Source blog: Greg's diary
More GPS fun
For no particular reason, dragged out my old Garmin GPS II device today, put some batteries in, and left it to find where it was. It took nearly an hour! And yes, it works. But what use is a GPS receiver without navigational aids? And navigators are now so cheap that it's just not worth thinking about. Today Yvonne bought a new navigator at ALDI for $59. I've been buying every one they have on offer, about twice a year, in the hope that the maps will some day improve. Today might be the day: finally they've discovered Kleins Road, where I live.
Photo backups: the other shoe
Backups to my first new disk went well. Today's the day for the weekly swap, so put in the second disk. First, connect to distress to save the disk contents (one Microsoft Start_Here_Win.exe and a whole slew of programs in Start_Here_Mac.app). That was a pain: to be on the safe side, I was running the CMD.EXE as administrator, with the unexpected result that it didn't see any of my ?network shares?, and it took me a while to work out what was wrong this time. Preparing the disk for FreeBSD was easier, but not as easy as it should have been: I wrote down the steps last week, but I got them wrong (now corrected).
Google Maps and Android: what a pair!
Into town today. Apart from a haircut and a visit to the Fruit Shack, Yvonne wanted to look at a carpet for sale in Mount Clear. We were to meet there. OK, get the directions from Google Maps and send them to my phone. See that the notification arrived, head off. Enable the route. It's gone! For no obvious reason, the notification had disappeared. And the only way to get the information, including the all-important address, would have been to go back inside to a Real Computer and send it again. No time for that. But Yvonne had told me: down to the roundabout, first left, first left.
eBay lies, or, where's my lens?
Exchanged email with Yana this morning. How's the new lens that I bought for her nearly 2 weeks ago? Send me some sample images. I hadn't told her about the purchase, but she picked it up from the post office last Wednesday, and for some reason didn't comment. She sent me some sample images?from the Leica DG Summilux 15 mm f/1.7 ASPH. that I bought for her over a month ago. And the new lens? What new lens? This one: Ha ha, only joking.
Favourite Unix artefacts
?segaloco?, one of the more active participants on the Unix Heritage Society mailing list, came up with a question: ?Your Most Prized UNIX Artifacts??. Interesting question. Unix is software. What can you keep? Source trees? The freely available ones are on the TUHS site. People won't admit to keeping clandestine copies of copyrighted material. And of course none of the replies referred to source trees. The single most mentioned artefact was the UNIX ?Live free or die? registration plate. And for me? From my reply, with additions: UNIX registration plate.
Testing JPEG integrity
So I have migrated one of my backup disks to the new 16 TB drive. The old 8 TB is free for other purposes, and I have it earmarked for videos. But what if some of the images on the new disk are corrupt, and they're good on the old disk. That could happen, since many of the files on the old disk have been there for years, and it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that they could have been damaged on the main disk. How do I check them? Google Gemini to my aid. It came up with some interesting stuff: jpeginfo, of which I had never heard, and also information that ImageMagick's identify command will provide information with the -verbose flag, and exiftool has a -validate option.
OM-1 firmware bug
While planning the photos of the weather stations, tried taking a photo with the OM System OM-1 Mark II and the Leica DG Summilux 15 mm f/1.7 ASPH.. I couldn't autofocus! Much examination showed that there's some compatibility issue between camera and lens. The lens works fine on the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark III, the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II and the Olympus E-PM2, and it works with the OM-1 Mark III as long as it's not set on C-AF autofocus. Why? The Summilux is unique amongst my Micro Four Thirds system lenses because it has an aperture ring.
Photo backup finished
My 8 TB photo backup ran smoothly and completed in almost exactly 24 hours: sent 7,824,233,002,625 bytes received 39,695,113 bytes 91,034,429.89 bytes/sec total size is 8,657,590,230,554 speedup is 1.11 Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on /dev/da2p1 15,257,008 7,498,588 7,605,849 50% 1,814,798 4,671,344 28% /pb1 Fri 6 Jun 2025 16:29:59 AEST Photo backup started Sat 7 Jun 2025 16:29:19 AEST Photo backup ended And once again the size of the disks isn't the same: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/1) /videobackup 96 -> df -i /Photos /pb1/ Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on /dev/ada1p1 15,257,008 7,507,545 7,596,893 50% 1,791,574 4,694,568 ...
More weather station woes
Why do both weather stations fail to communicate at particular times? I had assumed that the old one was gradually dying, but the new one does it too, roughly at the same time as the old one. Surely it can't be the location. Here's an example: The weather station is clearly visible about 12 m away. And the unit is supposed to have a range of 100 m. What's wrong? One clue is that it seems to happen to both stations at the same time.
tiwi disk problems?
While looking at tiwi's log files, saw this: Jun 6 12:15:16 tiwi kernel: swap_pager: indefinite wait buffer: bufobj: 0, blkno: 358465, size: 65536 Jun 6 12:15:16 tiwi kernel: swap_pager: indefinite wait buffer: bufobj: 0, blkno: 290150, size: 4096 Jun 6 12:18:32 tiwi kernel: swap_pager: indefinite wait buffer: bufobj: 0, blkno: 279446, size: 4096 That doesn't look good. That's normally an indication of a dying disk, but normally that would be indicated by other error messages as well. That's all I need.
Still more weather station pain
In mid-evening discovered that the weather station hadn't been logging since shortly before midday. Dammit, what's wrong with this system? I found an endless sequence of Jun 6 19:49:28 tiwi wh1080[23992]: Can't read device: Input/output error or Unknown error (5) Jun 6 19:49:28 tiwi wh1080[23993]: Can't read device: Device busy or Unknown error (16) Jun 6 19:49:31 tiwi wh1080[23997]: Can't read device: Device busy or Unknown error (16) Damn this unreliable system! Tried things that have helped in the past, like disconnecting and reconnecting the USB cable and power cycling the indoor station.
Transcode fail
I download my videos with yt-dlp. During the night not one, but all concurrent downloads failed due to lack of disk space. OK, yt-dlp is good at restarting partial transfers. Try that and get: [Merger] Merging formats into "Result.mp4" ERROR: Postprocessing: Conversion failed! What's that? Yet Another bug or incompatibility to chase!
More storage issues
Videos aren't the only thing where storage is running out. I had replace the 8 TB disk for my photos with a 16 TB disk 9 months ago, but the backup disks are still only 8 TB, so on Tuesday I ordered 2 16 TB backup disks. Today they arrived, so to Napoleons to pick them up, also looking in to Sebastopol to pick up some fruit and vegetables that Yvonne forgot on Wednesday. 32 TB in a small box! That's the equivalent of 20,000 IBM 3330 disk drive systems, the benchmark of my youth, each of which required an estimated 10 to 20 m² of floor space, not including power and cooling.
Storage woes
I'm running out of storage space on tiwi:/spool, one of the disks on which I store videos. And I'm downloading more. In the middle of the night I ran out of space, terminating a number of video loads. Most of the storage space is for series: I keep the episodes after looking at them, and some individual series take up over 500 GB of storage. What should I do? I have a choice: delete something or add more storage. A combination would also work. I don't want to delete them, so more storage is the answer, and I have it, currently: === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/1) ~ 352 -> df -c /spool/ /VB2/ /Video/ Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/ada0p4 7.567.870 7.422.409 69.782 99% /spool /dev/da0p1 ...
Speicherstadt transformation
The German TV series ?Notruf Hafenkante? is set in the Speicherstadt in Hamburg. It's a fascinating place. Here a photo from the German Wikipedia: While watching an episode of ?Notruf Hafenkante? tonight, I suspected?correctly?a transposition of a view out of the window. OK, Google Maps, show me some ?street views?. This one certainly stood out: That's not Hamburg! It's München! Well, it's about as plausible as this image, courtesy of National Geographic, which I discovered 10 years ago: That view (of the centre of München) is a real condemnation of National Geographic.
Can't contact fra
While trying to sync to my web servers today, received a connection error message from fra.lemis.com. Trying again with ssh gave me: === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/18) ~/Photos/20250603 289 -> ssh fra ssh: connect to host fra.lemis.com port 22: Connection refused Disconnected at Thu 5 Jun 2025 12:08:26 AEST What's that? It proved that sshd wasn't running, at least not the one I wanted to connect to. Fortunately I had a couple of connections open, so I was able to restart it with little trouble. But what if I hadn't?
The devil you know
So what new weather station do I buy? Do I buy a new weather station? Yes, the current WS1091 is really unreliable, but it's not clear that others are any better. It is clear that I would have to do considerable work to interface a new one to my system. So: I can live with changing the batteries occasionally. Will the thing talk to the base station when it's mounted in the correct place? Put it up there provisionally: Yes, there are no wind measurements (the vanes haven't been fitted, and they wouldn't turn anyway), but that's no worse than what I've had for the last year or two.
More storage!
My computer storage requirements continue to increase, mainly because of multimedia. I now have 18 TB of videos: Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/ada0p4 7,567,870 7,380,176 112,015 99% /spool /dev/da0p1 5,722,572 4,592,114 1,073,232 81% /VB2 hydra:/Video 3,815,019 3,340,961 435,907 88% /Video total 17,105,462 15,313,427 1,620,980 90% And though my photo storage is just below the 8 TB limit of my backup disks, it won't stay that way for long.
Web site activity over the years
My web server loads seem to be subsiding again, though there's evidence of load averages above 10: last pid: 63326; load averages: 0.51, 0.39, 0.348 That third place after the decimal at the end of the line is the result of one of the three being above 10, shifting the text one line to the right. When it goes down again, the last digit doesn't get erased. But by chance I found this: On 30 January 2004 you had a total of 2875 HTML hits.
More weather station investigations
Can my new WS1081 weather station run on and charge Nickel-Cadmium batteries? The first is easy to check: put in some charged batteries and see what happens. It works! So at least part of the instructions are wrong. And charging them? That will take a while to confirm. What does Google Gemini say? The WS1081 weather station itself does not recharge batteries directly. Outdoor Sensor (Multi-sensor): Often uses 2 x AA rechargeable batteries, and in some versions, it's solar-powered, which can help prolong the life of the rechargeable batteries. Oh.
Reddit confusion
I signed up for Reddit years ago, and I almost never used it. But there are some interesting links on weather stations (r/myweatherstation), so I tried to sign in. ?User name or password invalid?, their way of saying ?we have forgotten about you?. OK, sign up again with a different name. Sorry, Groogle taken. Groogled taken. Groogledddd taken. Sorry, Reddittttt, you're lying. Finally found a way around its broken user name recognition and signed up. Wait for confirmation message. Message doesn't show. Try again. Same thing. Try again. Same thing. ?We're having problems?. But then I found a way to register without an email address (why?)
Weather stations reconsidered
So what new weather station do I buy? All are more expensive than the one I have (I think), and all will require me to adapt my software. And then I saw the title of the instruction manual for my current WS1081: TOUCH SCREEN WEATHER STATION WITH SOLAR POWERED Yes, that's what they wrote. But inside it states (top of page 7): Rechargeable batteries have lower voltages and should never be used.
Destroying Frankfurt
My server ffm.lemis.com has been up for nearly 20 months: === grog@ffm (/dev/pts/0) ~ 14 -> date; uptime Sun Jun 1 03:17:01 UTC 2025 3:17AM up 605 days, 16:20, 1 user, load averages: 0.25, 0.29, 0.33 That's not its longest uptime. 1½ years ago it reached an uptime of 2067 days (5 years, 8 months) before it went down due to some failure with DigitalOcean. But now I have two servers in Frankfurt am Main, and all ffm is doing is running squid. fra.lemis.com can do that too.
Web server load
The load on my web servers has been quite tolerable over the last week or so, with load averages mainly below 1. That doesn't correspond directly to the number of hits. Today lax had: On 30 May 2025 you had a total of 702441 hits. ... 193130 /grog/photos/Photos.php?dirdate=19980703 That's much less than the 14 million or so that I had a while back, but it's still 5%, while the server load has dropped by over 99%. And why is this URL top of the list? It's of my musical instruments, 27 years ago.
fra: connectivity problems?
My external web servers have had no overload for a while, but I have an instance of top running on the external servers to keep up. Over the course of the day, fra.lemis.com showed other problems: client_loop: send disconnect: Broken pipe Disconnected at Fri 30 May 2025 08:47:22 AEST ssh: connect to host fra.lemis.com port 22: Operation timed out Disconnected at Fri 30 May 2025 08:48:42 AEST Fssh_kex_exchange_identification: read: Connection reset by peer Connection reset by 192.248.184. Disconnected at Fri 30 May 2025 08:53:44 AEST client_loop: send disconnect: Broken pipe Disconnected at Sat 31 May 2025 03:57:33 AEST Connection closed by 192.248.184.42 port 22 rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [sender] rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(231) [sender=3.3.0] Fri 30 May 2025 12:38:16 AEST Connection closed by 192.248.184.42 port 22 rsync: connection ...
The return of the Umlaut
Last month I got worked up about the fact that my cousin Sandy doesn't want to spell things correctly in her documentation. She deliberately removed all umlaut indications from German texts, giving rise to names like Konigsberg and Sohl (relatives called Söhl). I find it painful. But today I saw not one, but two cases where the umlaut marking was unexpectedly present. First, spam: 27 N + 31-05-2025 To groggly@FreeBSD Arnault Bernard ( 0) N + Mr. Bernärd häs dönäted 3.5,000,000USD tö yöu för the purpöse öf chärity project.
Still more weather station pain
I had pretty much given up on the new weather station, but it's good to sleep over these things. With the new station just outside the lounge room door, there were no more noticeable outages, though theoretically I should have checked how many retries I needed to get a reading. What I did see, with both indoor units, was lots of: May 30 04:53:11 tiwi wh1080[55533]: Can't read device: Input/output error or Unknown error (5) I'm not sure that that's the fault of the devices; I've had them for years, and it could be a program bug, either in my program or in the USB stack.
Renewed weather station pain
Overnight the weather station(s) had a communication dropout again. Both were affected, so it must have been the outside station. That's not important: it's slated for removal anyway. Now to install the new one. It wasn't easy. In fact, I gave up: The new station came without a mounting pole. OK, use the existing one. Sorry, no can do: the mounting brackets are too big, and they can't be adjusted to the existing pole.
New weather station
The Tesa WS1081 Solar Powered Touch Panel Weather Center with PC interface that I ordered last week as a replacement for my flaky Fine Offset WH-1081 has arrived, not a moment too soon: last night I had lost communication between the inside and outside units for 14 hours. It was back now, but before assembling the whole thing, it would be interesting to see if the inside unit is compatible, both with the computer and with the outside unit. The first inspection looked less than good. Here the rear of both inside units, the old one on the left: Different frequencies!
More web server investigations
The Apache (web server) rules that Daniel O'Connor gave me included the comment ?# Ichido AI Bot Blocker?. That sounded like something to look up, and I ended up at https://datadome.co/ (note that missing g). I had to sign up, so I tried that. Got the usual ?please verify your email address? message. Click. ?Can't resolve cf-app.datadome.co. I've never seen that before on a serious web site. Maybe I haven't now. It stayed like that for several hours, and then I got: You have been blocked. Why this blocking? Something about the behaviour of the browser has caught our attention.
Still more web server overload
Somehow the web server problems haven't gone away, at least not for long. I've been planning to find ways to identify the culprits and limit their access. Various suggestions on IRC. Jamie Fraser came up with the issue of .htaccess. Not an issue: I don't use it. Oh: === root@lax (/dev/pts/0) /var/log/www 50 -> find ~grog/www.lemis.com -name ".htaccess" /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/Day/20211118/.htaccess /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/PUS/.htaccess /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/Photos/19730801/.htaccess /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/Photos/20080325/.htaccess /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/webserver/.htaccess /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/AUUG-copy/exec/.htaccess /home/grog/www.lemis.com/myth/data/.htaccess /home/grog/www.lemis.com/myth/.htaccess What's all that stuff? Some of them were 18 years old. Clearly not needed, so I removed them all.
More web server overload
My web servers have been quiet for a week now. Until today. And suddenly we're back to the situation I saw over a week ago: fra.lemis.com with a load average between 200 and 250, though lax.lemis.com was much lower: fra: last pid: 77768; load averages: 205.87, 182.73, 178.73 up 16+20:13:13 23:56:56 CPU: 98.8% user, 0.0% nice, 1.2% system, 0.0% interrupt, 0.0% idle Mem: 821M Active, 2187M Inact, 68M Laundry, 828M Wired, 334M Buf, 94M Free lax: last pid: 29519; load averages: 6.61, 7.18, 7.83 up 443+04:18:31 23:57:06 99 processes: 4 running, 94 sleeping, 1 zombie CPU: 55.8% user, 0.0% nice, 2.3% system, 0.4% interrupt, 41.5% idle Mem: 242M Active, 2808M Inact, 1268K Laundry, 700M Wired, 321M Buf, 414M Free Why does fra ...
Migrating vultures
Time to avoid the USA? Vultr have a presence in Toronto. How much work can it be to move there? How about making a copy of ffm.lemis.com and bringing it back to life in Toronto? On checking, Vultr offer backups and ?snapshots?. The description isn't very clear, but it seems that the snapshot would be an image of the running system. And after fighting their menu system, it seems that I can just restore it to another system. Just what I want. The snapshot took for ever. ffm isn't big, only 25 GB of storage. And it took nearly an hour, during which I was able to confirm: === root@ffm (/dev/pts/0) /home/grog 2 -> time dd if=/dev/ufs/rootfs of=/dev/null bs=128k count=40000 40000+0 records in 40000+0 records out 5242880000 bytes transferred in 23.550468 secs (222623174 bytes/sec) That ...
Aliexcess: not what it seems
The thermometers that I bought from Aliexpress earlier this month had one significant disadvantage: no batteries. I had enough for two of them, but I needed more for the third. Off fighting the Aliexpress web site and found 10 for $5.02. That seemed reasonable. But they wanted $1.61 postage, and when I went to checkout they put another 10% GST on top. Total price $7.29, 45% more than what it seemed to be. And looking on eBay, I discovered that I could get them more cheaply there.
More web server observations
Somehow my web server load has recovered. Only round midnight UTC (10:00 local time here) did the load on both servers go over 1: load averages: 1.31, 0.82, 0.71 up 440+04:26:09 00:04:44 load averages: 1.15, 1.00, 4.85 up 13+20:21:13 00:04:56 That's lax.lemis.com and fra.lemis.com respectively. Since they have 2 CPUs each, they weren't even fully loaded. And then I saw what was using the CPU time: PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND 92255 grog 1 133 0 14M 1952K CPU0 0 3:52 99.16% egrep 92220 www ...
Web server load again
It's been 3 days now since my web server load came back to normal. Time to allow legitimate crawlers? Removed the completely restrictive robots.txt on lax, but not on fra at 3:00 UTC. We'll see what happens there.
A new weather station?
My flaky weather station has come good. For a while. It keeps losing contact between the inside and outside units. Today it did so again, and I really can't understand why. It can't be the distance: it's only about 20 m, through a window, and most of the time it works. When it doesn't, bringing the two units closer doesn't help. It also can't be batteries: the batteries in the inside unit were fully charged, and the ones in the outside unit are charged by solar power. But it failed when the sun was shining after running all night. Why don't I buy a new one?
Chasing William Murdoch
One of the more interesting English-language TV series is Murdoch Mysteries. We've watched the German version (English audio, German subtitles) up to the end of season 6. There's more, starting at season 13, but where are seasons 7 to 12? Some searching brought me to this site, which appears to have all sequences. Only for users (free), so I signed up. But it's geoblocked! So much for that.
Web server: calm
Into the office first thing this morning to check the web server load averages. Round 0.5 on both systems! And it stayed that way all day long. What does that say? That the crawlers have finally given up? On IRC, Jamie Fraser blamed it on AI bots. What can I do about it? He suggested: if you don't mind an anime character on your site briefly before the actual page loads, there's a project called "Anubis" that is apparently pretty effective at stopping them Should I (search for and) try Anubis?
Updating medical records
The misaddressed letter that I received last week proved to be from the National Diabetes Service Scheme (NDSS), offering me free education about Diabetes. After 18 years I think I now know what I need to know. But clearly it's time to update my contact details. That went smoothly with no problems nor identity checks. Anybody could have done it with no more information than my Medicare or NDSS registration number. I'm frequently annoyed by security measures that are both excessive and inadequate, but this is a little too insecure.
DDos via web crawler?
Despite all my attempts, the load on my web servers continues to increase, to over 200 on fra.lemis.com. Most of the requests were like this: 57.141.0.5 - - [16/May/2025:04:04:55 +0000] "GET /grog/diary-dec2010.php?dirdate=20101210&size=2&imagesizes=2222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222332222222222222222022222223222222222222222222122222222122221222222222222222222222222222222222222220222222222222222222222222222222222221222222222222222222222232222222220 HTTP/1.1" 301 - "-" "meta-externalagent/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler)" That's interesting for a couple of reasons: firstly, of course, my redirect worked, and secondly this one identifies itself as a web crawler, though my robots.txt prohibits all crawlers. I got the impression that some pages were particular targets, for example diary-dec2006.php. Downloaded something like 2.5 GB of log file for local analysis, but didn't get very far with it, especially since it took a couple of hours to load.
The daily web site pain
Somehow the load on my web servers isn't dropping. How long is it going to take for the crawlers to give up? And still the load on fra.lemis.com is much higher than on lax.lemis.com. Could it be related to DNS lookups? lax runs a name server, but fra (currently) doesn't, so it needs to find them from somewhere. That's something I can try.
Gemstone: still doesn't make the grade
I've had another special offer for acdsee Gemstone 15, something like $720 worth of software for $59. And another video to show all that it can do: superscale images (could be useful), mark parts of images and then do nothing with them, and all sorts of ways that Gemstone can disrupt your normal photo processing flow and make it different to move to some other product if you want to. I'm sure that there's more than that to the product, and that the videos are just substandard. But I don't have time to try it out. That's not the first time: I had exactly the same thoughts a year ago with release 12.
More web server pain
What causes ECONNRESET, ?connection reset by peer"? I've been getting a lot of them from my overloaded web servers lately. Searching the web didn't help; I suspect that I'll get more information from Stevens, but I need the time to look for it. But there's one obvious possibility: by delaying all requests by 10 seconds when imagesizes is specified, I'm increasing the number of requests. What if I'm running out of some basic net resource? And clearly the delay may not deter crawlers. What I need is to redirect requests with imagesizes?if they are very long. So I hacked something together to redirect any request with an imagesizes string longer than 5 characters: 177-38-154-79.brasrede.psi.br - - [14/May/2025:23:07:12 +0000] "GET http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-apr2023.php?dirdate=20230430&size=2&imagesizes=22322222022220222222222222222222222223222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222220&edit=0 HTTP/1.1" 301 382 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/122.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Trailer/93.3.3516.28" static.vnpt.vn - - [14/May/2025:23:07:11 ...
Web site slowdown
My web server load is still unbearable, load averages over 100 on both servers. And I got other warnings that things are not as they should be: Date: Sun, 11 May 2025 08:51:22 -0400 From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> This is an automated notification that bandwidth usage for your account has exceeded 75% of your available bandwidth pool. Date: Mon, 12 May 2025 11:50:06 -0400 This is an automated notification that bandwidth usage for your account has exceeded 91% of your available bandwidth pool. Date: Mon, 12 May 2025 21:47:45 -0400 This is an automated notification that bandwidth usage for your account has exceeded 101% of your available bandwidth pool.
Translating Sütterlin
Yvonne has received a couple of documents to translate, like this birth certificate: The Fraktur (printed) text is no problem, but the handwriting? It's the old German script, usually called Sütterlin, though that only refers to a specific version of the script. We can both painfully work our way through it, but it's really not easy. Yvonne came up with a partial translation, but we needed to improve it. Google Gemini to our aid? Yes, there's a free online tool, Transkribus, which does just that. But it too didn't like the originals.
Interrupting power supply
Got up to go to the toilet at 4:00 this morning. Flash! The lights got brighter, maybe an overvoltage spike courtesy of Powercor. Nothing seemed to have suffered. Did the PV inverter take umbrage? No, everything as usual. But from my office I heard a continuous alarm beep. In to find that my ?CyberPower? UPS had interrupted power and wouldn't take input power for an excuse. It had taken down hydra and eureka, my main machines, which had been up for over 6 months. What a useless contraption! Removed the ?UPS?, and while I was at it changed the swap SSD on eureka as planned a few months ago.
Web server load
Spent some time looking at the web server loads today. They weren't low. fra had load averages of over 200, lax always a little lower at round 150?and then they suddenly both dropped to below 1. So it's clearly a load issue and nothing related to shared VMs. Nothing for it: I need to learn how to resize images without reloading the web page. I don't know where to start.
Aliexpress gets highest ratings
As if I hadn't had enough trouble with my new mandolin already, I ran into another problem when trying to clean it: I couldn't get the cutting frame out of the device. It was stuck fast, and no lever would get it out. It's a dangerous thing, as my cut finger yesterday shows. And I can't put it in the dishwasher! Well, it seems that I can express my opinion: Very disappointing. It doesn't work nearly as well as in the advertisements: cutting onions is almost useless.
Web server load
Finally got fra.lemis.com up and running. Changed my DNS so that www.lemis.com pointed at fra. As I feared, its load average shot up to round 150 and peaked higher than I have ever seen it. OK, add a second entry for www pointing at lax.lemis.com. To my surprise, nothing much changed during the course of the day. But everything's pointing to the fact that I need to change my PHP code. I don't really need to reload the page every time a photo changes size, but somehow web crawlers love trying out the different sizes: 47.82.18.245 - - [11/May/2025:22:14:48 +0000] "GET /grog/diary-apr2023.php?dirdate=20230410&size=4&imagesizes=44444444444442444444444444444444444444444440444444444444444444444444444444404444444444440 HTTP/1.1" 200 325860 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/121.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/121.0.0.0" 47.82.18.245 - - [11/May/2025:22:19:35 +0000] "GET /grog/diary-apr2023.php?dirdate=20230420&size=2&imagesizes=22222222202222222222222222222222222222222222222222223222222222222222222222212222220 HTTP/1.1" 200 147323 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/121.0.0.0 ...
Web site: complete?
On with the web site installation on fra.lemis.com. It's certainly getting necessary. One of my cron jobs just arrived yesterday after nearly 3 days: Received: from lax.lemis.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by lax.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 53FA2285C4 for <[email protected]>; Fri, 9 May 2025 07:51:39 +0000 (UTC) Received: (from groggyhimself@localhost) by lax.lemis.com (8.15.2/8.15.2/Submit) id 546An1n6056671; Tue, 6 May 2025 10:49:01 GMT (envelope-from grog) On 5 May 2025 you had a total of 10656307 hits. Look at that number! 10,656,307 hits in 24 hours are 123 per second.
Web site setup, continued
More work on the new web site, fra.lemis.com today, to work my way round the issues I had had with PHP. First, which PHP? On lax /usr/local/etc/apache24/httpd.conf contains: LoadModule php7_module libexec/apache24/libphp7.so But the freshly installed /usr/local/etc/apache24/httpd.conf has: # LoadModule php7_module libexec/apache24/libphp7.so LoadModule php_module libexec/apache24/libphp.so Where does that come from? Where does libphp7 come from? There's nothing similar in the pkg repository, but something in my memory suggetsed mod_php.
New web server: no time
So where am I with the new web server (provisionally called fra.lemis.com)? In principle I should be able to start the web server. In practice, I still need to configure it. I've done this before, of course, and what I recorded then helped a lot. First, copy /usr/local/etc/apache24/httpd.conf and /usr/local/etc/apache24/Includes/www.lemis.com.conf from lax to fra. I'm not serving the other web sites from Frankfurt. Compare with the standard installed version. To my surprise, there was almost no difference. === root@fra (/dev/pts/0) /usr/local/etc/apache24 6 -> diff -wu httpd.conf.old httpd.conf --- httpd.conf.old 2025-04-17 01:40:47.000000000 +0000 +++ httpd.conf 2025-05-08 05:38:26.545876000 +0000 @@ -149,7 +149,6 @@ #LoadModule dialup_module libexec/apache24/mod_dialup.so #LoadModule http2_module libexec/apache24/mod_http2.so #LoadModule proxy_http2_module libexec/apache24/mod_proxy_http2.so -#LoadModule md_module libexec/apache24/mod_md.so #LoadModule lbmethod_byrequests_module libexec/apache24/mod_lbmethod_byrequests.so #LoadModule lbmethod_bytraffic_module libexec/apache24/mod_lbmethod_bytraffic.so #LoadModule lbmethod_bybusyness_module libexec/apache24/mod_lbmethod_bybusyness.so @@ -179,7 +178,16 @@ #LoadModule userdir_module libexec/apache24/mod_userdir.so LoadModule alias_module libexec/apache24/mod_alias.so #LoadModule rewrite_module libexec/apache24/mod_rewrite.so +LoadModule php7_module libexec/apache24/libphp7.so +# Does this belong here?
Bloody CAPTCHAs!
It seems that CAPTCHAs are rearing their ugly heads again. acdsee wanted them from me before logging in! Why? Is a CAPTCHA more secure than a password? No, just infinitely more annoying. And Vultr wanted one even when I was logged in. People, why do you want to annoy potential or real customers?
Gemstone 15
I've had a really good offer for acdsee Gemstone 15, the latest version. It looks as if it can do some things I need, like good background removal and noise recovery. Only $59.95 with a free video editor thrown in. But only until this evening, and I'm busy setting up a new web server. OK, what the hell, let's buy it I wish I hadn't. Firstly I couldn't enter the license key, and it kept hanging. Finally I found a way to enter it, and it refused it?and hung again. OK, reboot, braving the rwhod bug, and was finally able to enter the license key to its satisfaction.
More ancient photography insights
I'm still following up on the apparent 100th anniversary of the announcement of the Leica I on 5 May 1925. I've watched a number of videos, some informative, some just plain stupid. One that was in between came up with an interesting claim: the Leica II, the first Leica with a coupled rangefinder, was a reaction to the Contax I. Oh. I thought the Leica came first. Both cameras were introduced in 1932, but in which sequence? Is the otherwise mediocre video correct? Ask Google Gemini: Q: Which 35 mm camera was the first to have a coupled rangefinder?
A new server
There's nothing for it, I need a new external web server. Where? The obvious place is Frankfurt am Main, where I already have a smaller server, ffm.lemis.com. That server does almost nothing, so a larger one could take over its load as well. So: set up a new virtual machine, provisionally called fra.lemis.com, and start copying data from lax. What do I need to do? I already have a HOWTO, but it's over 11 years old. I'll update it when the dust settles, but basically: Create the server, running FreeBSD 14.1.
Web site performance
There's no doubt about it: I need to do something about my external web site www.lemis.com. The load average is almost alway over 100, and just copying data there takes forever: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/13) ~ 489 -> syncgrog Tue 6 May 2025 13:20:53 AEST ... sent 515,480 bytes received 271,541 bytes 55.99 bytes/sec total size is 5,028,536,454 speedup is 6,389.33 34103.31 real 3.24 user 0.18 sys Tue 6 May 2025 22:49:16 AEST Normally that takes about 20 seconds.
Delivery unsuccessful
Aliexpress may have a really hard-to-navigate web site, but they certainly keep me informed with the progress of their postage. But today I got this message: What's that? Follow the link to Australia Post, re-enter the tracking number: this is Aliexpress' new way of saying ?your parcel is waiting at NAPOLEON [sic] post office?.
Web site overload?
Lately I've been seeing a lot of heavy load on www.lemis.com: last pid: 32899; load averages: 171.42, 167.37, 168.65 up 424+07:01:22 02:39:57 340 processes: 181 running, 159 sleeping Very frequently the load averages are like that, round 170. At other times they drop below 1. An obvious reason is the load on the server, of course, but there's no obvious difference between the two. But: the server is a virtual machine, run by Vultr. Their choice of the number of machines on a given physical host makes assumptions about the CPU usage of each VM.
Blank images and pixel mapping
Looking at the photos I took of the pump swap, I discovered to my horror that no fewer than 11 blank images. What happened? In the Bad Old Days (think Leica) that could happen if you took a photo with the lens cap on, but on the Olympus E-PM2 the viewfinder would also have been blank. Shutter failure? It wouldn't have been the first with this camera. Took a sample shot with the camera, coincidentally showing my FED 1: No, that's OK. Intermittent error?
Yelp: howl!
There must be other butchers in Ballarat than Sinclair Meats and Davies. Off on the web to find Top 10 Best Meat Shops Near Ballarat, Victoria - With Real Reviews. Oh. Not a single butcher in Ballarat, not even Sinclair. Instead I got: This is a review for meat shops in Ballarat, VIC: "Farmer Joes Market has a fantastic array of fruit, vegetables, nuts and meats... " Sounds good. Where is it? In Boronia, a place so far away that we almost never went there even when in Melbourne, though Fleischers, now sadly gone, made it worthwhile.
Next Budget Direct nonsense
Budget Direct have finally got round to sending me the transcript of my ?chats? the other day. It's some strange Gmail function that requires 2FA to access. And then I can only display it, slowly and with timeouts. I can't find a way to save it. Replied to the email and asked for better access. Got a surprisingly quick reply explaining that it's for security reasons. I can't quite deny that: in my case there's nothing sensitive, but there could have been. But why this horrible access method? A password protected web page could have done it too. And a little later I received an automated mail: Thank you for sending an email to Auto & General Services about RE: BUDGET DIRECT: 12035912 CHAT TRANSCRIPT.
Bloody Android!
Yvonne was at Chris Bahlo's place this afternoon. Chris is currently in South Australia, and Yvonne is looking after the horses. And I got a phone call from her, hiding the green ?answer? button. Found it in time (just push other stuff aside, you know which) and answered. The call was disconnected after less than 5 seconds. OK, she'll call back. But she didn't. So I called her. Immediate ?not available, please leave a message?. Damn. Tried again a few minutes later. Same thing. And for some reason the display went blank while I was waiting, repeatedly. Why? These horrible Android devices are full of problems.
eBay payment pain
I've bought a Panasonic Lumix G 20 mm f/1.7 on eBay for Yana. Time to pay. Oh: Well, not surprising, since they haven't given me a payment method. Try PayPal: What's wrong there? Has somebody cracked my PayPal account? No. Must be an eBay problem. Pay with my bank card: Oh.
Clive Palmer supplies porn
Heard on IRC today: https://www.unitedaustraliaparty.org.au, the home page of Clive Palmer's United Australia Party, offers free porn.
Alternative insurers
Somehow I have had nothing but trouble with insurance companies. It was impossible to communicate with RACV, Elders Insurance seem to be stuck in the last century, Budget Direct have had one computer problem after another, . Only one company stands out: BUPA, my private health insurance. Not only have I not had any difficulties with them, they're one of the few funds that have actually paid out. And they offer car insurance. OK, apply for my 2002 Hyundai Elantra. $378 per year! I'm currently paying Budget Direct $218.61.
More Budget Direct pain
So is Yvonne's car insured or not? I'm sure that it is, but Budget Direct have sent a message saying that it isn't. Nothing for it: brave their horrible ?chat? interface again. Another 36 minutes, at the end of which they refused to send me a message confirming that the car is insured. They just wanted me to send them a screen shot of the message! I gave them until tomorrow evening to send a message confirming that the car is still insured, and to explain how this could happen. Shortly later, I got multiple emails with the certificate, which I didn't want, but not the promised ?chat?
More PV insights
Long discussion with Jamie Fraser on IRC today. Indeed, he has two PV systems, and he claims that they're in parallel. Long discussion, in which I discovered that not all PV systems are like mine: both of Jamie's just feed power into the house, and they don't have a direct grid connection at all. How do they limit the power sent to the grid? There's a separate device between house and grid that tells them ?enough?. That could work, I suppose, but how does it work with a battery?
Bloody insurers!
Part of transferring my finances to Bank Australia involves changing direct debit agreements that debit from my ANZ credit card. I have managed most of them, but I haven't found a way to change my details with Elders Insurance. Finally got round today: it seems I can't do it via the web! Instead she sent me an email with a PDF form to fill out, complete with boxes for each digit. How 20th century! It's been nearly a month since I got an SMS from my insurers, Budget Direct: Hi from Budget Direct .
ANZ account details stolen!
Early this morning read the news: More than 31,000 passwords belonging to Australian customers of the Big Four banks are being shared amongst cyber criminals online, often for free, ?the ABC can reveal?. The Australian firm Dvuln, which made the discovery, said the passwords were stolen directly from users' devices, which had been infected with a type of malware known as an "infostealer". "This is not a vulnerability in the banks," Dvuln's founder Jamie O'Reilly said. "
More Aliexpress fun
Bought more stuff on Aliexpress today: kitchenware, thermometers and a camera remote control. Their calculations weren't as extreme as last time, though I did catch the total changing while I was looking at it (admittedly, only from $57.50 to $57.51), on which their 10% GST was $5.80. But that's nothing near as bad as just finding things on the site. Looking for a weather station was a total catastrophe. I complain about eBay, but this is much worse. When are people going to realize that good documentation sells things?
Your FreeBSD broke my web site!
A couple of days ago a message went to the FreeBSD-questions mailing list. It didn't quite conform to the rules for interaction: Hi Free BSD faggots, Fuck you for creating a god insecure operating system and got 4chan hacked. I couldn't go to /pol/ you commies. ... TRUMP 2028! JUST DIE YOU FAGGOTS. The general opinion was ?ignore him/her/it??many considered it an AI bot. But then he went and contacted the FreeBSD Core Team, which is currently considering whether to reply. Potentially this could be bad press for FreeBSD. The claims should be worth investigating.
More weather station issues
What's the outside temperature? --:--. My weather station is misbehaving again. Despite battery change and placing directly under the outside station, it didn't communicate with it. Dammit, I've had issues with this device for over 15 years. What can I replace it with? I don't really want to write the software all over again for a new device, but the idea of a Wi-Fi connection has certain advantages. Spoke on IRC with Daniel O'Connor, who has been doing similar things, but he hasn't managed to crack his latest device. Spent some time looking, but I really don't want to have to get involved.
Second PV system: decision
Call from Yasmin, the one with whom I spoke about a new PV system 10 days ago. She was surprised that I hadn't been contacted by a techie and offered to chase one down for me. But why bother? It's clear from my own measurements that what they offer doesn't work at all for me, so I cancelled the order. That didn't help. A little later I got a call from 0414 870 226. Who's that? My old friend Simon. Simon who? Simon Collins, the techie whom I had cancelled. Spoke to him anyway for 18 minutes, during which I got some interesting information.
Can't read your diary
Make from Mike Jeays today. He can't read my diary. He gets error 500: internal server error, and it only affects the page . OK, check. I don't get a server error message, but I don't get a display of the page anyway. And yet it's exactly the same as the local copy, which displays normally. After some searching, came up with: [Sat Apr 26 01:41:15.333015 2025] [php7:emerg] [pid 73885] [client 121.200.11.253:22896] PHP Parse error: Invalid indentation - tabs and spaces cannot be mixed in /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/diary.php on line 590 Huh?
New toys
Yvonne back from shopping today with the package of goodies from Aliexcess: A multimeter, offered to me for about $3.50, which miraculously increased to $9.22. I already have one, but I had some doubts about the accuracy. But it didn't show anything: it needs a 9 V battery, not supplied, which they were too polite to mention. To my surprise I found an unopened package with 2 batteries in my shelves.
Portuguese CAPTCHAs
While looking at some old web pages, came across a web site that I didn't know, Olympus Passion. Want to sign up? Sure, why not? Não sou um robô? I know enough Portuguese to understand that, but why Portuguese? In any case, I have my answer to ?why not??. I'm getting more and more turned off by CAPTCHAs, though it might have been interesting to see what terms they use for ?crosswalks?, and what their fire hydrants look like.
Brollie
Found an article in ABC news today extolling the virtues of free video streaming. Nothing new to me: ABC themselves have iview, and SBS has ?on demand?. But they had a third one: ?Brollie?. OK, try them out. A fair selection, including a number of Australian films. I have been looking for Sunday Too Far Away for some time, so it was worth trying to download it. First, though, another one that looked interesting: Mushrooms. Download went very quickly, but I discovered that there were only 2¼ minutes out of 90 minutes, apparently in very low resolution (though the video itself was 1024×768, presumably upscaled) and apparently only a cropped part of the image.
