under the central tree and a number in the foreground have been removed.
|
More Emacs pain
|
Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I have a number of Emacs macros that I use to write this diary. One of them creates the framework for an article:
<?php pubdate ("2026-07-14T02:26:23+00:00"); ?>
<?php texttopic ("c", ""); ?>
<p>
</p>
<?php endtopic (); ?>
But at random, the indentation is incorrect. Why? I can't find out, but I have discovered that it only happens with the latest and greatest Emacs on hydra.lemis.com, while on eureka it works correctly. Why am I having so many problems with software upgrades?
|
ALDImobile gangs up on us
|
Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne's pre-paid phone tariff needs topping up. Not a problem: go to http://www.aldimobile.com.au/, select the correct phone and “Recharge”. Select the tariff and send.
Submitting order...
And it stayed that way all evening, despite a few retries an hour or so apart. Do I have to call them on the phone? That way madness lies.
| Tuesday, 14 July 2026 | Dereel | |
| Top of page | ||
| previous day |
|
Firefox: enough!
|
Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Tried once again to recharge Yvonne's phone today. Once again it hung submitting the order. OK, try with chromium instead of firefox. Slow (almost certainly the site), but it worked.
This isn't the first time that I've had problems like that with firefox. I have hated it since I first used it, over 20 years ago. It shows other issues, like random loss of page navigation and misplaced button sensitivity areas. Why haven't I got rid of it long ago?
The answer is simple: I can't get chromium, the obvious alternative, to work with multiple instances. Time to ask the twins, who should have a vested interest. They came up with a number of suggestions, some contradictory, but ultimately I was able to start multiple instances. I'm still trying to get my head around it, but in essence it seems that I need to remove the singletons and use separate configuration directories for each instance. firefox does that too, but it doesn't require as much fiddling.
Done? No, I also need to invoke the browser from Mutt. And once again it's a can of worms. The twins tell me to put this in ~/.muttrc (after substitutions for my environment):
text/html; chrome --display=:0.2 --user-data-dir=~/.config/chromium-2 %s; test=test -n "$DISPLAY"; nametemplate=%s.html
Part of that (the nametemplate) is to work round breakage in chromium: it ignores the content of the file it's displaying and goes by the “extension”, which must be .html. By contrast, with firefox, my .mailcap contains
text/html; /home/local/bin/dobrowser %s; copiousoutput
OK, dobrowser is a copout, but it's just so that I can access the file elsewhere. It contains:
WEBPAGE=/eureka/home/var/tmp/mutt-firefox/`basename $1`.html
mv $1 $WEBPAGE
/usr/local/bin/firefox $WEBPAGE
But that doesn't matter. Gemini's invocation doesn't work. Instead I kept the dobrowser approach and change the last line to:
chrome --display=:0.2 --user-data-dir=/home/grog/.config/chromium-2 $WEBPAGE
And that seems to work. But what a mess by comparison. Clearly chromium is firmly entrenched in the Microsoft space, even worse than firefox.
|
Warning! Breakin!
|
Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Message from eBay today:
We noticed a new sign-in on your account at ebay.com.au. Here are the details:
Time of sign-in
14/07/2026 11:57 AM AEST
Device
Linux (Chrome 143.0)
Approximate location
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
If this was you, there’s nothing you need to do. If it wasn’t, please change your password right away.
Now isn't that accurate and helpful? The “device” hadn't changed, just the browser, located 1,000 km to the south-west of Sydney, in a different state, and running on a different operating system. If they're going to warn, why can't the finally report correctly and with more details (IP address comes to mind)?
|
Clue to Emacs indentation problems
|
Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Reading my diary for 20 years ago, found a reference to my Emacs indentation macros. It's not clear that it's what I was using before the last update, but the clue might be in where I kept it. It still works on eureka, so I haven't lost it.
| 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. |
| Greg's home page | This month | Greg's photos | Greg's links |
| RSS 2.0 |
|
