Long Links
Back in early July I posted ten links to long-form pieces that I?d had a chance to enjoy because of not having one of those nasty ?full-time-job? things. I see that the browser tabs are bulking up again, so here we go. Just like last time, people with anything resembling a ?life? probably don?t have time for all of them, but if a few pick a juicy-looking essay to enjoy, that?ll have made it worthwhile. The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free by Nathan J. Robinson. I think we?ve all sort of realized that the assertion in the title is true.
Time to finish dereel
Somehow I've had lots of things to do lately, and one of the multitude of things I have left unfinished was the installation of dereel, my second desktop machine. But time has made it more urgent: for reasons I don't understand, a number of sites no longer want to talk to the firefox version on eureka. Time to continue with installing dereel. In principle, the next step is simple: install multi-monitor X on dereel and join it to eureka with x2x. I've been using X on the desktop for over 30 years, and I published my first article on how to configure it over 27 years ago.
Olympus edge conditions
I've had my ?new? Olympus E-30 for just over a year (in fact, the beginning of August has been a time for buying cameras over the decades). I only use it for my analemma photography series, and for the fun of it I didn't delete the images from the CF card, just to see how long it would last. It's a 4 GB card, and the pair of images I take amount to about 25 MB per pair, so I'd expect it to last for about 160 pairs. Today I was nearly there: only 30 MB left on the card. Took the first image.
Sony HDR-CX405, the last
Finally got round to looking at the video clips that I took with the Sony HDR-CX405 yesterday. First: where are the files? Well, this time there was only one. Copied it from the fake directory 2020-08-02 to eureka, where it showed itself as: -r-xr--r-- 1 grog wheel 736,886,784 3 Aug 12:33 20200802134529.MTS That file name looks like a date YYYYMMDDHHMMSS. But it doesn't match the timestamp of the file. Presumably Microsoft's ?copy? function is too polite to maintain the original timestamp. Further checking with PlayMemories showed that yes, indeed, it's the timestamp relating to the recording time (presumably the end of the recording), which could be useful in some bizarre circumstances.
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 12)
Here’s part twelve of my new reading of my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (you can follow all the installments, as well as the reading I did in 2008/9, here). This is easily the weirdest novel I ever wrote. Gene Wolfe (RIP) gave me an amazing quote for it: “Someone Comes to... more
Still more Sony HDR-CX405 strangeness
Why did the the Sony HDR-CX405 switch to interlaced mode after I set it for 1080p the other day? Off to check, revealing even more strangeness. Here's the Image Quality / Size menu: Of these, only Frame Rate and Image Size have obvious meanings. Well, maybe. In fact, Image Size refers only to still images. So how do you select the image size? I still don't know. Last week I selected it via REC Mode, but I discovered that the format I had selected was only interlaced.
VoIP recording software?
Yesterday's fracas with Telstra left me wishing that I had had an audio transcript of the call. Surely that can't be difficult: in principle I could have sniffed the traffic with Wireshark, but that's a bit clunky. Aren't there any recording programs out there? Yes, but it seems?paradoxically?mainly for Microsoft ?Windows?. And there's an Open Source Audio Recorder offering a free 30-day trial. rms would love that and point out that ?open source? is far from as obvious as ?free software?.
Strange RCS message
Found a typo in my diary entry for 51 years ago today. OK, not a problem, check it out and fix it. === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/16) ~/public_html 198 -> co -l diary-aug1969.php co: RCS file RCS/diary-aug1969.php,v is in use Huh? What's that? I've been using RCS for 25 years now, but this is the first time that I've seen that message. Off to the web to look for answers, nothing really good, but it seems that there should be a lock file name enclosed in commas, or maybe starting with an underscore, somewhere, and that this file should be removed.
Email: the end of an era?
What do I do about the BigPond issues? Yes, I can complain. I could also bang my head against a brick wall, which would have the advantage of being faster and more accessible; the end result wouldn't be much different. I've been running my own mail server for not quite 30 years. I've written books with instructions on how to set up a mail server. But maybe I'm becoming a dinosaur. I've been seeing more and more of this kind of problem that BigPond cause. To be fair to the mail services, they do have an issue of identifying spam, though BigPond have used some remarkably stupid methods to attempt to handle it.
Bloody Telstra again!
This afternoon Yvonne asked me to follow up on an email message that she had sent to Diane Saunders on Monday. Diane says that she hadn't received it. Oh. It was sent to the domain bigpond.com, run by Telstra, a company with whom I have had nothing but trouble. In this case, Yvonne's message had included lots of URLs. In the past BigPond has silently swallowed that kind of message and told nobody about it. Was this message at least delivered? No! Jul 27 03:15:28 lax postfix/qmgr[1862]: 21C982804C: from=<ylehey@lagoon.lemis.com>, size=5146, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Jul 27 03:15:30 lax postfix/smtp[27132]: 21C982804C: host extmail.bigpond.com[203.36.172.106] refused to talk to me: 550 5.7.1 Connection refused - IB116.