Subtitle download insights
Now opensubtitles.org have really annoyed me with their spamming. How do I download the rest of my subtitles? Tried again and got the usual fetch: https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/download/s/sublanguageid-all/imdbid-2398016: Not Found OK, can I download it from the web browser? No! First I need to select the language. When I do that in the browser, I get a page that looks the same but has different links. And then I was able to download the files. Well, some of them: ...
Opensubtitle spamming stopped
Bloody opensubtitles.org! It continually spams me: How is it gaining access? Via the web browser? A bit of searching showed: yes. Apparently it set a cookie to allow it to continue presenting notifications even when it didn't have a page open. For Chromium, go to Settings / Privacy and Security / Site Settings / Notifications and disallow them. In this case, I also deleted the cookie.
Finding the missing DxO PhotoLab
It was frustrating that I couldn't find a version of DxO PhotoLab for Yana yesterday. After she left, I did some searching in this diary. What I really wanted was PhotoLab 4, the last version before the one I'm currently using. No mention, but I did find some URLs that gave me a clue, like https://download-center.dxo.com/PhotoLab/v2/Win/DxO_PhotoLab2_Setup.exe. That's not much use, since it's the version that I already have, and which Yana's laptop refused to look at. And I can't go to the directory, because it's 403. But how about https://download-center.dxo.com/PhotoLab/v4/Win/DxO_PhotoLab4_Setup.exe? Yes! It's still there and can be downloaded.
How much PV power do we get?
Last week I did some thinking about how much power my PV array generates on average and came to no really clear conclusion, only that the offer I have is unreasonably optimistic. Power generation is measured in terms of hours per day at nominal generation capacity, and round here it's quoted at 3.5 hours per day: a 6.6 kW array should generate an average of 23.1 kWh per day over the year. My offer claims 4 hours (26.4 kWh). But it occurred to me that I have quite good records: my current inverter tells me that I have used 57,665.57 kWh of ?green?
Camera software for Yana
So we've come to a conclusion: Yana gets my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark I with the M.Zuiko Digital ED 14-150 mm f/4.0-5.6, the Zuiko Digital 35 mm f/3.5 Macro and the Zuiko Digital ED 8 mm f/3.5 fisheye. She still needs a fast normal focal length prime and a wide angle lens, both of which I have none to spare. And, of course, she needs software to process the photos. OM Workspace is free, about what it's worth, and I have old licenses for DxO PhotoLab 2, 3 and 4. But I couldn't find the downloads online?previously they were available, but I couldn't find them.
Opensubtitles pain
So why can't I download subtitles from https://www.opensubtitles.org/ and more? It seems that they track the number of downloads and stop after a while. OK, sign up. If I can. After half an hour of claimed incorrect user names and passwords and interminable CAPTCHAs I gave up. Even after being sent a password reset link, it wouldn't accept the link. Possibly this was its own way of saying ?your password doesn't fulfil our unspecified requirements?. As if that wasn't enough, it started spamming me! Somehow it's difficult to believe in their good will.
Downloading subtitles
On Wednesday I established that subtitles are available for a number of videos that don't include them, but they have made it so hard that it's hardly worth the trouble?unless you scrape the web pages. Tried that today, and in a very short space of time I had: Find the list of subtitles on opensubtitles.org, here for The White Queen. Download: === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/5) /spool/Series/White-Queen/subtitles 1310 -> fetch https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/ssearch/sublanguageid-all/idmovie-153691 fetch: https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/ssearch/sublanguageid-all/idmovie-153691: size of remote file is not known idmovie-153691 93 kB 314 kBps 00s ...
ATA pain
What's wrong with my ATA? My take is that it's badly designed, implemented and maintained. Most people don't enable syslog on their ATA, but I do, and I get ridiculous numbers of messages like: Apr 16 01:01:24 homephone HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4]PROVISION: could not download https://fm.grandstream.com/gs/cfgc074ad3766d8 Apr 16 01:01:25 homephone HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4]PROVISION: unable to download config data Apr 16 01:01:25 homephone HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4]PROVISION: config update not completed Apr 16 04:13:30 homephone HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4]CallRecord::writeCDRFile, No space! current file size =51158bytes, need extra 79 bytes. Apr 16 05:52:57 homephone HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4]SIPStack(0)::parseMessage: Failed to parse the sip message Apr 16 06:03:02 homephone HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4] nvram_data: no new data saved, no need to flush flash Apr 16 06:03:02 homephone HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4] user_data: Saving User Data...
More PV considerations
Woke up round midnight and lay awake for what must have been 2 hours thinking about the PV system that I had been quoted. Possibly the most interesting insight was that maybe it is possible to run two PV systems. I had thought about running them in parallel, which is pretty much a non-starter, but what about running them in series? One inverter feeds the house, the second feeds the first inverter. And the grid feed-in? That would be alright for the second inverter, the one connected directly to the grid, but would it accept feed-in from the first inverter? It's possible, I suppose, but it would depend on the individual inverter.
The new PV array
Mail from Modern Earth Energy today, addressed to the throwaway email address that I had asked them to change and attaching an image: ---Attachment: Lehey_29StonesRoad: application/octet-stream (1%) %PDF-1.4 %?? 1 0 obj <</Creator (Chromium) /Producer (Skia/PDF m91) /CreationDate (D:20250416063001+00'00') /ModDate (D:20250416063001+00'00')>> I recognize that magic number. It's a PDF file, but they're too secure to set the correct content type. Change it to application/pdf and it calls itself an ?Energy Yield Report?, though it's not clear why. It shows bare-bones information about a PV system and layout on the roof: It took me some time to discern that there are 7 panels facing north (in fact, 8°) and another 8 facing east (98°).
Subtitles: the pain
I've found a source of Upstairs, Downstairs in good resolution and quality, and with subtitles?all 140 GB of it! The subtitles are good for both of us, but particularly for Yvonne, who has difficulty with unfamiliar English accents. OK, now that we have unlimited data, why not download the whole thing? But where are the subtitles? None! Searches revealed: Opensubtitles.org, with a list of all episodes and confusing links. None appear to be subtitles. The first takes me to an equally confusing search page, which may or may not offer subtitles, or maybe just a link to unrelated advertising.
More PV power?
After last week's call, I had no fewer than three reminders of a call at 13:00 today to discuss upgrading our PV installation, two of them from a number (0483 909 812) that was reported as ?DB Realty?. Today the call came as planned from a number that wasn't identified (0451 532 572). The caller identified himself as Andrew Parker and may have mentioned his affiliation, but I didn't get it. He wasn't from Modern Earth Energy, but some kind of consultant to help me avoid the fly-by-night (my term) nature of the industry. They would also not be doing the work: that would be some company in Ballarat.
AliExcess again
Where's my chip cutter? I looked again, but I still can't find it. But I recall that it cut relatively thick chips, and they're not expensive. Sure enough, round $21 on eBay, with cutters for two different chip sizes (½" and ?" if I believe one seller). But how about AliExpress? That sounds like the kind of thing that they would sell. Off to look, marvelling once again at their amazingly badly organized search pages and constantly changing prices. But they had the same item for $17.29. OK, I can risk that. And while I was at it, found a couple of other things that I had been considering buying: a new multimeter (I don't trust the accuracy of the one I have) for $6.72, a battery tester for $2.68 and a quick USB charger for $2.59.
ANZ Bank complaint handling
Call on my mobile phone today from an unknown number in Melbourne. ?I'm Norelle from ANZ and want to talk to you about your recent complaint. Alright, Norelle, can you authenticate yourself? ?I'm Norelle from ANZ?! Yes, that's what scammers say too. ?I sent you a text?. Do you mean an SMS? ?Huh?? Yes, ultimately she said that she meant an SMS, but I didn't receive one. Based on the complete lack of preparedness for this kind of question, I assumed that she really was from ANZ. A scammer would have been better prepared. In the end she said that she would send me email, which she did.
Overly polite X software
Back to looking at my problems starting X on dereel, the new lagoon candidate. If I can't write to a remote .fvwm directory (why?) , I need to make it local. So I did that, and it started. But I still had these strange error messages: ?can't open unix:0?. In the cases I have seen in the past, the program was polite enough to give its name: xterm: Xt error: Can't open display: unix:0 OK, search my configuration files. No mention of unix:0 anywhere! I'll have to run ktrace at some point.
Which PDF editor?
The other issue with my O'Reilly royalties was that I had to fill them out in a PDF document. Sure, I could print it out, write in the details and scan it again. But how 20th century! I've been able to modify PDFs before, I think with Open Office, but surely there's a standalone PDF editor. Yes, of course. But not for FreeBSD! In the end I checked with Google Gemini, which pointed me to PDFgear for Microsoft. With only minor pain I was able to install it, and it seems to work. But what do I put in there?
?Wise?: Now you see me, now you don't
Despite all the problems I've had with ?Wise?, the unwisely named money transfer service, they remain the cheapest. And a couple of days ago I received mail from O'Reilly telling me that royalties had accumulated, and would I please fill out the enclosed form. OK, what's my US account number? I had it written down, but they want the name of the bank, and I didn't write that down. Wise? Transferwise? Unwise? I should check on the web site. Once again I couldn't find it! What a horrible web site! After multiple attempts, I found a way: On the home screen, scroll the 3½ flag images to the right, revealing a US flag.
Rebuilding dirlist, try 3
Also ran my script to rebuild dirlist as planned yesterday. Things weren't quite as good as I expected: not all the description files contained what they should, and some were missing. Clearly a file whose time has passed. But now I have two different partial dirlists, both wrong. Maybe there's a little less work now, but I'll have to see. The diffs are remarkably large. Here the version I created yesterday (dirlist) and the one I did today (dirlist.new): === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/public_html 4509 -> diff -wu photos/dirlist Photos/dirlist.new | wc -l 5661 === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/public_html 4510 -> wc -l photos/dirlist Photos/dirlist.new 6526 photos/dirlist 6437 Photos/dirlist.new The diffs are nearly as big as the files, and some of the damage is surprisingly recent: ...
A maze of twisty little symlinks
So dereel in its incarnation as a copy of lagoon is up and running. Start X? Fails: it had the xorg.conf file for the real lagoon, and the hardware is different here. OK, remove it and see what happens. Starts, bla[cn]k screen. Oh. Window manager not running. This is due to the transition from fvwm2 to fvwm3 that I started over a year ago. OK, install fvwm3 and continue. Multiple issues with the configuration files. For years the configuration on lagoon has Just Worked, as the .Xdefaults files show: === root@lagoon (/dev/pts/8) ~ 123 -> l ~yvonne/.Xdefaults-* -rw-r--r-- 1 yvonne home 3,664 6 Jul 2002 /home/yvonne/.Xdefaults-battunga -r--r--r-- 1 yvonne home 732 1 Nov 2007 /home/yvonne/.Xdefaults-lagoon Those config files are 23 and 17 years old!
A new video editor?
I've decided that avidemux's days are over. A quick Google Gemini search gave me a list of others to try: kdenlive, openshot and blender. As feared, they dragged in a whole slew of dependencies: ===== Sun 6 Apr 2025 13:58:57 AEST on dereel.lemis.com: pkg install kdenlive openshot blender The following 183 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked): New packages to be INSTALLED: ImageMagick7: 7.1.1.26_6 ... Number of packages to be installed: 183 The good news is that they installed cleanly.
Rebuilding lagoon
Today Yvonne made the mistake of taking a video from horseback using her mobile phone. And she held it in portrait orientation! Once I got it onto a sane machine, I discovered that avidemux, at least as installed on lagoon, has no provision for rotating video clips. It saw it as landscape, and there was nothing I could do to fix it. I've hated avidemux since I first installed it over 13 years ago. To add to that, my Google Gemini query failed, producing just random junk on the screen. lagoon's system is over 4 years old, and it is clearly in need of upgrading.
Fixing dirlist
Spent a little time this morning continuing with my dirlist reconstruction, but I didn't have much time. And then it occurred to me: each directory has a file description with the content of the header, though I no longer seem to use it. But that's exactly what I need for my Makefile target: dirlist: rm -f dirlist.new for i in [12]*; do \ if [ -e $i/description ]; then \ (echo -n "$$i "; cat $$i/description) >> dirlist.new; \ fi; \ done But I didn't have time for that today.
Recovering dirlist
How do I recover my seriously broken ~/pubic_html/photos/dirlist? It should have round 6,500 entries, one for each directory in ~/pubic_html/Photos/. But at least 880 entries are missing. I can't automatically rebuild the entries with my current method, because the infrastructure is missing for the older entries. OK, manual it is. Find the log messages where more than 2 entries had been deleted, and create diffs from the previous === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/public_html/photos 4449 -> rlog -r1.7655 dirlist revision 1.7655 date: 2020/10/08 03:47:35; author: grog; state: Exp; lines: +1 -38 Automatic checkin === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/public_html/photos 4450 -> rcsdiff -wur1.7654 -r1.7655 dirlist =================================================================== RCS file: RCS/dirlist,v retrieving revision 1.7654 retrieving revision 1.7655 diff -wu -r1.7654 -r1.7655 --- dirlist 2020/10/07 01:08:41 1.7654 +++ dirlist 2020/10/08 03:47:35 1.7655 @@ -326,7 +326,6 @@ 20010322 LUGS in Singapore ...
Where have my photos gone?
More processing old photos today, including considerable improvements on some of the photos I took during the 1967 Asia Trip. Stupidly, I had taken the photos on Ektachrome and developed them myself in substitute chemicals. Given the once-in-a-lifetime nature of the trip, I should have taken them on Kodachrome. To make matters worse, on at least one film I messed up the clearing bath stage, resulting in a pink tinge on the photos, like here: To my surprise, a simple white balance change fixed it: I had expected it to be some kind of ...
Bloody technology!
Somehow technology got the better of me today. First I wanted to take a photo of the reflective strips that Yvonne had hung up. And the camera didn't work! Pressing the shutter release did nothing useful. After some investigation discovered a hash icon in the display which I think meant high-resolution. But how do I turn it off? This is the OM System OM-1 Mark II, and I still don't understand the menu system. After a while I discovered that some while back I had assigned the hi-res function to the red button that normally means ?take video?. That was a mistake.
Apps?
I really don't like using mobile phones for computing tasks, but the writing is on the wall. How insecure are they really? Like anything portable, they're subject to theft. Yes, there are security measures like PINs and thumbprint and face recognition, but they don't help if the phone is not locked, and I'm not sure how safe they are if the phone is locked. On the other hand, how secure are phone calls like the one I made to ANZ today? Years ago (13 May 2007, but I didn't mention it in the diary) I established that it's surprisingly easy to tap into a phone line if you know how the lines are laid.
Cancelling my credit card
I've been transitioning away from ANZ bank for nearly a month now, and my credit card bill shows the effects: it's only about 40% of what it was last month. I only have one or two direct debits to cancel?and the card itself, of course, before they charge me an arm and a leg to renew it. But I can't find a way to tell the ANZ web site that I want to cancel the card before it renews. So I braved their phone system, still with this appalling voice non-recognition system of the kind that I have been complaining about for over 15 years.
We don't need no steenking encryption
Mail message from John Marshall today, encrypted for some reason?there was no sensitive data in it. And I couldn't read it! Much searching showed that there was something missing on hydra. I was able to read it on eureka once I found my private key. But what's the difference? The software is installed, and all the configuration files are the same. The real insight, though, is that this is the first time I've needed encryption since I installed hydra 1½ years ago.
cd -
In the evening while watching TV, I entered === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/1) /spool/Series/Die-jungen-Aerzte/04 2006 -> cd ../../Kanzlei/ === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/1) /spool/Series/Kanzlei 2007 -> cd - /spool/Series/Die-jungen-Aerzte/04 === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/1) /spool/Series/Die-jungen-Aerzte/04 2008 -> That was an accident, but what happened there? I was back in the previous directory. Try again? === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/1) /spool/Series/Die-jungen-Aerzte/04 2008 -> cd - /spool/Series/Kanzlei === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/1) /spool/Series/Kanzlei 2009 -> cd - /spool/Series/Die-jungen-Aerzte/04 === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/1) /spool/Series/Die-jungen-Aerzte/04 2010 -> pd Oh. I didn't know that that worked.
Straightening fisheye photos in practice
The main reason I bought my 7Artisans 4 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens was for quick wide-angle photos when I was in town. The 65° horizontal of a typical mobile phone or wide-angle lens? Why not 220°? But my experiments with panoramas have been somewhat frustrating. Today I tried with individual images. That was interesting. The first was my office: It's relatively easy to convert this with Hugin: load the image, set the projection, crop and save. The result: Yes, that's not as straight as a rectilinear image.
Google Maps excels itself
How do I get to Harvey Norman? I know of course, but I always get Google Maps to work out a route. While I was there I also went to the Fruit Shack, which is just round the corner. But the route that Google Maps chose blew my mind: Stop on the side of the road (Howitt Street) and walk across the car park to the main entrance. Even when I added a destination directly in front of the entrance (the route to the north and west starting at Howitt Street), it wanted me to stop, walk to the entrance, presumably return and then drive to the entrance.
A new deep fryer
The deep fryer that I ordered from Harvey Norman has arrived already, after less than two weeks. Only I can pick it up, nobody else! Why? Their SMS also didn't give me the order number, so I had to copy it to present on pickup. Off to Ballarat. Harvey Norman are interesting in that there seems to be nothing like a cashier. Finally I found somebody who was completely confused by the idea of a deep fryer and online purchases. ?Would that be electrical??. Maybe. But finally I picked the thing up. Receipt? Oh, we'll email it to you. On the way out I stopped to take a photo: Not the best (see below), but it shows the deep fryer with my handbag on top of it at bottom left.
Processing old photos
While looking for a photo recently I discovered that some were missing. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. Made lists of the photo directories (Photo1) and the web directories (Photo2) and discovered: === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/7) ~ 700 -> wc -l /var/tmp/Photo? 6723 /var/tmp/Photo1 6494 /var/tmp/Photo2 229 missing directories on the web! Today I did a bit of searching and found that a lot were not real photo directories, and some, especially the ones from the last millennium, contained duplicates: I had created a directory with a random date, put the photos in there, and then moved them to a directory with a more plausible date as I entered my diaries of the time.
In a BIND
For a couple of days I've been trying to get rid of these broken DNS requests on www.lemis.com: Mar 2 01:16:32 lax named[58441]: DNS format error from 189.36.144.18#53 resolving ORION.UNITELECOM.COM.BR/AAAA: empty question section Mar 2 01:16:34 lax named[58441]: DNS format error from 189.36.144.18#53 resolving corvus.unitelecom.com.br/AAAA: empty question section Asking Google Gemini came up with an overly complicated update to named.conf, and it also didn't work: it blocked all requests. Later John Marshall on IRC came up with what seems to be correct: --- named.conf 2021/12/14 04:01:45 1.8 +++ named.conf 2025/03/05 00:56:06 @@ -7,15 +7,22 @@ unix "/var/run/ndc" perm 0600 owner 0 group 0; // the default }; +acl blocked_ips { + 189.36.144.18; + 189.36.144.19; +}; + options { ...
Bank Australia: the other shoe
Into Bank Australia branch to pick up my cash, as painfully prepared yesterday. The preparation had one good thing: I was asked for my password! If I hadn't done it yesterday, I would have had to go through the whole rigmarole in the branch. And if it's necessary, why didn't they set one up when I signed up? Interestingly, the person at the other teller was being subjected to the same silly Equifax questions. I wonder if this is some new measure that they have imposed on their customers. Amanda, the teller, also asked me?again!?about the purpose of the withdrawal. When asked, she explained that it was to help prevent scams.
Bank Australia pain
It's hay time again, and Yvonne wants to collect a large sum (far too large!) of cash to pay for it. We're in the process of moving all our local banking to Bank Australia, so I called up to ask if they would have that much money available at the branch. So, once I finally found the number, I called up the phone enquiries at +61-3-9854-4666 and asked. Simple question, right? And nothing that would raise any security concerns (it wasn't that much money, so there's no concern that I might be planning a bank robbery). It took me 30 minutes!
More Google Maps fun
How long does it take to get from here to Cabrini Health in Malvern to arrive at 11:15? That depends on whom you ask. Ask Google Maps and it will tell you 2 hours. Or ask the mobile phone version and it will tell you something else. In the end we left at 8:53, mainly because we were ready. and were rewarded with an estimated arrival time of 10:53. But that gradually changed as we went through some of the worst traffic I've been in in a while, and finally we arrived at 10:03, a total of 2 hours, 10 minutes, still a couple of minutes ahead of Google's final estimate.
Another dead named!
named on www.lemis.com has crashed again! The backtrace is the same, but this time I noticed lots of this: Mar 2 01:16:32 lax named[58441]: DNS format error from 189.36.144.18#53 resolving ORION.UNITELECOM.COM.BR/AAAA: empty question section Mar 2 01:16:34 lax named[58441]: DNS format error from 189.36.144.18#53 resolving corvus.unitelecom.com.br/AAAA: empty question section Mar 2 01:16:36 lax named[58441]: DNS format error from 189.36.144.18#53 resolving orion.unitelecom.com.br/AAAA: empty question section They were there yesterday too. Is this some kind of attack? It's always from 189.36.144.18 or 189.36.144.19, and the request is also always one of very few invalid requests.
No mail!
Today I managed to cut down the contents of my mail inbox to only 5 messages, probably the least I have had in years. But it stayed that way for hours on end. Before going to bed, checked what was going on on the external server, and found: Feb 28 18:33:12 lax named[13618]: DNS format error from 189.36.144.19#53 resolving corvus.UNITELECOM.COM.BR/AAAA: empty question section Feb 28 18:33:26 lax named[13618]: resolver.c:1958: INSIST(((fctx->validators).head == ((void *)0))) failed, back trace Feb 28 18:33:26 lax named[13618]: #0 0x2bc830 in ?? Feb 28 18:33:26 lax named[13618]: #1 0x498aea in ??
More Android pain
I've been using computers of some form or another in the kitchen for well over a quarter of a century, but lately I've been using my Android mobile phone. It's not a good substitute. Today I had two recipes, and it was beyond me to switch between the two. And basically a phone is just too small. I should use the TV in the lounge room instead.
Clearing out out computers
It's been two weeks since I thought about giving away my old computers, and Kevin Koster has shown an interest. Today he came by and took a dozen or so with him, along with the three monitors that have been lying around for ever: Surprisingly it wasn't as painful as I had feared, not even the old SPARCstations, nor the HP Z800 that I inherited from Bruce Evans. And my office doesn't look that much emptier.
Another Google Maps failure
I always get directions from Google Maps, even when I know the way, so that I can give feedback. Today I asked ?take me to Virginia Williams dentist?. The result: That's not what happens when I ask on a Real Computer. I had to explicitly state Ballarat to get the correct location. Why? And driving on to the car sales place was even stranger. In the first 5 turns, it wanted to take me in the wrong direction, almost to the point where I thought that it had found the wrong direction.
Android causes panic
Yvonne left to do her shopping in late morning. First she went to Pene Kirk to pick up some medication, and then headed off to Ballarat. For about 900 m. Then, as Google Maps showed, she stopped on the Rokewood-Skipton Road. And stayed there for at least 10 minutes. What's that? Tried calling her, multiple times, but no response. Has she had some kind of cardiac crisis? Called Pene, but she didn't answer either. Nothing for it, off to see what had happened. But then she started moving again. Still no answer on the phone. Ambulance? Tried again and got a busy indication.
Sign in for your hospital stay
Yvonne will have her ?Re ablation? on 6 March, but this time in a different hospital, the Cabrini Health in Malvern. That's marginally irritating because it's on the other side of town, but a major annoyance is that the registration that caused me so much pain 4 months ago had to be done all over again. I suffered again from just about all the pain I experienced then, along with some new ones: The clever web programmer insists on entering names in the format ?Smith, Paul?.
M710e or V520S?
So disdain is a Lenovo V520S, apparently not in the ThinkCentre line, and not the ThinkCentre M710e that I ordered. But it works. What do I do? How do they compare in specifications? This time Google Gemini didn't help, so I went to DeepSeek instead. It didn't help very much, since it seems that the M710e comes in multiple versions, but the bottom line is probably: ThinkCentre M710e: Generally more expensive due to its rugged build and compact design. V520S: More affordable, targeting budget-conscious businesses. On the down side, it would mean returning it.
Microsoft ?Windows? 11
Getting disdain up and running was only half the pain, of course. Next was to make my first acquaintance with Microsoft ?Windows?. Even before I started, I was wondering why I bothered. First I was asked all sorts of silly questions. Do I want ?Kiosk?? What's that? Turn this device into a kiosk to use as a digital sign, interactive display, or other things What on earth does that mean? I'm baffled. About the only thing I know is that I don't want it. What I do want is to incorporate it into my network, and for that I have a setup page.
disdain
First thing this morning I took a look at disdain, the new Microsoft ?windows? box. First, what is it? A V520S. What did the listing say? An M710e! Or maybe a V520S, depending on where I look. Clearly the listing, which also showed an image of what is presumably an M710e, was badly prepared. That's a reason to return it, but I don't know if I care enough. The processor and storage are as described. Is that still a ThinkCentre? There's nothing on the labels to say so. Maybe Lenovo have given up the term. OK, why doesn't it run? Opened it up: Power on showed that the fan turned on and immediately stopped again.
disdain
Yvonne brought the new ThinkCentre back with her from Napoleons. It doesn't look very much like what was advertised (first image): More to the point, though, it doesn't work! Powering on causes a short burst of activity from the fan, and the power LED lights briefly, but then it stops and tries again a few seconds later. It's broke! Dammit, it's a pain to send things back. But what can I do? Sent a return request and got a quick response suggesting that I try reseating the RAM.
disdain for Microsoft
My new ThinkCentre arrived yesterday, and Yvonne picked it up today. A good opportunity to rearrange the systems I have. Put dereel in its current incarnation to the left of my desktop and put in the old 4 TB drive that once held my photos. Is there anything on the drive that might accidentally have been lost on later drives? Time to compare the contents. But how? My best idea was === root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /Myphotos 35 -> find . | sort > /home/grog/dereel-photos Then I can do the same on eureka and compare the results.
Bloody NBN outages again!
Message from Aussie Broadband today with their inimitable markup: NBN are planning network maintenance between **Mon 17th March 2025 08:00 AEDT** and **Fri 21st March 2025 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, some of this work will be performed during the day. You will experience one to two interruptions for up to 9 hours from 12:00 am to 09:00 am on a weeknight and/or for up to 12 hours from 06:00 am to 06:00 pm on Saturday and/or Sunday.
cron: So nice, so nice, we do it twice
Into the office this morning to find that my nightly source tree update had failed with strange messages that I had never seen before. Oh, it had also succeeded. My nightly cron job runs on hydra, but it got copied to dereel. Both jobs ran in parallel and tripped over each others' feet. The moral? Remove crontabs when building update machines.
Your credit card has expired!
Email purporting to come from BUPA today: From: BUPA <[email protected]> Subject: Mr Lehey, our records show your credit card is expired. Your credit card is expired Our records show that your credit card ending in 4352 is expired. This credit card is used to make premium payments for your Bupa Health Insurance policy. To stay covered with us and be able to keep claiming after 26 February 2025 which is when your policy is currently paid to please update your credit card details today. Spam? My credit card expires in May 2026.
Upgrading hydra
I've had hydra, my still-almost-new main computer, for nearly 1½ years, and I haven't updated the system software in that time. Time to do so. This time I'll create a new system on different physical hardware, and when it's done I'll just copy the disk image. Started on that, and how about that, it almost just worked. Partition a new SSD with gpart, so that the root partition (50 GB!) is the same as the partition on hydra. Compress the old hydra root partition to another partition on the SSD. If things go wrong, I can restore it to hydra.
SSD speed improvements
One of the few programs that runs on eureka and uses a lot of resources is MediathekView, a Java application. When I come into the office in the morning it's swapped out, and it takes a couple of seconds to come to life. But lately it has been really slow to wake up. Why? After a bit of searching, found: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/1) ~ 36 -> dd if=/dev/ada2p3 of=/dev/null count=65536 33554432 bytes transferred in 155.345170 secs (215999 bytes/sec) === root@eureka (/dev/pts/1) ~ 37 -> dd if=/dev/ada2p3 of=/dev/null bs=16k count=65536 1073741824 bytes transferred in 32.405464 secs (33134592 bytes/sec) That's the swap SSD.
More VirtualBox fun
As planned, Callum Gibson contacted me today with information about VirtualBox configuration. Ultimately it didn't help much: as he said, he uses NAT, and it had occurred to me that that really isn't appropriate in my home network: I want to be able to wake and connect to the VMs from outside. But I did some more playing around. The last two times I tried to run despise (25 June 2024, 19 November 2024), I had the same problem. The VM talked on the network interface, but it wasn't listening. I got continuous repeats of: 12:15:37.799085 ARP, Request who-has eureka.lemis.com tell despise.lemis.com, length 46 12:15:37.799087 ARP, Request who-has eureka.lemis.com tell despise.lemis.com, length 28 12:15:37.799213 ARP, Reply eureka.lemis.com is-at bc:5f:f4:c9:9b:bf (oui Unknown), length 46 That also means that a ping won't work.
More possibilities with VirtualBox
A discussion about virtualization on IRC today. I mentioned that the only way I have got VirtualBox networking to work was with a bridged adapter. Callum Gibson uses some form of NAT, something that has never worked for me. It seems that I need a dedicated adapter for that: not a problem, since the machine has two adapters. I'll get details from Callum when he's back at work. In the process, fired up despise for the first time in 9 months. Once again network problems, but they only started after the VM was up and running.
Calibrating lenses for Hugin
Spent much of today following up on yesterday's discovery of lens calibration procedures for Hugin, without coming to a conclusion. First I tried the most promising approach, calibrate_lens_gui. Where are the instructions? There's a bare-bones description online, but it doesn't match what Bruno Postle wrote: When you do calibrate this lens, using four photos and rotating around the no-parallax point,... But the instructions for calibrate_lens_gui, like Terry Duell's tutorial, only talks about one image. Never mind: I can take four and try both approaches.
More circular panoramas
Now that I have my circular panorama stitched, time to reply to the message on the subject. But I didn't even manage that! Bruno Postle had had more to say than I needed for this particular panorama: When you do calibrate this lens, using four photos and rotating around the no-parallax point, you can ensure there are control points in the periphery, and you will get an accurate angle of view. Also, when you calibrate the lens, there are other input fisheye types that might be a better fit for this lens, try them and see.
Mid-February: Late summer cleaning?
So I'm starting my next tidy-out of my old computer hardware, though I still haven't found my ThinkCentre serial number PC0240PE. But looking back through my old diaries, it seems to be the time of year to do this. Twenty years ago today I started planning a giveaway of old computer stuff, and ten years ago I gave away a lot of old computer stuff and also my old HP field service oscilloscope.
Time for new computers?
I have dozens of computers, including at least 8 ThinkCentres. Of those 8, four are in use, one is probably dead, two are in service to hold up my monitors number 0 and 3, and one has been moved into the shed. These last three are either also dead, or so old that it's not worth running them. Now it's time to upgrade lagoon, Yvonne's computer. Fine, we don't really need both computers in the lounge room (teevee and tiwi). tiwi can go as soon as I migrate the weather application, which shouldn't be difficult. But on checking, it seems that tiwi is a model M58p, old and slow.
New garage door opener
Our garage door opener remote control is here. Two packages (one inside, from China, and one outside with an Australia Post sticker), and no instructions whatsoever as to how to pair it to the garage door. Out to take a look at the opener, which didn't help much. OK, there's a button ?Door Code?. Press that. No travel, no response. Press a button on the remote control, which causes an LED next to the button to flash. Wait for a while. Flashing stopped. Done? No, the thing still doesn't respond. The web to the rescue, which brought me to these instructions, which I saved as ~/Documentation/Household/Garage-door-opener/ATA-160037_00_GDO-11V1_Home_Owners_Manual_hires_nobleeds.pdf.
4 mm panorama: done!
It's been nearly two weeks since I got my new 7Artisans 4 mm f/2.8 fisheye lens, and I still haven't been able to stitch a proper panorama. There are a number of strangenesses that I haven't got my head around, including how Hugin measures focal length. Bruno Postle has sent some helpful emails, but I still don't understand what I'm doing wrong. There are a number of potential options. Today I set to comparing each approach, in each case with these three images: First, load the three files without Exif data and set the angle of view to ...
eureka disk swap
As planned, swapped over disk drives in eureka today: a newer SSD for swap to replace the older, failing one, and the new 16 TB photo drive for not only the old 8 TB drive, but also the even older, no longer used 4 TB drive before that. All went well modulo my connecting the SSD to a non-functional power cable, requiring a change to a different cable. But somehow I get so stressed doing this kind of work. Somehow ?keep it up? is becoming too much of a concern. How old was the old disk? I put the 4 TB drive in on 31 January 2014, but I didn't clearly note when I installed the 8 TB drive.
hubble down!
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?
CSIRAC lives
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.
PHP programming again
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 ...
Completing the photo restore
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.
ZDF pain
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.
How to delete 7 TB of important data
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 .
More fisheye fun
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.
A new kind of exploit?
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.
More lagoon update
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).
Upgrading lagoon
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 ...
A new lagoon
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.
Still more fisheye fun
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.
More fisheye fun
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?
Tailor-made spam
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 [email protected] 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/#[email protected]">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?.
Wikipedia Library
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.
Ali Baba's treasure
So why shouldn't I buy one of these garage door remote controls from AliExpress? Yes, any new site has its issues, but they're not exactly unknown, and clearly they offer things cheaper than other sites. In addition, at $1.something plus postage it was cheaper than the $5.99 with free postage. Oh. That was yesterday. Now the postage has made it more expensive. OK, it's still only $6. Sign up. No, we don't like your chosen password: it has spaces in to make it more secure. Remove spaces. ?Please enter a valid email address?. What, another site that wants me to use a Big Mail Provider?
Irritating technology
Yvonne has been having trouble with the remote control for the garage door, and now it doesn't work at all. We've had it for nearly 10 years, so it's not surprising that the battery might have worn out. Brought it into the office and discovered that I had replaced the battery (a CR2032) some time ago, and the new battery still had a reasonable voltage. Replace it anyway. Still doesn't work. Oh. Must be defective. Where do I find a replacement? To my surprise found a model number, PTX-5V2, and a large number of outlets selling them or compatible devices at prices up to $72, but also as low as $1.61.
DeepSeek accessed
Finally managed to sign up for DeepSeek. It seems to be trying hard to look like Google Gemini. The answers I got, though (?why can't I sign up as [email protected], for example) were particularly useless. I'll try more when I have time to compare the answers with Gemini, but so far there's nothing very exciting to see.
Updating the weather software
It's been over 15 years since I started writing my weather station software, and I've never been happy with it. Much of it has atrophied, not helped by the physical deterioration of the weather station. The graphs are such a pain that I have looked the other way. But surely I can get the 5 day graph: Clearly I was successful, but getting there was interesting. There has been no significant update of the script since I wrote it 15 years ago.
More ?AI? bots
The USA is shocked: a Chinese Artificial Intelligence Chatbot is on the market! Stocks tumbled! Nvidia stocks were down by 17%! And that although the bot, DeepSeek, is based on Nvidia hardware. But it's Chinese! Yes, USA, get used to it. More to the point, what can it do? Tried to sign up. ?Verify you are human?. A relatively harmless CAPTCHA, but that's rich for an AI bot. OK, did that. Oh: Error sending code: Your email domain is currently not supported for our registration.
Translating recipes
By chance, after yesterday's experiment with instant Kung_pao, I found this sachet: What is it? A small sticker on the back tells me that it's Kungpao chicken seasoning. That's worth trying, but how? Here are the instructions: OK, Google Translate to the rescue: That's completely illegible!
ALDI digital rice cooker
I don't use a rice cooker. I tried it once 16 years ago, and found it less than useless. But times change, and this one is digital. So Yvonne picked up one of them yesterday as well. The problem, of course, which I knew 16 years ago: I need to cook several portions. That's why I freeze my rice in serving portions and thaw them out when I need them. I won't need to cook any more rice for several weeks. Still, it's worth looking at the details. First: it doesn't give weights, only ?cups?. And as previously, the ?cup? holds 180 ml, about ¾ of a US cup.
Processing the analemmas
It's been well over 5 years since I started taking photos intended to stitch an analemma, and I must have taken about 1000 pairs in that time, every day when the sun was shining at mean solar noon. But I haven't processed them. Today was the day to start, during which I discovered that I had a surprising number of out-of-focus images. And somehow the sheer number of photos is an issue. I didn't even manage to align 12 of them. This could be (even) more difficult than I expected.
Where's Yvonne?
Yvonne off into town for shopping, as every Wednesday. And once again Google Maps didn't want to show me her location. We've seen this before, and resetting is relatively simple, so I called her up and asked her to re-enable ?accurate reporting?. But this time it didn't work. Bloody Google Maps! OK, nothing for it, wait for her to come back home. Later I saw on my phone that she had tried to call me. But I had my phone on ?quiet? because of other things it annoys me with. Bad Groggy. Call her up. No response. Not no answer, not even a ring tone.
Glacial hydra progress
I tried to print something out on hydra yesterday. ?lpr: error: no default destination". What, haven't I configured printing yet? I've had the computer for 15 months already! Some searching. /etc/printcap is the configuration file. It's identical with the one on eureka, which works. Missing spool directory? It should be /var/spool/output/brother. No,that's there too. What is the problem? A web search pointed me at CUPS. Oh. I've seen this before: === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~ 2664 -> wh lpr 6174412 -r-sr-sr-x 1 root wheel 14856 23 Juni 2024 /usr/local/bin/lpr 5296379 -r-sr-sr-x 1 root daemon 40056 28 Juli 09:03 /usr/bin/lpr CUPS uses the same program names as the Berkeley printing system used in FreeBSD.
Time for eBay reform
Buying things on eBay is becoming increasingly frustrating. People are abusing the system, making it more difficult to find what I'm looking for. Over the past few days I've seen a particular number of practices that eBay should prohibit, in their own interest: Misclassification of items. I have a saved search for cheap film cameras. There are slim pickings, but digiDirect are up to the challenge to make it even worse: they have been listing film under cameras.
Update your emergency details!
Notification from Aussie Broadband today: you have 8 unread messages! Maybe there were, but they went back a couple of years. Then, later, a message with incorrect emergency numbers: Then know that these numbers are wrong. They're the VoIP numbers that I have never used, and they're not even the ones they have on record for other contact details! And if that weren't enough, they did this six months ago, though on that occasion it seems that I forgot to note whether I was able to update the details or not.
Inverted images?
On Saturday I puzzled about the fact that this photo is inverted, and nothing can fix it: But that's on my local web server. While messing around on the external web server today, I discovered that it isn't inverted there: it's rotated by 90°! Why? It's the same image, and as far as I can tell the Exif data is the same. I really need to understand Exif better.
Blocking XSS exploits
A week ago I received email from J K Tamim, an apparently honest cracker, who pointed out that an address like http://lemis.com/grog/diary.php/%22%3E%3Csvg%20onload=alert(document.domain)>%3E was vulnerable to XSS. What's that? ?Cross-site scripting?, thus the TLA. I had no idea that any such thing exists. Much web searching came up with many web pages telling me what to do, most of them using .htaccess files. Somehow none of them make much sense to me, and there's a definite feeling that ?one size fits all? doesn't work. These search results show the pain. But look at that URL. There are three parts: http://lemis.com/grog/diary.php is the correct URL of my diary.
Reinstalling scanner
I've had my Epson ?Perfection? 4990 Photo scanner for over 17 years, but it still works. I think. The computer that drove it, dischord.lemis.com, self-destructed in sparks a few months ago, and now I need to find a way to install a driver under Microsoft. I recall that it was a pain the last time, but I forgot to write down how I worked around it. OK, I won't make that mistake again. First, where is the driver? I thought that Microsoft would recognize when an unsupported device was on the USB bus, but I couldn't find anything today. OK, search the web for ?Epson Perfection 4990 driver?.
CPU hogs?
While checking something completely different today, discovered that iftop was using 50% of a CPU core on eureka. Why that? It should use almost nothing. It was working normally, and when I stopped and restarted it, it used almost no CPU again. A memory leak issue? Unfortunately I didn't check how long it had been running, but there's always a next time. And something similar seems to be happening with albo, my mobile phone. Yesterday evening I discovered: The battery charge was down to 50%, and Mendhak GPS logger was using 80% CPU.
