Live AMA tomorrow (Friday): Meeting C++ Online
Tomorrow I’ll be joining Jens Weller for a live AMA on “Meeting C++ online.” The coordinates are: I’m looking forward to your technical questions about C++26 evolution, cppfront, Rust, reflection, safety and security, concurrency and parallelism, and software in general… and optionally questions about SF/fantasy novels and cinema, but then I might ask some similar … Continue reading Live AMA tomorrow (Friday): Meeting C++ Online →
Tidying up the music room
I've been thoroughly demoralized these last few days, but I can't stand looking at more Israeli genocide, and I don't have the enthusiasm to do anything with my computers. But there's always a thing waiting for me, tidying up the mess I have generated over the last nearly 10 years: There are three main categories: old cables, the photos that I inherited from my mother 5 years ago, and various books and data that I haven't been able to classify, even two Qume daisy wheels: I haven't used daisy wheels in over 30 years.
Problem avalanche
Removing Mona's cage had a strange side effect. The weather station behind it, on top of the loudspeaker, started communicating unreliably with the outside station: OK, try to move it slightly to see if it would fix the problem. Bloody USB cables! But I got it done. Later I wanted to watch the news (I don't know why; all Israeli death and destruction). ?No signal? from the TV. Damn, what's wrong there? teevee wasn't running! Somehow my messing around with the cables must have dislodged the power cable.
Spill, part one (a Little Brother story)
This week on my podcast, I read part one of “Spill“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original. Doctors smoke. Driving instructors text and drive. Dentists eat sugary snacks before bed. And... more
Subtitle display pains
We watch videos with subtitles where available, but for some reason there are multiple problems with the representation. Yesterday we were watching ?Der Bergdoktor?, and the subtitles stopped in mid-episode. A quick investigation showed that the subtitles (in WebVTT format) had empty lines. After removing this, all was well: === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/7) /spool/Series/Bergdoktor/17 48 -> diff -wu /spool/Already/Series/Bergdoktor/17/17-05-Lebenswege.deu.vtt 17-05-Lebenswege.deu.vtt --- /spool/Already/Series/Bergdoktor/17/17-05-Lebenswege.deu.vtt 2024-07-19 00:19:13.000000000 +1000 +++ 17-05-Lebenswege.deu.vtt 2024-10-06 14:30:53.270641000 +1100 @@ -2619,9 +2619,7 @@ sub577 00:36:48.680 --> 00:36:52.520 Dürfen Sie mir als Noch-Ehefrau sagen - was mit ihm ist?
syslog pain
I have a display of eureka's most common system log files on hydra:0.0: /var/log/messages and /var/log/maillog. And other systems are configured to log to eureka as well. But lately it occurred to me that I wasn't seeing any log messages from other systems any more. More investigation showed that syslogd was running with the -s option (Do not log messages from remote machines). OK, fix that. Oct 6 09:14:29 eureka Forwarded from homephone: HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4]CallRecord::writeCDRFile, No space! current file size =51158bytes, need extra 86 bytes. Oct 6 09:14:29 eureka Forwarded from homephone: HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4]CallRecord::writeCDRFile, No space!
Copying files: the pain
Spent a lot more time today trying to perform that most basic of operations, copying files, on Android. In addition to the apps that I mentioned yesterday, came across two more: Copy My Data, which sounds so obviously what I want. But once again the app has limitations: it only copies to other phones! I didn't even try to find out whether it could access the files I was looking for. android-file-transfer , or maybe aft, a program that installs on FreeBSD, and which I tried a couple of years ago.
Finding my personal data
How do I find Yvonne's ECG? KardiaMobile and Android don't help at all. But I found an unlikely ally: firefox. ?Download file?. After fighting my way through the Kardia menus to ?display PDF?, I chose firefox to display it, and then I could ?Download? it (again). And it put it in the /Downloads directory at the top of the directory tree shown by WiFi File Transfer. === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/7) ~ 38 -> PHONE=fossil fh Connected to fossil.lemis.com.
