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Postings for February 2025:  (20 posts)
Wed, 12 Feb 2025 01:01:04 UTC

hubble down!

Posted By Greg Lehey

I haven't heard from carneous (on IRC) for some time. He had a machine called hubble which was last booted on 2 March 2010. The last time I heard, two years ago, it had been up for a little over 13 years. Is it still up? Today he showed up, only carn nowadays, and gave the sad news: some time between mid-2023 and May 2024 the power supply died?clearly a machine that got a lot of attention. It would have reached 5000 days uptime on 9 November 2023. Did it?

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 01:47:24 UTC

CSIRAC lives

Posted By Greg Lehey

It's been over 20 years since I visited CSIRAC, but I was greatly impressed, and I was left wanting to know more. Today, while looking for something completely different, I came across this page, which includes much more detail, including something like a manual and an emulator. Now I just need time to read it all.

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 01:30:43 UTC

PHP programming again

Posted By Greg Lehey

I have a PHP script (createexif.php) to update the Exif data in my photos. It's currently useful to add information about my 7Artisans 4 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens. But the interface is via the Makejpeg file that I use to do the photo name mapping (one line per image), and that's inconvenient. For example, I would have to update the Makejpeg file like this, run createexif.php and select the output lines: === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/25) ~/Photos/20250131 976 -> cat Makejpeg A1310643_DxO Fisheye-test-1 l 48 f 4 === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/25) ~/Photos/20250131 978 -> createexif.php  -c ,,, exiftool -overwrite_original_in_place -TagsFromFile Fisheye-test-1.jpeg '-all>all' -title=Fisheye-test-1 -author='Greg Lehey' -copyright='Greg Lehey' -fnumber=4 -lensmodel='7Artisans fisheye' -lensserialnumber='43035' -focallength=4  Fisheye-test-1.jpeg ...

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 00:45:27 UTC

Completing the photo restore

Posted By Greg Lehey

The restore of my photo disk completed shortly after I came into the office this morning. It wasn't completely successful: x grog/19640401/pass2/Untitled-Scanned-19.psf tar: (null) x grog/19640401/orig/Untitled-Scanned-02.jpg tar: (null) ... I've never seen that message before. What does it mean? Do I care enough to UTSL? It's not serious in itself, since the tar run was just to read in the first 99.5% of the files, to be followed up with an rsync from the dying disk. But yes, if this is on the backup disk, I should follow up. And in this particular case, there was nothing wrong with the copy on disk.

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 00:05:32 UTC

ZDF pain

Posted By Greg Lehey

ZDF seems to be having trouble this weekend. Apart from (surprisingly short) timeouts, I ended up with messages like Access Denied You don't have permission to access "http://www.zdf.de/" on this server. Reference #18.50981002.1739068938.96225329 https://errors.edgesuite.net/18.50981002.1739068938.96225329 What's that? The URL (not a link) led to nothing useful. I found that I could access it via a proxy in Germany, but in principle it should be accessible anywhere in the world. Have they picked on me for downloading too much content? That, too, should be allowed.

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 23:04:44 UTC

How to delete 7 TB of important data

Posted By Greg Lehey

There's a funny noise coming from eureka, a ?chunk-a-ka-chunk? about every 2 seconds. What is it? It's really difficult to establish, but I was sure that it was coming from a disk. Gradually it became clear that it was /Photos, the 8 TB disk with all my photos on it. OK, I was half expecting this since August last year, and I have a new 16 TB disk just waiting to be installed. But the copy is a little out of date. So I installed it in dereel, currently my test box, and brought it up to date: === root@dereel (/dev/pts/1) /Photos 31 -> cd /Photos && mailme rsync -Havx --delete-after  .