When is solar noon?
At this time of year I take my house photos round solar noon to keep the sun as high as possible and out of the image. And for that I use the NOAA Solar Calculator, which shows things like azimuth and time of solar noon: So today solar noon was at 13:32:39. That's when the sun is due north, right? Well, no, according to NOAA. It will be at 0.17° (10') East. It won't be due north until 13:32:51: Huh?
Reporting OM-1 Exif issues
I've had issues with Exif data from the OM System OM-1 Mark II almost since I got it. Clearly there's something about the format that confuses exiftool. And after looking at the forums, it seems that nobody has mentioned exactly this problem. OK, report it. It seems to happen with some images and not others; I suspect this is related to the location of the data. But for that I need a clear statement and examples. I came up with three. The first one (5 December) is in portrait orientation, but nothing I can do can persuade it to change from this view: For reasons I don't understand, it's inverted.
Portable phone base stations
Discussed the Hadi Nazari issue on IRC. Daniel O'Connor came up with a surprise: the idea of a portable mobile phone base station has already been implemented?on a drone! And where? In Bimbimbie, also in the south of New South Wales, not that far from where Nazari got lost. And the same people were involved in the rescue operation. The test implementation was done over 18 months ago. Why haven't they followed up on it?
A use for a printer
I've been exchanging mail with Fritz Jörn, who had as yet unspecified problems reading my New Year's letter. Apart from that, there were character set problems, caused by his use of Microsoft ?Outlook?: Greg, thank you \226 but please send me a readable version \205 \226 and ... I first grumbled about this breakage in ?Outlook? over 25 years ago. This claims to be a ISO 8859-1 encoding, but those characters (conveniently represented in octal) don't belong to the set. But Fritz and I have been at odds with this sort of thing for much longer than 25 years.
Garmin (mumble)
One of the more interesting news reports recently was the case of Hadi Nazari, a hiker who got lost in the Kosciuszko National Park over Christmas, and who was found alive and well 13 days later. The news details are very hazy: how far did he go? How did he, an experienced hiker, get lost? What did he do during that time? One thing is clear, though: with mobile communications he would have been found much more quickly. How much does it cost to install mobile coverage in national parks? How much did the search cost (300 people for 13 days, along with infrastructure)?
albo charge
A few days ago I was puzzled by the power consumption of albo, my phone. It had used 65% charge in something like 14 hours (4.6% per hour discharge), and I suspected Vic Emergency. But no, I've had the app running all the time, and the phone tells me that it's using almost nothing. And yesterday evening it was still charged at 82%, so I didn't recharge it. This morning it was 74%, and this evening 54%. That's 1.6% per hour. Why the difference?
Defishing with nona
As planned, played around with Hugin today to produce some project files to feed to nona. I started with this sample image from DPReview, which I can no longer link to: The photo was taken on 24 July 2017, so that's the directory where all the files are. I saved the project files with the names cyl.pto (cylindrical), equi.pto (equirectangular), equip.pto (equirectangular Panini), mil.pto (Miller cylindrical), pan.pto (Panini) and pang.pto (Panini general). The results:
Wed, 08 Jan 2025 00:51:31 UTC
Still more defishing approaches
Continued yesterday's investigation of ?defishing? today. As expected, OM Workspace has little to offer. It can do automatic defishing for Olympus lenses only, but DxO PhotoLab does that too. And it can't even defish any third party full-frame fisheyes. And of course all requires the GUI. But then I found this article, where the author (?_sem_?, living on Pitcairn, of all places) came up with a Microsoft script using Hugin's nona. That's doubly useful: first, it confirms my initial expectation that nona is the correct program, though clearly part of the Hugin GUI emulates it, and secondly it gives me a basis for my own program.
WhatsApp madness
In the late afternoon Yvonne came to me and told me that she was having difficulty adding a contact to WhatsApp. In to take a look. It took me 20 minutes and lots of swearing: basically, you can't do it. Well, that's not what the helpful web pages told me. Only what they told me had nothing whatsoever to do with what I saw. Finally one page explained: FOOL! You shouldn't be using a Real Computer, you should be using a smartphone! And then you do this and that and the other thing and type everything in on a smartful glass keyboard.
Defishing investigated
My reasons for buying a third fisheye lens are very different from the other two. I want this one because it's small, and I want to coax rectilinear images from it. And yesterday's attempts to ?defish? an image from one of my candidate lenses with DxO PhotoLab was a complete failure. So: is that the fault of the lens or DxO? Tried it with an image from my old Olympus Zuiko Digital ED 8 mm f/3.5 fisheye lens. Not a complete success, because DxO is still broken and recognizes lenses only by their focal length and maximum aperture, so despite the contradictory info in the Exif data, it claimed that it was a Panasonic lens.
Fisheye lens: a good idea?
Watching more video presentations about fisheye lenses today. It's becoming clear that my intended use is anything but typical, and my attempts to ?defish? images with DxO PhotoLab were catastrophically bad, apparently a problem with DxO. Maybe I'm stretching things too far.
Mobile phone power consumption
albo.lemis.com, my ?new? mobile phone, has significantly higher power consumption than hirse, its predecessor. It really needs charging at least every other day, and every day if I use it for navigation. But in the past couple of days its power consumption has increased significantly. I charge overnight, and at the end of the first day the charge level is typically round 60% to 70%. If it's lower, I charge. If not, it's typically round 25% by the second evening. But in the last couple of days the charge level has been round 35% on the first evening. That's more than double the power consumption that I typically see.
Google Maps: How did you like...
I use Google Maps a lot for various reasons, including navigation. I enter corrections which are occasionally applied, though in some cases (Harrisons Road for example) they're particularly reticent. And for some reason they don't have the Exeter Guildhall, the oldest continually operating municipal building in England, but I can't find a way to submit the entry without hundreds of details (opening times, phone number) that I don't know. That doesn't stop them from asking me how I liked the Guildhall car park (which they do have on their list). This morning I got another one: You'd think they'd know enough to realize that this is a theatre, and that I haven't been within 10,000 km of there in the last 30 years.
Chasing down the Christmas letter stragglers
I still have 6 recipients for the Christmas message to whom I haven't been able to deliver the message. I've already established that one is too secure to talk to me, but there are a lot of other bounces, notably from outlook.com, that I need to interpret. There are so many different ones! Spent some time today chasing them up. <[email protected]>: host ghd-com-au.mail.protection.outlook.com[52.101.149.2] said: 550 5.4.1 Recipient address rejected: Access denied. With the help of Google Gemini, was able to establish: The email error code 550 5.4.1 indicates that the email was rejected because the recipient's email address was not found on the recipient's server.
A bad day for Google Maps
When I go into town, I get Google Maps to plan the way for me. But today I couldn't send the route to my phone: Huh? Why don't I have the latest version? Why, don't I have the latest version? How do I find out? The info page shows me: But how do I know if an update is available? No idea. Let's ask Gemini.
New Year's letter
For 12 years now we have been sending out annual newsletters, originally at Christmas, but now as close to on the dot of New Year (UTC) as I can manage. And it's a pain. First, the good news: this year's letter is out, and I managed to attach a PDF version. But it took several hours, and there are still big mail systems that refuse mail from me. The big difference from last year is that SPF records have become an absolute requirement. Even last year's workaround of sending the messages via Aussie Broadband no longer work: <[email protected]>: host mail.aussiebroadband.com.au[121.200.0.25] said: 550 5.7.23 <[email protected]>: Recipient address rejected: Message rejected due to: no SPF record.
More Google Maps antics
Yvonne into town to shop today. I normally track her position with Google Maps' location sharing. But today she disappeared off the map. It's surprisingly irritating, in particular when she returns and I need to get the cats out of the way. When she came back, I confirmed that it was the same issue as last week. Once again the compass wheel was red: OK, press on it. And it did the same thing as last time, though I had forgotten: Select ?Turn On?.
Rats destroy the Internet
On the toilet this morning I tried to read the news with albo, my mobile phone. ?No Internet?. Oh. Bloody National Broadband Network again? No, I couldn't access the local weather either. eureka down? I've been half expecting that: it's 11 years old, and I have some disk issues. So this time I need to address them: new swap SSD, replace the /Photos disk. Finished showering and dressing, into the office. eureka was up and running, and we had had uninterrupted Internet access. So what's my phone saying? It's connected by Wi-Fi, of course. Or it was. The access point is on top of the freezer in the pantry.
Understanding VicEmergency
On Thursday Chris Bahlo suggested that I could get better results from Vic Emergency by configuring the display. Today I took a look. How about that, I had never set up an account. OK, do that, accept the greatly delayed email request. Oh. That's VicEmergency's inimitable way of saying ?you have already accepted?. At least it led me to some explanations of their displays: OK, what colour are these displays that I received on Tuesday?
Craig Weber again
Mail from Michael Ralser today, with a photo of a cheque written to him by Craig Weber, but unsigned. Who? I had great pain with Craig (eBay seller klearview_au) seven years ago. I had ordered a disk, was scammed into paying for it twice, and I never saw the goods. I finally got most of my money back, though eBay was particularly obstructive, and my (strongly) negative feedback disappeared. I wrote an article on the subject. So I wasn't the only one. Weber is still active, with very high approval ratings.
Google Maps fail
Yvonne out to harrow the paddocks today. Out of interest I checked her location with Google Maps. But before I could zoom in close enough, she was finished and came back in the driveway. But she had disappeared from the map! And she didn't return. In to check and discovered that her phone had decided to turn off accurate reporting, or some such status. In any case, the compass wheel on the display, normally blue, had gone red. Click on it. Do you want accurate reporting? Of course, fool. OK, done. And the position on the map returned immediately. How do these things happen?
Still more X problems on teevee
To the lounge room in late afternoon, turned on the TV and started looking at something. And the display on teevee froze. What caused that? Mouse or keyboard issue? The machine was still running, since it was playing music from Radio Swiss Classic. But then that stopped too. To the office, where I found that teevee was still running normally, but the xterm with the X display was not reacting. Shot it down and restarted it, and all worked normally. That's the fourth time now. This time I caught it in the act. What did the log file say? Nothing of use: [2281147.654] (--) NVIDIA(GPU-0): HISENSE (DFP-1): connected [2281147.654] (--) NVIDIA(GPU-0): HISENSE (DFP-1): Internal TMDS [2281147.654] (--) NVIDIA(GPU-0): HISENSE (DFP-1): 600.0 MHz maximum pixel clock [2281147.654] (--) NVIDIA(GPU-0): That appears to happen when I ...
More system strangenesses
Checking the overnight logs today brought a couple of surprises. First, from hydra only, Limiting closed port RST response from 29 to -4 packets/sec Limiting closed port RST response from 11 to -5 packets/sec Limiting closed port RST response from 2 to 26 packets/sec Limiting icmp unreach response from 13 to 2 packets/sec Limiting icmp unreach response from 28 to -3 packets/sec Limiting icmp unreach response from 28 to -6 packets/sec That relates to a change I made last year to stop ridiculous quantities of PING ICMP packets I receive.
Wise?
A few days ago I received an email claiming to be from Wise, the banking service that used to be called Transferwise. It was quite well done, and it passed some of my usual checks, but it was clearly phishing, in particular because it was sent to the address that I have only given to eBay. Worth reporting to Wise so that they can warn others. But how did I do it? They only accept with topics that they have thought of. Finally fought my way through their mess and sent the message. At least I was able to attach the original, unchanged message.
Google Gemini draws cats
A couple of days ago Google Gemini offered to create photos for me. I know they've done this for some time, but this time I tried it out: ?Make a photo of a Borzoi chasing a chocolate Burmese cat?. And how about that, not too bad: Clearly we have a running Borzoi and a running cat. But the dog isn't chasing the cat, he's just running. And the size relationships are wrong: the dog should be about twice the size. Time to investigate the details. More pictures.
Still more problems on teevee
Turned on teevee again today. Was X working? Yes, with firefox displaying ancient photos that I was looking at yesterday. Iconified that, looked at something else, deiconified firefox and?it hung. Why? I restarted it from the fvwm menu and it hung again. I had to start it from an xterm. Clearly this has something to do with the way I started X, but what?
More file system experiments
Yesterday I established that the file system on my new 64 GB SD card was exFAT, and that that's correct for this size card. But it's inconvenient: my processing scripts are based on FAT, and mtools can't handle exFAT. On the other hand, there's no restriction that prevents me from creating a FAT file system on the card. Well, that's what I thought: === root@hydra (/dev/pts/4) ~ 396 -> gpart show da3 => 63 124211137 da3 MBR (59G) 63 32705 - free - (16M) 32768 124178432 1 ntfs [active] (59G) === root@hydra (/dev/pts/4) ~ 397 -> gpart delete -i 1 da3 gpart: Device busy OK, remove and replace card.
DxO PhotoLab 8: last chance
My trial of DxO PhotoLab 8 is running out. Do I want to buy it? The only feature of any use is the improved DeepPrimeXD/XD2s. By chance, while testing the exFAT file system, I ended up with a relatively noisy test photo, taken with the Olympus E-PM1 at 3200/36° ISO. How does it compare? Here first normal conversion, then the ?conventional? DeepPrime that I have with DxO PhotoLab 5, then the DeepPrimeXD/XD2s that comes only with PhotoLab 8: Is there a difference?
Another X crash?
Turned the TV on in the afternoon. No display! I had this only two days ago. Back to hydra to restart X, but it was already running: === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/7) ~ 1 -> ps aux | grep Xorg root 8655 0.0 0.4 25300588 84728 9 S Sat17 0:57.91 /usr/local/libexec/Xorg :0 -config xorg.conf -listen tcp -auth /home/grog/.serverauth.8636 What was it? Cable problem? Keyboard? Nothing obvious.
More SD card investigations
So why can't hydra recognize the file system on my new SD card? I suspected that the partition type (NTFS) was wrong, and I changed it to FAT32. But that didn't work either. OK, is the partition correct? Does Microsoft even look at the partition type? Put the card into distress, which happily read the files. So no, Microsoft doesn't seem to look at the partition type. So: is it even FAT32? What does a hex dump show? === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/Photos/20191215 1755 -> hd /dev/da3s1 | less 00000000 eb 76 90 45 58 46 41 54 20 20 20 00 00 00 00 00 |.v.EXFAT .....| 00000010 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| Is there a file system called EXFAT?
More Emacs problems
On teevee, tried to edit something. I have C-x B bound to buffer-menu, but it didn't work, and of course I couldn't remember the name of the function. And other key bindings, including the ones that are stored in my cerebellum, didn't work, notably M-p, which is bound to repeat-complex-command. I couldn't even copy text! It wasn't due to the version of Emacs: on teevee it's 29.4, the latest and greatest, and on tiwi it's 28.1. But in particular It Used To Work. And, started from teevee, it misbehaved on tiwi and hydra as well. Only on eureka did it work correctly.
More Microsoft surprises
One of the strangest things about my remote desktop connection to distress (a Microsoft machine) is that setting up the connection keeps changing. It works much worse for Yvonne than for me, but recently I have been getting this message: I can select either one, but I can't find a way to close them. There's nothing to select in the message beyond the choice of session. Leaving the session with ?Disconnect? works, but the session is still there when I return.
More X strangeness
Turned on the TV in the afternoon and... no signal. What, has teevee gone down? No, it was still up, but somehow X had stopped. And this stupid breakage with the display meant that I had to restart X from another system. That worked, but lots of settings were wrong. In particular, the display of special characters was wrong. Starting new xterms worked, but what was wrong with the old ones? Here the parameters for the old and new: grog 8663 0,0 0,1 39940 25724 9 I Sa.17 0:00,30 xterm -name xterm-lx -bg BlanchedAlmond -s -sl 2048 -sb -ls -j -rw -display :0.0 -geometry 90x50+15+0 -fn 10x20 -e /usr/local/bin/bash grog 9288 0,0 0,0 20400 8184 9 I Sa.19 0:00,02 ...
Merging file systems: the pain
It's been well over a year since I got my new machine, hydra.lemis.com, and I still haven't migrated everything from eureka. I know why. Today I ran into problems with my Emacs initialization file ~/.emacs. I had an older version on hydra than on eureka. OK, simple: move it and its RCS file ~/RCS/.emacs,v from eureka to hydra and replace the versions on eureka with a symlink to hydra. But it didn't work! I already had symlinks in place, and I managed to blow away my control file. Much searching through backups, taking up much of the afternoon. And that for one file!
Understanding NTFS SD card
What's on the new SD card that I bought last month? It claims to be an NTFS card. Can that be right? Certainly my FreeBSD machines couldn't recognize it, though it worked fine on distress, the Microsoft box. In principle that points to a deficiency in FreeBSD, and I know that our NTFS implementation is not the best, but can cameras understand NTFS? Today I put to test the hypothesis that it might really be a FAT32 file system with incorrect partition information. === root@hydra (/dev/pts/4) /usr/ports/print/texlive-full 327 -> gpart show da3 => 63 124211137 da3 MBR (59G) 63 32705 - free - (16M) 32768 124178432 1 ntfs (59G) === root@hydra (/dev/pts/4) /usr/ports/print/texlive-full 328 -> gpart delete -i 1 da3 da3s1 deleted === root@hydra (/dev/pts/4) /usr/ports/print/texlive-full 333 -> gpart add -b 32768 -t fat32 da3 ...
DeepPrime XD/XD2s in more detail
So how much better are the results from DxO PhotoLab's new XD/XD2s noise reduction? Yesterday it looked as if there was a significant improvement, but the processing parameters were different. Today I tried a different motive: I took three images at 200/24°, 6400/39° and 100,000/51° and processed them five ways: DxO 5 normal, DxO 5 DeepPrime, DxO 8 normal, DxO 8 DeepPrime and DxO 8 DeepPrimeXD. I couldn't see any difference between DxO 5 and DxO 8. For normal sized images there was almost no difference to be seen between the processing options under DxO 8.
Still more pixel peeping
So why do I have this light spot in the images I took yesterday? It looks for all the world like a stuck pixel. OK, we have a pixel remap function in the menus. Try that and take a photo at 100,000/51° ISO with the lens cap on: Oh. That's not at all better. After a lot of comparison processing, came up with an ?unprocessed? conversion (?no correction? in DxO-speak), which came up with this detail: DxO problem?
Where did that file come from?
While syncing my diary to www.lemis.com, found this: rsync: write failed on "/home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/diary-dec1964.php": No space left on device (28) rsync error: error in file IO (code 11) at receiver.c(381) [receiver=3.1.3] Huh? Overflowing logs again? But no, after tidying up there I still had no space on disk. Finally I traced it to a file /var/tmp/webfoo36468, 1.6 GB in size, starting on 12 October. Where did that come from? It contained Apache logs, but they're normally stored in /var/log/www, and that's what I had just rotated.
Chasing up photo processing issues
I still haven't really identified the cause of the strange problems that I have had with Exif data processing on my OM System OM-1 Mark II. I have established that the problems occur with DxO PhotoLab (release 5), but not with OM Workspace. For some reason, this particularly boring photo resisted correct processing: The steps and issues were: Process raw file AC050194.ORF to set camera model to be OM System OM-1 Mark I.
I'm not making this up
Seen in my email today: 8 N + 10-12-2024 To [email protected] ( 292) HR Department N + Annual Leave Nonfiction Spam, of course. We shut down our HR Department last year (no, come to think of it, that's fiction). But what kind of illiterate scammer can confuse a presumed ?notification? with ?nonfiction??
More photo software thoughts
After yesterday's consideration, I tried DxO PhotoLab 8 again. There's really very little difference, and for that the price of US $229 is just too high. So I'll just forget all of them. But then I heard of a new product with a hard-to-spell name, Aiarty. Free! Installed that, and later went back to the web site, where everything seems to have changed. Ah, it was Aiarty Image Matting, just part of their product, specializing in background removal. Can I even use it on its own? I can find out later.
Another technology failure
Yvonne has had trouble with fossil, her phone, Yet Again. It failed in the most basic of functions, making phone calls. It went through the motions, but didn't connect, and incoming calls went straight to voice mail. Much messing around. The settings screen showed that it had forgotten its phone number?maybe. At least it wasn't showing, while it does show on mine. Power down, up, no change. Power down, reseat SIM card, power on. Now it works. Somehow we have had so many issues with modern technology recently. Will it continue?
Why did my swap fail?
Yesterday's eureka crash was clearly related to the disappearance of the swap device. There's also a smoking gun pointing to me messing around in the cabinet round that time. But is that the only reason? Can I read the entire device? === root@eureka (/dev/pts/2) /usr/local/etc/postfix 40 -> time dd if=/dev/ada2 of=/dev/null bs=1m ^C^C43313+0 records in 43313+0 records out 45416972288 bytes transferred in 212.532209 secs (213694538 bytes/sec) No! The ^Cs came after a lot of these messages: Dec 8 12:54:03 eureka kernel: ahcich4: Timeout on slot 19 port 0 Dec 8 12:54:03 eureka kernel: ahcich4: is 00000000 cs 00000000 ss 00080000 rs 00080000 tfd 40 serr 00000000 cmd 0000d317 Dec 8 12:54:03 eureka kernel: (ada2:ahcich4:0:0:0): READ_FPDMA_QUEUED.
What do I want from new photo software?
I currently have test installations and offers for a number of photographic software packets: ACDSee, for which I already have a license that I don't use, Affinity, for which I have had a 6 month trial since August, and which I also found too hard, Radiant, and DxO PhotoLab 8. I've spent time reading about them, even tried a couple. And there are online videos that I've tried watching and found completely irrelevant to my requirements. Somehow they don't do it for me. So what do I really want? Moiré reduction. I can't get better than this in yesterday's photo of my phone: Easy, accurate background removal.
Still more KardiaMobile pain
Why did fossil, Yvonne's phone, suddenly stop communicating with her KardiaMobile 6L? I suspected firmware issues. Bluetooth is flaky at the best of times, but it seems that KardiaMobile has made things worse. It doesn't adhere to normal pairing procedures: it requires fingers on the contacts to even pair. But the status this morning was that enzian, hirse and albo all worked, and fossil didn't. OK. First, disable Bluetooth on fossil, then reenable it. Also restart the app. No improvement. Microsoft solution? Uninstall and reinstall the app (why is it 89 MB in size? Only web browsers are that size). Restart.
Crash!
All day long the /Photos disk on eureka was making a rhythmic churning sound. SMR catching up with a backup? Firstly it took far too long, but much more importantly, it's not an SMR disk. In the evening I went feeling through the disks on the machine. Yes, definitely /Photos. Left it at that and went back to the lounge room and did some web surfing. And then I couldn't connect to wwww.lemis.com, my local web server. I couldn't start an ssh on eureka either. Damn. How do I even access the console on eureka any more? It was the right-hand monitor, and it was spewing swap pager errors.
More KardiaMobile pain
Last month we had untold pain with Yvonne's KardiaMobile 6L, which repeatedly refused to work. Without the aid of any diagnostics, I guessed that it was a pairing issue. But the indicator said ?battery discharged?, and so I ordered some replacement batteries (CR2016). But then it ran without that kind of problem for over a month. Until today. OK, change the battery. Yes, the old battery had a voltage of 3.00 V, while the new one had 3.20 V. But I still couldn't pair! Much investigation.
Paying bills: unWise
My domain registration is coming up, and it seems to be getting more expensive all the time. Today it would have been over $59. But Gandi is in France. What is it in Euros? 31,98 ?, which corresponds to about $52.80. OK, that's what I have TransferWise for. Signed in, which for once worked without problems, and discovered that I should top up my credit. And somehow that, too, went without too many problems. Then pay. ?Your card is frozen. Unfreeze??. Now why did I do that? Still, unfreeze. ?Your card is now unfrozen?. Gandi says ?Our online banking partner refused your payment?.
More GPS strangenesses
Heading off to Ballarat, my phone claimed ?GPS signal lost?, and with a brief interruption stayed like that until it was restarted. Is that an issue with Google Maps or with the phone? I have a log from the Mendhak GPS logger which should tell me something?once I do a lot of mouse and keyboard manipulation.
Mail bloat
A couple of days ago I received: Date: Sat, 30 Nov 2024 03:14:15 +1100 (AEDT) From: Mail Delivery Subsystem <MAILER-[email protected]> >>> MAIL From:<[email protected]> SIZE=755923075 <<< 552 5.3.4 Message size exceeds fixed limit 554 5.0.0 Service unavailable 755 MB in a single mail message! It would have been some nightly maintenance message, but why so big? I'll never know: it's gone to the bit bucket in the sky. Yes, of course I was able to increase the limit (to 1 GB, both for message and mailbox size), but how times have changed!
Tidying the freezers
It's been at least 14 years since I started keeping computer records of what's in our deep freezes. It's not easy to keep things in sync. I can't go to a computer every time I take something out of the freezer, and for some baskets with frequent change, such as the breakfast ingredients, I no longer even keep track: it's easier just to remember, including where the things are in the basket. But the thing's full, and we have this cheese that I bought over a month ago. It keeps reasonably in the fridge, but it's time to freeze it. But where?
Exif: not out of the woods
Somehow I haven't solved all my Exif problems. Here another one: === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/25) ~/Photos/20241126 1407 -> geotag *.jpeg Warning: [minor] File contains multi-segment EXIF - Sichuan-pepper-1.jpeg Error: Can't write multi-segment EXIF with external pointers - Sichuan-pepper-1.jpeg 0 image files updated geotag writes GPS information to the file's Exif data. I really need to follow up on this one.
Still more git pain
Recently I've had trouble with my git controlled source trees again. I changed something in the ports tree, and git objected next time I tried to update it, suggesting that I use git merge --no-ff or git rebase. I've seen that before, and I thought that it had worked. But no, the same message shows the next time I try to update it. HOW I hate git! I think the writing's on the wall: it's the last straw that will stop me from contributing to FreeBSD. As it was, I gave up and cloned the tree again.
Australia Post advice
Message from Australia Post today, something like ?You have mail?. But this time I read the fine print: Australia Post will never send you an unsolicited email asking for your password, credit card details or account information. Protect yourself against security risks like phishing links. Australia Post recommends carefully checking links to ensure they are from a verifiable source, or typing the link directly into a browser instead of clicking. Nothing wrong with that. But what do they want me to type in?
AI explains kernel techniques
Warren Toomey posted this message on the COFF mailing list today: A spin lock, also known as a spinning lock or spinning lock mechanism, is a type of mechanical locking device used to secure and protect sensitive electronic components, such as microprocessors, memory chips, and other high-value devices. Here's how it worked: when a CPU instruction was executed and the necessary data was stored in registers, the CPU would "lock" the registers by spinning them around to prevent other instructions from accessing them."
VicEmergency grumblings
I've grumbled about Emergency.Vic or VicEmergency or whatever they want to be called for multiple reasons, and currently they're scaring us because there's a thunderstorm. What, right here in Dereel? Well, no, about half the state of Victoria, an area of about 110,000 km², or larger than Hungary or Portugal. And of course there's this silly ?Heres? that I grumbled about earlier in the year and which keeps cropping up. Mentioned it to Jane, who's from interstate (New South Wales), and she said that it looked like the name of my ?watch area?. Really? We can test that. Add another area round Briagolong, and call it ?Silly?.
Bloody security!
Woke up this morning to discover that albo.lemis.com, my mobile phone, had updated its Android operating system without asking. Security updates! That scares me. In principle, of course, security is good. But the way they go about it almost invariably breaks something for me. Today it could have been the Mendhak GPS logger, but that was muddied by the fact that both F-Droid and GPS logger also had updates, which I installed. But when I started the logger, I got lots of tastefully formatted Java vomit: OK, stop, restart.
Your accout is tempory suspend
Another strange mail message today: 37 N + 25-11-2024 To [email protected] ( 387) PayPal-Sicherheit N + Ihr Konto ist vorubergehend eingeschrankt PayPal securty? ?Ihr Konto ist vorubergehend eingeschrankt? doesn't really mean anything. It should have been ?Ihr Konto ist vorübergehend eingeschränkt?, but clearly the scammer who wrote the message doesn't understand much German if he makes such spelling errors. But this seems to be just one of many scams under way at the moment. They're getting cleverer, and I'm having increasing difficulty identifying them. I've had a couple of invalid PayPal money requests, but it's not clear where the abuse lies.
Fixing my Exif processing
It took a surprisingly small amount of work today to work around Exif limitations for high ISO photos with my OM System OM-1 Mark II. Before I had: File AB220116.ORF Date taken: Friday, 22 November 2024, 17:44:54 Exposure: 1/250 sec, f/9.0 (EV 14.3), 65535/49.2° ISO And now it's Date taken: Friday, 22 November 2024, 17:44:54 Exposure: 1/250 sec, f/9.0 (EV 14.3), 100000/51° ISO 100000?
Exif limitations
Why did exiftool report ISO 65535 yesterday? The value is like a smoking gun: the largest unsigned number that you can fit in 16 bits. Spent some time trawling the web,bt only came up with this forum discussion, only 4 years old. It confirmed that the ISO field is only 16 bits wide, and in the example shown there was an alternative: [ExifIFD] 0x8830 Sensitivity Type : Recommended Exposure Index [ExifIFD] 0x8832 Recommended Exposure Index : 102400 That was with a Sony ILCA-99M2.
More photo processing pain
House photos again today, which I got taken pretty quickly?I was done by 8:30. But somehow the processing wasn't as easy as normal. I couldn't read the photos in from the camera! Much searching, and I discovered: I had taken the photos on the new SD card that I had received earlier in the week. Normally you should format the card before using, but for the fun of it I tried without formatting. It worked! So why couldn't I read the data in? The device was recognized, but mtools didn't want to know about it. OK, what's on this card? === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/Photos/20241123 1066 -> gpart show da3 => 63 124211137 da3 MBR (59G) 63 32705 - free - (16M) 32768 124178432 1 ntfs (59G) === root@hydra (/dev/pts/4) ~ 279 -> fdisk da3 The ...
Where have all my photos gone?
I've been taking photos of the sun at noon for over 5 years, with the intention of stitching them together to show an analemma. But I haven't got round to processing them yet. I take two photos every sunny day at mean solar noon (which is exactly 12:25:00 here) with a 10 EV neutral density filter, one at 1/4000 s and f/5.6 to get the sun, and one at 2 s to get the background. One day I'll use Hugin to align them all. Yesterday I accidentally took 3 images, the first one second too early. That would have confused any automated alignment method, so I backed up all the images and deleted the files from the CF card.
OM-1 Mark II Exif data: fixed?
So I'm keeping the OM System OM-1 Mark II. I've established how to connect it to newer FreeBSD systems by USB. The only outstanding issue is the Exif data. Yesterday it occurred to me that I could kill two birds with one stone. Currently part of my processing includes convert -interlace line -quality $QUALITY -rotate $ROTATION $SRC $DEST I introduced it in that form in May 2010 (without a comment in my diary). What's the purpose? The -interlace line improves the delay when loading. $ROTATION was for the cameras and processing software that I had at the time, which could leave the images rotated; I no longer use it.
VirtualBox pain again
I haven't used Microsoft under VirtualBox in the last few months: I've had too many hangs. But it made sense to fire one up to test DxO PhotoLab version 8. I failed. In fact, I had saved my the state of my two machines (despise and disaster), so they came up running?and without a network. That's not the first time. In the case of despise, it was clear why: I had changed my network configuration on hydra in the meantime, and it was trying to talk to re1, now inactive. After I rebooted and reconfigured, though, things looked even stranger: === root@hydra (/dev/pts/4) /usr/ports/graphics/p5-Image-ExifTool 227 -> arp despise despise.lemis.com (192.109.197.170) at 08:00:27:c5:56:31 on re1 expires in 892 seconds [ethernet] despise.lemis.com (192.109.197.170) at 08:00:27:c5:56:31 on re0 expires in 1199 seconds [ethernet] No wonder I couldn't talk ...
DxO PhotoLab 8
So why am I having difficulty copying Exif data with photos from my OM System OM-1 Mark II? One obvious reason could be the trick that I use to get DxO PhotoLab 5 to recognize the camera at all: I change the model number in the Exif data, and then I change it back again. After that, I have difficulties with the resultant image. Clearly I should try with a version that knows the camera. So today I downloaded a trial version of PhotoLab 8. It really doesn't seem to have changed very much for the US $229 that they want me to pay for the upgrade.
OM-1 Mark II USB issues
So what is the USB problem with the OM System OM-1 Mark II? The ?quirks? that I noted last week might be a clue, and I've seen that before. In particular, Hans Petter Selasky (now sadly dead) gave me a number of workarounds. I embedded the one I chose into a script: ID=$1 usbconfig -d $ID add_quirk UQ_MSC_NO_TEST_UNIT_READY usbconfig -d $ID add_quirk UQ_MSC_NO_PREVENT_ALLOW usbconfig -d $ID add_quirk UQ_MSC_NO_SYNC_CACHE For that, I need to know the ID. The first lines are from /var/log/messages: Nov 19 15:20:43 hydra kernel: usb_msc_auto_quirk: UQ_MSC_NO_TEST_UNIT_READY set for USB mass storage device OM SYSTEM OM-1MarkII (0x33a2:0x013a) Nov 19 15:20:43 hydra kernel: usb_msc_auto_quirk: UQ_MSC_NO_PREVENT_ALLOW set for USB mass storage device OMSY STEM OM-1MarkII (0x33a2:0x013a) Nov 19 15:20:43 hydra kernel: usb_msc_auto_quirk: UQ_MSC_NO_SYNC_CACHE set for ...
The OM-1 Mark II: next step
To my surprise, the seller of the OM System OM-1 Mark II said that he would take the camera back?maybe: You can send the camera back to me and I will send it to CCC Warehouse for warranty repairs. It's not clear what he means. I still haven't established the cause of the USB problems, and my real issue was that, contrary to the claims, the camera doesn't have an Australian warranty. And maybe he just wants to have it repaired for me.
More Exif issues
There's something strange about the Exif data of the OM System OM-1 Mark II, as I quickly noticed. In particular, exiftool sometimes works, and sometimes it doesn't. Initially I blamed that on the version of exiftool, but it's not that simple: === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/Photos/20241117 844 -> make convert ... exiftool -overwrite_original_in_place -TagsFromFile /Photos/grog/20241117/PC/Monas-present.jpeg -all>all -title=Monas-present.jpeg /Photos/grog/20241117/Monas-present.jpeg Warning: Malformed APP1 EXIF segment - /Photos/grog/20241117/PC/Monas-present.jpeg 1 image files updated === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/Photos/20241117 845 -> exifx Monas-present.jpeg File Monas-present.jpeg Date taken: Sunday, 17 November 2024, 10:38:03 Size: 5184 x 3888 pixels (20.16 megapixels) Author: Greg Lehey === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/32) ~/Photos/20241117 846 -> exifcopy orig/A*F Monas-present.jpeg copying from the ORF raw image exiftool -overwrite_original_in_place -TagsFromFile orig/AB170031.ORF -all>all -title=AB170031 Monas-present.jpeg Warning: [minor] Writing large value for MakerNotes - Monas-present.jpeg 1 image ...
Slow SD cards
How important is the speed of an SD card? Today I took the weekly house photos and noticed something unusual: a flashing indicator in the viewfinder after the photos. Ah, yes, I took the photos with my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II, but I had an SD card from the OM System OM-1 Mark II in it. And it was very noticeably slower. Not enough to be a problem, but clearly that could change if I were taking more than 3 images at a time.
How much is a warranty worth?
The seller of my OM System OM-1 Mark II has still not understood that his claim of an Australian warranty is incorrect. It doesn't help that his mail ?service?, outlook.com, accepts my messages, claims delivery, but he doesn't receive it. OK, try again with Gmail. No response. On eBay he tells me that he wants to go via the official channels, even though he has seen the mess that they made of his previous message. But that's his privilege, and eBay asks for people to do it where they can observe it. OK, send the message via eBay. A relatively short email had to be chopped into 8 messages, most of which are illegible.
Miscommunication in modern times
A fair amount of communication today. Discussing the camera problem with the seller via eBay is a pain: the email I got wanted me to log in to view the invoice, though I was already logged in. And then it claimed that my credentials were incorrect. How can that happen? My guess is that it wants my eBay USA credentials, if I still have them. What a mess these people are! I was able to find the details from the eBay site, though only some of them were legible. Still, now I have his name and email address from the invoice, , so sent him email.
Telstra: we can do as well as NBN
A while back I had come to the conclusion that the continual National Broadband Network ?planned outages? were ?because we can?: they're a government monopoly. Would a commercial phone service with similar technology do the same sort of thing? Of course not! Well, until today: I wonder how long it will be. I still can't imagine that it will be an entire working day.
Refining photo processing
How do I fake a camera model for DxO PhotoLab? I did this years ago with a flag to my fordxo and fromdxo scripts. But there's an easier way: I identify my photos with an initial letter indicating the camera came from. 15199935 was taken on 19 May with my older OM-D E-M1 Mark I (the last one before it died), 4B127650 was taken on 12 November with my OM-D E-M1 Mark II, 9B070423 came from my newer Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark I on 7 November, and AB130012 was taken with the OM-1 on 13 November. The date coding is courtesy of Olympus or OM System.
Following the USB issues
Why can't I read data from my new OM System OM-1 Mark II to hydra? After reading my diary, it seems that I have seen it before. It's not hydra, it's FreeBSD. So presumably all will be well again after I add the corresponding entry to /usr/src/sys/dev/usb/quirk/usb_quirk.c. But somehow that's tacky. You don't update your operating system for every new USB device, and other systems, including older FreeBSD, don't have the issue. There must be a better way.
USB issues through the years
Why can't I connect my new OM System OM-1 Mark II to hydra via USB? Apart from the camera itself, it was the only invariable in yesterday's failure. But it's not the first time I've had problems with USB. One of the few commits I've made to the FreeBSD source tree in recent years was a set of ?quirks? to make life easier with other Olympus cameras. Since then the stack has learnt to recognize what it needs?it says: Nov 13 11:55:47 hydra kernel: usb_msc_auto_quirk: UQ_MSC_NO_TEST_UNIT_READY set for USB mass storage device OMSYSTEM OM-1MarkII (0x33a2:0x013a) Nov 13 11:55:47 hydra kernel: usb_msc_auto_quirk: UQ_MSC_NO_PREVENT_ALLOW set for USB mass storage device OMSYSTEM OM-1MarkII (0x33a2:0x013a) Nov 13 11:55:47 hydra kernel: usb_msc_auto_quirk: UQ_MSC_NO_SYNC_CACHE set for USB mass storage device OMSYSTEM OM-1MarkII (0x33a2:0x013a) Nov 13 11:55:48 hydra kernel: ugen0.3: <OMSYSTEM OM-1MarkII> at usbus0 Nov 13 11:55:48 hydra kernel: ...
A new camera!
To my mild surprise, received email this morning: my camera is waiting for me in ?NAPOLEON?. I had an appointment for a haircut anyway, so I was able to pick it up on the way home. First impression: part of a kit that also included a M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-40mm F2.8 PRO II. It came with the instructions for the lens (94 pages, 28 languages) and a ?Basic manual? with only 300 pages, compared to the 566 pages of the full manual. But that's misleading: the manual is also in 28 languages, so there were fewer than 10 pages in English.
SD cards: decision
Spent far too much time trying to find an optimal SD card today, not helped by the poor choice of search criteria and apparent bugs in eBay's web site: change the order from ?Best Match? (which I think means ?fastest query?) to ?Price + Postage: lowest first?, and many items disappear. The sort order is also not correct. I must have spent 4 hours investigating this stuff. At the rates I charged as a consultant, I could have bought dozens of cards for less. But in the end I bought the 64 GB Lexar Professional 1800X SDXC UHS-II card that I was looking at yesterday.
Where's my camera?
Now it's Monday. I bought my new OM System OM-1 Mark II last Wednesday, and since Thursday, 4 days ago, Australia Post claims that it has been ripening in Malaga. Checked again round midday. No change! Ah, but we were just testing you. Later in the day it had miraculously made its way to Bayswater, Victoria, a distance of 3,450 km, without passing through any airports: Where's Bayswater? Out in the extreme east of Melbourne, nowhere near the airport. What's it doing there?