Finally! CAPTCHAs decoded by AI
It's no secret that I hate CAPTCHAs with a passion. So of course I'm delighted to hear that Andreas Plesner of the ETH has cracked CAPTCHAs with an AI program. It's interesting that it's best at recognizing (presumably US) fire hydrants: in Switzerland they're almost certainly the same as in Germany. In passing, it's interesting to note that this it's ReCAPTCHA version 2 that is so painful. Version 3 is invisible to the user, so I don't have an issue with it.
Android copy, yet again
Why couldn't I save Yvonne's electrocardiogram? All I need to do is copy it from her phone to a Real Computer. What are the options? I have an FTP server, but it only accesses parts of the directory tree, and I can't do a recursive listing. AirDroid offers a web interface, but though it's useful for some things (once I have worked around their emetic insistence on registering an account and sending all my data round the world and back: just start it and point a web browser at port 8888), it also doesn't seem to be able to access ?hidden?
Real-life heart monitoring
Finally got round to using the KardiaMobile 6L in earnest, on Yvonne. It works! And the good news is that it didn't detect any problems. And now? Display the ECG? First you need to ?download? it and choose not to encrypt it! What kind of nonsense is that? All you get is a PDF, but I knew that. At least we were able to display it. How can I back it up? I spent most of the afternoon trying to find out, but failed.
Mobile phone speed test revisited
So were yesterday's mobile phone speed tests typical? Tried again today: Still comparable with the NBN, but it's puzzling that the upload speed is so much higher than the download speed.
A network!
Finally National Broadband Network is back to normal. Somehow it seems to have disrupted the entire week.
Mobile phone speed test
Yesterday's mobile phone speed test showed particularly poor performance. About the only surprise was that the upload speed was much higher than the download speed (1.2 Mb/s and 182 kB/s). What's it like under normal conditions? Tried again today: Not only comparable to the National Broadband Network link: the upload speed is greater than the 5 Mb/s limit on my NBN link.
?liveCor KardiaMobile software
So now we have a network connection, so I can try again to install the app for the KardiaMobile 6L. And yes, after offering a lot of unrelated stuff and they typical Android pain, it installed and asked me to sign up for some service that would end up costing more than the device itself. Ha ha, only joking. You don't have to sign up. A bit of playing around, and how about that, I was able to generate an electrocardiogram that gave me the reassurance that it had detected nothing wrong with my heart. And yes, I can save it as a PDF?somewhere.
Understanding Aussie Broadband
Yesterday I received no support from Aussie Broadband, but after the net came up again I received an email: Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2024 13:51:12 +1000 From: Aussie Support <support@aussiebroadband.com.au> Subject: Re: [Ticket#2024100110021591] Thanks for raising a query with Aussie Broadband. If the query is urgent, we suggest giving our friendly Australian team a call on 1300 880 905 (8am to midnight Australian Eastern Time). OK, Aussie, I'll bite. What query? Sent off a reply and got the surprising response: Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2024 16:04:35 +1000 From: Aussie Support <support@aussiebroadband.com.au> Subject: Re: [Ticket#2024100110021591] Hi there and thanks for reaching out.
One outage? Three!
After complete lack of service during the past two working days, I was hoping for something better today. And maybe I got it. The net link stayed up until 9:41. But then it went down again for nearly 4 hours. Still, better than the last couple of days. But then it went down again! Admittedly only for 13 minutes, but it had just come back again when it went down for a third time! So far this week we have had Duration from to (seconds) ...
KardiaMobile 6L
The KardiaMobile 6L that I ordered on Monday promised 2 day delivery, but it wasn't sent until yesterday evening. What chance that it would get here today? But it did. Tried to use it, but I couldn't download the software. Admire the refusal to take a screen shot. I did have marginal network access. Is this a device for fair weather networking? About the only thing of interest was the device itself: Which way round? Clearly the V shows the direction. Oh, but it's not a V, it's a ?, which they seem to think is an ?, so you should hold it the other way round in order not to get erroneous readings.
TV fail
No news from the net today, of course, so like yesterday I tried to watch TV news. But today the TV claimed that the antenna wasn't connected. Checked everything, and the only things that could have gone wrong were the antenna cable and the TV itself. I thought I heard something on the wrong channel before I changed it. Could it be a problem with the TV? I don't really want to know.