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 19:35:57 UTC

MLMs are the mirror-world version of community organizing

Posted By Cory Doctorow

This week on my podcast, I read MLMs are the mirror-world version of community organizing, a recent post from my Pluralistic newsletter. MLMs prey on the poor and desperate: women, people of color, people in dying small towns and decaying rustbelt cities. It’s not just that these people are desperate ? it’s that they only... more

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 00:43:19 UTC

More fisheye fun

Posted By Greg Lehey

House photo day again today. It went as smoothly as I had known it, but in the process I decided to try the 7Artisans 4 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens again. And that was interesting. The first issue is, as ever: how do I mount it? Traditionally you mount the camera on a slide that can move it backwards and forwards to get the entrance pupil over the axis of rotation of the tripod. Where is the entrance pupil? The general consensus is that there is no clearly defined entrance pupil for a fisheye lens. But it seems to be reasonable to guess that it's somewhere near the back of the front element.

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 00:36:48 UTC

A new kind of exploit?

Posted By Greg Lehey

Seen in my mail today:    5 N + 28-01-2025 To groggy@lemis (  21) Lemis Cloud          N + Audio recording REC#282025-284656056.wav Transcript ?Lemis Cloud? indeed. Clearly it's some kind of exploit. But what kind? Mutt tells me: A     2 38seconds__AudioRecording__lemis__REF213       [image/svg+xml, base64, 0.6K] Is that an appropriate format for audio? I wouldn't think so, but svg+xml confuses me.

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 02:48:22 UTC

More lagoon update

Posted By Greg Lehey

Yesterday's upgrade to lagoon, from 12.2 to 13.5-PRERELEASE, worked as is intended. And the upgrade to 14.2-STABLE? Just as easy! The only issue was that I managed to set the same address on two network interfaces: for some reason, this machine has three of them. Now for the hard part: upgrading ports. And of course it didn't work out of the box. As always, it removed Emacs (why?) , but also most of the other things needed. And in the second or third iteration I found: pkg: libglvnd-1.7.0 conflicts with mesa-libs-18.3.2_3 (installs files into the same place).

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 23:30:47 UTC

Upgrading lagoon

Posted By Greg Lehey

So why did I end up booting dereel (the current name for the new lagoon) from the wrong partition, /dev/ada0p4 instead of /dev/ada0p2? Simple: that's what was in /boot/loader.conf from lagoon. Fix that and it booted fine, though of course I managed to forget the network configuration and had to disconnect and reconfigure on the fly. That had the interesting result that rwhod still claimed to be lagoon, so the ruptime display for lagoon alternated between 244 days and 7 hours. OK, build a new FreeBSD 14 world. After some hours, stable/14/amd64.amd64/tmp/obj-tools/lib/libz -lz -L/usr/obj/hydra/home/src/FreeBSD/git/stable/14/amd64.amd64/tmp/obj-tools/lib/libthr -lpthread  -legacy ld: error: undefined symbol: pthread_getname_np >>> referenced by assert.c:136 (/hydra/home/src/FreeBSD/git/stable/14/sys/contrib/openzfs/lib/libspl/assert.c:136) >>>               assert.o:(libspl_assertf) in archive /usr/obj/hydra/home/src/FreeBSD/git/stable/14/amd64.amd64/tmp/obj-tools/cddl/lib/libspl/libspl.a cc: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation) *** [ctfconvert.full] Error code 1 ...

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 16:26:45 UTC

Announcing the Picks and Shovels book tour

Posted By Cory Doctorow

Announcing the Picks and Shovels book tour (permalink) My next novel, Picks and Shovels, is officially out in the US and Canada on Feb 17, and I’m about to leave on a 20+ city book-tour, which means there’s a nonzero chance I’ll be in a city near you between now and the end of the... more

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 13:30:00 UTC

Thinking like a fox: A reading list for the future

Posted By Werner Vogels

Here are a few of my favourite books to help you think like a fox - from sci-fi classics to the importance of doing nothing at all (it's a Dutch thing).