SD cards: the pain
I'm still looking for answers for yesterday's choice of an SD card. eBay is a catastrophe. How about digiDirect? Not much easier. Surely these people must understand what criteria people are looking for. Back to eBay and somehow managed to find a card that would do the job?32 GB, 270 MB/s, round $49 (as opposed to about $13 for slower cards). That's the read speed, of course. What speed was the all-important write speed? I can't find it any more: the last one must have been sold or fallen through their broken sort system. But while I was at it, found a 64 GB card which was honest enough to give its speeds: V60 II, 10 in an open circle, 3 in a bathtub, 4K, 270 MB/s read, 180 MB/s write.
du reporting incorrectly
Yesterday I answered a question by Dewayne Geraghty on the FreeBSD-questions mailing list: why does du produce incorrect output?. Why, does du produce incorrect output? No, it doesn't, as I explained in my answer. But I missed one point: there's a new option, --si. Why two --? That looks so Linux-like. But no, it's been there for 7 years (so eureka doesn't know about it), and as far as I'm concerned, it doesn't need to be there at all. From the man page: --si "Human-readable" output. Use unit suffixes: Byte, Kilobyte, Megabyte, Gigabyte, Terabyte and Petabyte based on powers of 1000.
OM Capture
Investigating my coming OM System OM-1 Mark II today. There's a lot of documentation. Eleven years ago the Olympus OM-D E-M1 came with a 165 page manual. The OM-1 Mark II has 566 pages, more than 3 times as much. Hopefully I'll find what I'm looking for. One thing that I did find was a reference to (but no URL for) a software product called OM Capture, which connects a camera to a Real Computer (well, one running Microsoft, anyway). Why hadn't I heard of it, especially as it seems to work with at least my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II?
Bloody Multi_key again!
For reasons I don't understand, the Multi_key on my Emacs stopped working again. Why? I spent a lot of pain, starting last December, to get it to work again, which involved installing the development version of Emacs and fixing it to play nice with X. But ?I didn't change anything?, and now it no longer works. Off again to look on the web, and found this bug report: the original Multi_Key problem has been resolved. OK, update my development version. It wasn't a big step, 31.0.50.20240718,3 -> 31.0.50.20241017,3. Multi_key works, but I was back with other problems with Wayland, and for reasons I don't understand, it claimed init file errors, though it was too polite to say which.
More NBN outages
In mid-morning we went off the net-again! This time was different, though: the display on the NTD was normal. But nothing was going down the ?wire?. And of course the terminally broken Aussie Broadband phone app showed that the connection was up. OK, for the fun of it, power cycle the NTD and restart dhclient. It worked! Oh. For nearly a minute. Then it went offline again. This time the ODU LED was red. Nothing much to do there. Aussie still claimed that I was up. OK, maybe if I run the diagnostics they'll see the error of their ways. ?Check Connection?.
RIP Darl McBride
On 16 September of this year, Darl McBride died. Who? He was the man who turned SCO around. In early 2002, then called Caldera International, they released the source code to older Unix free of charge under a liberal license. Were they ever the good guys! But a little over a year later, after changing name, management and direction, they sued IBM for (to quote the current version of SCO_Group,_Inc._v._International_Business_Machines_Corp.) : SCO claimed that IBM had, without authorization, contributed SCO's intellectual property to the codebase of the open source, Unix-like Linux operating system.
More KardiaMobile pain
It seems that yesterday's guess about how to pair the KardiaMobile 6L was not completely accurate. It will display an ?empty battery? symbol even if it thinks it is paired. I didn't get a photo (and it's too secure to allow screen shots), but basically it shows it as being normally connected, only the empty battery symbol is displayed. Sometimes it will come to its senses (or is that sensors?) if you put your fingers on it. Other times, like this evening, it won't. Lots of messing around and eventually it worked, but I still don't understand what the issue is.
More Android pain
A few days ago Yvonne's phone started producing random backgrounds when turned on. They're really irritating, and today I investigated what was causing them. Ah, that's not a bug: it's a misfeature, called ?Wallpaper Carousel?. I suppose that it's modern that that page describes only security implications, and not how to turn the bloody thing off. When I did find out how (Settings ? Lock Screen), it seemed surprised that I would want to stop it. But thankfully it's gone now.
Friday's tracking revisited
Why did Google Maps give me such a ridiculous timeline on Friday? It could be Google Maps, or it could be my phone. Today I checked the track log collected by Mendhak GPS logger, as processed by Wikiloc: So it's at least Google Maps. But looking at that Wikiloc trail in more detail shows, at the east end of my journey: That position in the extreme south-east is fully 400 m from where I was, at the Malaysian Laksa House.
Academia surpasses itself
On a daily basis I get emails from Academia.edu with subject lines like ?$1, 30 day trial. Are you the ?G. Lehey? cited in Operating Systems papers?? or even ?Are you the Greg Lehey who wrote "Treasurer"??. Based on that information, there's no way to know; I have to pay to correct their records. But now they've come out with another tack: 69 ND 03-11-2024 To grogac@lem ( 903) Mentioned by Greg Le ND $1, 30 day trial. ?G. Lehey? mentioned by ?Greg Lehey? They want me to pay for mentioning myself!
INTU: remote temperature sensor
Seen on the home page of INTU, a phone health service: It's amazing all the things they can do by telephone.
I hate KardiaMobile!
There's no doubt that the KardiaMobile 6L toy ECG device is useful. But it annoys me on every possible occasion, starting with this silly deliberate confusion between the letters A and ?. That's not as trivial as it seems: the first time I tried it, I recognized the letter V and used it upside down. And how do they market the thing in Greece? Then there's this refusal to let me take screen shots. Why? Much more important, though, is that I get the feeling that they're out to grab money. On every occasion they ask for me to sign up for a really expensive service of dubious utility.
Google Maps: blessing or curse?
As always, I used Google Maps for the trip. Annoyingly, as so often, it had forgotten the detailed itinerary that I had sent yesterday, but it was really helpful getting off the freeway, showing the exact lane I needed to fight my way through the tangle that is the road system. But then it avenged itself. It got upset that it couldn't take me to the entrance of the Melbourne Private Hospital, so it switched to pedestrian mode to help me. And I couldn't get it to switch back to car! Maybe there's something about the user interface of mobile phones that I just don't understand, but I tried everything I could think of without success.
Preparing for hospitalization
Yvonne is off to the Melbourne Private Hospital tomorrow for a catheter ablation, which will involve her being in overnight. Boredom? Time to set up the Facebook app on her phone. And to make things bearable, she should use voice input. That works fine on my phone, but not on hers: ?No permission to enable Voice typing?. Huh? Off to look at the keyboard settings, but without any success. And for once Google Gemini had nothing useful to say. Finally I found it: That's only approximate, of course, like all Android documentation.
More Bank Australia fun
Paper mail today, one each for Yvonne and me. Not our Bank Australia debit cards?they arrived on Tuesday?but the corresponding PINs. I had already set mine, so I gave the other to Yvonne: Yvonne didn't like the PIN that Bank Australia gave her. Not a problem: she can change it. Just log in and follow the undocumented menu tree. But she couldn't log in! Wrong password! But we only set it yesterday. OK, ask for a new password. Sorry, can't identify your account. Huh? Off to my computer, where I was able to make the request with no trouble.
Bloody NBN!
Another all-day National Broadband Network outage today, from 8:32 to 16:25. Or at least, that's what we saw. Aussie Broadband's useless app told me that there was a danger, but that there was currently no outage. On the other hand, they threaten a total of 10 days of outages, starting this morning: What use is this app?
More Android strangenesses
Recently I've discovered the Android apps of the German TV stations. Interestingly, though they clearly run on a mobile phone, they offer a download service. For the fun I tried it out. And how about that, they download round 10 times as fast as the same service on the web. On the web I typically get round 200 kB/s, while on the phone it's closer to 2 MB/s. Why? It's not a tuning issue on eureka: videos from SRF come down round 2 MB/s. It must be the broadcaster web sites. But there's another strangeness: yes, once I have downloaded them, I can play them if I can put up with the tinny phone loudspeaker.
A slew of broken web sites
Over the past couple of days I have had pain with not one, not two, but three different web sites. They're not unusual, but somehow they seem to be ganging up on me. I was expecting delivery of a replacement battery for my ThinkPad. Not urgent?I hardly use it?but today was Yvonne's shopping day, and initially Australia Post had claimed that they would deliver it yesterday or today. But in the course of the morning I received lots of contradictory statements. This one at 11:30: That's a lot to read.
An easy spam indicator
A couple of days ago I received multiple spam messages with different content but the same message ID. It happened again today: 59 N + 29-10-2024 To groggyhimself@le (1163) Package delivery N + The delivery of your package is still pending - Confirm your shipping details 60 N + 29-10-2024 To groggyhimself@le (1155) BCF Surprise N + ?=>Expiring Soon : Get Your Yeti Crossroads Backpack Reward Now! That => in the second line is mutt's way of indicating that the messages are related, in this case because they have the same Message-ID.
Bank Australia web site
Interesting (paper) mail today: two debit cards from Bank Australia, the first communication I've had from them since we signed up last week. OK, needs activation. The sheet of paper accompanying it told me what to do: Login to the app or internet [sic] banking; Go to Cards. OK, I knew that I had a temporary password to change, so logged in (or is that loggedin?) , did that and ran into the most extreme password strength checker I have ever seen, helped by the fact that, like Bank of Melbourne, their web site is too secure to show me what I have typed in.
Another monitor dropout
Just to keep me on my toes while fighting health service web sites, my number 2 monitor dropped out on me. That's the one I bought three months ago to replace the old Matrix NEO 270WQ, which was dying of the same symptoms. Cursed location? No, I think that it was Bruno wandering around behind the monitors, though I thought that DisplayPort cables were less susceptible to such problems. To be observed.
BUPA: What will you pay?
The other half of the issue with Yvonne's procedure on Friday is, of course: who will pay for it? In particular, I had asked for a single room for the night. Will BUPA pay that? And how much of the other costs will they cover? Tried to call them up, but I didn't get a dial tone. After a lot of messing around, discovered that this horrible Grandstream HT802 Analogue Telephone Adapter had hung itself up. It still responded to nmap, but it didn't respond to my web requests. Power cycle, and then it worked. Called them up on 134 135 and had to enter my date of birth and my policy number, all over my phone keypad.
Patient registration: bad for the heart
Yvonne is due for her catheter ablation on Friday, and of course she needs to fill out patient registration. I've been through this before earlier this year. On that occasion it took me 3 days. Given Yvonne's cardiac issues, it was clear that I had to do it. The good news: it was much faster this time, though of course they annoyed me in the same manner. All dates in their format, all numbers, with slashes and leading zeroes for single digits, so my birth date 19 August 1947 had to be written 19/08/1947. To help, it inserted the slashes automatically, even after I had already done so, so I ended up with a first attempt 19/81/947, which it then of course rejected.
Microsoft crash
Processing some photos today, Yvonne was using distress, the Microsoft machine that we normally use. OK, we have a backup: dischord, an older, slower machine. Start a remote desktop. Bang! It seemed to explode, and though it had been powered on (hibernated), it lost power. And there was a vague smell of burning electronics. I've never seen that before.
Strange spam
A triplet of spam today. From my inbox listing: 7 N + 27-10-2024 To groggyhimself@ (1320) Shein Surprise Limited Time Only: Get Your Shein Mystery Box Reward Now! 8 N + 27-10-2024 To groggyhimself@ (1320) Woolworths Shipment ?=>Final Notice Coming for a Tupperware 36-piece set Reward 9 N + 27-10-2024 To groggyhimself@ (1320) Nespresso Surprise ?=>Expiring Soon: Claim Your Nespresso Pixie Reward That's with mutt, which groups messages together. But what do these three have to do with each other, apart from the fact that they're clearly spam?
Teleconference with Professor Peter Kistler
We had planned a teleconference with Professor Peter Kistler this afternoon. Bloody Zoom again! I didn't even try to set it up with FreeBSD. Back to ancient eucla, a Microsoft laptop. And I was able to set that up with relatively little pain. Only I had to type in meeting ID and password, and a couple of times it decided to go to sleep, and when it woke it had forgotten everything. By the time we were done, I could remember the password QRLw24, though not the 10 digit meeting ID with the shifting spaces. The meeting had been scheduled for 15:15, though Yvonne had asked for 15:45: Martin, the farrier, had been due at 14:45, and we were concerned that he might come late and not be finished by 15:15.
Have I been pwned?
Message from haveibeenpwned, a service that checks for leaked credentials, mainly email addresses. Two lemis.com addresses have been leaked, from a breach at digiDirect, despite the name a camera sales company from whom I last bought something 5 years ago. At the time I grumbled about their IT infrastructure, but it seems that they have had a breach of 304,337 accounts. As haveibeenpwned puts it, [email protected] Compromised data: Dates of birth, Email addresses, Names, Phone numbers, Physical addresses OK, what email address did I give them?
fvwm3 changes decorations
Strange problem on hydra today: the window manager (fvwm3) on hydra:0.2 changed its configuration. How? It had been running since 23 September. But I couldn't leave it the way it was, because the mouse key bindings had changed. So I restarted it, not a big problem in itself, but how did it happen?
Next case of software rot
Yvonne called me into her office today. Chris Bahlo had told her that there was something wrong with her photos for 19 October. And indeed there was: no photos! Check the sync operation. Volumes of vomit that she hadn't seen, indicating some problem with s3cmd. It looks as if it has lost libraries: ===== Mon 21 Oct 2024 16:30:19 AEDT on lagoon.lemis.com: make sync s3cmd sync /home/yvonne/public_html/Photos/20241012/big/ s3://lemis/yvonne/Photos/20241012/big/ -P --delete-removed Error loading some components of s3cmd (Import Error) Invoked as: /home/local/bin/s3cmd sync /home/yvonne/public_html/Photos/20241012/big/ s3://lemis/yvonne/Photos/20241012/big/ -P --delete-removed Problem: ImportError: No module named S3.ExitCodes S3cmd: unknown version.
Where's Yvonne?, day 8
I still haven't found a reason why Google Maps displays Yvonne being far from her real location. It's not random: initially it was here, about 700 m east of the house: But now it's roughly in the middle of our property: I've been trying to establish where these ideas are coming from. The best I can establish is that they happen when in fact her phone has no GPS signal (it's inside the house, and the receiver doesn't seem to be the best).
Another Ports Collection threat
For some time now xv won't display PNG files. I found a workaround in feh. But it's not installed on teevee. OK, we can fix that: === root@teevee (/dev/pts/7) /home/grog 3 -> pkg install feh The following 10 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked): Installed packages to be REMOVED: ffmpeg: 6.1.1_6,1 firefox: 128.0.3,2 get_iplayer: 3.35 mediathekview: 13.8.1_1 mpv: 0.38.0_1,1 vlc: 3.0.21_2,4 I had thought that this package removal was a thing of the past.
How to live with Android
My recent experiments with Android have been relatively successful, and I won't do much more with it now: I want to maintain my sanity. But it's worth writing up a HOWTO for next time.
Revisiting Google Maps locations
So now I have a log of Yvonne's movements on Monday, where Google Maps had placed her here, to the east of our property: But no, the track log showed a lot of noise round the house, along with their track along the ?coathanger?, but nothing east of Stones Road: So the fantasy location looks like an idea in the mind of Google Maps. As if to confirm this, she suddenly appeared at almost exactly 38.8° S, 145.75° E: She stayed there for half an hour, ...
More Android investigations
As planned, more playing around with the Android debug tools today. Some of the first issues were the various hangs I get when connecting and disconnecting. What I have discovered so far: adb is too polite to report anything except the most serious errors. My guess is that the hangs are due to some unreported error. adb needs to be run as root. If not, it appears to run normally, but it doesn't find any devices, and the shell won't run.
Tailor-made job descriptions
I'm still subscribed to LinkedIn, for reasons that I don't really understand. I retired decades ago, and there doesn't seem to be much else going on there. But an email today stood out: 33 N + 17-10-2024 To Greg Lehey ( 457) LinkedIn N + Greg, 19,102 individuals in Committer, core team member. roles like you are getting views Now isn't that exactly what I would be looking for?
Android file access: finally!
So how do I access my Android devices from FreeBSD with adb? Where's the port? Off searching. There isn't one! Google helped, showing this page, which needed some reading before I discovered that the Ports Collection spells adb as devel/android-tools. Installed that and followed some now-lost instructions and got: === root@hydra (/dev/pts/4) ~ 145 -> adb devices * daemon not running; starting now at tcp:5037 * daemon started successfully List of devices attached 4lzlrwtwei55cacu device === root@hydra (/dev/pts/4) ~ 146 -> adb shell iron:/ $ Well, almost.
A year of hydra
It's been a year today since I picked up hydra, my ?new? computer. And I still haven't finished configuring it! Why? A number of reasons: laziness, of course. But what I didn't expect was how many programs no longer run properly. So it makes sense to have eureka running alongside it with its 9 year old system. And no, there's no way to exploit from outside any vulnerabilities that it might have.
Accessing Android files, yet again
More investigation of how to get the existing GPS files off Yvonne's phone. Google Gemini had some useful information: Note: The /Android/data directory is typically hidden and contains sensitive app data. Accessing it directly might not be straightforward for most users. Methods to Access: Using a File Explorer App: Download a trusted file explorer app from the Google Play Store. Popular options include ES File Explorer, Solid Explorer, and File Manager. Enable "Show hidden files" within the app's settings. Navigate to the /Android/data directory and explore the app-specific folders.
Extracting Yvonne from paddock
Why is Yvonne so frequently in that paddock 700 m east of the house? Clearly she isn't, of course, but Google Maps shows her to be there. But is it Google Maps' fault? Maybe her phone is making that absurd claim. OK, she has the Mendhak GPS logger installed. What does it say? Oh. It's logging to /Android/data/com.mendhak.gpslogger/files/. And Android, in its infinite wisdom, won't let me access that directory. But I've been there before, and I worked around it by logging to a readable directory (in the /DCIM/ hierarchy) on hirse, and also by getting the app to send the logs via ftp.
Yvonne back in paddock
Yvonne and Jane out riding today, and I tracked their progress. But before they left, I found Yvonne in a familiar if unlikely place: That's exactly the same place as yesterday! The coordinates are precise to about 1.1 m north-south and 0.8 m east-west. Why?
Where's Yvonne?
One of the things that I find very useful is keeping track of where people are. Google Maps helps here, up to a point: it can broadcast a person's location to people of his/her choice. We have that set up for each other, so for example when I picked up Yvonne from the hospital last month, she was able to observe my progress and come outside at the correct time. But what if the phone doesn't broadcast its location, either because it doesn't know it (no GPS signal) or because it has mobile data disabled? Clearly we can't say anything, and under those circumstances Google Maps shows the last known location, along with the time.
Strange Hugin problem
I've been using Hugin on a regular basis for over 16 years, but somehow it keeps coming up with new surprises. The most recent was with enblend, the component that actually performs the stitching. It hasn't been solved, so for affected panoramas I still use the old version on eureka?one of the many reasons why I can't upgrade it. My current method is to perform the first part of the processing, the part that requires manual intervention (masking and rotation mainly) on hydra with the newest version, and then run enblend on eureka. Today I tried running enblend on hydra and got an error message I hadn't seen before: ?Invalid command line options?
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.
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 <[email protected]> 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 <[email protected]> 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?
Instagram: you can log in
Instagram seem to have finally fixed their mail problems. Tried again today, it promised to send me a code, and it delivered. And it didn't ask me to change my password. Are things fixed? I have little confidence.
Photo processing pain
Yesterday was house photo day, something that I normally don't mention here. But yesterday I made a mistake with the north-west view: I forgot the last component image, so all I got was: But I found out about that in time and went and took a complete sequence. It was an almost cloudless day, so I had to take photos with and without my hand in front of the sun. But once again I made a mistake. I didn't put my hand completely in front of the sun, giving rise to reflections: Never mind, I have a corresponding image from the first series.
Instagram: not to be outdone
Back to look at yesterday message from Instagram. But it has changed! Well, the page to which it has linked has changed. Now it won't let me do anything except ?appeal?. Sorry, Instagram, you're really not that appealing. But what about my original account? Tried that again, and got further: Sorry, Instagram, there are no asterisks in my email address. Get it to send anyway. gurgle ? Instagram Enter the code we sent to i*******m@l****.com Check your email And again nothing happened, not even an attempt to send the message to the server.
Instagram pain
I've had an Instagram account for I don't know how long. It's not the kind of site that I find useful, but Nick Macdonald seems to have his only web presence on it. OK, take a look. ?Please login to view the remainder of this page?. OK, Instagram, if you wish. ?Sorry, your password was incorrect. Please double-check your password?. Damn you, Instagram. You have changed my password without telling me. OK, send me a ?Login Link?. But nothing came. Repeat. Nothing came. The mail logs showed that it didn't even try. OK, new email address, new account. Select nick? Sorry, they're all taken or ?not available?: stupidinstagrambpas user already exists ...
Linux on Intel 4004
Interesting reference in email today: Dmitri Grinberg has run Linux on an Intel 4004: This video is at least partially in fast forward. It's worth looking at the clock in the bottom right corner of the laptop display. But how can it work? The 4004 only had maximum of 4 kB of memory. It seems that it really just emulates a MIPS instruction set. Still, an impressive achievement.
New ports
Somebody has broken xv, a program that I have been using for ever. It was one of the programs on my Applications for UnixWare CD, released in 1993. But the version I have on hydra doesn't recognize PNG images. I've established that the problem is with a library, not xv itself, but does that help? There's a thread on the FreeBSD-questions list about mail clients, but there was one reply suggesting graphics/feh. Installed that. Yes, it works, displays PNG. But there's nothing that I can do to influence the display. As far as I can see, no rotate, no resize. Not really a replacement for xv, not even in this limited context.
DVD disaster
When I finalized the specifications for hydra almost exactly a year ago, one of the requirements was a DVD drive. That seemed like a no-brainer, but it later occurred to me that DVDs and CDs are gradually becoming a thing of the past, and that for the few occasions that I might need one, I could use a USB drive. As it was, the choice of an inbuilt drive limited my choice of case. Today I had some data CDs that I had been asked to copy. OK, put them in the drive. It's behind a door. How do you open the thing?
More on software maintenance
Earlier this year I discovered a bug in the man page for make(1). make first looks for a file BSDmakefile, but it's not mentioned anywhere in the man page. In fact, it's not mentioned anywhere in the sources. Where does it come from? After some discussion on IRC, discovered that make reads a file /usr/share/mk/sys.mk, and that contains: # Tell bmake the makefile preference .MAKE.MAKEFILE_PREFERENCE= BSDmakefile makefile Makefile OK, that's specific to FreeBSD. NetBSD doesn't know a BSDmakefile.
Measure your IQ
Today I saw an advertisement from a company called Cerebrum offering to tell me my type of intelligence: spatial, musical, mumble. Over the years I've noticed that different people address problems in different manners, and I've decided for myself that I'm very much spatial. But I've had very intelligent people at work who couldn't find their way round the building. Clearly not a spatially defined intelligence. So this test looked interesting. Disappointing: it was all a matter of pattern matching, and some of the questions were quite difficult. Finally I finished.
Spring rains arrive
Heavy rain overnight, causing me to decide to turn off the heating in case we had a power failure. That didn't happen, but we got round 22 mm of rain, or, as the Bureau of Meteorology put it, 2.2 mm: It's easy to understand inaccuracies in weather forecasts, especially for areas far from weather stations. But this app shows quite accurate rainfall maps, so it's hard to understand why they should be so completely inaccurate in recording rainfall.
More makefs debugging?
So why can't I build a NetBSD system any more? Do I really need to? No, I still have the disk image that I was using last time. OK, replace the ?disk? in kimchi with that image and reboot. No networking! I've seen that before too, though I've never been able to work out why. Create a new VM using that disk, and all is well. Except that I don't have a debug version of makefs there, only some output. OK, time for a new FreeBSD machine. Install 14.1 and upgrade to -CURRENT. And that almost worked: it seems that the /usr/obj has blown out to 18 GB!
Secure confirmation
For some reason I wasn't signed up for the ARD mailing list. OK, fight my way through the broken web site and sign up. Obligatory confirmation message: Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2024 03:03:58 +0200 From: ARD Mediathek Newsletter <[email protected]> Subject: Bitte bestätigen Sie Ihre Anmeldung Bitte klicken Sie auf den folgenden Link, um Ihre Anmeldung zu bestätigen: https://seu2.cleverreach.com/f/136025-139443/wss/1220015-cb7511128984 ?Please click on this link to confirm your registration?. https://www.cleverreach.com? What's that? Yes, on some reflection there's little that can go wrong. But it requires reflection, and it encourages sloppiness.
IBM 3330 space requirements
For years I've been comparing the capacity and size of my disk drives with those of the IBM 3330, the big disk drive of the 1970s. Here an image from the University of Auckland: It had 8 or 9 drives, though I've only ever seen 8, as in that photo. Each drive initially held 100 MB, but by the time I came on the scene they had doubled that to 200 MB, so an 8 drive configuration held 1.6 GB, coincidentally 0.01% of the capacity of my newest drive.
More NetBSD pain
My NetBSD sources are in place, so I followed the build instructions. Oh. For some reason, they're for cross-builds. And the old make build seems no longer to be the way to go. OK, move on to the next chapter, compiling the kernel. And it failed! A typical situation is: kimchi# config GENERIC Build directory is ../compile/GENERIC Don't forget to run "make depend" kimchi# make depend make: don't know how to make depend. Stop Clearly it wants that done in a different directory, but which? /usr/src?
Exploit?
Into the office this morning to see lots of messages streaming off the log screen. The first that hit me were these: Sep 18 08:27:20 eureka Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from tiwi: postfix/smtpd[39164]: connect from localhost[127.0.0.1] Sep 18 08:27:20 eureka Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from tiwi: postfix/smtpd[39164]: NOQUEUE: reject: MAIL from localhost[127.0.0.1]: 452 4.3.4 Message size exceeds fixed limit; from=<> proto=ESMTP helo=<tiwi.lemis.com> Sep 18 07:45:54 eureka Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: postfix/local[11450]: C04D126359D: to=<[email protected]>, relay=local, delay=0.2, delays=0.19/0/0/0.01, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (delivered to command: exec /usr/local/bin/procmail -t 2>>/home/grog/Mail/procmailerr || exit 75) Sep 18 09:05:40 eureka Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: postfix/cleanup[25410]: EB30626359D: message-id=<[email protected]> Sep 18 09:05:40 eureka Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: postfix/smtpd[25400]: disconnect from www.lemis.com[45.32.70.18] ehlo=1 mail=1 rcpt=1 data=1 quit=1 commands=5 Sep 18 08:55:25 eureka Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: Forwarded from 192.109.197.137: postfix/local[18921]: 9124426359D: to=<[email protected]>, relay=local, delay=1.4, ...
Back to the makefs bug
It's been nearly a year since I started investigating a bug in makefs(8), or at least in the FreeBSD version. It comes from NetBSD, where it works. High time to get back to it. But it seems that kimchi, my NetBSD box, no longer has a debug version of makefs, and to build it I need to build a kernel. And for some reason, the build fails. Dammit, any old (well, newer) version of NetBSD will do. But first I have to download things.
X breakthrough
Why don't my changes to .Xdefaults make any difference? On a whim, started a new xterm. It works! So the whole issue was that xterm doesn't pay any attention to the .Xdefaults after it has been started. That makes sense, but it took me a while to get to it.
Banking: the pain
Last Wednesday Yvonne had problems with the Bank of Melbourne: her debit card expired in February, and she had to go to the branch in Ballarat to get money. It took her nearly an hour, and the person who dealt with it?clearly an immigrant?spoke English so badly that she could barely understand him. And this at the ?we speak your language? Bank of Melbourne! So why did she not get a new card? After over 30 frustrating minutes on the phone, we established: Yvonne never received a replacement card.
Back to the old slog
So after only 11 days I have finally copied my disk. Time to shut down quartet and revert to the other system configuration issues I have. One relatively minor issue is that the function of the Prev and Next keys (marked PageUp and PageDown) on xterm has changed: it should, as the inscriptions suggest, page up and down, but now it pages through the shell history. Why? It must have something to do with the X resources. I've been playing with them recently, adding additional key bindings. Initially they were: *VT100.Translations: #override \ <Key>Next: scroll-forw(1,page) \n\ <Key>Prior: scroll-back(1,page) But in the course of my configuration attempts, I changed them to: xterm*VT100.Translations: #override \ <Key>Next: scroll-forw(1,page) \n\ <Key>Prior: scroll-back(1,page) \n\ Shift <Key>Insert: ...
Disk copy, day 11
Into the office today to find: x ./grog/20110827/Components/dam-panorama-CPL-6-1EV.jpeg x ./grog/20110827/Components/dam-panorama-CPL-6.jpegtar: (null) : Truncated tar archive: Unknown error: -1 tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors. Another NFS issue! OK, that's enough. Try the rest with rsync, this time with the H option. And how about that, after hardly more than 5 hours: grog/www/test/ grog/www/test/big/ grog/www/Photos/small/white-background.gif => grog/www/Photos/big/white-background.gif sent 1,193,207,971,130 bytes received 18,071,175 bytes 63,800,349.81 bytes/sec total size is 7,886,580,015,513 speedup is 6.61 rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) (code 23) at main.c(1359) [sender=3.3.0] 18702.08 real 433.88 user 1307.03 sys What's that error?
Disk copy, day 10
Into my office in the morning to find that quartet had rebooted as a result of the grid power outage. Had it finished the copy? No. Mounted /newphotos (not in /etc/fstab) and discovered, to my horror: === root@quartet (/dev/pts/0) /home/grog 8 -> df -i /newphotos Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on /dev/ada1p1 15,257,008 903 15,103,534 0% 3 6,486,139 0% /newphotos Only 3 inodes and 903 MB in use.
Ethernet issues?
Seen in my daily report: Sep 13 01:32:47 eureka kernel: em0: Watchdog timeout Queue[0]-- resetting Sep 13 01:32:47 eureka kernel: Interface is RUNNING and ACTIVE Sep 13 01:32:47 eureka kernel: em0: TX Queue 0 ------ Sep 13 01:32:47 eureka kernel: em0: hw tdh = 785, hw tdt = 903 Sep 13 01:32:47 eureka kernel: em0: Tx Queue Status = -2147483648 Sep 13 01:32:47 eureka kernel: em0: TX descriptors avail = 903 Sep 13 01:32:47 eureka kernel: em0: Tx Descriptors avail failure = 5 Sep 13 01:32:47 eureka kernel: em0: RX Queue 0 ------ Sep 13 01:32:47 eureka kernel: em0: hw rdh = 330, hw rdt = 329 Sep 13 01:32:47 eureka kernel: em0: RX discarded packets = 0 Sep 13 01:32:47 eureka kernel: em0: RX Next to Check = 330 Sep 13 01:32:47 eureka kernel: em0: RX Next to Refresh = ...
Disk copy, day 9
Into the office this morning thinking that I hadn't been overly clever by copying an archive to quartet. It had completed, after only about 24 hours, but now I had to extract it, and that could take as long again. But it didn't. It was over in about 10 seconds: truncated archive. Now it was no longer 6.8 TB in size, only 2048 bytes! How did that happen? Oh. In another xterm I had accidentally entered: === root@quartet (/dev/pts/0) /newphotos 274 -> tar cvf Photos.tar /Photosiostat 1 tar: /Photosiostat: Cannot stat: No such file or directory tar: 1: Cannot stat: No such file or directory tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.
NBN outage?
So how long did the announced overnight NBN outage last? It didn't. It seems that it didn't happen, and both Aussie Broadband and NBN web sites deny all knowledge of it.
NBN outages: yes, no, maybe?
Email from Aussie Broadband today: Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2024 12:41:14 +1000 From: Aussie Broadband <no-[email protected]> Subject: nbn Unscheduled Outage NBN has let us know that your service/s may currently be affected by an outage. That's one of these ?impossible? messages. How can I receive it if my link is down? Checked, and of course it was still up. But my phone (connected via my NBN link) agreed: Had there been an outage? Checked my NBN stats page.
Disk copy pain
Copying my photo disk to the new 16 TB drive still isn't done! My first attempt ended up with far more inode and data use than the old disk. Part of that was because I used the wrong invocation: I omitted the H option, meaning that rsync created new files for each copy of a link. OK, start again with /Photos/grog to see if it works. But it put the result in /newphotos/grog/grog, and I couldn't find a way to stop it. Next time I'll try something like cd to the source directory and referring to it as . (dot), specifying the destination accordingly.
Understanding shell syntax
While investigating my lost space on my new photo disk, entered this: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/6) /Photos/grog 17 -> DATE=20101009 ls -li $DATE/*jpeg www/$DATE/big ls: /*jpeg: No such file or directory ls: www//big: No such file or directory Huh? === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/6) /Photos/grog 18 -> DATE=20101009 === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/6) /Photos/grog 19 -> ls -li $DATE/*jpeg www/$DATE/big === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/28) /Photos/grog 14 -> ls -li $DATE/*jpeg www/$DATE/big 863295 -rwxrw-r-- 2 grog lemis 3099465 9 Oct 2010 20101009/dam-dup-panorama.jpeg ... www/20101009/big: 863295 -rwxrw-r-- 2 grog lemis 3099465 9 Oct 2010 dam-dup-panorama.jpeg ...
Aussie web site hangs
Why can't I access the tariff information on the Aussie Broadband web site? Started writing an email and looked on the web site for information. Pop! Up came a ?chat? window. OK, ask Dominic. No, site working fine. Will he report that it isn't for me? No, not worth the trouble. With a bit of insistence, along with my possibly visible negative response to the ?are you happy with this response?? popup, he went off and investigated, something that took a total of round an hour, including a restart because of a timeout (7 minutes, he says) on his part. I ticked ?send me the transcript?
Understanding the photo size discrepancy
It's been a few days since I investigated the cause of my excess data usage on the new /Photos disk. I had suspected issues with links between my photos processing directory and the ?big? versions in the web hierarchy. Both images are the same, so they should be links, not copies. But preliminary investigations showed that they were copies on the original as well. That was for photos taken on 3 September 2024. Was it always that way? Off looking. No! === root@quartet (/dev/pts/0) /Photos/grog 119 -> l -i $DATE/*jpeg www/$DATE/big 1480997 -rwxr--r-- 2 grog lemis 3,544,601 1 Jan 2015 20150101/Ceiling.jpeg www/20150101/big: 1480997 -rwxr--r-- 2 grog lemis 3,544,601 1 Jan 2015 Ceiling.jpeg That's the same file, as intended.
Academia surpasses itself
For years I've been getting email from Academia with questions like ?Greg Lehey ?? Did you write "Treasurer"??. To answer I first need to pay them money! I can do without that. But today I got the ultimate question: 131 ND 08-09-2024 To academia@lem ( 903) Mentioned by Greg Le $1, 30 day trial. ?G. Lehey? mentioned by ?Greg Lehey?
NBN advice for morons
The National Broadband Network sends information emails from time to time, maybe monthly. I've only just found out about them and signed up. I don't know why I bothered. Today I got a newsletter offering Avoid the ?Wi-Fi gap? and get the internet you need (capitalization original). It also offers a TL:DR (punctuation also original), which can be summarized: buy new equipment and a faster Internet link. No mention of troubleshooting of any kind. Thank you, NBN, for reinforcing my negative impressions. To be fair, though, there was more information about the upcoming outages: this page explains that they're upgrading the system to new ?5G mm Wave technology?
Unwise actions
Received in the mail today: Yes, I'm still with ?Wise?, despite my annoyance last month. My searches show that they're the best of a bad lot. But now they're asking me to migrate my secure desktop environment to my mobile phone. Or are they? This is just an email, asking me to log in. Most emails of that nature are scams. What do they say on their web site? How do I access the web site? Once again these HORRIBLE CAPTCHAs, asking me to identify fire hydrants, whatever they may be.
Understanding the disk copy issues
So why is the copy of my /Photos disk so much bigger? === grog@quartet (/dev/pts/2) ~ 31 -> df -i /Photos /newphotos/ Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on eureka:/Photos 7,629,565 6,806,976 746,292 90% 1,764,291 1,479,355 54% /Photos /dev/ada1p1 15,257,008 7,237,056 7,867,381 48% 1,877,931 4,608,211 29% /newphotos It strongly suggests symlinks changed to separate files. Off for a look, and discovered?not surprisingly?the main discrepancy in /newphotos/grog: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/1) /Photos 83 -> du -s /Photos/grog 6603970 /Photos/grog === root@quartet (/dev/pts/0) /newphotos 97 -> du -s /newphotos/grog 7011999 /newphotos/grog Those are sizes in megabytes!
Disk copy, continued
Into the office this morning to discover that my disk copy had failed after transferring 4 TB: ... x ./grog/20160115/orig/P1153725.jpg x ./grog/20160115/orig/P1153728.jpg x ./grog/20160115/orig/P1153729.jpgtar: (null) : Truncated tar archive: Unknown error: -1 tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors. That wasn't completely unexpected. OK, continue with rsync, something that I'll have to do anyway a couple of times. In the process, discovered that the --delete-after option changes rsync's behaviour: it first builds a list of files, which takes some time. I wanted immediate results, so I restarted without: === root@quartet (/dev/pts/0) /var/tmp 34 -> Log rsync -av --delete-after /Photos/ /newphotos ===== Fri 6 Sep 2024 09:30:09 AEST on quartet.lemis.com: rsync -av --delete-after /Photos/ /newphotos building file list ...
Installing the new disk
So what do I do with my new 16 TB Seagate Exos disk? On the whole it seems to be a better idea to put it in eureka, where the old disk is. That would save issues with NFS and SMB, and there's plenty of space for it. So reluctantly shut eureka down for the second time in a few days, put the disk in, cabled it up, rebooted into the BIOS setup menu. No new disk. What happened there? I know I've had cable problems in eureka?after all, it is over 10 years old?but I thought that this would work.
NFS recovery
So why am I getting these stale NFS handles? Discovered a number of these messages in /var/log/messages: Sep 4 18:40:48 teevee kernel: newnfs: server 'hydra' error: fileid changed. fsid 0:0: expected fileid 0x31700, got 0x2. (BROKEN NFS SERVER OR MIDDLEWARE) What does that mean? The result of trying to remount a new mount on hydra? What does hydra say? Sep 4 18:44:50 hydra kernel: UFS: forcibly unmounting /dev/da0p1 from /VB3 But that was a few minutes later. Nothing obvious.
More NFS pain
Watching TV in the evening, I wanted to watch a film. They're on /spool/Videos/, NFS mounted on an external drive from hydra. And I had an access error. Oh. Yes, hydra agreed. Disk not accessible. I must have accidentally disconnected it while looking at the machine this afternoon, and /var/log/messages agreed: Sep 4 14:25:03 hydra kernel: ugen3.2: <Western Digital My Passport 2627> at usbus3 (disconnected) Sep 4 14:25:03 hydra kernel: umass0: at uhub2, port 4, addr 1 (disconnected) Sep 4 14:25:03 hydra kernel: da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 scbus8 target 0 lun 0 Sep 4 14:25:03 hydra kernel: da0: <WD My Passport 2627 4008> s/n 575856324537304557343143 detached Sep 4 14:25:03 hydra kernel: ses0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 scbus8 target 0 lun 1 Sep 4 14:25:03 hydra kernel: ses0: <WD SES Device 4008> s/n 575856324537304557343143 detached Sep 4 14:25:03 hydra kernel: (ses0:umass-sim0:0:0:1): ...
New disk
My new 16 TB Seagate Exos disk has arrived already. How do I install it? One issue with having hydra built commercially is that I don't understand it as well as the machines I built myself. Took off the covers and compared with the motherboard documentation (at https://download.msi.com/archive/mnu_exe/mb/MAGX670ETOMAHAWKWIFI.pdf), and that's straightforward enough. But where do I mount the disk? When I picked up the machine, Seth pointed out disk mounting positions, but they're for SSDs. There seems to be no provision for 3½" magnetic disks. Should I put it on the base? Or remove the DVD, find an adapter frame and put it in there?
Finding the lost disk space
After my concerns about disk space yesterday, the backup ran normally today, and for some reason there was much more space available. Here yesterday, then today, seen from eureka: Filesystem 1M-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/da0p1 7,630,093 7,630,043 -76,250 101% /videobackup tiwi:/spool 7,567,870 7,423,744 68,447 99% /spool ... /dev/da0p1 7,630,093 7,372,189 181,603 98% /videobackup tiwi:/spool 7,567,870 7,374,421 117,770 98% /spool Why? A look around showed me that everything was gone from /spool/Videos, my collection of films.
