Made Sichuan cabbage stir-fry again today. That's about the third time, but it could be the last. It doesn't taste bad,
but somehow it's boring. Part of it could be that the Doubanjiang that I bought last month was not the right kind. It seems that for Sichuan food I need Pixian doubanjiang,
not the milder type that I had bought. But I don't know if that would have saved the dish.
As planned, I took sea.lemis.com off the list for www.lemis.com overnight.
Did it make any difference? Not much. Reenable it. Load average shot up to (only) round
100. That difference could be due to the external load.
OK, it looks like sea is toast. But Vultr offers an additional, expensive
service: for $10 a month (half the cost of the server) they will protect against DDoS. Will that help? There's only one way
to find out, and running it for a day will cost about 32 ¢, so I did that. We'll see
tomorrow.
Just by chance, saw another Olympus Pen EE-S for sale on
eBay today. OK, I can watch it. And it sold
for $14.11! Admittedly, there was postage as well, and eBay seem to have added a (generous)
10% “Buyer Protection fee”, so the total came to $35.49, but that's less than half what I
paid. I was happy that the seller accepted my offer for the camera, bringing it down in
price by almost $20, but it almost looks as if I shouldn't have. Grrr.
On with the daily web server overload today. Things were relatively quiet, but at one point
the load average on sea.lemis.com hit 100, while the others weren't affected:
And DDoS? The Vultrs obligingly noted that no DDoS had been
detected. So the service served no purpose here. Still, I have followed up what things I
can. Goodbye, sea.
What is this “Buyer Protection fee” that eBay added to yesterday's auction? There was a link under the text, so clicked on it. A popup
appeared—for one second, long enough to establish that the text was relevant, but not
nearly long enough to be able to understand it.
Off to “help” (what a euphemism), which led me to this
explanation, containing:
The Buyer Protection fee is applied to all items listed on eBay.com.au by sellers
registered in Australia who don't have a Pro plan (excluding Vehicles and Classified
Ads). It's not an optional fee, as we want everyone to be able to benefit from these
protections.
Wasn't buyer protection at no cost something with which they used to advertise? And now
they want money for it, which you don't find out until the item is sold. And do they
mention it on the item listing? Of course not. That would scare off bidders. eBay, you
disgust me.
While looking for perceived missing photos in the 1990s, found this collection of photos. They're
terrible:
-
They're apparently from a film that was very old before it was developed, and latent
image fade has taken its toll, particularly noticeable in the magenta image of the sprocket
holes at the bottom of this image:
Looking at the images themselves, they must have been taken from about 1988 to 1990. I
think they're all on the same film, which would explain some of the image quality.
-
Some of the images are badly exposed, like this one:
Can't find dimensions for 'Germany-4-orig.jpeg'
My guess is that the exposure meter was misled by the sky. I wondered for a while about
the dark strip in the middle of the image, but I think that it what I was trying to
photograph, maybe a plume of smoke. There are two other images with similar marks.
-
For reasons that I don't understand, a number of images are tilted, like this one:
Can't find dimensions for 'Germany-7-orig.jpeg'
-
A couple are obviously out of focus (or is it camera shake?):
Looking at modification timestamps, it seems that I have had multiple attempts at processing
these images.
-rw-r--r-- 1 grog home 0 5 Mar 2009 makejpeg
-rw-rw-rw- 1 grog lemis 903 12 Aug 2013 Makejpeg
-rw-rw-rw- 1 grog lemis 903 10 Feb 2025 Makejpeg
-rw-rw-rw- 1 grog lemis 903 6 Jun 2025 Makejpeg
And in at least one case, my recovery attempts proved negative. Here an old image (of
Yana, probably round 5 years old). Before on the left, after
on the right:
Still, the images can serve one useful purpose: for testing old image recovery software.
We're looking after Esperanza, one of Chris Yeardley's mares, and yesterday Yvonne found her lame. It wasn't any better this evening, so Chris came
by to take a look, and suspected that she had been kicked. A bit of bute and all should improve.
I went along, for the first time in months in that area. The ground was drier than I
expected, but the dam is full:
Can't find dimensions for 'Dam-detail.jpeg'
People are worrying about a bad summer, but so far there has been little to substantiate
their claims
Read on Quora today: Der Triumph der Sehschlitze: Wie eine Generation das Sehen verlernt, by Alexander Steipe. It's in
German, but basically repeats some of my objections, so it must be right. The title
translates as ”The Triumph of viewing slits: How a generation is forgetting how to see”.
People buy enormous TVs (he mentions an average of 100", which is overstating the
case), but then look at things on mobile phones, requiring them to twist their necks by 90°
to do so.
Seen on my log display window round 14:30:
Oct 9 14:29:51 eureka postfix/qmgr[98289]: 8492D2635AD: removed
May 5 23:00:00 eureka newsyslog[89480]: logfile turned over due to size>1000K
Dec 16 16:00:00 eureka newsyslog[66937]: logfile turned over due to size>1000K
The first entry is normal enough. But where did the others come from? They appeared round
the same time, and there was no other entry in between.