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:55:10 UTC

A new lagoon

Posted By Greg Lehey

It's time for more systems upgrades. Not only is Yvonne's machine, lagoon.lemis.com, way down-rev, it also doesn't have enough memory to satisfy firefox, and I recently saw disk errors. So: start again with a new machine and one of the many SSDs that I have lying around. How do I do it? Upgrade, in principle, starting with the current disk contents. Boot from SD card, enter shell, partition the disk (thoughtfully wiped by Peter Jeremy) in the same way as the one on lagoon, copy, boot. Well, a couple of issues. First I needed mount points, and the SD card is read-only.

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 20:00:00 UTC

Photo Philosophizing

Posted By Tim Bray

What happened was, I went to Saskatchewan to keep my mother company, and got a little obsessed about photo composition and complexity. Which in these troubled times is a relief. This got started just after take-off from Vancouver. As the plane climbed over the city I thought ?That?s a nice angle? and pointed the Pixel through the plexiglass. You might want to enlarge this one. A couple of days into my Prairie visit I got around to processing the photos and thought that Vancouver aerial had come out well. No credit to the photographer here, got lucky on the opportunity, but holy crap modern mobile-device camera tech is getting good these days.

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:39:21 UTC

Still more fisheye fun

Posted By Greg Lehey

Spent some more time trying to stitch the panoramas I shot with my 7Artisans 4 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens. I failed. After some consideration, it seems that the problem lies with the incorrect angle of view calculation that I saw yesterday. And the Exif data causes the problem: images that don't contain a focal length result in a popup that asks for the focal length and may calculate the angle of view correctly as a result. If the focal length is in the Exif data, it doesn't need to, but it seems to calculate the incorrect angle of view. It also assumes a rectilinear lens.

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 20:25:45 UTC

Canada shouldn?t retaliate with US tariffs

Posted By Cory Doctorow

This week on my podcast, I read Canada shouldn’t retaliate with US tariffs, a recent post from my Pluralistic newsletter. But you know what Canada could make? A Canadian App Store. That’s a store that Canadian software authors could use to sell Canadian apps to Canadian customers, charging, say, the standard payment processing fee of... more

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 01:27:36 UTC

More fisheye fun

Posted By Greg Lehey

Spent some time today investigating the panoramas that I took yesterday with the 7Artisans 4 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens. There were surprises. The project files that I created with my mkpto script were completely broken, presumably because of incorrect assumptions that it makes. In particular, it didn't know the focal length of the lens: it has no electronics, and the other fisheyes report the length. OK, use the Hugin GUI. Here the three images that it had to merge: When I loaded them into the GUI, I got: What's that?

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 01:25:43 UTC

Tailor-made spam

Posted By Greg Lehey

Yet Another scam email today trying to steal my email password (what's that?) . But this one was tailored to an address that should never have seen the light of day:     <div>         <div><p style="font-size: larger;"><span style="font-weight:300;font-style: italic;">Hydra</span><span style="font-weight: 600;">Mail</span></p>             <p>Hi Grog</p>             <p>Please note grog@hydra.lemis.com authentication expires 01 February, 2025.</p>             <p><table><tr><td style="background-color: cornflowerblue;color: white;padding:5px 7px;border-radius: 3px;"><a style="color:white;text-decoration: none;" href="https://ipfs.io/ipfs/Qma8kStn7DAiwSWLoPeQRBU1GBEWSUDSLQbKkVb16TJoDd/#grog@hydra.lemis.com">Continue</a></td></tr></table></p>             <p>Please continue to keep or change your password.</p> <p></p> Regards,<br> Hydra Mail        </div>     </div> </div> I like the ?Hydra Mail?.

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 01:20:35 UTC

Wikipedia Library

Posted By Greg Lehey

Tidying up my notifications on Wikipedia, I found a 3 year old note: ?Congratulations! You are now eligible for The Wikipedia Library". What's that? ?an open research hub, a place for active Wikipedia editors to gain access to the vital reliable sources that they need to do their work and to be supported in using those resources to improve the encyclopedia?. That sounds interesting, but I'll have to put it off until I can investigate in more detail.