Another disk fail?
Seen in this morning's logs: Sep 2 01:12:21 eureka kernel: (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): READ(16). CDB: 88 00 00 00 00 01 22 76 29 a8 00 00 00 08 00 00 Sep 2 01:12:21 eureka kernel: (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error Sep 2 01:12:21 eureka kernel: (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): SCSI status: Check Condition Sep 2 01:12:21 eureka kernel: (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): SCSI sense: ABORTED COMMAND asc:47,3 (Information unit iuCRC error detected) Sep 2 01:12:21 eureka kernel: (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): Retrying command (per sense data) Sep 2 01:12:29 eureka kernel: (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): READ(16). CDB: 88 00 00 00 00 01 22 76 29 a8 00 00 00 08 00 00 Sep 2 01:12:29 eureka kernel: (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error Sep 2 01:12:29 eureka kernel: (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): SCSI status: Check Condition Sep 2 01:12:29 eureka kernel: (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): SCSI sense: NOT READY asc:4,1 (Logical unit is in process of becoming ready) ...
Where did all my disk space go?
My nightly backups have another surprise in store: Filesystem 1M-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/da0p1 7,630,093 7,630,043 -76,250 101% /videobackup tiwi:/spool 7,567,870 7,423,744 68,447 99% /spool videobackup a copy of tiwi:/spool, made with rsync. Why the discrepancy? Off to find out, and, not surprisingly, discovered a number of files on /videobackup that didn't get removed when they went away on /spool. OK, remove them: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/0) ~ 55 -> df Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/da0p1 7,630,093 7,563,450 -9,658 100% /videobackup tiwi:/spool 7,567,870 7,420,523 71,668 99% /spool How can that happen?
distress despair
House photo day today, involving lots of processing. And distress, my Microsoft 10 box, decided that it wanted to reboot. OK, what the hell, though I hate being told what to do. But after rebooting, things didn't work normally. DxO PhotoLab isn't a ball of fire at the best of times, but now it just hung. And other photo software wasn't much better. Bloody Microsoft! While waiting for that, start processing on dischord, a Microsoft 7 box. It was also glacially slow! What's wrong with these things? Samba? How do you connect these things? Wasn't there some program I could use to test connectivity?
Skittish rodents?
We've had enough issues with mice and rats in the house lately, but there are more. One of the many outstanding issues in my transition to hydra is the mouse: for reasons I don't understand, it seems to work intermittently. When marking text (left button down, move the mouse) it seems to reset the start point from time to time. My fault? I was beginning to think so, but lately there has been a second issue: suddenly the mouse pointer will jump to another screen. That's not my fault, but whose fault is it? The mouse? X? The Nvidia driver?
More Microsoft insights
Did some photo processing today. Try to fire up distress. Nothing happened. That's from an fvwm menu, which, like all such things, is too polite to complain. Try starting the underlying script: === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/11) ~ 8 -> /home/local/bin/dordesktop distress 3790x2110+0 Connecting to distress ATTENTION! Found a certificate stored for host 'distress', but it does not match the certificate received from server. Review the following certificate info before you trust it to be added as an exception. If you do not trust the certificate the connection atempt will be aborted: Subject: CN=distress Issuer: CN=distress Valid From: Thu Aug 29 09:44:00 2024 To: Fri Feb 28 10:44:00 2025 Certificate fingerprints: sha1: 6997782949cdf6f8e1db8a8056ebb46ae4506d11 sha256: 09225dcd1ca45eba670dfd3ac99f3271e4ea23bc4bce9b737f77a7109f16723a Do you trust this certificate (yes/no)?
POS pain
Yvonne forgot some things on her shopping trip yesterday, and she was going to go in again today to pick up the remainder. But some of the purchases, at the Fruit Shack, were things that I was interested in choosing, so I went instead. First to Bunnings in Delacombe to look at rat traps, and only remembered that I had looked online yesterday and decided that they were far too expensive (by a factor of 2 to 3). On to the Fruit Shack, passing ALDI on the way, so did the remainder of the shopping there. ALDI has self-serve checkout, and I've used it in the past.
hydra crash
For no particularly good reason, I ran nmap against my /24 today. hydra crashed! It's not clear why; there was no evidence of a dump or anything. But somehow it's another indication that all is not well with the networking, and this time VirtualBox wasn't involved.
X font progress
So now I have the Ubuntu X fonts in /usr/local/share/fonts/Ubuntu/. How do I tell X about them? There used to be something you needed to do, but I forget. What I did recall was the Emacs function view-hello-file, which shows the expression for ?Hello? in many languages and scripts. Last October it showed, inter alia, Check up. The fonts are all there! Well, nearly all of them. Makasar is still not there, possibly also not on Ubuntu. In fact, it's not even there in older versions of Emacs.
More VirtualBox fun
Yesterday I was left with puzzles about the networking of my VirtualBox VMs. Today I tried to track it down. I failed. Everything just worked. So what went wrong yesterday? I discovered that today I had booted from the ?DVD?, but that shouldn't have made any difference. OK, reinstall. And how about that, it installed a second copy of Ubuntu with differences that I don't understand. But the networking continued to be available, and with a bit of messing around I was able to install such basics as ifconfig, rwhod and NFS. Now I can look at those X fonts. Oh.
Chasing down the video flashing
Another video with ?flashing? this evening, this time not from ZDF but from ARD. Just what I've been waiting for. Switch over to server 1:, running the nv driver and not the nvidia driver, view the same video at the same position. It flashes! Oh. That's not what I had expected. But at least I have eliminated one potential culprit. What am I left with? It only ever happens on my TV and with some (mainly older) German videos. So we're left with three potential culprits: my Hisense A7G TV, the German videos and mpv, the video player. At least two of them must be in collusion, but which?
VirtualBox again
It's been a while since I last tried to use my VirtualBox VMs. But I have this Ubuntu system that I installed a couple of months ago, and I wanted to look at the X fonts. Fired it up and... no networking! What went wrong there? Did I forget to load the KLDs? No: === root@hydra (/dev/pts/12) ~ 23 -> kldstat | grep vbox 6 3 0xffffffff82c14000 590d0 vboxdrv.ko 7 2 0xffffffff82c6e000 4210 vboxnetflt.ko 10 1 0xffffffff82c82000 55b0 vboxnetadp.ko That's all I need.
Buying cheese online
We're out of Appenzeller cheese. How can we make a fondue? Well, we could make it out of only Gruyère, but we could also try to buy some more Appenzeller. Campanas have already made clear that they can't (or won't?) get Appenzeller. Though they have a good choice of cheese, you wouldn't know it from their web site, which concentrates on their mainstream business, booze. So we'd have to order it in specially. Off to take a look at what Google suggests: The first on the list also looked best: Alpine Express.
Understanding Affinity
So I've signed up for the 6 month trial of Affinity. After some searching, I've come up with this introduction: Is it really an introduction? It starts by selecting a ?document?, whatever that may be. And when I try, there are no documents. That's not surprising, but it also offers me more conventional menus at the top, something that doesn't appear in the tutorial. File offers me a relatively familiar Ctrl-o to open an image, and with some tree-climbing I can open an image. And then? The display has almost nothing to do with the tutorial, though it does offer things like ?develop?.
Catching up with lost threads
Somehow I've been lazy lately, and I've left lots of things lie that really need attention. Today at least I made a start: back to looking at the makefs bug, requiring me to start my virtual machines again. But I didn't get much further than that. Then there's the question of these strange flashes in some videos, notably from ZDF. I had wondered if it might be a bug in the Nvidia driver?it wouldn't be the first. Drag out the nv driver supplied with X. How do I configure it? Simplicity itself: === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/9) /etc/X11 49 -> diff -wu xorg.?.conf --- xorg.0.conf 2022-09-30 16:08:25.976728000 +1000 +++ xorg.1.conf 2024-08-23 16:26:34.647427000 +1000 @@ -79,8 +79,8 @@ #Option "FPTweak" #Option "DualHead" Identifier "Card0" - Driver ...
Understanding Gumtree
Another message from Gumtree today: What seems strange about this message? The obvious thing would be the strange markup, but it seems that this is typical of mail messages from Gumtree. Still, follow up... Oh. User has been deleted, for reasons that Gumtree won't divulge, but which could include abuse. More strangenesses to get used to.
NBN outages explained
Talking about the planned NBN outages on IRC today. Juha Kupiainen suggested that there might be a calendar entry attachment. Yes! BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:ical BEGIN:VEVENT UID:66c66cd9ee768 DTSTART:20241001T200000Z SEQUENCE:0 TRANSP:TRANSPARENT DTEND:20241011T070000Z SUMMARY:There is an nbn outage in your area CLASS:PUBLIC DESCRIPTION:As part of a national rollout to upgrade the Fixed Wireless net work\, nbn?? will be replacing hardware in your area. The program will fut ure-proof sufficient capacity for new and existing customers on the networ k. As tower climbing is required\, this work must be performed during the day. You will experience one to two interruptions for up to 9 hours from 1 2:00 am to 09:00 am on a weeknight and/or for up to 12 hours from 06:00 am to 06:00 pm on Saturday and/or Sunday.
Bloody NBN again!
A while back I was severely angered by the National Broadband Network performing maintenance work that effectively took me off the net for a whole day. Fortunately?I thought?those days are over. But today I received mail from Aussie Broadband, who report, in their inimitable markup: NBN are planning network maintenance between **Mon 23rd September 2024 06:00 AEST** and **Tue 1st October 2024 18:00 AEST**, for **540 min**., for **480 min**., for **600 min**. NBN are planning network maintenance between **Wed 2nd October 2024 06:00 AEST** and **Fri 11th October 2024 18:00 AEDT**, for **600 min**.
Developing Affinity
Serif have brought out a new offer: 6 month extended free trial for their Affinity photo processing software. How can I refuse? Well, it took me several weeks and a reminder before I finally installed it. After all, I did try it 7 years ago and came to the conclusion that it wasn't for me. But 7 years is a long time, so it's worth trying again. And once again I'm presented with a new, confusing interface and confusing terminology: no longer do I process a photo, it's a ?document?. At least that presumably means that I won't have to ?develop?
Microsoft: unexpected success!
Overnight distress.lemis.com had to reboot, because Microsoft said so. When it came up again, it seems to have been surprised: Of course, everything's relative: === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/10) /dump/distress-Microsoft 151 -> l DISTRESS/Backup\ Set\ 2024-07-22\ 104007/ drwxr-xr-x 3 grog wheel 8,192 22 Jul 11:57 Backup Files 2024-07-22 104007 drwxr-xr-x 3 grog wheel 1,536 30 Jul 09:29 Backup Files 2024-07-30 091357 drwxr-xr-x 3 grog wheel 1,024 5 Aug 10:12 Backup Files 2024-08-05 100306 drwxr-xr-x 3 grog wheel 1,024 12 Aug 10:53 Backup Files 2024-08-12 104300 drwxr-xr-x 3 grog wheel 1,536 18 Aug 19:15 Backup Files 2024-08-18 190024 The last backup is 3 days old.
Selling the lawn mower
Spring is on its way, time to sell my old lawn mower: After the pain I have had selling things on eBay, I put the advertisement in Gumtree, the first time I have sold anything there. They don't make it easy, and after I finally submitted the advertisement (fourth attempt), I discovered that they had offered it for free! It seems that they don't like the $ symbol in their ads, and they're too polite to complain, so they just set the value to 0.
Warning from lemis.com
Seen in today's mail: 11 + 19-08-2024 To [email protected] ( 174) lemis.com + Security alert Huh? From: address (after the length) lemis.com? Still, let's read... Looks just like one of those silly Google warning that I keep complaining about. When did it happen? What IP address? About the only thing that I can be reasonably sure of is that I didn't log in with a MacBook Pro. It took a little while to sink in: it claims to come from lemis.com, specifically https://lemis.com/activity/notifications. That's simple: the URL doesn't exist, and I currently (still) don't do HTTPS.
?Wise? scam?
Interesting message my mail today: 88 + 16-08-2024 To groggyhimself@lem ( 593) W?i?s?e? + Ticket (AU-K421004) : Enable 2FA and Verify Your Details by August 20 Bloody 2FA again! Somehow ?Wise?, the money transfer people who used to have the too-descriptive name ?Transferwise?, get on my nerves. How do I even know if it's kosher? Is there anything on their web site about it? No, but a week ago they sent me mail offering a service that really does look OK, but there's nothing about that on their web site either.
Guillotining Greg
Baking bread today, which involves lining the bread form with baking paper. And what better to cut it with than with the guillotine that I bought for photographic purposes in December 1967? That's the way I always do it, but today, for some reason, I raised my hand inappropriately after putting the paper in place. After treatment, it looks like this: The mess on my thumbnail is adhesive from the plaster.
More proof of life
A letter from Info retraite today, apparently a successor institution of CNAV, the French pension fund, claiming « Le site officiel qui simplifie la retraite » (?the official site that simplifies retirement?) . They want to know if Yvonne is still alive. In principle that's normal, but in the past we have had untold communication problems. And once again the letter was nearly a month old?dated 27 July?though the post mark showed that it had been posted in France (Paris only two days later, so they must have found the cheapest postage method. On the whole, things look a lot more professional, but one thing was interesting: an on-line access, reminiscent of the German POSTIDENT.
The pain of upgrading
I've had hydra for 10 months now, and I'm almost done. But there are still a number of issues that I need to clarify, most of which don't have that much to do with the hardware, now that I have my monitors installed the way I want. By now eureka should have been degraded to Internet server roles such as mail and web servers. But I'm still using it for my day-to-day work. I can't use MediathekView on hydra because the newer versions have some weird Java (programming language) incompatibility. I still don't have a complete set of X fonts. VirtualBox doesn't work reliably, so one of the reasons for my ridiculous amount of memory has gone away.
Configuration: so nice, so nice, we do it twice
I still had time, so how about finally migrating teevee to fvwm version 3? Brought it into the office for that purpose, which proved to be helpful. And with only a couple of stumbles managed to get it up and running. Only somehow the .Xdefaults don't seem to work as specified. Have I forgotten to update a configuration file? Somehow included the wrong one? Now that the main work is done, I have time to check things through at my leisure.
More system upgrades
This flashing on hydra monitor 2 still isn't going away, so it's finally time to reconnect the monitors: swap monitor 0 (DVI via DisplayPort) and monitor 2 (HDMI). They have different resolutions, and I was expecting a bit of fun, so I started X server 4 to do the configuration on. I got my fun. Things froze completely. All X servers were in state D (short-term disk wait), but they didn't use any CPU time. The mouse was dead, and there was no way to switch away from the server. I could access the system from eureka, but I couldn't stop the X server.
Musk's X server issues
Today was another big day for Elon Musk, interviewing Donald Trump on TwitterX. But things didn't go according to plan. It seems that his X servers got a DDoS. I suppose that's a different problem from the ones I have with my X servers.
More video flashing
This strange flashing (or flickering) on video output continues. So far I had only seen it on ZDF content, but this evening I saw it on another German channel. What's causing it? So far I have established: I have only ever seen it on our TV. It only happens on certain content. In the form I'm seeing now, it only happens on teevee, not tiwi. So what should I investigate now? teevee and tiwi are almost identical, both ThinkCentres running FreeBSD.
DFXP deciphered
More investigation into the DFXP subtitle format. To my surprise, Wikipedia redirects to TTML, where I read: Timed Text Markup Language (TTML), previously referred to as Distribution Format Exchange Profile (DFXP), Oh. I can do TTML. Why am I having trouble with DFXP? A quick look at it with Emacs is surprising: That doesn't look like any form of XML.
Converting subtitles
We have a series of videos with a new subtitle format, DFXP. And for some reason mpv can't understand that. There must be some program that can handle them. A web search found a number of online services, presumably requiring you to upload and download every file manually. There must be an easier way. Yes! Netflix-to-srt, as they title it, claims to do exactly that. OK, download and try: === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/6) /spool/Series/The-Marvelous-Mrs-Maisel/01 7 -> python3 /usr/local/bin/to_srt.py Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/local/bin/to_srt.py", line 216, in <module> main() File "/usr/local/bin/to_srt.py", line 212, in main f.write(to_srt(text, fn[-4:])) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ File "/usr/local/bin/to_srt.py", line 73, in to_srt return xml_to_srt(text) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ File "/usr/local/bin/to_srt.py", line 165, in xml_to_srt content = re.search(content_re, s).group(1) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ AttributeError: 'NoneType' object ...
Learning X
Fixing my X resources is not easy. Apart from the issues regarding the clipboard interface, still not solved, there's the question of the sheer number of resource definitions needed in .Xdefaults. Adding another 12 names for xterms will blow that list up by over 100 entries. Surely there must be some kind of inheritance. After much searching, found: yes. There are resources and classes, and a whole lot of other things that I didn't know about. Chapter 9 of the X Window System User's Guide for X11 R3 and R4 of the X Window System, one of the books that I recently sent to Cornelius Keck, describes them.
More git pain
A few days ago I reinstated my Makefile patch for editors/emacs-devel and ?committed? it (locally). That seemed to have satisfied git to the point that it was happy to update the tree anyway. Until today. Now it complains again. Please push or stash. But pushing didn't work: it returned an error 403. Presumably that's the HTTP ?forbidden? error. Why? OK, stash: === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/6) /usr/ports/editors/emacs-devel 59 -> git stash Saved working directory and index state WIP on main: 844c0c7d6849 x11/xclicker: new port: autoclicker for x11 What does that mean?
The daily X pain
I've been dragging my heels on updating my X configurations. What do I do first? I want minimum down time, particularly on hydra. And it's becoming clear that I have to do something to rearrange my resource names. Currently I give my xterms names that have ?just growed?: xterm-rs, xterm-r, xterm-rx, xterm-rsx, xterm-rsxa, xterm-rsxd, xterm-rsxp, xterm-rsxrad, xterm-rsxrap, xterm-rsxraz, xterm-lx and xterm-lsxraz. What do they mean? The -l and -r refer to left and right sides, the s probably to a root shell. And the rest is a case of UTSL. It seems that some aren't even used! Time for better names that reflect the class of system to which they refer.
Chasing the TV flickering
What I did manage was to compare my flickering video output between teevee and tiwi. Surprise, surprise. It doesn't happen on tiwi. Same video file. Same software (mpv), though a slightly older version. Same TV. About the only thing that comes to mind is the display card. That would also explain why the flickering extends to other windows, including the root windows. The other thing that I noticed was that the flickering went away when I repositioned the video stream and then returned to the same place.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it
It's time to reconfigure my X displays Yet Again, so that the LG 27UP850 monitors are both connected via DisplayPort. But the flickering has stopped, so I moved on to other things, notably trying to update my X configuration. And I didn't even manage much of that.
teevee progress?
Somehow I'm not making much progress with teevee. Some reasons are clear: messing around with cables, especially HDMI, is stress-inducing, potentially it could take more time than I am willing to expend, and ?if it works, don't fix it?. But it needs to be done, and today I was reminded forcefully that there's still an issue with fvwm 2: Aug 7 18:02:59 teevee kernel: pid 25117 (fvwm), jid 0, uid 1004: exited on signal 6 (core dumped) Aug 7 18:02:59 teevee kernel: pid 25118 (fvwm), jid 0, uid 1004: exited on signal 6 (core dumped) Aug 7 18:02:59 teevee kernel: pid 25119 (fvwm), jid 0, uid 1004: exited on signal 6 (core dumped) For reasons I don't understand, fvwm(2) just didn't want to talk to the X server.
Flickering video display, again
More playing around with the flickering/flashing display that I had investigated yesterday, with little progress. Tried recoding it like this: === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/12) /spool/Series/Freunde-fuers-Leben/01 7 -> ffmpeg -i 01-04-Pillengluck.mp4 -c copy foo.mp4 The result? Still flashes. Even the root screen flashes! An obvious further investigation occurred to me later: try displaying it with tiwi. Both computers are connected to the TV, so it's as simple as changing the input. Mañana.
More flashes on TV
Watching an old programme on ZDF this evening, ?Freunde für's Leben?. And once again I got these strange flashes that appeared to be due to the video source confusing the TV. Even when I pressed ?Pause?, the flashing continued. Even describing it is difficult. Dark sections of the image flash white. How do I track it down? An obvious start would be to recode the file and see if the recoded version also causes the effect. If not, at least we have a workaround.
Understanding cable problems
My new 3 m DisplayPort cable is here already. Installing it isn't as easy as it seems. Yes, physically attaching it is straightforward enough, but using it properly means braving nvidia-settings and of course restarting all my X sessions. Still, I should check that it works, so I connected monitor 3 via the new cable to the output for monitor 2, and connected the identical monitor 2 with the existing HDMI cable to the output for monitor 3. All worked. By rights the flashes and dropouts that I had had before on monitor 3 should now have occurred on monitor 2.
Apple mail fail?
One of the many things that really get on my nerves is email written in HTML only. Apart from the fact that Mutt handles it badly, it makes it very difficult to reply to without resorting to ad-hoc commercial solutions. It also makes it difficult to follow mail threads. One of the relatively frequent participants in the Hugin mailing list has been sending out such mail, using iPad mail and iPhone mail. I thought I might have some input, so I sent him a message asking him to at least set multipart-alternative. He wasn't upset, but he didn't know how to set it up.
I hate cables!
Much of my computer rearrangement recently has been impeded by cable issues: wrong length, inadequate quality (especially these horrible HDMI cables, which have already cost me a TV, and which seem inadequate for my 4K monitors), hard to trace the other end. Today I had a case: turn on the monitors for eureka. No display. After a while, discovered that the left-hand one had the wrong HDMI cable connected. Connect the right one and it works. But I couldn't get the right-hand one to run. It was connected to one of two DVI cables, but it wouldn't display with either of them.
Mail corruption
Seen this morning on my mail screen (Mutt): 17 + 02-08-2024 To Greg Lehey ( 22) Yvonne Lehey + GateKit 18 + 01-08-2024 To grog@freebsd ( 23) mailman-owner@ + ??>mailing list memberships reminder The second message, typical at the start of the month, looks to be a follow-up to a private message from Yvonne. Huh? Take a look: From MAILER-DAEMON Thu Aug 1 22:02:31 2024 Date: Thu, 01 Aug 2024 05:00:02 -0700 From: mailman-owner@ To: [email protected] Subject: mailing list memberships reminder Message-ID: <mailman.630.1722513602.810421.mailman@> In-Reply-To: <[email protected]> But that's impossible.
Tidying up teevee
Slow day today. Spent some time playing around with teevee, though there wasn't much to be done. I'm still puzzled by the difference in font size that mpv demonstrates between tiwi and teevee. Could it be in the configuration files? They're in ~/.config/mpv/. But no, they were the same. But somewhere I recall reducing the size years ago. How did I do it? It's not in my wrapper script. Somehow I'm missing something here. OK, RTFM. ?No manual entry for "mpv"?. Oh. Only recently did I discover that ports man pages have been moved from /usr/local/man to /usr/local/share/man, and I had had to update my MANPATH accordingly.
Waking distress
Lately I've been having slight trouble accessing distress, one of my Microsoft boxes. I access it by rdesktop, but first it needs to be woken. That's what wake(8) is for: it sends a Wake-on-LAN packet to the machine, which is listed in /etc/ethers. Problem: hydra has two network interfaces. Under those circumstances, wake wants to know which interface to use, so I run wake re1 distress. But lately that hasn't worked: === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/18) ~ 42 -> wake re1 distress wake: write(): Network is down wake: Cannot send Wake on LAN frame over `re1' to `distress': Network is down === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/18) ~ 43 -> wake distress === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/18) ~ 44 -> And yes, the second invocation works, the one that shouldn't work.
Completing teevee
Now that hydra is running relatively smoothly, I can turn my attention to teevee, the replacement for tiwi that I have been working on for nearly two months. It was happily running in my office, but moving it to its correct place was complicated by the cabling and my requirement to keep things running throughout. My concerns with the cabling were justified, but after that things came up smoothly, and it Just Ran. Well, of course there were a few details. I still need to migrate to fvwm3 and modify my .Xdefaults, but that's the same issue as with hydra, and for the time being things work well.
Fixing firefox
One of the problems with a 3840×2160 resolution monitor is that web browsers like firefox display everything too small. Spent some time today changing the default font sizes, with less than stellar results. Surely there's a better solution? A web search pointed me at the configuration parameter layout.css.devPixelsPerPx in about:config. By default it's set to -1.0, but it can be set to between 1.0 and 2.0 to scale all output.
hydra progress
More work on hydra today. What do I need to do with the configuration for server 1? Fired it up, and it came up, just with the monitors in the wrong sequence. And nvidia-settings didn't want to know about the fourth monitor until I insisted. OK, moving the monitors is almost straightforward, except now there are no X display 1 and friends. I have to tell nvidia-settings the (sometimes ambiguous) name of the monitor. Save the config file, and we're done. Start the server with the new config file. No devices detected. Fatal server error: no screens found(EE) Huh?
Fixing xv
The version of xv on tiwi works with PNG files, while the version on hydra and teevee doesn't. OK, copy across. Needs two libraries that weren't installed on hydra, libtiff.so.5 and libjasper.so.6. Copy them across. Runs. Doesn't display PNG! So there must be something in some other library that breaks it. What a pain.
hydra: tying up loose ends
Why does screen 2 on hydra not work at native resolution? Yesterday's console messages suggested the HDMI cable. I have two cables to two monitors. What happens if I swap them? It works! What a relief! So it was something to do with the HDMI cable. Well, it worked for a while. Then I got random lines on the screen, and at one point it briefly went blank. Playing around with the HDMI connectors worked around that, but clearly they're not up to the job. This isn't the first time that I have had trouble with HDMI. I should change the cable for a DisplayPort cable.
CrowdStrike hits FreeBSD
When I had time this morning, continued with the hydra X configuration. As expected, I couldn't unload the nvidia.ko kernel module. I had to reboot. But what happened then was anything but what I expected: Panic, even in single user mode. I have almost exactly repeated the CrowdStrike incident on FreeBSD! A kernel module from a third party caused the system to get stuck in a reboot loop.
Where's my stash?
After fixing the build of editors/emacs-devel last week, I ran into a problem: git point blank refused to update the entire ports tree. So I had to ?stash? the Makefile. Today, after the ports upgrade, I needed to rebuild the Emacs port. Where's my Makefile? Read various things that didn't make any sense to me, but I couldn't find it. In the end, just reapplied the patch: it's only two lines, and I even had the diffs in this diary. But why is everything to do with git so difficult?
teevee progress
And teevee? I've moved the box to the other side of my desktop, where I can easily access the back of the box. And there I made a surprising discovery: two DisplayPort connectors! I had considered the ThinkCentres too primitive to even have DVI outputs, one of the reasons I use a display card. The display card is almost certainly necessary anyway, but the DisplayPort output really surprised me. It came up and seemed to work normally. But once again I had issues with the Alt key functions under bash not working correctly. For example, Alt-F should move one word forward, but instead it capitalizes the word.
More upgrade fun
Yesterday's world build on hydra finished in record time. But that was yesterday, and since then my cron jobs had updated the tree. Nothing for it, another world build, this time with -j 45: >>> World build completed on Sun Jul 28 08:41:17 AEST 2024 >>> World built in 922 seconds, ncpu: 32, make -j45 ... >>> Kernel build for GENERIC completed on Sun Jul 28 08:42:12 AEST 2024 >>> Kernel(s) GENERIC built in 55 seconds, ncpu: 32, make -j45 ... >>> Installing kernel GENERIC completed on Sun Jul 28 08:42:13 AEST 2024 978.87 real 24411.08 user 2256.35 sys Reboot, then brave upgrading all my ports, 6 GB worth: The following 413 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked): ...
Can't stop Perfectly Clear
Messing around on distress, one of my Microsoft boxes today, discovered that ?Perfectly Clear? was full screen. No, not almost full screen like most programs, which leave the bar at the bottom free. It completely covered the screen, and with Microsoft's pitiful excuse for window management, that means that I couldn't resize or iconify it. OK, c-q should stop it, right? Yes, probably, it should stop it. But the maker hasn't made any provision for stopping it! Presumably people do it by the window decorations, which were missing here. Key bindings? Off looking for the documentation (?Perfectly Clear is no longer maintained.
Catch that mouse!
I now have a second J.BURROWS mouse, Officeworks' special. The side buttons are so convenient, so now I have one for eureka and another for tiwi. But they're so skittish! Once upon a time mice were so sluggish that you needed to speed them up with xset m 3 or some such. But now even a setting of 0 is too fast. More searching, and found this page: ?mouse speed too fast?. And it pointed me to an xinput variable, libinput Accel Speed.
hydra update: the end in sight?
More work updating X on hydra.lemis.com today. To avoid shooting myself in the foot, I created Yet Another configuration file and a server hydra:4, then played around with nvidia-settings. That was more work than I expected, especially because nvidia-settings kept trying to change things without warning. It seems to love changing display positions from relative (?RightOf Screen0?) to absolute (?+1920+0?) and then complaining about it not being a good idea. But finally I had a configuraton that looked good. Only screen 2 (the second LG 27UP850) didn't display anything. More investigation showed that it would only work at resolutions of 2560×1440 or lower, but not at its native resolution of 3840×2160.
Completing the restructure
More rearranging in the office today. The monitors for hydra have been in the correct positions since yesterday, though I still need to complete the X configuration. But for the moment things work. Next, eureka. Three monitors which barely fit in the space left over. But that problem ?solved? itself: the old Matrix monitor didn't power up properly. My latest guess is that there are issues with the power connector, and disconnecting and reconnecting it was the last straw. So: goodbye Matrix, you have served me well for well over 10 years. I paid a surprisingly low price for it at the time, only round $300, and I wasn't expecting it to last long.
An offer you can't refuse
Seen on the Ballarat Courier today: Login or signup to continue reading $0/ $NaN/year All articles from our website & app Who can refuse that?
X configuration, part 4723
The good news about connecting up my new monitor was that it worked out of the box. Of course, it was connected to a running output (hydra:0.2) configured for 1920x1080, but it picked that up and ran with it. That was the good news. I wasn't expecting the reconfiguration to be easy, and my expectations were met. Although I had an output on the rightmost monitor (to become hydra:0.3, but currently hydra:0.0), the server and Nvidia software didn't want to know about it, thus the blue screen on that monitor: OK, run nvidia-settings.
The end of the SPARCstations
What's constant about these photos? Clearly not the image quality. Clearly not the aging person between keyboard and chair. Also not the location, nor the displays. Not even the keyboards, which I had to change before the last photo. But there is one constant: the monitors are mounted on SPARCstation pizzaboxes. I had long since stopped using them as computers, but they did very well at propping up the monitors, and they have been doing it for round 30 years.
Office restructure, next step
Spent much of the day moving monitors around. It shouldn't have been difficult, but there were constraints: Remove junk accumulated round the old monitors. No computer to be powered down. Remove mess from behind the monitors. Find cables of appropriate length and type to connect to the monitors. In the process, I found a lot of old documentation, including appointment cards dating back as far as June 2017. And I managed not to disconnect any cables. Sadly, the power connector to eureka was loose, so I did have to reboot it?exactly at a time where it had no monitor connected.
Can't save Emacs buffer
Writing an email today, I tried to save the buffer. No go: select-safe-coding-system: Loading charset map: No such file or directory, MULE-uviscii Huh? What's that? It seems to be related to the fact that the message contained non-ASCII characters. A bit of a web search brought this page to light, which helped me work through to discover the directory /usr/local/share/emacs/30.0.50/etc/charsets/. Previously it contained MULE-uviscii.map, but now it doesn't. Clearly it relates to my recent rebuild of Emacs, but how? I found an older version, and it doesn't look like something that changes frequently, so putting it in place worked around the problem.
A new monitor
Finally the monitor that I ordered last week?a day before the display card?has arrived. I paid for it on Sunday, 14 July, but it wasn't sent until the afternoon of Monday, 22 July. And to make up for that, it arrived today, less than 2 days after being sent, and it was delivered to my door. Not bad for free postage. Now the real work starts: tidying up the monitor arrangement that once displayed eureka, which has been there for over 9 years:
New display card
The display card that I ordered last week is there. For once it's not the fault of Australia Post: it arrived in Napoleons (sorry, NAPOLEON) a week ago, just after Yvonne did her shopping, and since it wasn't urgent, I waited until today. It's enormous! The package measured 31×43x6.5 cm, or 8.66 l! But most of it was air: the real package measured 29.5×21×5.3 cm, only 3.28 l: That's still ridiculous. The card itself measures 16×7×1.7 cm, or 0.19 l, only 2.2% of the volume of the package: Why do people do this?
Network failure out of sympathy?
What does ?riven? mean? It's clearly the past participle of a strong verb, but which? Does it conjugate like ?strive?? Off to check the found of all wisdom, the OED. Are you human? Oh, no. They've added a CAPTCHA to insult their users. But after correctly answering the CAPTCHA, I got another one. And another one. The thing was stuck in a loop. Called up the State Library of Victoria, where Tom confirmed that OED had changed something, and that they (SLV) had been having trouble, as had all other libraries, and that it wouldn't be solved today. In the meantime I had tried logging in to the National Library of Australia.
Understanding the CrowdStrike failure
A couple of days ago I engaged in guesswork about how the CrowdStrike bug caused the global system crash. Today Ginger Wolnik posted a reference to this video on the Tandem Alumnni mailing list: It pretty much supports my guesswork: a kernel module had an unrecoverable error. But the details are interesting. Microsoft has a bad reputation for security, but in this case it seems that it's not to blame. As I guessed, the CrowdStrike software includes kernel modules. But Microsoft tests all third-party kernel modules before giving them its seal of approval.
More X configuration fun
What's next with my X configuration? Where should I start? A good one would be to interface with the clipboard. I've tried this before, but it didn't work as I expected. Time to look again. Another answer in the page that described the xterm feature recommends adding this to .Xdefaults: xterm*VT100.Translations: #override \ Ctrl Shift <Key>V: insert-selection(CLIPBOARD) \n\ Ctrl Shift <Key>C: copy-selection(CLIPBOARD) But that's strange. I don't see anything like that elsewhere, and I'd prefer to do it with the mouse.
World network crash
Email from the Ballarat Courier today: Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2024 00:47:00 -0600 Subject: Breaking: Major IT outage impacting banks, media, airlines and supermarkets Why should the Ballarat Courier report that? Nobody else did. Well, for about 1¼ hours. Then the New York Times came up with this: date: Fri, 19 Jul 2024 04:01:28 -0400 Subject: Breaking news: Global tech outage grounds flights and hits businesses Reading headers is frequently interesting.
Here's a basket for all your eggs
I continue to get popups like this on random web sites: What a good idea! It makes it so much easier to compromise multiple sites if somebody gets your Google password. The real issue is, of course, that creating and maintaining passwords is too complicated, especially if you're using a mobile phone. I keep a non-standard list of passwords and associated email addresses, of which I have several hundred. Crack one of those and you have access to one site only. Spam me on it and I can remove it.
More ports pain
House photo day today, made more difficult by wind and threatening rain. But I got the photos done. The fun started with the processing: /usr/local/share/hugin/data/plugins/top_five.py CAT:Control Points NAM:keep 5 CPs per image pair fails @api-max What does that mean? Hugin complains about things all the time, but this one was fatal. My best bet is that it was a knotted python. OK, reinstall Hugin. ===> Registering installation for hugin-2023.0.0_4 pkg-static: Unable to access file /home/src/FreeBSD/git/ports/graphics/hugin/work/stage/usr/local/lib/python3.11/site-packages/_hsi.so:No such file or directory pkg-static: Unable to access file /home/src/FreeBSD/git/ports/graphics/hugin/work/stage/usr/local/lib/python3.11/site-packages/hpi.py:No such file or directory pkg-static: Unable to access file /home/src/FreeBSD/git/ports/graphics/hugin/work/stage/usr/local/lib/python3.11/site-packages/hsi.py:No such file or directory More ports agony!
New Emacs
My Emacs build finished yesterday without complications, and this morning I installed it, also almost without complications. Only this message: Emacs is now built with native compilation enabled by default, which requires GCC version 11 or later. However, it is known that some elisp applications don't work correctly when compiled. You can work around any such issues by disabling native compilation using the following steps... That's in /usr/ports/editors/emacs-devel/pkg-message. Is it something to worry about? Only, I suppose, if I get an ?application?
xterm clipboard access
A while back I found suggestions that X, and in particular xterm, can access the clipboard directly. I made a note of it in my diary, but not clearly enough: it took me 20 minutes to chase down this reference, to which I referred less than 2 months ago. It wasn't without issues, which I should chase up.
Emacs resources
So gradually my xterm configuration is close to where I want it, though the effect on the .Xdefaults file is clear: === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/23) ~ 762 -> l /eureka/home/grog/.Xdefaults .Xdefaults-hydra -rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 2,477 30 Jun 14:38 /eureka/home/grog/.Xdefaults -r--r--r-- 1 grog lemis 7,644 19 Jul 13:30 .Xdefaults-hydra Next, Emacs. And somehow things started all over again. Somehow the specified resources don't seem to have any effect. They do, however, have a couple of strangenesses. For example, I have: emacs*Geometry: 110x75 That's the xrdb syntax that I know.
More fvwm3 conversions
Continued with my X reconfiguration today, and discovered that I had forgot the details that I had investigated at the beginning of the month. Put them in, and they worked. But now I have even more multiple entries. Spent some time looking for ways to inherit resources, but there doesn't seem to be one. Now I have 163 mainly duplicate resources in my .Xdefaults file, and it looks like it might increase.
fvwm3: enough?
More playing around with fvwm3 today, and at least partially cracked the MenuStyle entry. Instead of this, MenuStyle black gold brown -*-*-medium-r-*-sans-12-*-*-*-p-*-*-* mwm I tried this: MenuStyle * mwm It didn't complain, but the colours were wrong. OK, we know that: Colorset. But no, it didn't want to know. It wants MenuColorset: MenuStyle * MenuColorset 5, mwm But with that, I finally have my configuration the way I want it.
Back to X configuration
Lately I've been doing very little, and the wait for getting VirtualBox running correctly?if at all?means that I have time to look at other painful things. So, today fvwm3. The more I look at it, the more it's a can of worms. There are two major problems: The documentation is oriented towards the developer, not the end user. It seems that the syntax for MenuStyle has changed. I used to have: MenuStyle black gold brown -*-*-medium-r-*-sans-12-*-*-*-p-*-*-* mwm But now it complains about the keyword gold.
Aussie does it again!
Mail from Aussie Broadband today with their inimitable asterisks: Subject: It's time to review your emergency contact details We?re just checking in to make sure all of your **emergency** details are correct. ... Address: **29 STONES RD DEREEL VIC 3352** Contact number: **0353184210** Well, no. They include the numbers of the four VoIP lines that they have half provisioned, but not the mobile phone that they also have on file. And two of those VoIP lines are not connected. Time to change things. Log in.
VirtualBox: enough!
So where do I go from here with VirtualBox? Discuss the matter on the FreeBSD mailing list. But I'm not a member, and something seems to have gone wrong with the signup. Enough! This is really very frustrating. I'll leave it for a while; after all, I do have Microsoft boxen that will do the job. Instead I'll turn my attention back to the new teevee. And for that I need a better display card than the GeForce 710 that I have been using. Apart from potential performance issues, the fan is noisy, and blowing it out with compressed air doesn't help.
A new monitor
It's been nearly 9 months since I got hydra.lemis.com, my new machine. And I still haven't completed the migration. One of the issues was the X configuration, of course, and I had run into trouble with my old Matrix monitor, which is probably on its last legs. I had kept it because of the lower resolution, only 2560×1440, while the new LG 27UP850 monitor is 3840×2160. But since my cataract operation, it seems that 3840×2160 is perfectly readable. So: another 27UP850. I know my way round the thing, it works well, and now it's over 25% cheaper, since it's last year's model.
More VirtualBox pain
More messing around with VirtualBox today. Why can't I save the state of a virtual machine? More experimentation showed that I couldn't do anything to stop it. No suspend. No ACPI shutdown request (was just ignored). No power off. All I could do was to shut down the VM from within (with the SHUTDOWN command). Clearly something's wrong there. Searching the web, found a reference to the user belonging to the vboxusers group. I knew that, of course, but I had expected a clean install to set it, and it didn't. But it didn't help. Tried starting as root, and that didn't help either.