Investigating makefs
The lack of a network made it difficult to ignore the bug report about makefs that I have been dragging behind me for the past 12 months. Spent some time looking at it, and came up with some more issues with the man page. One of the big differences between makefs on NetBSD and FreeBSD is the file system block size: 8,192 bytes on NetBSD and 32,768 bytes on FreeBSD. There's a way to set the block size, though the man page doesn't make it easy to find out. I think that this should do the trick: kimchi# makefs -d -1 -o b=32k usrbin-32k /hydra/sbin But the result is gibberish.
Tethering and hotspots revisited
This almost total non-availability of the National Broadband Network makes it all the more urgent to find an alternative. At least in the short term the mobile telephone network seems the obvious solution. Before the net failed, tried a query with Google Gemini, which told me the obvious about configuring the phone, and then Now, other devices like your laptop, tablet, or another phone can connect to your Xiaomi's Wi-Fi hotspot using the provided SSID and password. Somewhere there it mentioned USB. Why USB? This thing has a network interface.
Still more NBN outages!
Mail from Aussie Broadband today, which of course didn't reach me until the evening: Date: Wed, 02 Oct 2024 15:31:09 +1000 Subject: NBN scheduled maintenance NBN are planning network maintenance between **Thu 31st October 2024 06:00 AEDT** and **Sat 9th November 2024 18:00 AEDT**. As part of a national rollout to upgrade the Fixed Wireless network, nbn® will be replacing hardware in your area. The program will future-proof sufficient capacity for new and existing customers on the network. As tower climbing is required, this work must be performed during the day. You will experience two interruptions of up to 12 hours.
Another day without a net
Up early this morning just in case the National Broadband Network decided to take the net link down again. A good thing, too: it went down earlier and stayed down longer: Duration from to (seconds) 32778 1 October 2024 ...
Mobile hotspots
The National Broadband Network may be down, but I'm not completely off the net: I still have my mobile phone. That's a pain, of course, but it could be better than nothing. And since it runs a castrated Linux, it should also be capable of routing IP, assuming that they haven't castrated that component too. But there's this silly term ?hotspot?. What does that mean? Traditionally a hot spot has been something, well, hot, generally used to mean a place where there's a lot of activity. And somehow that has developed into designating an area where there's a lot of radiation.
The NBN outage from hell
I was up relatively early this morning, in time to see our network link drop just before 9:00. Damn! That must be one of many National Broadband Network outages threatened for the end of last month and most of this month. From the Aussie Broadband site, trimmed and sorted: From To Duration (hours) Total duration 23-09-2024 06:00:00AM 01-10-2024 06:00:00PM 12:00 ...
What price SMS?
Received an SMS from ALDIMobile today: my call credit had dropped below $5. OK, recharge, and while I'm at it check usage. Eight SMS, all sent at 10:42 on Saturday. Yes, I sent one SMS to Hannah McEwan at that time. Why was I charged 8 times? Oh. That's a short message system. How short? Can it be that what I sent was a fragmented and reassembled? SMS is a pretty useless system at the best of times, but if it costs several dollars to send a single message, it rivals the prices I was paying for Internet access 30 years ago.
Time for an ECG monitor
Today we spent over 4 hours taking Yvonne to the Ballarat Base Hospital, ultimately just for an ECG measurement. Time to finally bite the bullet, so ordered an KardiaMobile 6L on eBay. According to the seller, it should be here tomorrow or on Wednesday. I'll believe it when I see it, but Wednesday would be good.
The daily Instagram
So did Instagram reinstate my password? Of course not. Tried to log in today and had exactly the same issue that I had on Friday OK, try the password reset. Yes! It allows me to reset it, using a page with the heading ?Facebook?. Sent me a code. Please enter. Sorry, something went wrong Please try closing and re-opening your browser window. Am I really the only person suffering this pain?
Meeting Ben Sturmfels
It's been over 5 years since I first heard from Ben Sturmfels, and since then we've been planning to meet. It still hasn't happened! But he has an office in Sturt St, Ballarat, just round the corner from the Base Hospital. Went down there and found that he wasn't there. But at least I tried. Who knows what the next 5 years might bring?