The pain of cables
Osso buco for dinner tonight. For that, we need risotto alla milanese. And how about that, according to our freezer database, we have some in basket 9. Do I believe that? Not overly. But it's a good chance to bring the database up to date with reality. Print out the contents of 9 and compare. Oh. === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/7) ~ 109 -> echo 'select * from freezer where basket="9" order by description ;' | mysql household | a2ps ERROR 1064 (42000) at line 1: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '0~select * from freezer where basket="9" order by description' at line 1 Huh?
More VirtualBox fun
Spent a large part of the day setting up VirtualBox on Ubuntu. I have resolved at least one thing: to move a VM from one instance of VirtualBox to another, I need to press the ?Add? button, not the ?New? button. And that uses the configuration file (like despise.vbox), and it works up to a point. Clearly a saved image isn't going to work well, especially as in this case I had to reduce the memory from 24 to 16 GB and the number of CPUs from 8 to 4. But it's so slow! Well, at least the disks were. There was a difference: this setup uses normal magnetic disks, while my other instances have used SSDs.
VirtualBox on Ubuntu
My continuing pain with VirtualBox had established that the problem was not (only?) related to the hardware on which it ran: it also happened on quartet, a test ThinkCentre. So if it's a single point of failure, it's probably either FreeBSD or the specific VirtualBox port. OK, before I move quartet (as teevee) to the lounge room, how about installing Ubuntu on it and trying like that? I've been through the installation a couple of weeks ago, and I still have the install media. How hard can it be? Excruciating! It started with a broken copy to the USB card, but after I had done the install, I still needed to integrate it into the home LAN.
More work on teevee
Finally got round to doing some more ?work? on teevee. Somehow this cable mess really gets me down. Spent a lot of time trying to get the correct cables in the right place, in principle only monitor and audio. And apart from minor frobs to get the mouse right and to mount the correct file systems, all worked pretty much out of the box. But the next step is more cabling in the lounge room, which is another horror.
Scam from Google Play
While looking for that most elusive of things, a good Android app, got this unsolicited popup: 221.236.211.162? That's not an IP that I use. A bit of checking showed: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/6) ~ 204 -> host 221.236.211.162 162.211.236.221.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer 162.211.236.221.broad.cd.sc.dynamic.163data.com.cn. A traceroute failed after 13 hops, so it's clearly not nearby. What does that mean? Possibly the advertisement can't determine the IP addresses in use on my phone, but why use a fake address?
Quiet day
Today was one of those days where I didn't do anything worth mentioning, quite a difference from the last few weeks. When am I going to continue with upgrading tiwi (or teevee)? Somehow the issue with VirtualBox has thrown a spanner in the works. An obvious attempt to localize the problem would be to try the same scenario running Linux. And for that I need a machine for the installation?the same one that I need for teevee. What do I do? So far, nothing.
Understanding mice
Yesterday's confusion with mice puzzled me. Wasn't there a way to set a button map? Yes, and I found it not so long ago: there's a button map that xinput is too polite to display with xinput list-props. Instead I need xinput get-button-map With that information, I've added this to my HOWTO page: Current (2024) versions of X don't seem to use moused any more. Use /dev/sysmouse: Section "InputDevice" # generated from default Identifier "Mouse0" Driver "mouse" Option "Protocol" "auto" Option "Device" "/dev/sysmouse" Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" EndSection It's not clear if ZAxisMapping is of any ...
Understanding mice
More playing around with my new mouse today, on tiwi. Yes, it works, but how do I remap the side buttons? moused is started with root 36620 0,0 0,0 13112 1720 - Is 22:13 0:00,00 /usr/sbin/moused -3 -p /dev/ums1 -t auto -I /var/run/moused.ums1.pid That doesn't even match the entries in /etc/rc.conf.d: moused:moused_enable="YES" moused:moused_flags="-m 2=4" # Remap rear side button to 2.
A mouse!
I'm still planning to put in the new teevee.lemis.com in the lounge room Real Soon Now. The intention is to run it in parallel with tiwi until I'm happy. Until then, all the videos will be on tiwi. Things that are missing are: keyboard, mouse, display card (maybe). Surely I have lots of keyboards and mice? Yes, I do, but for some reason they ?don't work?, at least partially because all the dongles are unmarked, and none of my experiments in pairing them have worked. So when I was in town on Thursday, I picked up an el-cheapo wireless keyboard and mouse from Officeworks, total price $33.
Problems with NBN scheduled outages
It seems that I'm not the only person to get annoyed by National Broadband Network scheduled outages.
ANZ password: Groggy's fault
Checking my local web pages, discovered this: -r--r--r-- 1 grog lemis 6462 2 May 14:32 bank.php That's the page I use to access financial web sites. And it had a new password, one that I hadn't transferred to my password list. So the issues that I had on Tuesday were my fault after all. Did Gracia do the right thing then? No. she couldn't have known that, and her utter conviction that I had typed a special character in the password shows a lack of will to investigate the real issues.
ANZ: You typed the wrong password
Time for my monthly check on my bank accounts today. But no, my ANZ web page told me that my password was wrong. What? It's stored in the web browser. I also have it written down, so I tried that. No, wrong. Please reset. How did that happen? It's definitely not my doing. Called up and finally, after nearly a minute of announcements, I was asked the reason for my call. ?I think my password has been breached?. WRONG. Another two minutes explaining to me how to use the ANZ App to reset my password. And then I was disconnected. Nearly 3 minutes for nothing.
bhyve: out
I've already had my concerns about using bhyve instead of VirtualBox, but another thing that concerned me was how to save a running instance. Once again Google Gemini to my aid. You don't: Unfortunately, as of July 1, 2024, bhyve itself doesn't offer a built-in feature to save the state of a running virtual machine. This functionality is under development, but there's no official release yet.
20 years of wrong directions
Twenty years ago today I started this idea of saving all my RCS files in a separate hierarchy. Bad idea, and it's still biting me.
X configuration: RTFM!
More searching for answers to the .Xdefaults issue today. What does the xterm(1) man page say? Much more than it did 30 years ago. Now there are 7,758 lines, about 130 pages. When I learnt X it was 253 lines, less than 5 pages. And much of this new version describes exactly what I'm looking for: a line like xterm-r*faceName: DejaVu Sans Mono refers to a name xterm-r, which is described in X(1): -name This option specifies the name under which resources for the application should be found.
Constructive translations
Google Translate is quite useful for reading labels on East Asian food, but it has its limits. Here's a particularly amusing one: Somehow Google Translate is just too eager to please.
Lies, damn lies and statistics
Last month was cold? How about this month? mysql> select year(date), min(outside_temp), avg(outside_temp), max(outside_temp) from observations where month(date) = 7 group by year(date); +------------+-------------------+--------------------+-------------------+ | year(date) | min(outside_temp) | avg(outside_temp) | max(outside_temp) | +------------+-------------------+--------------------+-------------------+ | 2017 | -1.8 | 8.386610996751084 | 17.2 | | 2018 | -0.5 | 8.84761882739429 | 19.7 | | 2019 | 1 | 9.319298495442224 | 18.5 | | 2020 | -0.8 | 8.394708139534231 | 16.7 | | 2021 | ...
Understanding Xdefaults
Now I have an almost functional fvwm3 configuration. How do I polish it? An obvious thing would be to move much of the specifications to the .Xdefaults file. I already have some stuff in there. For example, for xterm: xterm*Geometry: 100x50 xterm*faceName: DejaVu Sans Mono xterm*faceSize: 9 So I don't need to put those details in the fvwm3 config. But what about the others? Currently I have: + "hydra" Exec LC_ALL=en_AU.UTF-8 /usr/local/bin/uxterm -name "xterm" -s -sl 2048 -sb -ls -j -rw -display :0.3 -geometry 90x50+53+0 -e /usr/local/bin/bash & + "hydra" Exec LC_ALL=en_AU.UTF-8 /usr/local/bin/uxterm -name "xterm-r" -s -sl 2048 -sb -ls -j -rw -display :0.3 -geometry 90x50-53+0 -e /usr/local/bin/bash & That defines the xterm parameters for left and right xterms.
Donate somebody else's organs!
I've been planning to apply for an organ donor pass for years now, and today I found I can do it on the web. Only one minute! Well, 3. First I need to find my Medicare card and enter the details, and then enter my name in a form that the form likes (to match what's on the card). And that's it! I'm a certified organ donor! All I needed was my name, address and Medicare card number. I could do that for lots of people without them knowing. In an age where people are paranoid about security, it's amazing that I can get a spare kidney or two without the donor knowing (even before his death).
Still more VirtualBox fun
Finally my world build was done. Rebooted quartet and ran make installworld. It failed! install -o root -g wheel -m 444 ftime.3.gz /usr/share/man/man3/ install: ftime.3.gz: No such file or directory How did that happen? My best bet is that the culprit was the nightly cron job that updates the source trees. Installed as best I could, and then on. OK, update the VirtualBox packages to be on the safe side. But no, I was up to date. === root@quartet (/dev/pts/0) /src/VirtualBox 40 -> kldload vboxnetadp kldload: can't load vboxnetadp: module already loaded or in kernel We've seen that before.
SSD strangenesses
The first step in installing quartet was copying a system image. That's simple: I have a number of identical 128 GB SSDs, one of which has the system for teevee. So all I need is dd. === root@teevee (/dev/pts/0) /home/grog 3 -> time dd if=/dev/ada0 of=/dev/ada1 bs=1m 122104+1 records in 122104+1 records out 128035676160 bytes transferred in 1944.455866 secs (65846532 bytes/sec) 65 MB/s? That's not exactly blindingly fast for an SSD. I had been watching ?progress? from another xterm, which showed me: === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/1) ~ 3 -> iostat 1 tty ada0 ada1 pass0 cpu tin tout KB/t tps MB/s KB/t tps MB/s KB/t tps ...
Why quartet?
Why did I call the new machine quartet.lemis.com? That goes back decades. At Tandem our first Unix machine was an LXN, a rebadged Altos machine. Our first real Tandem Unix box was the Integrity S2. So when it came to naming the machines, the LXN was called solo.euts.tandem.com, and the S2 was called trio.euts.tandem.com. After I left Tandem, they had a new machine, which they called quattro.euts.tandem.com?that would never have happened if I had stayed. In English, we have solo, duo, trio, quartet and more. Since my ?new?
More VirtualBox fun
As planned, set up one of my ThinkCentres for VirtualBox testing. I was going to call it monorchid in memory of my old test box for SMPng, but then it occurred to me that even the oldest machines now have multiple processors. This one has four, so I called it quartet.lemis.com. Things didn't go easily. I ran into the old issue with that I had in March. But even after setting that, things weren't smooth. Did I have the kernel modules? === root@quartet (/dev/pts/0) /src/VirtualBox 30 -> kldstat|grep vbox === root@quartet (/dev/pts/0) /src/VirtualBox 40 -> kldload vboxnetadp kldload: can't load vboxnetadp: module already loaded or in kernel === root@quartet (/dev/pts/0) /src/VirtualBox 41 -> kldload vboxdrv kldload: can't load vboxdrv: module already loaded or in kernel Huh?
fvwm3: success?
So I moved on to my other issue, fvwm3 configuration. The obvious thing was to change all of the specifications that fvwm3 complained about. That wasn't as simple as it looked. For example, it complained about this line: HilightColor black palegreen What does the man page say? What man page? I have fvwm3(1), but it doesn't mention anything like that. On the web I found this page, but though the content is different and more complete, it also didn't help. But somewhere that I forgot to write down told me: HilightColor textcolor backgroundcolor This command is obsoleted by the Style options HilightFore and HilightBack.
More VirtualBox fun
When I went to bed last night, disaster.lemis.com was still running fine. Fixed? No. When I got up this morning, I discovered that it had stopped responding at 23:32:20, with the same symptoms as I have been having before. What next? Look at the log files. Nothing, neither in /var/log/messages nor in the VirtualBox logs. Where do I go from here? Changing hypervisors doesn't seem to be an option: Bhyve seems to have issues with Microsoft, VMware doesn't run on FreeBSD, and what I've seen of Xen suggests that it needs to run on the bare hardware. Change machines? That currently looks like the best option.
More disaster
So why are my Microsoft virtual machines getting network hangs? An obvious thing to try would be to upgrade VirtualBox. That went smoothly, but it caused problems with Qt that were more difficult to resolve. On restarting (this time disaster.lemis.com) I had to recover the net configuration again, after which things ran smoothly. How long? Set up a ping to record the time and stop when there was a failure. It was still running when I went to bed. Solved? I don't trust it.
fvwm3: progress
Somehow I still can't make much sense of the required syntax for the fvwm3 configuration file. There seems to be a disconnect between the (relatively copious) documentation and my understanding. So time for some experimentation. Made these changes (inter alia) in the configuration file: +Colorset 21 fg black, bg yellow -Style "xterm-r" Icon xterm.xpm,Color yellow/black,IconBox -40 300 -1 -140 +Style "xterm-r" Icon xterm.xpm,Colorset 21,IconBox -40 300 -1 -140 Success! Well, sort of. Now these windows have icons that have a yellow background and a black foreground, which proves to be the opposite of what I wanted.
More Microsoft on VirtualBox investigation
What's wrong with the networking on disaster.lemis.com and despise.lemis.com, my Microsoft 10 virtual machines running under VirtualBox. Is it the hardware? Is it FreeBSD? Is it VirtualBox? Is it Microsoft? For the fun of it, asked Bard, which came up with this answer, referring to a forum post that didn't quite address my issues, but it gave me some ideas to follow on. This post is interesting because it refers to the same network hardware that I have. This incomplete post seems to indicate that a different network adapter might solve the problem. But if so, I have two problems. Certainly we have different symptoms now.
Understanding Microsoft issues with VirtualBox
Saturday's installation of Ubuntu confirmed that there wasn't much wrong with the VirtualBox network configuration on hydra. OK, what's the issue with Microsoft? Spent some time investigating. First, can it be that the VMs didn't like the host configuration changing under their running image? Rebooted despise. No improvement. OK, for the fun of it, try the ?troubleshooter?, which has never shot any trouble for me. But this time it came up and said ?done!?, specifically ?restored default gateway?. That's nonsense, of course: I was trying (and failing) to ping the default gateway. But of course I tried again anyway. And it worked!
Mobile phone power consumption
I've been playing more than usual with albo.lemis.com, my new Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 mobile phone. And the power consumption differs markedly from hirse.lemis.com, my old Redmi 9T. And it shows in the power consumption. Here first albo, then hirse: Is the Note 13 really that much hungrier than the 9T? Or is it just that I have been using it more?
Ubuntu again
Installed the latest version Ubuntu Linux on a virtual machine today. Why? A couple of reasons: to see whether VirtualBox still works after the change in networking infrastructure that caused disaster and despise, my two Microsoft VMs, to lose connectivity. And to see how well it does out of the box with rendering non-Roman fonts, thus a user-oriented desktop version. It didn't start well. Configured it with all the defaults, and it just hung on boot. After a while I decided that it wasn't going to do anything, and went searching the web, coming up with Ubuntu 18.04 installation on a VMWare stucks [sic].
?Wise? money transfers
I had to transfer a small amount of money to Germany today. ?Wise?, the vaguely named financial service, seems the cheapest. But once again they did everything to annoy me. To complete the transaction, I first needed to install their app on my phone, with all its attendant security implications. And then they used it for ?security? verification: So to perform an action on the phone, they send me a ?security number? to the phone, requiring me to jump between two apps. After the event it occurred to me that this was a perfect application for AirDroid.
albo: complete?
Some minor playing around with my new Xiaomi Redmi Note 13. It's not the way I want it?it is Android, after all?and it's not even the same as hirse, my old phone. But it will have to do. I don't know whether it's just the increased attention to the phone, or something else, but it seems that there are far more advertisements than on hirse. I came across this page, which gave me some suggestions that might work.
Emergency location!
One of my favourite gripes with Android phones is how difficult it is to find where they are. That's particularly silly in case of emergency. But now, scarcely more than 15 years after the introduction, it seems that somebody has done something about it: How does it work? Do I want to know? For no good reason it appears to be limited to emergency numbers (112, 000).
More albo fun
So gradually albo.lemis.com is working roughly the way I want it, or as close as you could expect from an Android device. As Austin predicted, the irritating ?this phone will not work after August 31? message is now gone. Tried once again to get something useful from ?WiFi File Transfer?. Now it can see the device IP address (awesome!) , but it can't see itself. Start another app and it no longer shows in the list of active apps, and it hides itself by calling itself ?FTP File Transfer?. If I try to restart it, it just notes that its ?HTTP Port?
Redmi Note 13 camera
The new Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 boasts a 108 MP camera! That's more than any of my real cameras, even in Hi-Res mode. How good is it? While playing in the lounge room, took this forgettable picture, along with a natural-sized crop: It's not bad under the circumstances, but the most interesting part is the resolution: 12 MP. How do I get 108 MP? Do I get 108 MP? Do I care?
More app pain
Another app that didn't get transferred to my new phone was ?WiFi File Transfer?. Why not? It's gone! Well, there's another with the same name. It's marvellous! Transfer files and folders from phone's storage media to other platforms such as PC is an awesome feat. Just wifi, not needed a cable. What are we coming to when a simple file transfer is ?awesome?? And this sentence no verb? OK, install that. Not what I expected: And somehow it managed to install without providing an icon.
More fun with albo
More playing around today with my albo.lemis.com, my new Xiaomi Redmi Note 13. It proved that the Mendhak GPS logger was not logging. Why? It seems that the configuration was copied, but the write permissions weren't. And then there's this irritating message ?At the end of August, it's likely that this phone will not be able to make calls?. That's from the old phone, but the SIM is now in the new phone. I had called ALDIMobile support yesterday (2435 from subscribing phones), and Vince had told me that he would raise a ticket to have the message cleared. But today it was still there, and it's irritating.
Google pain
Somehow Yvonne managed to get herself locked out of her Google account today. How do we get it back? Send a code to her mobile phone. Where's her phone? Out in the paddocks: Out to take a look, calling from my phone in the process. Nothing. Is it really there? Or maybe in the stables? Back into the office. ping fossil. Normal ping responses. That's not possible that far from the access points. Tried again. It was in Yvonne's office! And that in plain view.
More fun with albo
Spent a lot of time playing around with albo.lemis.com, my new Xiaomi Redmi Note 13. Copying things from hirse was only partial: yes, it seems that most apps got installed, and some of them also retained the configuration information. But only some of them; others required reconfiguration. One of the apps that I knew I would have to install myself was the Mendhak GPS logger, which also require installing F-Droid. That was strange: F-Droid spent a considerable amount of time building up a repository, not saying that it hadn't completed, and until it was, I couldn't find the GPS logger. But when it was installed, it included all its configuration information!
New mobile phone
The real reason for today's journey was to pick up my new Xiaomi Redmi Note 13. Back home with it and set it up with relatively little difficulty, though it took quite a while. First observation: it was cheaper because it was white (and thus the name albo.lemis.com). But the protective cover is opaque and anthracite black. Only a little bit round the lenses shows the natural colour. And though it copied a lot of stuff across, it didn't copy everything. A number of apps weren't copied, and random things like my ring time didn't make it either. And the home screen is a complete mess.
More hydra pain
Somehow the change of the network configuration on hydra has caused problems for VirtualBox. I had a lot of trouble connecting to my Microsoft VMs. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, and on a couple of occasions I ended up with rdesktop killing the session, apparently because I had started two, and the one left out in the cold gave up and somehow terminated the session. In addition, there are issues with the audio, background noise that seem to be related to what the CPUs are doing. They're particularly evident when the Microsoft VMs are working. I've had hydra for nearly 9 months now.
Relocating video files
tiwi, my TV computer, is continually running out of space. Currently I have three disks connected, with 8 TB, 6 TB and 4 TB. There's still space available, but the biggest consumers are films (166 GB) and series (6.4 TB). Clearly the series alone are almost enough to fill the first disk. I can put the others elsewhere, notably on the third disk (/VB3) which has only about 1 TB. But how do I maintain the illusion of a single file system? VB3 is mounted on hydra, and I access it via NFS. Deep links! === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/13) /spool/Series 16 -> df Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/ada0p4 7,567,870 7,459,980 32,211 100% /spool hydra:/VB3 3,815,019 3,696,084 80,784 98% ...
Another hydra crash
Lots of photos to process today: not just the lens comparisons, but the weekly house photos. And once again hydra hung while processing them with the Microsoft VM. Only this time no watchdog timeout occurred, and I had to reboot it. OK, another chance to try the net/realtek-re-kmod driver. Two months ago it failed to load, probably because the machine is up and running. Today I tried it in single-user mode, and it worked. But the on-board interface came up as re1, requiring some reconfiguration. And then my virtual machines didn't work! It proved that they, too, were looking for re0.
Special offer on mobile phones
Seen on hirse (my current mobile phone, soon to be retired): ?Here's your chance to get this item at a great price!? What's wrong with this advertisement? It's from the seller who sold me exactly this phone. Why should I want another one? And why hasn't he sent the one I bought? And why should I pay over $40 more for this ?special offer? than I paid for the one I bought? And why the option of paying either $450.65 or ?Approx.?
Quora: regurgitating?
It's pretty clear that Quora is on its last legs, and it has been for some time. Recently I have been receiving upvotes for old replies, notably ?Should I buy the Olympus OM-D E-M5 or the EM1??, which I answered in November 2016. Why am I getting upvotes now? My guess is that Quora picked the reply out of a hat and presented it to numerous people. Until last week I had had one upvote; now it's 14.
Google: You have violated our policy
Sent a message about the Tapiola panoramas to the Hugin mailing list today. The response was swift and unexpected: We're letting you know that we've permanently removed the content at https://groups.google.com/d/msg/hugin-ptx/6cIfYhbkz74/yG2lQnBmBgAJ Why did this happen? An external report flagged the content for illegal content or policy violations. As a result, our legal content and policy standards team removed the content for the following reason: unwanted content. Learn more You can learn more about our content policies and enforcement at our help center.
Installing another air conditioner
Nathan Barnes and his apprentice Justin along this morning at 8:00 to install a Mitsubishi MSZ-AP-60VG2 air conditioner. As if the early hour wasn't bad enough, the remote controlled front gate had got jammed, not for the first time, and I had to go out into the freezing cold and dark with only a dressing gown to un-jam it. They got stuck into it pretty quickly. About the only issue was that we had to briefly take house power down, so nearly all the computers had to be powered down. Once again lagoon survived on the UPS, but the other machines didn't have one.
Understanding infrared thermometers
Found yet another old infrared thermometer in my office today. Put in some batteries and tried it out. It worked, sort of, but showed completely random temperatures up to 10° apart. I recall problems with it 7 years ago, and at the time I thought it was due to moisture. But clearly there's more to the accuracy of infrared thermometers than meets the eye.
More teevee progress
The only thing missing with teevee was the display card, and I put that in the ?too hard? basket on Sunday. Today I got round to doing it. Yes, connect it to the monitor via HDMI and it comes up normally, without the dead display issues that I have had so often on tiwi. Starting X was a different matter, of course. I need drivers, and that's the usual horror with the Nvidia site. But now we have artificial intelligence. What does Gemini say? Once again something helpful: install the nvidia-driver-470 package. And yes, that worked! Gemini seems to be more and more useful, though I'm sure I'll soon run into limitations.
Hugin fail
I was really unhappy with yesterday's results with Jari Kirma's panorama. Spent some more time looking at it today. There are 30 component images, and they have an exposure range of EV 11.4 to 9.8 (at 15/12.8° ISO!) , which seems to be appropriate. Here the unretouched first and last image: DxO PhotoLab has no trouble with the images. Here the thumbnails: But Hugin makes a complete mess of the exposures: Things were so bad that the out-of-box Hugin wasn't even able to align the images.
A new mobile phone
After considerable investigation, I have decided on a new mobile phone, a Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 with 5G coverage to maximize its useful life, though the 5G versions cost significantly more . Why that one? Fatigue, mostly. There are so many phones to choose from, and there's little to distinguish them. This one was one of the relatively few on sale from JB Hi-Fi at a price that I was prepared to pay ($479, discounted from $549). Why JB Hi-Fi? They're the only shop in town, they have relatively few models, and they have presumably chosen the most usable models. And a comparison with my current phone shows it to be better in all respects.
hydra: Watchdog timeouts
Seen after some work with despise, the Microsoft VM running on hydra: Jun 8 09:00:16 hydra kernel: re0: watchdog timeout Jun 8 09:00:16 hydra syslogd: sendto: No route to host Jun 8 09:00:16 hydra kernel: re0: link state changed to DOWN Jun 8 09:00:16 hydra syslogd: sendto: No route to host Jun 8 09:00:21 hydra kernel: re0: link state changed to UP That's presumably associated with the hangs that I have been seeing.
Hugin loses to one-liner
Jari Kirma is playing with panorama software. Problem: Hugin doesn't run on his Apple machine. So he wrote what he claims is a one-liner in Mathematica that creates panoramas. The result isn't too bad: How much better could Hugin do? I asked him for the component images and stitched them. Oh: Even ?Perfectly Clear? didn't help much: What went wrong there?
Understanding Bluetooth
While reading through old diary entries, came across this article, which includes information about using my Bluetooth headphones. I had recently tried to use them, but I couldn't get them to pair, and I had assumed that they were defective. But no, not really, just Bluetooth. Tried the instructions there, and they worked. How I hate Bluetooth! If something goes wrong, there's almost no way to diagnose the problem. Time for a HOWTO page.
teevee progress
Next step with teevee: put the disk in the spare machine on top of hydra. That was a non-starter, literally: it didn't make it through the power-on self test. I recall a machine being defective, and that must be the one. But it had 32 GB of memory in it, so I took half and increased the other machine to 22 GB, which should be more than enough. The other 16 GB can go into the new lagoon. Then upgraded teevee from FreeBSD 13.1-STABLE to 14.1-STABLE, which went surprisingly smoothly once I found enough space for /usr/obj: it now takes up nearly 17 GB!
A new display card?
tiwi.lemis.com, my current TV driver computer, has a display card with an nvidia GeForce GT 730 chip set. I get the feeling that it's sometimes not fast enough. What do I buy? How much do I want to pay? The sky's the limit. I have a number of other nVidia cards lying around, two of them with the necessary HDMI output. One is a GeForce GT 210, the other a GeForce GT 710, both weaker. But I'm replacing the machine with a more powerful one. Would they work well enough? And then there's one in distress, a Microsoft box. What is it?
Relying on digital devices
How accurate are digital devices, in this case thermometers? I asked myself that question when I used the Dallas 1820 twenty years ago. I came to the conclusion that the inaccuracies were negligible in comparison with random temperature fluctuations in the object I was messing. And I've stayed of that opinion, though I admit to not wanting to challenge it. Lately I've been measuring temperatures frequently to adjust the electric heaters we're using. And yes, there have been significant differences between the fixed displays and the infrared thermometer that I carry around with me. But then, the fixed thermometers have significant hysteresis, so I accepted that.
dereel upgrade, completed
Brought dereel up to date today. It's a much slower machine than hydra, and the build took nearly 4 hours. Somehow clang is an exercise in navel contemplation: it seems to take longer than the rest of the build together. Next is to revive tiwi as teevee and bring it up to the latest stable release. Mañana.
More system upgrades
An interesting thing about solid-state disks is that, though they're generally more expensive than rotating disks, that doesn't apply to smaller sizes. There seems to be a lower price limit for old-style disks, round about $70, but ?small? SSDs can be much cheaper. Last week I bought 4 128 GB disks for $19.31 each, including postage. My intention is to use them as system disks for machines like tiwi (which currently has 17 TB of spinning disks) and lagoon (again with considerable image data on line). Don't I have enough to do to finally complete the migration to hydra? Yes, of course I do.
Another power fail
On the way home, got a frantic call from Yvonne: she had plugged an electric heater into one of the power strips on the desk in her office, despite my warnings to only use the wall outlets: they were connected to the UPS for her computer, lagoon, rated at 350 W. Bang! Goodbye to the last system that didn't go down on Tuesday. But the worst thing about it was that, even after she disconnected the heater, the power didn't come back, and the UPS screamed continuously. Nothing for it, she had to wait until I got home, 20 minutes later.
Google Maps pain
Coming home was a pain. In principle I know the way, but I let Google Maps guide me anyway, though the instructions are a bit vague round the south of Ballarat. Going down the extension of Humffray Street I saw warnings of road works up ahead, so I turned towards Barkly Street. But Google Maps wanted to take me in the wrong direction! Finally got to the end and found significant road works that encompassed Barkly Street too. After waiting for ever for the traffic lights and not getting through when they did turn green, turned off for another alternative. Oh.
RIP Mike Karels
Shock news today: Mike Karels, one of the original BSD troop, died yesterday of a heart attack on his way back from BSDCan. It was completely unexpected, and we're still trying to come to terms with the news.
Power fail!
Heating with electricity uses a lot of power, of course, something that we don't have much of. In principle we have 11.5 kW available, but even that got exceeded just before breakfast: tstamp Pac Status SOC VBat PacGrid PacBat PacPV FromPV W1 2024-06-04 10:42:16 0 Internal Bypass Closed 22 255 NULL 0 0 0 13750 2024-06-04 10:42:17 0 Internal Bypass Closed 22 255 NULL 0 0 0 13575 2024-06-04 10:42:19 0 Internal Bypass Closed 22 ...
No mail!
Into the office this morning to discover that mail delivery had stopped during the night. Further investigation showed that the root file system on eureka was full. Why? Lots of searching with find didn't find anything obvious. No new large files in the last 24 hours. But looking through the backup logs gave me a clue: it happened during backup. And then looking at eureka from tiwi gave me the clue: === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/9) ~ 1 -> df Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on eureka:/videobackup 39,662 31,535 4,954 86% /videobackup eureka:/photobackup 39,662 31,535 4,954 86% /photobackup eureka:/ 39,662 31,535 4,954 86% /eureka eureka:/home ...
Porting enblend 4.1.4
House photo day again today, and I still haven't ported the last functional version of enblend to hydra. Tried again today, with limited success. For some reason it tried to refer to strerror_r() as returning a string, when in fact it returns an integer. OK, not an issue, hack the source. Oh. The whole semantics are different. But it seems that the port had prepared for that, and it had alternative code for what proves to be the POSIX version (the other version is the GNU version; rms has something to answer for). But try as I might, I couldn't persuade it to accept my hacks.
Two years of core, over?
Two years ago today I became a member of the FreeBSD Core Team. It should now be over, but for reasons to which I wasn't privy (midnight teleconferences), it has been delayed. As I said at the time ?Video meetings aren't going to work effectively. ? So now we're hanging on to our power for another few days. The elections are almost over, and after several weeks, only 52% of developers have voted. Why? Apathy, I suspect. I certainly failed in one of my stated goals, to make the Core Team more visible. But it seems that I was the only one who wanted to do that.
Five years of phone smart
Five years ago today I grumbled about the same things that still annoy me with Android. Now I need a new phone just to be able to make calls. At the time I wrote: I'm thinking of reverting to my old steam-driven mobile phone: at least I can always make calls and terminate them without scratching my head. Of course, that's no longer a solution either. If my 3 year old phone can't make calls after the end of August, certainly no steam-driven phone will.
Another power issue
As a result of the air conditioner issues, I listened carefully to what it was doing. And then round 7:10 it just cut out, stopped dead. That's unusual. Normally it gradually winds down. Damn, what is it this time? Into the office for some reason, where I saw the display on the ATA: only 2 LEDs on, out of 4. That's a reasonable first indication that we're off the net. What does the NTD say? All looks normal, for once. But the display on hydra was funny: window manager gone. A look on eureka confirmed my worst suspicions: Boot:. Somehow it had restarted.
More clipboard pain
Yesterday I found various ways to bridge the gap between the cut buffer and the clipboard. But they all seem to have issues, and I spent quite some time today trying to understand how to do things correctly. The only thing that I established with any certainty was that things don't ever seem to work the way they're documented. Emacs documentation contradicts itself, but claims that the normal c-y should copy from the clipboard, when in fact it copies from the cut buffer, as it always has done. Why is this so difficult?
Another mobile phone search
So I need to buy a new mobile phone in the next 3 months. What should it be? Xiaomi, definitely. Not because I like them?after all, it is a ?smart? phone?but because I have come to terms with their particular wrinkles. And there are now 5 generations of newer phones, with prices between $375 and round $2000. Which do I choose? Definitely nothing over $1000, almost certainly nothing over $500. What features? I recently discovered that my current phone either doesn't have a telephoto lens for its camera subsystem, or it's so well hidden that I couldn't find it.
Digital driver license: scam?
Thinking about yesterday's experience with trying to register my digital driver license, it occurred to me: I already have it! My article on the subect last August was when I installed the app and noted that I could authenticate myself with a thumbprint. And later I tried to use it at the Napoleons post office, but they didn't accept it, probably correctly. So what's all this about? Somebody trying to scam me? First, let's change the password from a Real Computer. How about ?W4s I breached??? No, not valid: Please enter a valid password.
More phone smart
Callum Gibson came up with an observation today: SMS Backup & Restore can make incremental backups. It's just hidden in a menu where normal people would intuitively find it. Than mail from ALDImobile: the 3G network is closing down at the end of August, after which my phone may not work. Check by texting ?3G? to 3948. The result: Thanks for using our device checker. The info below is from 30 April 2024, for your Xiaomi M2010J19SG. This phone wont [sic] connect to the Mobile Network after 31 August 2024.
X configuration continued
It's been some time since I did any work on my X configuration for hydra. Apart from just plain laziness, there's the question of font size. Now that I can see better, the sizes I have chosen seem too big. But where do I set it? I wrote it down somewhere, possibly as a link, but after considerable searching I couldn't find it. Time to start my own X configuration overview. Another thing that irritates me is this clipboard/cutbuffer dichotomy. So many programs copy data to the clipboard, while xterm uses the cutbuffer. I've played with autocutsel, but it doesn't seem to do what it claims to.
Digital driver license!
Message on hirse, my mobile phone, today: my digital driver license is available. Just follow the instructions. Did that, painfully typing in the email address and password, refusing to sync to Google, saving to phone. Password incorrect! Tried again. Same thing. Tried a bit more, and it got so upset that it went into a never-ending loop of displaying the page, erasing it and starting again. OK, I'll try later on a Real Computer. Oh. Message gone. Nothing in my backups. No email. It's as if it never happened. How do I reinstate it? Why is everything so flaky nowadays?
X manuals: gone
When we moved into the Stones Road house I threw away a large number of old books. But some were too good to throw away, like the original X manuals published by O'Reilly in the early 1990s. I offered them on the Unix Heritage Society mailing list and ended up promising them to Cornelius Keck. But there's no hurry, right? Well, that was 9 years ago, and after about 5 I asked again. Yes, still interested. Another 4 years, and finally today I took them in for shipment.
More SMS backup pain
I've managed to stop from backing up the same data every day, but now I've reached the opposite result: What went wrong there? Followed the Help link and found page after page of details for phones that I didn't have. So how about ?BACK UP NOW??
Understanding the hydra net hang
More photo processing with despise running on hydra, and more hangs. They're becoming predictable: feed more than about 50 images to ?Perfectly Clear? and it will hang. And maybe it will recover by itself after a while (10 seconds? 50 seconds?). But in the process it stores truncated images. A repeat fixes that, but it's still irritating.
OM System Workspace
Why didn't Olympus Workspace not want to connect to the ?server? yesterday? It's too polite to say more than ?Failed to communicate with the server". Which server? What failure? Checked and found that it was trying to contact https://app.olympus-imaging.com/olympusworkspace/en/, and that's an old, worn-out magic word. Now it needs to be called OM Workspace, and they're too polite to assume that you don't know that. OK, try to download that. No, it claims not to know about Olympus Workspace, but it refuses to install while Olympus Workspace is present. OK, let's remove it. ?Configuring Olympus Workspace 1.4.1?. Huh? I don't want to configure it, I want to remove it.
More E-M1 investigations
How dead is my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark I? It displays nothing when I power it on. But will it talk to a computer? Yes! And when I disconnect it, I again briefly get this S-IS.AUTO at top left of the display, so I can at least confirm what it says. But the software (Olympus Workspace) didn't want to connect to the Internet. Why not? ?Failed to communicate with the server". All this software is so terminally broken. It's not clear that it would have helped, so I let it be.
Still more weather station pain
After yesterday's crash on tiwi, I forgot to restart the weather application. When I did, I once again ran into this issue with the MySQL libraries. I really need to RTFM about that. But it only ran for about 20 minutes. Then it hung again with the eternal May 20 15:46:31 tiwi wh1080[26226]: Can't read device: Input/output error or Unknown error (5) May 20 15:46:32 tiwi wh1080[26227]: Can't read device: Device busy or Unknown error (16) How I hate this thing! USB connection problems? Tried the usual workarounds, to no avail.
More VoIP issues?
Yvonne received a phone call this morning on her mobile phone. Why that? The caller told me that she had tried the (VoIP) ?landline?, but that it wasn't available. It works for me. But somehow this sounds like a compatibility issue. Do I have the courage to call Aussie Broadband and report it?
tiwi problems?
While looking at a web page on tiwi in the afternoon, everything froze. Well, almost everything. The mouse cursor still ran, but I couldn't input anything. Off to hydra, which told me that the X server was running at 100%. Rogue web page? Quite possibly. Shot down firefox, and X went with it. Restart X, and things seemed to work, but though I had started it with -listen tcp, I wasn't able to start anything that would talk to tiwi:0, not even locally. Is that because I started X from a different system? But while watching TV later, the system paniced: May 19 18:55:22 tiwi kernel: Fatal trap 12: page fault while in kernel mode May 19 18:55:22 tiwi kernel: cpuid = 3; apic id = 06 May 19 18:55:22 tiwi kernel: fault virtual address = 0x0 May 19 18:55:22 ...
Building enblend 4.1.4
I can't run the enblend 4.1.4 binaries directly on hydra due to library hell. Sometimes I wonder if dynamically linked executables are still a good idea. But I have the source: build it. Use the port in the Ports Collection? That's too fragile. If it's not up to date, it won't work. So build it as the author intended. After tripping over the confusing installation instructions, I came to: Extract the source archive, of course. I chose to do so in /usr/ports/graphics/enblend-4.1.4/work, giving the tree /usr/ports/graphics/enblend-4.1.4/work/enblend-enfuse-4.1.4.
SMS backup, the down side
After yesterday's success with saving SMS messages, I set up SMS Backup & Restore to back up at frequent intervals, once an hour. Today I downloaded the results. 20 files, each 20 MB in size, and all almost identical. Only the backup date was different. Complete backups! It's bad enough to have a single file backup, but it seems that there is no provision for incremental backups. Clearly once an hour is far too frequent. For the moment I'll go back to once a day.
More house photos
Another round of house photos today, and once again the latest version of enblend made a mess of them. Time to install enblend 4.1.4 on hydra.
Saving SMSs
I've been trying in vain for years to find an app that reliably forwards SMSs to email. This recent increase in their use by people who should know better just makes the thing more important. I have a couple of apps installed on my phone in the vain hope that they might help, but most of them just want to back up, not forward. OK, if that's all there is, try SMS Backup & Restore. Google Drive? Dropbox? OneDrive? Or (strongly discouraged) on your phone? Sigh. Somehow these people are not on the same planet as I. Select ?this phone?, ignore alarm bells, and I was actually able to select a directory folder that I could access externally, though of course they changed the path name from /SMS to /primary/SMS.
SMS takes over the world
I didn't need to worry about forgetting yesterday's doctor's appointment: I got not one, but two SMS to remind me. Marginally acceptable, I suppose. What if I hadn't read the messages? Would they have called me? If so, that's really acceptable: it saves a lot of work on both sides. But why not an email? Ah, email is portable, so it must be bad. Then this morning I received more SMSs: I suppose that's acceptable, too, though really barely. Why can't they just send email?
NFS fun
I still have my home directory spread across hydra and eureka, and it's definitely not ideal. Today I wrote yesterday's diary entry on hydra and committed it. It didn't show on the same file system on eureka. I've experienced consistency issues with NFS in the past, but it's been a while, and I've been doing things like this for a long time. What has changed now?
More hydra net hangs
Last month I had issues with hydra hanging while processing photos with despise, a Microsoft VM. I suspected a network card issue at the time, and I stopped using despise for a while. But then I tried again, and so far there were no issues. Then today I reprocessed some old photos, a total of 159 images from ten years ago. And in the middle of running ?Perfectly Clear?, I got another dreaded net hang. Or was it? I had prepared for this eventuality with a vty logged in as root and with only local file systems in its path. Switched to it.
Weight graph: take a step back
Yesterday's graph of my weight was compelling, but somehow it's a little short. It started at the beginning of the year, but I've been recording my weight for over a year. How about some more data points? Spent a while typing in the values for the last 4 months of last year. And how about that, a completely different viewpoint. The first graph is the second half of the second graph: Oh. That's not at all what I expected, and it clearly shows the advantage of plotting graphs.
Recovering hydra, day 2
Copying the /home file system on hydra ran until 4:28 this morning. The next step would be to copy the individual files?maybe. After all, they were all backed up?maybe. This morning's backup output failed: *** Mail of at least 153911296 bytes could not be accepted *** at hydra.lemis.com due to lack of disk space for temp file. *** Currently, 150424 kilobytes are available for mail temp files Admire the different units, almost obscuring the fact that the message was only just too big. I wonder what it contained.
Catastrophe!
After yesterday's power outage, I left it until today to pick up the remains of hydra. A good thing, too. It took all day and I still wasn't done. In principle it came back relatively quickly. Fire up my kludge window managers, start firefox... Nothing. Well, for a while. Then the machine rebooted. Huh? That never happens. Try again. Start X. Start window managers. Start firefox. Spontaneous reboot! Damn, what's causing that? Something wrong in /usr/local? Ran a manual fsck on the root file system, and how about that, it found a number of anomalies. Start firefox. Crash. OK, something in /usr/local?
Power outage!
While watching the news on TV this afternoon, there was a ?beep? and the TV and tiwi, the driving computer, powered off. Nothing else, including the microwave ovens and lagoon, Yvonne's computer, which were on the same circuit, didn't. It must have been a power surge, lasting less than a second. Damn! I must do something about that. Waited for it to come back. It didn't. And of course the display remained blank. I really need to do something about that; the TV is connected by HDMI, but the machine comes up looking for the DVI interface, which wasn't connected. Into the office to get a monitor to connect to the DVI cable which I had hanging out for exactly this purpose.
ACDSee software free
Interesting offer in the mail today: ?Completely FREE! Get Gemstone Photo Editor now, no strings!?. OK, if it's free, I'll take 2. I looked at ACDSee briefly ten years ago, and while I didn't find anything wrong with it, I didn't mention it again. OK, follow the link. ?Please fill out this CAPTCHA?. Dammit, what is wrong with the browser on hydra:0.2 that always wants CAPTCHAs to be filled out? Started up despise, where it's supposed to go, and got the same result. Then a download link, along with a popup asking whether I wanted to do something that I could resist.
More Hugin experiments
Yesterday's comparisons of the output of enblend 4.1.4, 4.2 and 4.3 were revealing, but they don't match the images I used last week.
Hugin problems, continued
Last week I reported the problems I had with the new version of Hugin and got a response from Lukas Wirz, who is working on enblend and has recently committed a patch to fix this kind of problem. So I downloaded the latest version of enblend 4.3 from https://sourceforge.net/p/enblend/code/ci/default/tree/, a link that I had to be told about: the home page only offered version 4.2, which is what I had been running. Building had also not been straightforward: the FreeBSD Ports Collection has a too-rigid structure to easily deal with changes of location and archive format, and the README in the archive is seriously in need of correction.
More net outages
Another two National Broadband Network outages this morning. Clearly we can expect more: And reading back in my diary for years gone by, that's nothing unusual. Five years ago today I had exactly the same problem.
libmysqlclient: still no joy
The power outage also meant that I had to manually restart the weather monitor on tiwi. As last month, I had to run ldconfig to get the system to recognize it. So it wasn't the symlink. Presumably the issue was that MySQL wasn't installed on tiwi, and the hints file doesn't include the directory. Time to RTFM and check which hints file I should update.
Another bloody RCD trip!
While making breakfast this morning, the RCD for the kitchen tripped. That's the same one that has given me pain last month. And on that occasion, too, it happened while cooking breakfast. I had suspected the water kettle then, but there was no obvious connection today. Still, since it also took tiwi down, it might be time to replace the kettle.
More network outages
Another network outage round 9:00 this morning, like last week. There was a difference, though: the display on the NTD was different, no signal strength indication at all. Clearly one of the blanket National Broadband Network outages that they're threatening all the time. OK, now that I can access the MyAussie app without too much pain, let's see what they have to say. Yes, of course we don't have an NBN connection, which is why I enabled mobile data. But even if I hadn't, ?something went wrong? is a cop-out. And despite everything, I wasn't able to access the site: Report a fault?
Rearranging the office
I've been in my current office for nearly 9 years, and in that time a lot has not changed. I still have the same computer and some of the monitors, and the computers under the monitors have also not all changed. Here the only photo I took 9 years ago, and how things look now: But I put a couple of audio amplifiers under the leftmost and rightmost monitors. The leftmost was my old Technics SU-3500, but it failed relatively soon after, so I replaced it with a Sansui San110, which ended up under the right-hand monitor.
More weather station pain
Writing yesterday's article on my weather program, I checked the current status. Nothing! It seems that it had stopped logging at 17:30 or so yesterday afternoon. Checking came up with a continual stream of May 5 07:00:03 tiwi wh1080[111]: Can't read device: Input/output error or Unknown error (5) May 5 07:00:03 tiwi wh1080[110]: Can't read device: Device busy or Unknown error (16) May 5 07:00:06 tiwi wh1080[116]: Can't read device: Device busy or Unknown error (16) May 5 07:00:06 tiwi wh1080[115]: Can't read device: Input/output error or Unknown error (5) May 5 07:00:08 tiwi wh1080[119]: Can't read device: Input/output error or Unknown error (5) What went wrong there?
More Hugin strangenesses
It was house photo day yesterday. And once again I had issues with the newer version of Hugin that I have on hydra (2023.0.0.d88dc56ded0e) while the older version on eureka (2018.0.0) worked fine. I use a script that creates the project files (.pto) and then stitches them. Yesterday's panoramas had a number of problems, the most extreme of which was this one (first 2023 Hugin, then 2018: What causes that? The project file is the same in each case, and so is the invocation to build the panorama, in essence hugin_executor --stitching laundry-door.pto Could it have something to do with masks?
Ramen for breakfast?
I've been thinking of various ways to eat Ramen noodles for breakfast. One of the more interesting facts is that they really come from China, and the kind I have come from Shandong. I've played around a couple of times, but how about asking an artificially intelligent expert? To my surprise, Google Gemini came up with a recipe that doesn't look bad. The interesting idea was to fry the noodles until crisp. That didn't work for me, and in general the experiment wasn't very successful. In particular, I didn't know that the Miso was salty, so the overall dish was just barely edible.
More ldconfig strangeness
Rebooting tiwi meant that my weather program didn't get restarted. Once again I had this issue with libmysql.so.18. I suspected that that was due to the fact that the directory usr/local/lib/mysql was a symlink to the directory on eureka. OK, copy the files over and run ldconfig on them. It still didn't work! I was in the parent directory, so I simply wrote ldconfig -m mysql. And it seems that it doesn't like that. ldconfig -m /usr/local/lib/mysql/ did the trick.
The night when time stood still
Woke up at 5:15 this morning. What's that light outside? It was almost as bright as day. But the sun doesn't rise for another 2 hours. Turned around, went back to sleep and woke at 7:15, but couldn't get back to sleep. OK, get up. Looked at my watch. 8:42! My bedside clock was fully 1 hour, 37 minutes slow! How could that happen? The clock is electronic and synchronizes to mains frequency (which is somewhat fast). It doesn't seem likely that it would fail like that. And then I asked Yvonne. Yes, her clock stopped altogether round 1:15. She looked back quite some time later and it was showing the same time, so she reset it.
Web site overload: recovery
Once again this morning the web server error log was full of error messages from ip7.ip-145-239-202.eu. But finally it seems to be over. All that remains is this strange error message [Thu May 02 07:42:26.457757 2024] [php7:notice] [pid 27107] [client 145.239.202.7:64277] PHP Notice: Undefined index: -1 OR 2+948-948-1=0+0+0+1 in /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/kleins-road/exterior-slides.php on line 399, referer: http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-jun2013.php?subtitle=Al%20Jazeera%20issues&article=D-20130604-000628 OK, I've blown away that file, but I have a local copy. Works perfectly. Copy it back to www. No photos found! Potentially that was the reason for the negative index.
Android strangeness
Downloading some files from hirse, my mobile phone, was particularly slow today. Why? === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/15) ~ 4 -> ping hirse PING hirse.lemis.com (192.109.197.228): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=4432.006 ms 64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=4491.037 ms 64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=4636.822 ms 64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=4777.693 ms 64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=4885.086 ms 64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=5 ttl=64 time=3869.501 ms 64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=6 ttl=64 time=2954.141 ms 64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=7 ttl=64 time=1959.271 ms 64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=8 ttl=64 time=967.665 ms 64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=9 ttl=64 time=4.943 ms 64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=10 ttl=64 time=1.908 ms 64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=11 ttl=64 time=1.314 ms 64 bytes from 192.109.197.228: icmp_seq=12 ttl=64 time=2.119 ms It came good by itself.
Web site attack
Sometime in the early evening it occurred to me that I hadn't received any external mail in over an hour. Problems on the external server? Yes. The file system was full. This morning there were something like 13 GB free, but now it was at 108% with -3.5 GB. Something had eaten up over 16 GB in a few hours. I knew where to look. The web server error log was full with messages like [Thu May 02 07:42:26.457757 2024] [php7:notice] [pid 27107] [client 145.239.202.7:64277] PHP Notice: Undefined index: -1 OR 2+948-948-1=0+0+0+1 in /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/kleins-road/exterior-slides.php on line 399, referer: http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-jun2013.php?subtitle=Al%20Jazeera%20issues&article=D-20130604-000628 [Thu May 02 07:42:26.457785 2024] [php7:notice] [pid 27107] [client 145.239.202.7:64277] PHP Notice: Undefined index: -1 OR 2+948-948-1=0+0+0+1 in /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/kleins-road/exterior-slides.php on line 399, referer: http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-jun2013.php?subtitle=Al%20Jazeera%20issues&article=D-20130604-000628 [Thu May 02 07:42:26.457812 2024] [php7:notice] [pid 27107] [client 145.239.202.7:64277] PHP Notice: Undefined index: -1 OR 2+948-948-1=0+0+0+1 in ...
www: no swap!
A few months back I ran into memory pressure on www.lemis.com, my remote virtual server. OK, add a ?memory disk?. And that worked. # dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/swapfile bs=1m count=4096 # mdconfig -a -t vnode -f /var/swapfile md0 # swapon /dev/md0 Until Vultr decided to reboot my machine. And then the md device was gone. It wasn't until today that I noticed. How do you ensure that they're recreated after reboot?
Cracking the fvwm2 to fvwm3 transition
I've been dragging my feet on updating hydra's window manager, mainly because I don't know where to start. I wrote the configuration files nearly 30 years ago, and I have long forgotten the details, in particular what I changed relative to the defaults: this was before I religiously ran version control. One of the big issues, though, was that fvwm3 no longer issues error messages! So I don't know what it doesn't like. After RTFM I discovered that I can get it to output messages to a log file, apparently with a predetermined name ~/. ~/.fvwm/fvwm3-output.log. That's particularly irritating in my situation, where I don't have a directory ~/.fvwm.
Academia nonsense of the day
After being asked if I wrote ?Treasurer? and co-authored a paper with PO Box, today I got another one: 21 N 01-05-2024 To groggyhimsel ( 901) Mentioned by rm rf N ?Greg Lehey? cited by ?rm rf? Is this Artificial Intelligence at its finest?
NBN outage!
Early this morning, while I was reading news on hirse, my mobile phone, an app failed to resolve a host name. Bloody Android apps! It wasn't until later that I discovered that that was the beginning of a 30 minute network outage. OK, what's my MyAussie app for? Fired it up and discovered that it wanted a password. My passwords don't cater for mobile phones: this one was 31 characters long, sprinkled with special characters that are a particular pain to enter on a mobile phone (is that why so many password restrictors demand them?) , and Aussie is too secure to display more than one character at a time when you enter a password.
NetBSD again
I have a bug report on makefs, a program ported to FreeBSD from NetBSD. It works under NetBSD, but the FreeBSD version creates invalid file systems under some circumstances. OK, let's compare what FreeBSD and NetBSD do. For that I need a NetBSD system, and the last one I had (a virtual machine) is ancient. OK, install a new virtual machine. How hard can it be? The biggest problem was getting installation media. For some reason, both firefox and fetch failed early in the download. In the end I downloaded it to my external server and then copied it from there.
Security, 2024 style
Mail from eBay today. I have a second account that I set up for some purpose, and they've noticed that I don't use it. Can they shut it down? No, I think not. I don't know what I might need it for, but it's convenient. All I need to do is log in. I failed. Password wrong. No worries: they'll send me a reset link. Got that, went to the login page. Enter user ID. OK. Enter new password. It's not strong enough! Must contain at least one digit and one special character to make it easier to crack. I tried, in sequence, No security!
Latest Academia mail
Seen in my inbox today: 47 ND 28-04-2024 To grudgled@gma ( 940) Academia.edu ND Have you coauthored a paper with Po Box? Somehow that's related to a request to Claim ?Treasurer? for your profile. There, too, Po Box appears. I'm sure that they've sucked ?PO Box? out of the document and interpreted it as a name. And of course, ?Po? is a polite word for ?arse? in German.
Security, 2024 style
Message purporting to be from Linkt today, exhorting me to beware of scams, and offering good advice: Online safety tips for your account: Don’t click on links in an SMS. Replace your password with a passphrase. A passphrase is made up of four or more random words with special characters making them harder to guess. Ah, and that's not a password?
Extracting photos from Android MMS
I've been searching for a method to extract photos from MMS messages on Android for at least 10 days, when Helen Weir sent us some photos of Pixie (now Mona). All seemed to be non-starters: the instructions didn't match reality, or they just didn't work. Or they required installation of apps that were incomprehensible in their use, or required infrastructure that I didn't want (why do you need Google Drive to copy a file?) . Clearly the files must be on the device somewhere, and though text appears to be stored in a database, I can't imagine that to be the case for images.
The cruft of ages
Where do you find documentation about software? Man pages, of course. But: === root@hydra (/dev/pts/5) ~ 9 -> man fvwm3 No manual entry for fvwm3 Oh. === root@hydra (/dev/pts/5) ~ 10 -> fvwm3 --help usage: fvwm3 [-d display] [-f cfgfile] [-c cmd] [-I vis-id | -C vis-class] [-l colors [-L|A|S|P] ...] [-r] [OTHER OPTIONS] ... -A: allocate palette ... Try 'man fvwm3' for more information. Huh? Is it there or not? Where is it? A === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/10) ~ 50 -> locate -i fvwm3 ...
More fvwm fun
Spent a lot of time reading documentation for fvwm, without coming to any real conclusion. It does seem that I can have one window manager per screen, but clearly there's a question as to whether I want to. It seems that the -v option might give me more insights into what fvwm3 doesn't like about my configuration file, though.
Preparing for fvwm3, again
One of the issues with hydra is that the X configuration is a mess. Part of that is things like font size, and it's a good thing that I postponed until after my cataract operations: I think I can now choose a significantly smaller text size. Even the issue with the window decorations is no longer so important, though it's still on the small size. The real question is the window manager. I was quite happy with fvwm2, but X no longer is. And all the instructions say that fvwm3 is a drop-in replacement, but that's not even close. It makes a complete mess with my configuration files, but it's too polite to complain.
The sting in the tail of the symlink
Finally got round to writing up my monthly garden flower page for this month. The big difference was removing the Acacia melanoxylon: How do I align them? I have scripts that align photos taken on a single day, but these are a week apart. And to add to the annoyance, my scripts really assume that the build directory and the directory for the day's files are on the same file system, and here they are not, so I need to use symlinks.
More Microsoft pain
Can I find other ways to avoid the hangs I had over the weekend? For reasons I don't understand, despise.lemis.com tries to access the eureka:/dump file system when I run DxO PhotoLab. What do I need /dump for? For backups, in principle. But this is a VM, and it's so much easier to back it up (and restore it if necessary) from behind the scenes rather than running a Microsoft backup program. So umount it, or whatever Microsoft calls it. What does Microsoft call it? No idea. I went through likely searches and drew a blank. Then played around with the file manager or whatever it's called, the one that with the right clicks will display a graphical representation of file systems and ?folders?.
Installing the Realtek driver
As planned, installed the net/realtek-re-kmod driver for the Realtek 8125 2.5 Gb/s NIC. The installation message was surprising: Add the following lines to your /boot/loader.conf to override the built-in FreeBSD re(4) driver. if_re_load="YES" if_re_name="/boot/modules/if_re.ko" How is that going to work? If the driver is built into the kernel, you can't load another driver. And of course that is what happened: === root@hydra (/dev/pts/5) ~ 4 -> kldload if_re.ko kldload: can't load if_re.ko: module already loaded or in kernel I had thought that it was a separate driver.
No weather!
Checking the weather readings from my weather station this evening. None! I had forgotten to restart the application after tiwi lost power on Saturday. OK, start it. ?Can't find libmysqlclient.so.18?. Damn, which version is it? I've been messing around with these things so long that I don't recall which I was using. In principle it would be in ~/src/weather/WH-1080-tiwi/, but there is no such directory, just directories with other system names and versions going back 12 years: === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/13) ~ 26 -> l -rt ~/src/weather/WH-1080*/wh1080 -rwxr-xr-x 1 grog lemis 62,179 5 Jul 2012 /home/grog/src/weather/WH-1080-amd64/wh1080 -rwxr-xr-x 1 grog lemis 54,368 29 Nov 2020 /home/grog/src/weather/WH-1080-dereel/wh1080 -rwxr-xr-x 1 grog lemis 52,741 11 Sep 2022 /home/grog/src/weather/WH-1080-eureka/wh1080 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root lemis 61,048 23 Oct 2023 /home/grog/src/weather/WH-1080-lagoon/wh1080 -rwxr-xr-x 1 grog lemis 54,312 9 Nov 14:53 /home/grog/src/weather/WH-1080-hydra/wh1080 -rwxr-xr-x 1 grog lemis 52,788 24 Apr 22:15 /home/grog/src/weather/WH-1080-teevee/wh1080 ...
Understanding medical bills
Last time I was in Geelong for my eye checkup, Estelle asked me about paying my bill: $500 outstanding. But that should only have been $250, and finally I got round to checking. Yes, deducted far too early on 15 March. It looks for all the world like an organizational slipup. So what's going on? I received an estimate ahead of time for the sum they're asking, but clearly that was before they contacted Bupa, my medical insurers. OK, print out all the documents I have, not helped by the fact that Google Chrome produces PDFs that my printer doesn't want to know.
The daily Android pain
For some reason I found myself using fossil.lemis.com, Yvonne's phone, today. I wanted to access my local index, simplified for mobile telephones. But it wasn't there. How do I enter it? The URL isn't designed even for keyboards, let alone toy glass keyboards. But there was nothing for it. Try to type http://wwww.lemis.com/grog/index-local.php?page=talipon&header=no into the thing. Yes, says Google, you mean http://www.lemis.com/grog/index-local.php?page=talipon&header=no, right? No, you idiot, http://wwww.lemis.com/grog/index-local.php?page=talipon&header=no. Don't try to outguess me. But I couldn't find a way to enter the URL. OK, install firefox, which for some reason wasn't on the phone. Ah, you mean Firefox Fast & Private Browser?
hydra: the other shoe
Continued with the photo processing so rudely interrupted by the crash yesterday. And it happened again! In each case it happened while I was processing photos on despise.lemis.com, a virtual machine running on hydra. What caused it? Yesterday I had guessed a network adapter hang, based on the fact that everything else seemed to work, but I couldn't ping the machine, and any attempt to start a program hung, presumably because the PATH includes directories on other machines. But for some reason ARP seemed to work. Is that a counterindication? Other possibilities might include overheating, but I didn't have the issue when processing my house photos, which also maxes out 32 cores.
hydra crash!
Back home, I had plenty of photos to process. A good thing that I have despise, which gets through them really quickly. But then things froze up. Somehow the rdesktop window had focus and wouldn't let go. And vtys hung. Gradually it became clear: I had lost network connectivity. Nothing for it but the Big Red Button. Two crashes in one day! Not only that, of course. I've been holding off updating the X configuration on hydra until my eyes are OK again. And there's so much piled up: the window managers are a real mess. Managed to get the thing up and stumbling, but of course there was no time left for photo processing.
Google maps: the curate's egg
I've been using Google Maps for navigation even when I don't need it, but clearly today's journey to Keilor Park was a case where I did need it. It got us there with no problems at all, once again taking a short cut round the university which proved to be about 2 minutes shorter than going through Ballarat. But the user interface! Even by Android standards it's appalling. Today I had: Send the route to my phone. I would have liked to send it to Yvonne's phone, but it's too secure for that.
Power fail?
While cooking breakfast today, the lights over the cooktops went out. More investigation showed that another circuit breaker had tripped. Why? There's nothing outside that could have done so, but the water kettle thermostat had just turned it off. Is it on its way out? No idea, but it did demonstrate to us where circuit 5 (from the row of breakers) is: ?kitchen?, pantry, lounge room and dining room. So tiwi failed too. Fortunately it came back without too much trouble, but I hate it when computers go down.
Still more cats
Yvonne is really dead set on getting a brown Burmese cat. No other colour will do. We could have found a (small) number of chocolates, but no, it must be a brown. So she asked the seller for photos. And they came by mobile phone, of course. But what I didn't expect was that she couldn't download them. First she had to turn on mobile data and download them slowly and expensively! Only later did I find suggestions: More searching in the settings pages brought me to this: People, we've had machines with multiple interfaces for 40 years!
Solving the routing issue
I should have called Aussie Broadband yesterday about the routing problems that I discovered on Sunday. But I dreaded the encounter, so I put it off. But it had to be done, and today I called up and was connected relatively quickly to Ashika, who of course didn't understand. What kind of router do I have installed? She could only see one IP address. I tried to explain, and she decided to escalate to ?level 2? after only 3 minutes. And after a total of 5 minutes, the call was done: she would send me an email, to which I should reply with the problem details.
How to copy SMS, again
Callum Gibson read my article on how to save an SMS. He has a simpler method: Google messages. That way you don't need Microsoft, just a web browser. OK, sounds interesting. Off to take a look, but instead of https://messages.google.com/ I was redirected to https://www.android.com/google-messages/. Funny, says Callum, ?it works for me?. Still, the page is clearly related, full of advertisements and content unrelated to what I'm looking for, like ?With Google Messages, you can customize your experience, ensure private conversations, and enjoy the latest AI features.?. Dammit, all I want to do is to save an SMS with its metadata, like you can do with any sane MUA with a single click!
Off the net again!
Idly checking ping times today brought a failure: I couldn't ping eureka.lemis.com from lax.lemis.com. Nor anywhere else, for that matter. Firewall problem? No, a traceroute stopped much earlier than that. Is there something wrong? The block has been routed here for nearly a year, and in May last year I confirmed: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/24) ~ 33 -> whois -h whois.cymru.com " -v 192.109.197.0" AS | IP | BGP Prefix | CC | Registry | Allocated | AS Name NA | 192.109.197.0 | NA | AU | ripencc | 1991-05-01 | NA 4764 | 192.109.197.0 | 192.109.197.0/24 | AU | ripencc | 1991-05-01 | WIDEBAND-AS-AP Aussie Broadband, AU ...
Understanding depth of focus
One of the things I learnt as part of my cataract operation was the term depth of focus. I know that, right? No, what I know and use is depth of field. And while they're closely related, there's a subtle difference: depth of field is measured in distances, the closest and furthest distance in acceptable focus when you focus on a specific point. I've known this for ever, at least since I started using cameras 60 years ago. The lenses had a depth-of-field scale on the lens, here a Diaxette that looks just like the one I had at the time: The top (black) scale is distance, in feet, and the lower (red) scale is depth of field.
How to save an SMS
I've been trying for years to find a way to save or copy an SMS. Based on my almost complete lack of success, you'd think that somebody wanted to avoid it. Even the mobile phone apps that promise to save or forward them don't work for me. But finally I've found a way to at least save the text, if not the metadata: Start Microsoft ?PhoneLink? and display the message. Select text. This only works with the text itself, not the rest of the display.
Manipulating data in the Microsoft space
I've been running autocutsel for a while now, and it works, up to a point. If I copy something on Microsoft, it automatically updates the clipboard on the machine that runs the rdesktop. If I mark text on an xterm, it also appears in the clipboard. But it doesn't change the cutbuffer in any way, and that's not what I understand from the documentation: When the clipboard is changed, it updates the cutbuffer. When the cutbuffer is changed, it owns the clipboard selection. The cutbuffer and clipboard selection are always synchronized.
despise photo processing times
House photo day today, a total of 111 images to convert. And despise did it in 3 minutes, 50 seconds, an average speed of 2.07 s per photo. That's far better than I have ever seen. But then I converted another 17 images from the afternoon. 1 minute, 30 seconds, or 5.3 seconds per image. Why? My guess is that there's some amazing inefficiency in DxO PhotoLab that applies at the start of every processing batch. Even the values given are inaccurate: it can take up to 15 seconds after pressing ?export? before it even starts.
Finding rwhod
despise.lemis.com is now running as well as you can expect of a Microsoft system, but I'm still running into this irritating loss of rwhod on reboot. Last time I noted issues, but not how to fix it. What I need to do is: Start CMD.EXE as administrator with c-s-mouse1. cd to \Program Files?(x86)/rwho. Try running rwhod. If this fails, find RWHODINSTALLER.EXE, which is somewhere else, location not divulged. This time I didn't need it.
Reprocessing old photos
Fifteen years ago I spent a lot of time comparing photo processing. A lot has changed since then. In particular, I was concerned with gradation, and I took a lot of photos with different camera settings. I made a comparison between ?muted? and ?vivid? profiles, which showed no obvious difference. I thought that I had not understood that ?muted? and ?vivid?, like many of the settings, only applied to the in-camera JPEG images. But that's not the case: these were JPEGs (which I took alongside the raw images), and there was really almost no difference: There's really almost no differencd.
Bloody Microsoft again!
Now that it doesn't use any significant power, I have taken the easy way out and let despise.lemis.com (Microsoft ?Windows? 10) carry on running. Bad idea. Microsoft did its usual update without asking me, and after that ?Perfectly Clear? didn't want to know about registration. Back to where I was at the beginning of the month. Grrr! But despise is a virtual machine, and I do backups religiously. Can I revert to the state of yesterday evening? No, it seems. Restoring the backup was trivial, but every attempt to restart it failed with VERR_ACCESS_DENIED. But not only despise: all VMs. More searching, and found what I've seen before less than a month ago: I need to be in the voxusers group.
Authenticating calls
Returning to the issue of authentication, I have had contact with three different health service providers this week: Specsavers, St John of God in Geelong and Health First. All accepted my call without identification, at least once: on calling back to Health First, I was asked for the inevitable date of birth. Why not the others? Because they recognized my phone number. Health First did that once too, but they ?up?graded their booking software. Specsavers knew all my data without having to ask. And the things that they were doing were more ?high risk? than anything I do with Aussie. And Aussie of all people should be able to identify the phone, since it's with them.
Aussie Broadband: Go away
Another message from Aussie Broadband complaints today. It seems that they have completely misunderstood the complaint, something that could only have happened if they had read neither the complaint nor my messages. But the content is amazing: I understand your concern at this point in time. However, what you are requesting is not something we can accommodate. I have reached out to our compliance team for further input. He understands my concern? There's no evidence whatsoever of that. And why can't he ?accommodate? what ?I am requesting?? My guess is because he has so little understanding of the issue that he can't do anything.
18 years of blog!
Mail from LiveJournal today, enclosing (if that's the word) a ?virtual gift? for being with them for 18 years. That was a reaction to people calling my diary a ?blog?, and it was very short-lived, round 2 days. I seem to have barely mentioned it in my diary.
Aussie complaints make contact
Mail from Aussie Broadband about my complaint. In summary: Thank you for bringing your concerns to our attention regarding the difficulties you've encountered with unauthorized access to the account. We understand the importance of addressing this matter promptly and appreciate your patience as we work to find a resolution. As per the guidelines outlined by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), our company is required to adhere to strict customer identity authentication rules to safeguard the privacy and security of our customers' information. This includes verifying all points of identification to ensure compliance with privacy laws.
despise performance comparison
Comparison of photo processing times using DxO PhotoLab DeepPRIME: Machine Number Time Time/photo despise 133 41:20 19..5 s distress 29 ...
More Aussie Broadband pain
Response from Aussie Broadband support accounts to my authentication questions yesterday. No attempt to address my issues, just I strongly suggest you contact our team on 1300 880 905 with CJ so we can arrange a solution to this issue. And I explained why that won't work 2 days ago. OK, up a notch: Please note the TIO deadline tomorrow and forward this matter to your complaints team. I expect to see a complaint number with details (not just asterisks) by this evening.
VoIP problems: resolved!
Mail from CJ Ellis this morning: Good morning Greg .good news , the phone is working It seems that their message bank is now working properly for me , but I am 26 in the que , I am hope to get a message bank on the phone as it was as I wanted in the first place with themm .. Sore y for all you troubles with them ... It was good to get to the computer to find all the lights working on the router & the phone working ..
More fun with Aussie
To my surprise, two messages from Aussie Broadband support accounts today. One was an acknowledgement that I had complained about not being allowed access to CJ's account yesterday with no suggestion about what went wrong. That's enough. A stiff reply with a threat to take the matter to the TIO if they don't respond by Tuesday. The other message was more to the point: Unfortunately we are unable to access the modem as our logs are show a connection to a dell devices at the moment. Are you able to confirm the Ethernet coming from the NBN box is connected to the WAN port on the modem.
DST ends
Daylight Saving Time ended today. Lots of clocks to change, including my cameras. In days gone by I have used this horrible OI.Share, mobile phone app to set the time on the OM-D cameras. But it's such a pain. It has the advantage of setting it almost exactly correct (why do mobile phones, which use NTP, still have times that vary by a couple of seconds?) . But is it that important? Yvonne's Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark III proved to be 3 minutes fast. That's 1 second per day since DST started, but should I (or Yvonne) constantly reset it? I'd be for resetting only when it really makes sense, and then I can do it with programs after the event, like this case 14 years ago ...
disaster? despise!
Yvonne had some photos to process yesterday, and she did it ondisaster, which worked well. I checked the processing times, and they seemed significantly faster than her normal processing on distress, but I forgot to write them down?something like one photo per minute, because all her photos are done with DxO PhotoLab's DeepPRIME feature. But that increase in processing speed didn't seem as dramatic as I had noticed But why limit myself to 8 CPUs? hydra has 32 logical CPUs. I could easily increase the number on distress to 16. And, probably, invalidate my license keys.
Aussie: You are not worthy
Another day half wasted trying to get Aussie Broadband to fix their configuration problem. Once again a message explaining the situation and asking them to do something about it. Then called up Aussie, and for a change I was connected to an Australian, Harrison. He wasn't the brightest: I gave him the details at the outset, but he wanted to hear my date of birth no less than three times and CJ's address twice. After a quarter of an hour he still had not managed to identify me, and I asked to be connected to his supervisor. After a few minutes I was connected to Paul, who also couldn't find the message I sent.
disaster processing photos
disaster.lemis.com seems to work well now, though I still need to confirm my software licenses. But one was a surprise: ?Perfectly Clear? has decided that it's licensed after all! I need to tread carefully now to ensure that it doesn't change its mind.
Aussie: no support any more!
So what's wrong with CJ's VoIP service? The obvious thing to do would be to try it on my own ATA and see what happened. And indeed, it still didn't work. The same symptoms: call in rang, but the caller got a busy signal, and it stopped trying to call after a few seconds. Clearly a service configuration issue. So I sent Aussie a summary of what has happened so far, and then called them at 14:20, and was connected to a very quiet Mohammed after only 4 minutes. The same old pain, at least 10 minutes of identification before we even got started.
named death
As if I didn't have enough to do, after CJ left I discovered that I hadn't received any external mail for nearly 6 hours. Local mail was still coming through, so checked things on lax.lemis.com (also mail.lemis.com). At first sight things looked OK. Nothing queued bar the usual messages from MAILER_DAEMON to non-responsive spam sites, maillog showed the usual rejections because of name lookup issues. Sent a message from freebsd.org. It didn't arrive! A bit more searching and I discovered that all DNS lookups were failing: named had stopped. Why? No idea, except that I added disaster.lemis.com to the configuration yesterday.
More Aussie pain
Back home at 15:00 and tried to catch up with the day's work. First this diary. I was in the middle of describing yesterday's pain with CJ's phone when the doorbell rang. CJ, with a car full of hardware. It seems that he didn't just power cycle the router, he disconnected a number of cables. Did he put them back correctly? Anyway, took the router in and connected it to dereel, which is seeing more use lately. All works, the phones register, as the Aussie status page shows. And I still can't call in! So effectively we're where we were before I called Aussie the first time.
More Aussie VoIP pain
So why didn't CJ Ellis contact me about the success of power cycling his modem? Checked the status page. Both phones not registered. Did something go wrong with the router? Is he maybe completely off the net? What a time! I was in a hurry because of an appointment in Geelong, but called up Aussie support and was told that there was a two minute wait?every two minutes for 8 minutes. Finally I was connected with Pranil, who asked all sorts of questions that I didn't know (CJ's mobile phone number, for example, which for Aussie's purposes doesn't exist). Finally I got through to him that I just wanted to check whether CJ was on the net or not, but he kept returning to VoIP configuration.
Bigger disaster
Carried on playing around with disaster.lemis.com today. It was my intention to use it seriously, and 1 CPU wouldn't cut it. But hydra has 32 logical CPUs, so we could easily allocate 8 to disaster. Did that, and fired up DxO PhotoLab. Please activate. OK, we're getting used to that. But when I tried to activate ?ViewPoint?, it told me ?too many activations?! Three activations on the same disk! Another support request, and all I could do for today. But I did try processing Saturday's photos. 140 images processed in 5 minutes! 28 images per minute, where I previously only had about 5.
CJ off the air
Mail from CJ Ellis today: Hi Greg It seems that I have had no phone signals since we last spoke & you had been in touch with Broadband for me to be able to have message bank .. I thought it might have been the storm that has stop my phone , from having signals , but to even now there is nothing there .. Sorry to trouble you ,but it has been a saga with broadband since we have changed to them with the phone service .. What's wrong now? Clearly the loss of VoIP has nothing to do with the bad weather.
Where's my New York Times?
No surprisingly, I got no response to my open letter to the New York Times. During the week they relent and keep their 1-800 phone number manned beyond dawn until 10:00 (in the morning), so called up there, where a grating artificial voice asked me for the 10 digit code. Huh? What's that? Somehow worked past that and was connected to Robert, who told me that all was OK with my subscription. I explained (hopefully to his comprehension) that I wasn't getting any email. He said that he would contact technical support (medium wait), after which he said that I should now be receiving email.
50 years of microprocessors
It has been well over 50 years since Intel introduced its first microprocessor, but for me the first one was the 8008. Spent a while comparing it with my most recent processor: Feature I8008 Ryzen 7950X factor Introduction April 1982 September 2022 Transistors ...
Another disaster
Response from not one, but two people at EyeQ today, saying that the license details were correct, but because the product is no longer supported, they can't do anything about it. They did offer me a discounted upgrade to Radiant, the new replacement, but that would still cost money. OK, one thing's for sure: changing hardware messes up licenses. So let's do what I had been planning all along and set up a virtual machine on hydra. What shall I call it? Yvonne was for discard or dismiss. She would have liked disgust too, but we've already had that one. But by the time I asked her, I had already started with the name disaster.lemis.com, so one of the next ones will be Yvonne's choice.
distress: disaster?
Into the office first thing this morning and wanted to continue with yesterday's photo processing. That involves waking distress.lemis.com, the ThinkCentre running Microsoft, which is usually hibernated. That goes via rdesktop, so I first hear the sound of the DVD drive seeking. But then nothing. More problems with this bloody Microsoft? No, the machine wasn't running at all. Even the power light was off. More searching, and ultimately came to the conclusion that the box had some hardware failure. Not to worry, I have a number of these boxen. Took out the disk and put it in another one, same model.
Another Postfix tweak
Why does my mail from hydra come from, well, [email protected], and not [email protected], like from eureka? I still don't know why, but Tom Ivar Helbekkmo, told me how to fix it. Put this in eureka's /usr/local/etc/postfix/main.cf: masquerade_domains = $mydomain I've been using Postfix for well over 20 years, and I'm still learning.
More hydra completion
Apart from the various issues that I still need to think about, there's one thing about hydra that I've put on the back burner: the ?beep? doesn't work. But then I found this diary entry from ten years ago: ... looked for the speaker connector, which I hadn't set up when I built the machine. With good reason: this high-quality enclosure doesn't have a speaker! Not a big issue, since they almost never fail, and I had dozens of old machines from which I could cannibalize a speaker.
File system strangenesses
I've gradually been tidying up my old TV series archives. One of the bigger jobs was Um Himmels Willen, where I reloaded some because the originals were truncated. Finally got round to moving things around, but found something unexpected: === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/21) /spool/Already/Series/Um-Himmels-Willen/D 413 -> ls -l 07-01-Am_seidenen_Faden.deu.vtt -rw-r--r-- 4 grog home 58478 5 Mar 13:29 07-01-Am_seidenen_Faden.deu.vtt === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/21) /spool/Already/Series/Um-Himmels-Willen/D 414 -> mv 07-01-Am_seidenen_Faden.deu.vtt ../07 === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/21) /spool/Already/Series/Um-Himmels-Willen/D 415 -> echo $? 0 === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/21) /spool/Already/Series/Um-Himmels-Willen/D 416 -> ls -l 07-01-Am_seidenen_Faden.deu.vtt -rw-r--r-- 4 grog home 58478 5 Mar 13:29 07-01-Am_seidenen_Faden.deu.vtt So I move a file to a different directory.
Open letter to the New York Times
To any human at the New York Times: TL;DR: I'm not receiving email, and I can't find any way to report it. I don't consider a ?Customer Care? only available in the middle of the night to be acceptable. Please fix. In more detail: I've had a digital subscription to the New York Times for over 6 years, and I've found it a useful resource. But today it occurred to me that I hadn't received any email from them for ?a while?, How long? Well, you keep bombarding my old email address with subscription offers that aren't as good as the one I have, but in the last week the only message I had to the real email address was an excruciatingly long survey.
Blacklist removal: success
Yesterday I received mail from Wendy Bartlett, whom I knew at Tandem Computers. Replied, or at least I tried to: <[email protected]>: host ff-ip4-mx-vip2.prodigy.net[144.160.159.22] said: 553 5.3.0 flpd594 DNSBL:RBL 521< 45.32.70.18 >_is_blocked.For assistance forward this error to abuse_rbl@abuse-att.net (in reply to MAIL FROM command) Damn, will this never end? For the sake of completeness, sent a message to [email protected] to say that I was just an innocent bystander. Surprise, surprise: Thank you for contacting the AT&T Postmaster.
Where am I?
One of the recurring themes in film series that we watch is that somebody gets lost (in the Alps, for example). They have mobile phone connection, but they don't know where they are. That's simple: all modern phones have a GPS module that can identify where they are to within a couple of metres. And there are silly things like Plus Codes that convert the output into incomprehensible codes. That's nonsense, of course. The phone should be able to send its location coordinates with every call, or on a call-by-call basis for the paranoid. But its not available anywhere that I can see.
Simulating cataract surgery improvement
How do I describe the change in vision after cataract surgery? Obvious: tap into my brain and download the images. But I don't know how to do that, so the next best thing is to take some photos and process them as ?before? and ?after?. Here a few attempts: The important thing here is that I was previously unable to see whether the door was locked (lock vertical) or open (diagonal, as here).
Google Maps from the worst side
I've been using Google Maps on almost every trip in the last couple of years, and they often work well. But yesterday they identified congestion on the way into Geelong, and took me straight through it anyway, taking 5 minutes longer than their own estimate. OK, there are things we can do about that. Go via a diversion: That all went fine up to a few hundred metres before the waypoint, when it became clear that Google Maps had no intention of taking me any further.
Understanding Android displays
Yesterday I spent an inordinate amount of time complying with the hospital's silly RAT requirements, notably a screen shot of a photo of the device.. Yes, I did that, and I also brought the device itself. When I got there, one of the first questions from reception was "Did you do a RAT??. Yes. OK, then, go on through! Ha ha, only joking. The next nurse wanted to know, but she was happy with the device, so all the messing around with Android was unnecessary. But independently of the operation, I did come to one discovery: yes, Android's file manager does distinguish between ?photos?
Preparing for surgery
Tomorrow's the date of my cataract surgery. When do I need to be there? Hopefully not in the early morning, but they haven't told me so far. But there's one more thing to do: All patients having elective surgery will have to undertake a Rapid Antigen Test the day prior to scheduled surgery. Patients will need to show proof of a negative test result when arriving at the surgery centre. It is suggested to take a photo of the test result next to a drivers license or medicare card and then take a screen shot of the photo which will capture the date and time of the result.
Emacs crash
While doing something non-spectacular today, Emacs instance on eureka stopped for no apparent reason. That's unusual. Normally my Emacs processes run for months. But only a little later, another one stopped, this time with a But even more unusual was that another one crashed, this time with a signal 6 (SIGABRT): Mar 19 13:32:11 eureka kernel: pid 4734 (emacs-24.5), uid 1004: exited on signal 6 (core dumped) If it had been hydra, I would wonder about hardware issues, but eureka has been running reliably on the current hardware for over 10 years.
If it's broke, don't fix it
tweedledum is my first ?machine? with ZFS. It installed a default set of file systems: [root@tweedledum /home/grog/ryoms/Logs]# <b>df -c</b> Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on zroot/ROOT/default 61665232 1852404 59812828 3% / zroot/tmp 59812932 104 59812828 0% /tmp zroot/home 59812964 136 59812828 0% /home zroot/var/audit 59812924 96 59812828 0% /var/audit zroot 59812924 96 59812828 0% /zroot zroot/var/log 59813004 176 59812828 0% /var/log zroot/var/crash 59812924 96 59812828 0% /var/crash zroot/usr/ports 60633592 820764 59812828 1% /usr/ports ...
Virtual machines for ryoms
More playing around with virtual machines for ?Roll Your Own Mail Server? today. Strange things happened when I ran VirtualBox on eureka but displayed on hydra. What about displaying on eureka? Yes, almost. Still this issue with the kernel modules. There are three of them, but vboxnetadp was missing. In the past I've had issues with the sequence of loading, but today I found the solution: load only vboxnetadp, and it will load the other two, and, it seems, also ng_ether. And, to my surprise, things mainly worked, modulo a couple of surprises. The network wasn't set up correctly, presumably because of the issues getting it to work when I installed it, so I had to set up /etc/resolv.conf and the host IP address and default router in /etc/rc.conf.
More VirtualBox setup
Yesterday I established that I couldn't run my old VirtualBox VMs on hydra, at least not without changes that I didn't want to make. What about tweedledum? No, it didn't want to know about that either. OK, run on eureka. Install a standard FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE system, even with ZFS, and as close to default as made sense. The only changes were to enable NTP. Everything went well, but of course the network interface didn't work: the default network is NAT, and what I want is a bridged network. I've seen this before, but I now wonder why these defaults just don't work.
Reprocessing old photos
Ten years ago today I drove along the Great Ocean Road with Jörg Micheel and his son Richard. Lots of photos, of course, which I processed with the means at my disposal in those days. Can I improve on things? The biggest difference is the ?optimizer?. In those days I used the Ashampoo optimizer, which frequently improved things, but left something to be desired. In November 2021 I switched to ?Perfectly Clear?, which, though discontinued, seems to be better. OK, I already have a script for reprocessing old photos, and it works most of the time (very old directories have different structures).
Microsoft does it again
It's middle of the month, past the time where Microsoft crashes and restarts distress and somehow manages to stop my rwhod from running. They're getting more cunning all the time. In the past I have had to reinstall the program, but recently I haven't even been able to do that: the file was marked immutable or whatever Microsoft calls it, and I couldn't delete the old one. I had to start as ?Administrator? and manually remove it before I could reinstall it. But even that doesn't work any more. First, I can no longer start a shell COMMAND.EXE as Administrator. Have they changed something, or have I forgotten something?
Putting ryoms to the test
I'm about half way through my review of ?Roll your own mail server?, and I'm running into trouble. So far I've been reviewing with my own knowledge of the material, but how he's moving into areas that I don't know. That's good, of course: that's why I'm interested in the book. But how can I review this content? I had thought of moving through more quickly, but I really need to try this stuff out for myself. OK, what do I need? As the author recommends, two systems that initially talk only to each other. Fine, revive tweedledum.lemis.com and tweedledee.lemis.com. Set up virtual machines.
Surgery: the other shoe
I'm still not done with my webwork (virtual paperwork) for my cataract operation next week. When I thought it was done, I got a mail asking me to perform the next step. OK, dammit, get it over and done with. ?Please enter a credit card number for the gap payment?. That's unusual, but OK. And it went relatively quickly. And they deducted the money immediately! Your payment was successful, a payment confirmation will be sent via email. Please complete your credit card details. If you selected 'Allow Automatic Charging of Incidentals? your Credit Card details will be stored securely and only accessed if you have further incidentals payments after your hospital stay.
Configuring daily cron jobs
FreeBSD runs a number of cron jobs every night to check for things that could be problematic. The jobs themselves are in the /etc/periodic/ hierarchy. One of them (/etc/periodic/security/110.neggrpperm) produces this output: Checking negative group permissions: find: /VB3/oldbackups/eureka-FreeBSD/Downloads: No such file or directory 141107070 -rw----rwx 1 grog lemis 313303 Oct 11 09:03:38 2017 /home/grog-eureka/DxO/Modules/C14933a_000.caf 141107071 -rw----rwx 1 grog lemis 4713293 Aug 23 14:48:40 2017 /home/grog-eureka/DxO/Modules/C15101a_000.caf 141107087 -rw----rwx 1 grog lemis 4745060 Aug 23 14:48:48 2017 /home/grog-eureka/DxO/Modules/C19627a_000.caf ... What's that? The issue, if there is one, is that the ?other?
Fire recovery by Facebook
Yvonne told me today that the CFA was holding a ?fire recovery day? today, 4 hours at the Dereel Hall. I can do without that, but why wasn't I informed? Ah, only on Facebook, assuming you're subscribed to the right group.
CAPTCHAs: Not the site's fault?
I've had a remarkable number of particularly irritating CAPTCHAs lately, and I've expressed my displeasure in no uncertain terms. But am I maybe pointing the blame in the wrong direction? In every case, it happened with a modern browser running on hydra, usually firefox. I'm not sure if it happened with chromium as well. But with firefox on Microsoft, things worked with minimal annoyance. Can it be that there's something about the behaviour under FreeBSD that rings alarm bells somewhere in the innards of something?
Registering for operation: the pain
Yesterday I vented my spleen (which on the face of it was not involved) about the appalling requirements to register for next week's cataract operation. But there was nothing for it: it had to be done. Are they less obnoxious towards Microsoft users? Tried it on distress. Yes, they still have a CAPTCHA, but it's just a matter of ticking the ?I am not a robot? box?twice on different occasions. On the first occasion it sent me a 6 digit PIN, not to prove that I had entered the mobile phone number correctly, but to ?authenticate? me! And to give me time to think, it waited up to 20 seconds before responding to every input.
autocutsel
Callum Gibson came up with a new (to me, anyway) program today: autocutsel. I haven't investigated in detail, but it claims to keep the cut buffer and clipboard in sync. It's not quite clear whether this is a good idea, but until I understand the alternatives, it could be a good approach.
More bloody CAPTCHAs!
I've been bombarded with a lot of things to do for next week's cataract operation, and even more SMSs reminding me to fill things out. Some of them make no sense at all: Please take a RAT test on the previous day, take a photo of the negative result along with your driver license, and then a screen shot to confirm the time. What's wrong with this? It implies that you would rather lie about the results, potentially endangering yourself, than postpone the surgery.
More ryoms
Once again spent a lot of time reviewing ?Run Your Own Mail Server? (which I keep feeling should be called ?Roll Your Own Mail Server?). I'm making good progress, less so with my accompanying cookbook.
More email review
Spent a lot more time today reviewing ?Roll your own mail server?. It's getting a lot more nitty-gritty now, but I still don't have a good feel about exactly what I should do. It's too early to criticize; for that I need to find my way through the book. Maybe I should write a cookbook.
Learning about email
More reading of ?Roll your own mail server?, the book I have to review. Normally a review takes me a couple of hours, but in this case I'm particularly interested, so I'm going through it with a fine-tooth comb, and it looks like taking days. I've been running my own mail server for well over 30 years, but I'm amazed how much I have learnt.
Relax!
Somehow I didn't do very much today. The continuing hot weather didn't help, but it seems that I was just catching up with my mail; the Unix Heritage Society seems to be particularly active lately. And I've been given for review the draft of a book on running email servers, something very close to my heart. And then Hugin came up with some problems that took me a while to fix. But is that enough to keep me going all day? It seems so. Somehow I'm slowing down.
Weather forecasts
Very hot day today, with a top of 40°, only 0.2° less than the maximum all summer: How did the various weather apps predict the temperatures?
CJ exploited?
Mail from Eddie Purcell, who suggested that Facebook would never ask for the kind of information that CJ Ellis had to provide on Tuesday. Is he right? Certainly it looked strange, but as I have been commenting lately, lots of things look strange. But then today Yvonne got a message from CJ via Facebook, asking her to confirm who he was; she should have received a code on her phone. He needed her confirmation to be able to set up his mobile phone. What, CJ and mobile phone? Called him, no reply. Sent him email, which Gmail refused until I bounced it, and he called back in the evening.
What is ?feels like? temperature?
The other half of the fire danger is the weather, of course. I've already established that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has two competing weather forecasts, which can differ by a degree or two. So when Ainslie mentioned her favourite mobile phone app, AccuWeather, I tried it out. It didn't start well. I needed the ?AccuWeather Australia? app, which made sense. And it came up telling me that the outside temperature was 70°. No way! This silly thing doesn't understand modern units! Well, it does if you insist, but why should you need to? It should display in the units of the country for which it was prepared.
Is it a total fire ban today?
Seventeen years ago, even before we moved to Dereel, I checked the Victorian emergency services and discovered, as I put it at the time, that they ?... think of the web sites more as a geek sport than a way to disseminate information?. You had to search to find that kind of information. It's looking like being a really hot weekend, again potential fire danger. Times have changed, and now I get informed when there's a total fire ban?by the Ballarat Courier, who make the content available without a subscription. Today I received such a notification at 15:00. The emergency services web sites have learnt something in the last 17 years, right?
IP address location: still broken
A few years ago I noted how inaccurate IP location services are. Now I have officially moved my address block to Australia. Have they improved? Tried again today and got: Site Groggy iplocation.io Schellnhausen db-ip Frankfurt, Braubachstrasse criminalip NSW, Garnpung lake ...
Google: so nice, so nice, we do it twics
Yvonne and Ainslie over to Chris Bahlo's place today, despite relatively tight timing. I kept an eye on their location, and indeed they made it back in time, apparently one by one: Now how did that happen?
Google: so nice, so nice, we do it twics
Yvonne and Ainslie over to Chris Bahlo's place today, despite relatively tight timing. I kept an eye on their location, and indeed they made it back in time, apparently one by one: Now how did that happen?
Working round Gmail breakage
Once again I sent a Schrödinger's cat email today. The recipient was rejected, the Cc: address worked. From MAILER-DAEMON Fri Mar 8 09:44:52 2024 <[email protected]>: host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[142.251.2.26] said: 550-5.7.26 This mail has been blocked because the sender is unauthenticated. 550-5.7.26 Gmail requires all senders to authenticate with either SPF or DKIM. 550-5.7.26 550-5.7.26 Authentication results: 550-5.7.26 DKIM = did not pass 550-5.7.26 SPF [hydra.lemis.com] with ip: [45.32.70.18] = did not pass 550-5.7.26 550-5.7.26 For instructions on setting up authentication, go to 550 5.7.26 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#authentication s31-20020a63451f000000b005dc493c9496si14163290pga.507 - gsmtp (in reply to end of DATA command) OK, we know that.
Aussie: support me!
In the afternoon, my IRC proxy failed again. It's on lax, so off to check. Can't reach system! Has it gone down again? It didn't come back. Can I access it via ffm.lemis.com (in Frankfurt/Main, obviously)? Yes! So it's a routing problem. A quick traceroute showed: === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/45) ~/FreeBSD 57 -> traceroute lax ... 5 be400.lsr1.nextdc-s2.syd.aussiebb.net (180.150.0.172) 174.822 ms 174.776 ms * 6 be30.bdr1.coresite-la1.lax.aussiebb.net (202.142.143.199) 182.125 ms 179.557 ms 180.318 ms 7 * * * Close, but no cigar? It's reasonable to assume that lax.aussibb.net, like lax.lemis.com, is located in Los Angeles.
Crash!
One of the first things I do in the morning is check the load on www.lemis.com, canonically named lax.lemis.com. But the top program had stopped. And so had all the other windows to lax. Oh: === grog@lax (/dev/pts/4) ~ 1 -> uptime 11:16PM up 3:38, 8 users, load averages: 2.78, 3.14, 2.91 The system rebooted! And yes, /var/log/messages confirmed: Mar 6 19:35:23 lax qpopper[19872]: Stats: ... Mar 6 19:38:41 lax syslogd: kernel boot file is /boot/kernel/kernel Mar 6 19:38:41 lax kernel: ---<<BOOT>>--- What caused that?
Security above all
CJ's and my pain yesterday had a justification, at least from Facebook's point of view. Somebody had compromised CJ's account, and they wanted to confirm that it was really he. So they sent a 6 digit code to his email system, which ultimately I read and typed into the Facebook screen. Then they wanted a photo of his driver licence, which I scanned in for him. CJ wasn't involved at all in verifying his identity! And of course, they would by far have preferred to send him a code to his mobile phone, if he had one. When will people realize that this is a completely useless way to confirm identity?
Keeping up to date
Various sites are telling me that my Chrome is out of date. And that only 5 months after installing the then latest and greatest! OK, pkg upgrade. ?I will remove all the unrelated packages that are dear to your heart, this time with the exception of Emacs?. No thanks. Build from scratch, trying not to get too annoyed at the continual resizing of the screen. Fail: ===> node-20.10.0_1 has known vulnerabilities: node-20.10.0_1 is vulnerable: WWW: https://vuxml.FreeBSD.org/freebsd/77a6f1c9-d7d2-11ee-bb12-001b217b3468.html 1 problem(s) in 1 installed package(s) found. => Please update your ports tree and try again.
10 more years of Internet
Ten years ago I was doing a Coursera course on the history of the Internet, and one of the assignments was: ?Write an essay that imagines how the Internet will be different 20 years from now?. And that in 1000 words. I did make the 1000 word maximum, but I also wrote a slightly longer version that said what I wanted to say. So: now we have the halfway point. I've been keeping my eye on proof or disproof of my claims, and I'll continue to do so. Here the biggest takeaways so far: Most purchases will occur on-line, and the few remaining shops will mainly exist to order and supply goods available on the Internet.
Updating NBN
It seems that the NBN truck that I saw last week was ahead of its time. Today I received mail with more verbiage. But it seems that it only applies to fibre: upgrade data rates from 100 Mb/s to 500 Mb/s, or up to 1 Gb/s for faster connections. And somehow this will end up costing more money, not because the links are any more expensive, but because people will use more data: ?The average household now consumes 443 gigabytes per month across 22 internet-connected devices," she said. "
Gmail annoyances
Part of the ordeal with CJ's computer was complicated by another issue with Gmail: <[email protected]>: host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[142.251.2.26] said: 550-5.7.26 This mail has been blocked because the sender is unauthenticated. 550-5.7.26 Gmail requires all senders to authenticate with either SPF or DKIM. 550-5.7.26 550-5.7.26 Authentication results: 550-5.7.26 DKIM = did not pass 550-5.7.26 SPF [hydra.lemis.com] with ip: [45.32.70.18] = did not pass 550-5.7.26 550-5.7.26 For instructions on setting up authentication, go to 550 5.7.26 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#authentication x2-20020a1709027c0200b001dca8522501si8881415pll.276 - gsmtp (in reply to end of DATA command) I've seen this before.
CJ's pain again
CJ Ellis round this morning with his computer and most of the stuff I asked to bring with him. He has been locked out of Facebook! Oh horror! Hard to say what caused that, and I don't really want to know, but they sent him instructions on how to reset it, requiring email with a code being sent to his mail server (Gmail). But the code was only valid for 30 seconds, and he didn't know how to open two tabs on his web browser. By the time he had written down the code and re-entered firefox, the code had expired.
Evil passwords again
The FreeBSD is using Matrix for internal communications. And that requires a Kerberos password. How do you do that? Ah, yes, from this diary. OK, generate a password. This silly ?evil random passwords? again! =================================================================== Generating strong, evil random passwords... =================================================================== Your new, ready to forget, password: ung... Your new, ready to forget, mail password: ahXoog... But it worked. Only mail doesn't work any more. It always creates a new password. More pain. Maybe that's why they're evil.
UnWise
Yvonne wants to transfer money to Austria again. OK, that's a case for this stupidly renamed Wise funds transfer service. They used to be called Transferwise, but clearly that name was too descriptive. OK, the transfer is for round ? 1000. I don't have that much in my account, so I needed to transfer it from a real bank account. But first I had to solve these really horrible CAPTCHAs. And though normal bank transfers in Australia are performed in real time, Wise told me that it would take a day. Wise told me that it would take two days. Clearly they couldn't decide.
CAPTCHAs on the rise!
I had hoped that CAPTCHAs were finally going away, but today I was confronted with two particularly virulent ones, from Vultr and Wise, the vaguely named money transfer service. Not only multiple CAPTCHAs, but ones that change when you click things, and some which are so vague that I can't recognize them, apart from the use of US American terminology like ?crosswalk?. Will they never go away? Can't somebody use Artificial Intelligence to make a CAPTCHA-solving browser plugin? Please?
Web server calmer
Watched the web server load all day today. And yes, the load average stayed relatively constant in the 8 to 20 range. Fixed? Hardly. I do like to appear on Google search results, especially for things for which there are few hits, for example (surprisingly) Swine Bismarck, which we ate last night.
Chasing down the Hugin stitch problem
House photo day again today, and once again I had fun with Hugin, particularly with this panorama, stitched with hydra (Hugin version 2023.0.0.d88dc56ded0e) and with eureka (Hugin version 2018.0.0.5abfb4de7961): What's causing that? There's nothing obvious, and they're both stitched from exactly the same project file using exactly the same command: hugin_executor --stitching e-from-house.pto What does hugin_executor do behind the scenes?
Out, foul bot!
My web server continues to suffer from extreme overload: 2:09AM up 338 days, 17:57, 8 users, load averages: 177.41, 158.34, 121.08 And since it's the beginning of the month, I got my web server bill, round double what it has been in the past. And the server continues to hang. Clearly I need to do something. Most of the traffic seems to come from web crawlers. OK, how about excluding them for a while? Put this in robots.txt: User-agent: * Disallow: / That effectively tells new crawlers to stay away.
Real uptime
Seen recently: Current time: 2024-02-29 16:11:21 UTC System booted: 2013-10-22 02:22:24 UTC (540w2d 13:48 ago) Protocols started: 2020-10-26 16:08:37 UTC (174w3d 00:02 ago) Last configured: 2024-01-07 01:40:54 UTC (7w4d 14:30 ago) by root 4:11PM up 3782 days, 13:49, 2 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00 That's a router somewhere in the FreeBSD complex. Yes, not a real computer, but still worthwhile. I'm told, though, that while the software is running fine, the hardware is worn out, so it's not likely to stay there much longer.
Phone smart, again
One of the things that really annoys me about my Android mobile phone is that it's so difficult to keep apps running. In particular, basic functionality like an FTP server keeps stopping, though I have set it in some obscure place (not the app configuration) to stay running at all times. It was all the more surprising that I recently found that it had been running for 4 or 5 days. But then it stopped, and now it keeps stopping every few hours. That can't be intended. How I hate these things!
More VicEmergency insights
Following up on the bushfire today didn't bring much in the way of new insights. Yvonne drove down Kleins Road further than I had been able to do yesterday, but around the corner the road was closed, and there still wasn't very much to see on the 47 Kleins Road property. We'll have to wait a few days more. But Petra Gietz has found another trick with the VicEmergency app. I had discoved the map settings (or was that ?Filter??) page and noted that I could only select one setting. But she had another: one that showed the wind direction. Currently: That's useful, but there seem to be a number of issues with the function.
NBN upgrades?
The first thing that struck me when I arrived at the Dereel Hall was this truck: Is that the National Broadband Network that we know and love? Yes. What was it doing there? Providing network connectivity. But we have NBN coverage already. Yes? What kind? Fixed Wireless. Ah, but mumble. Maybe there isn't any fixed wireless here. I expressed my doubt, and just by chance there's a FW antenna at the extreme left of the photo above: The person I spoke to didn't seem very well informed.
Bushfire? Bushfire!
Bushfire danger today was... extreme? catastrophic? Spent much of the day following this emetic VicEmergency service, without gaining much in the way of insights. And then after dinner I heard lots of vehicles going past. But I didn't see them, and at this time of year I should at least have seen their cloud of dust. Outside, where it was clear that they were some kind of flying vehicle. Bushfire? Yes! I know that address. 47 Kleins Road, where we lived from 10 July 2007 to 8 May 2015. And the fire went down where we used to take the dogs for a walk.
Cat danger
I have now secured the disks behind my monitors so that Bruno can't dislodge them. But somehow the danger isn't over: That's eureka. Should I cover it?
Gmail: now I accept you, now I don't
Sent a reply to the Google Hugin user group today. It was both accepted and rejected by Google: <[email protected]>: host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[142.251.2.26] said: 550-5.7.26 This mail has been blocked because the sender is unauthenticated. 550-5.7.26 Gmail requires all senders to authenticate with either SPF or DKIM. 550-5.7.26 550-5.7.26 Authentication results: 550-5.7.26 DKIM = did not pass 550-5.7.26 SPF [hydra.lemis.com] with ip: [45.32.70.18] = did not pass 550-5.7.26 550-5.7.26 For instructions on setting up authentication, go to 550 5.7.26 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#authentication bw11-20020a056a00408b00b006e5306d0ff1si2541353pfb.248 - gsmtp (in reply to end of DATA command) Your message was successfully delivered to the destination(s) listed below.
Emergency? Catastrophic!
Today and (especially) tomorrow are slated to be some of the most dangerous fire days in the year. How do the emergency services help? No better than they have done for the past 15 years. Fortunately the Ballarat Courier sends email notifications, so I get the information that I should have got from VicEmergency. But I still monitor what VicEmergency has to say, which at least has amusement value. And today, for the first time ever, I received a notification saying something like ?Catastrophe?. That's worth looking at, so I selected it and was taken to the app. Ha, ha, only joking.
www overload: increasing?
Unexpected mail today: Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2024 10:08:48 GMT From: Mail Delivery Subsystem <MAILER-[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: Warning: could not send message for past 4 hours lax.lemis.com is the overloaded web server. And the message to which it referred didn't finally get sent until nearly 12 hours after it was submitted: Received: from lax.lemis.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by lax.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3D3B3280BF for <[email protected]>; Sun, 25 Feb 2024 12:49:50 +0000 (UTC) Received: (from groggyhimself@localhost) by lax.lemis.com (8.15.2/8.15.2/Submit) id 41P0wvpZ054217; Sun, 25 Feb 2024 00:58:57 GMT (envelope-from groggyhimself) So why did the second one get through first?
www hangs investigated
Once again the web server on www.lemis.com hung, round 8:54 this morning. I've been keeping output of w(1), which shows: 9:44PM up 331 days, 13:32, 5 users, load averages: 139.65, 71.45, 34.21 9:49PM up 331 days, 13:37, 5 users, load averages: 2.89, 35.55, 29.94 9:54PM up 331 days, 13:42, 5 users, load averages: 0.69, 13.46, 21.24 9:59PM up 331 days, 13:47, 5 users, load averages: 0.30, 5.09, 14.95 10:04PM up 331 days, 13:52, 5 users, load averages: 0.22, 2.09, 10.66 10:09PM up 331 days, 13:57, 5 users, load averages: 0.24, 0.93, 7.56 10:14PM up 331 days, 14:02, 5 users, load averages: 0.32, 0.56, 5.38 10:19PM up 331 days, 14:07, 5 users, load averages: 0.43, 0.47, 3.88 10:24PM up 331 days, 14:12, 5 users, load averages: 0.44, 0.52, 2.87 10:29PM up 331 days, 14:17, 5 users, load averages: 0.32, 0.43, 2.15 10:34PM ...
More Hugin strangenesses
It's been four months since I got the new hydra, and I still haven't completed the transition from eureka. A surprising number of things have slowed me down, in particular the number of programs that work on eureka and not on hydra. notably MediathekView and Hugin. MediathekView in particular is irritating. It can send URLs to a web browser, but now that they have further broken firefox, it has to be on the same system. In addition, what resolution do I need for my monitors? hydra:0.1 is running at 3849×2160 (?4K?) , and many things are hard to read. But that also relates to my eyes, which I'm planning to have overhauled Real Soon Now.
Quora revisited
Quora seems to be on the way out. I haven't received any mail this year, and I have barely looked in. But it's still there. Today I found a search result pointing to a Quora reply, and while I was there I found a whole lot of mainly particularly silly questions addressed to me. The good news is that there is now a ?downvote? selector arrow on all of them, so I can easily downvote questions like ?What is the quarter past 4 on time??. And of course there are the old stupid time questions like It is 4:30 PM in a place whose longitude is 40?E.
www load dropped
For days I've been looking with concern at the load on www.lemis.com, with load averages round 30 and peaking at round 150. The only times when it was normal were when the server got itself confused and started refusing all requests. So when I saw a load average round 3, I was concerned. But no, everything was working normally. Can it be that whatever was overloading the server (looked like a DDoS) has now moved on to more fruitful pastures?
30 years of minnie
Warren Toomey runs a site now called TUHS (?The Unix History Society?) . I've known of Warren for round 30 years, at the latest since May 1994, when he published the Commentary on the Sixth Edition UNIX Operating System that I subsequently put up on the web. But probably the most important contribution was what is now called TUHS; previously it was called PUPS (PDP Unix Preservation Society), and that's still the name of the save file I have for the mailing list: it fits better under the fingers than TUHS. And his server has always been called minnie. Well, for the last 30 years, anyway.
The web server issue
My web server is still running with load averages over 100. No hangs today, but how long can it last? There's an obvious but difficult solution: rewrite my web page code to do the grunt work at the client end. How much work is that? My photo display functions are 3000 lines of PHP code, and they would need to be rewritten in JavaScript. which also involves me learning enough JavaScript to do the job. In the meantime, how about a second server? ffm.lemis.com is sitting around doing nothing. OK, start an rsync. No rsync on ffm. And it's way down-rev.
More web server pain
In my log messages this morning: lax.lemis.com kernel log messages: +swap_pager_getswapspace(3): failed +swap_pager_getswapspace(19): failed +swap_pager_getswapspace(3): failed ... And coinicidentally (or was it?) , my web server had hung up in a state where it just replied with ECONNRESET again. OK, I know how to do that: apachectl graceful doesn't work, but apachectl stop; apachectl start does. But how did that happen? Typically I use almost no swap: in general it's round 13% full. But clearly I need more. OK, how do I do this? It's a machine without a swap partition, and currently I have two memory disk (md) of size 1 GB and 2 GB.
Joining video files
Last month I watched a video series from Al Jazeera about Al Nakba. It was very informative, not to mention horrifying. But is it balanced? Al Jazeera is an Arabic broadcaster run by the government of Qatar. Is there anything else? Yes. Ten years ago I participated in a course on Coursera about the recent history of the Middle East, which I think was produced by an Israeli institution. I still have the videos. Started looking at them, but they're all very short (most less than 10 minutes). How can I join them? I've been there before, and I'm sure that this diary contains the information.
What's this message?
Seen on a random xterm: [53586:-1385032960:0216/233605.117805:ERROR:quic_network_blackhole_detector.cc(86)] Blackhole detection deadline should be the last deadline. What does that mean? What produced it?
Rain on BOM app
A couple of days ago I claimed that I couldn't view rainfall on the BOM Weather mobile phone app. Of course I can, as Andrew Perry reminded me. All I need to do is to swipe in the right way, and I get a rainfall map that is far and away better than the web-based map: it can be resized, paused and scrolled, and it gives a forecast up to 90 minutes in the future. Better in every way?once you find it.
More Microsoft strangenesses
My accountant needs proof of my identity for an application to close an account. Yes, we've signed and returned the form, but they want proof of my identity: a driver license! And for some reason I couldn't find any on our local network. OK, scan and save. But dischord, my old Microsoft ?Windows? 7 box, told me that the device wasn't connected. Given the work that I've been doing lately behind the computers, that's no impossible. But no, all USB connections were firmly in place. Stop application. Power cycle scanner. Still nothing. OK, what does the ?operating system? say? Yes, it's there.
Web ECONNRESET?
My external web site has been very busy lately, with load averages going up over 100 and seldom below 10. I'm surprised that it's still so responsive. But on a couple of occasions I've seen it below 1. How could that happen? To my surprise, I was no longer able to access the web server. ECONNRESET: ?Connection reset by peer?. It was only the web server; everything else worked normally. OK, try an apachectl graceful. And yes, after that it worked. But why did it happen?
BOM strangenesses
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology, who don't want to be called BOM, but whose Internet domain is bom.gov.au, supplies a lot of information. At http://www.bom.gov.au/places/vic/KFC2/ I can see a local weather forecast. On my mobile phone, using the BOM Weather app (that appears to be the official name), I can get a different forecast for the same place. For example, for tomorrow the web site gives temperatures between 7° and 24°, while the app gives 9° to 23°. I've never seen the two agree. But there's one thing that I can't view on a mobile phone: the local rainfall map. While searching and discussing on IRC, discovered another strangeness: https://www.bom.gov.au/ doesn't work.
Android confusion
I've been trying to rearrange the icons on my phone, and in the process ran into this horrible idea of coalescing icons into ?folders?, in the process adding a title of its choice: But where did it get that title from?
firefox outwitted?
I've been grumbling about the disappearance of my quick menu bar (my term) on newer versions of firefox. Callum Gibson to the rescue: just hit the Meta (Alt) key and you'll get a menu to enable you to customize it. It don't work for me. Ah, not Meta, Alt. And how about that, I hadn't remapped Alt; it was still where it's marked on the keyboard. And how about that, it gave me a ?Bookmarks Toolbar? and enabled me to add things to it. So not a menu bar after all? Well, yes and no. It seems that the menu bar is gone, but the bookmarks toolbar has taken its place.
More hydra strangenesses
More attempts to migrate from eureka to hydra today. It's really not easy. So many things have changed. The new version of firefox seems to have changed its behaviour. I like a quick menu bar at the top (no idea what the firefoxes call it), but that no longer seems to be available. And copying text to X seems to have changed too. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and the issue seems to apply to Emacs as well, which also seems to sometimes forget its current directory. It's all so variable that I haven't tried to investigate further.
bde dying
Seen in this morning's backup log: DUMP: dumping (Pass IV) [regular files] DUMP: read error from /dev/ada0s1a: Input/output error: [block 586720074]: count=10240 DUMP: read error from /dev/ada0s1a: Input/output error: [block 586721232]: count=10240 ... DUMP: read error from /dev/ada0s1a: Input/output error: [sector 586723552]: count=512 DUMP: 32.05% done, finished in 0:11 at Sun Feb 11 21:18:51 2024 bde, one of the laptops that I inherited from Bruce Evans, has a defective disk. Doubtless that has nothing to do with Scott Ashhurst, who brought the machines to me nearly 2 years ago.
Emacs pain
Another program that I have been using forever is Emacs. I started with MINCE in about 1980 or 1981, and first installed GNU Emacs on a Xenix box in about 1989. My fingers are trained to work with it and the keyboard bindings I have added to it. If I find myself on a different keyboard (one without the F keys on the left), I often have to think carefully about what key combinations I need for a specific function. But here, too, the modern world is catching up with me. How do I start Emacs on hydra? The old invocation (in the fvwm2 menus) is: /home/local/bin/Emacs -display eureka:0.0 -geometry 100x50-53+0 -font 6x13 That works on hydra too, sort of.
hydra: Learning fvwm3
Somehow my attempts to work around the bug in fvwm2 are all too hard. Running it from eureka starts programs on eureka, not hydra. Attempts to statically link with eureka's libraries prove to be a can of worms. And I've established that (so far) the problem doesn't occur with fvwm3. So why not use that? The main reason is because the results aren't as expected. No colours any more, icons in the wrong place on the screen. But there must be a way to do that. Off searching the web, and came up with this page with the encouraging title Things I ran into when moving from Fvwm2 to Fvwm3 by Chris Siebenmann.
Making software maintenance easy
Answering a question on the FreeBSD-questions mailing list, discovered that there's a problem with the documentation of BSD make: make searches by default for a Makefile called BSDmakefile, but it's not mentioned in the man page. OK, that's easy enough to fix. First, check what the man page says: If no -f makefile makefile option is given, make will try to open `makefile' then `Makefile' in order to find the specifications. And what does make do? In /usr/src/usr.bin/make/main.c I find: } else if (!TryReadMakefile("BSDmakefile")) if (!TryReadMakefile("makefile")) TryReadMakefile("Makefile"); OK, that's straightforward enough.
Porting statifier
How much work is it to port statifier to FreeBSD? Ten years ago I gave up when it didn't build out of the box. But in fact that issue?the name of the architecture?was quite easy to fix. But then I got: === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/51) ~/src/statifier/statifier-1.7.4 85 -> gmake all /bin/sh ./configure rm --force VERSION rm: illegal option -- - ... Gratuitous Linuxisms! And indeed the Makefile.in contained unnecessary stuff like MKDIR = mkdir --parents MV = mv --force RM = rm --force RMDIR = rm --force --recursive Why?
Static linking
My hope of working around the fvwm2 bug by running fvwm2 on eureka, pointing at hydra, proved to be less than perfect. Yes, eureka's version of fvwm2 doesn't crash?if it's linked with the libraries on eureka. And that (currently) means running it on eureka. But then all the programs it starts also run on eureka. So the obvious thing is to somehow find a way to run eureka's version of fvwm2 on hydra with the eureka libraries. Simple: link them statically. In the Good Old Days that was the only way, but nobody does that any more. Ten years ago I found a package called statifier that can do that?if your environment is correct, and in this context that means Linux.
Still more mobile phone smart
As usual, I planned my trip into town with Google Maps and loaded the itinerary into my phone, more for the fun of it than anything else. First I needed to go to PPT to drop a letter. But on leaving I discovered I was 10 minutes late, so off to the dentist first, where I arrived only a couple of minutes late. Coming out, of course, tried to modify my itinerary. Google Maps hadn't noticed that I was at the second destination, and when I tried to change things, everything hung. I couldn't get any response from the map, and I couldn't stop it (why doesn't Android have a user-visible kill function?)
More hydra strangenesses
Once again I'm finding more important things to do than complete the migration from eureka to hydra. It's certainly helped by the strange things that keep happening. Instead, today I paid some attention to the mess of cables and backup disks behind eureka's monitors. I've started putting some brackets to hold them in place, especially since Bruno could knock them down: It's a slow business: it's easy to dislodge or disconnect something.
What I see is all you get
A couple of days ago I stumbled over a surprising number of TV series on the ZDF web site, several hundred of them. That poses two questions. Firstly, how do I download them? It seems that each episode has its own URL, not easily deciphered. But youtube-dl is clever enough to scrape the index page and download the videos it finds. Only, as I discovered a year ago today, it's limited to what the web page displays by default, and the web designers have determined that it's a bad idea to display everything at once (?slide sideways?) . Still, I was able to download dozens of videos automatically.
Ten years of eureka
I'm gradually moving my desktop from eureka to hydra, but today reminded me how slow progress is: ten years ago today I started using eureka in earnest, doing photo processing. It was so much faster. Today I did my house photo processing on hydra. It was so much faster than on eureka. And in particular the graphics on the new monitor were so much better than on the old Matrix monitor. But somehow Moore's law is dead and buried.
More phone issues
hirse.lemis.com, my mobile phone, is still misbehaving. While making my calls in Snake Valley, I was able to make the call, but the display didn't show the call, and there was no way to hang up. And when Yvonne called me, I didn't get a display to enable me to answer the call. I had to wait for it to time out, and then call her back. The usual Microsoft trick worked: reboot. But why does this happen?
Printing on hydra, solved
So what's my problem with printing on hydra? The web didn't help. But gradually it came back to me: CUPS. CUPS is a replacement for the Berkeley printing system that we know and love. I thought it was a Linuxism, but it seems that Apple committed it. And they re-used the Berkeley program names: the daemon lpd, the print program lpr and the utilities lpq and lprm. But the background configuration is completely different. So: I set up my /etc/printcap for Berkeley printing, start lpd. So far, so good: CUPS stores its lpd in /usr/local/libexec/cups/backend/lpd, so I got Berkeley lpd. But when I try to print with lpr, I get the CUPS /usr/local/bin/lpr, because my PATH is set up to look at /usr/local/bin before /usr/bin.
hirse death?
I'm using hirse.lemis.com, my mobile phone, more and more. Today I tried to wake it, but it was sleeping the sleep of the dead. I had to force reboot it to get any sign of life. Is this an indication that it's on its way out?it is, after all, nearly 3 years old?or just par for the course for consumer electronics? That could also explain the ftp speeds of round 75 kB/s that I had earlier in the day.
Strange cd
Seen this evening: === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/6) /spool/Series/30-min/Freunde-fuers-Leben/01 49 -> cd .. === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/6) /spool/Series/Freunde-fuers-Leben 50 -> How could that happen? Symlink? No, no symlinks involved. I had renamed the directory from a different xterm. Now where does bash get its directory names from?
More printer problems
Got a message from my accountant. Here's a PDF document, please sign and return by email. OK, how does that work? What kind of proof is the email? Still, I suppose I should print it out, sign it, scan it in and return it. But I can't print from hydra! I hadn't set up printing yet. That in itself is interesting considering that I've been running it for 3 months. OK, what do I need? I had a vague recollection, but it was worth checking the FreeBSD handbook. But the information in there doesn't match what I have on eureka. It wants a spool directory /var/spool/lpd/lp.
Printer problems
Another email from cert-bund.de today: an SNMP vulnerability. Huh? I don't use SNMP. Well, no, but one of my devices does: "asn","ip","timestamp","system_desc" "4764","192.109.197.198","2024-01-30 00:54:15","Brother NC-8500h, Firmware Ver.1.02 (13.03.07),MID 84E-403" That's my printer! And that's what I get for having it visible on the global Internet. OK, firewall it.
How long is Andy Farcas gone?
I've established that Andy Farkas' domain andyit.com.au no longer has active name servers, and that I haven't been able to update the zone for over a month. But of course there's other information: the zone file. When was it last updated? === grog@lax (/dev/pts/2) /usr/local/etc/namedb 25 -> l slave/ -rw-r--r-- 1 root bind 1,137 10 Nov 2022 andyit.com.au That was two months before we last heard of him. Hard to say what it means, but it's concerning.
More hydra migration
I've been using a hybrid setup with eureka and hydra for a couple of months now. That's nothing new: for years I spread my desktop across two computers and multiple screens. But I still have the goal to reincarnate eureka as a virtual machine on hydra. In the meantime, the most important part is to rearrange the screens. And that proves amazingly difficult?not because it's hard to achieve, but because I want it to be comfortable. That's the same reason why I tend to go into my office to check things while cooking, although I have an Apple (fwaggle.lemis.com) in the dining room: it's less comfortable.
What happened to Andy Farkas?
Andy Farkas used to be a regular on our IRC channels, but we haven't heard from him for over a year. Today I got a message asking me if I know where he is. No. How do you find people whom you only know from the Internet? He has a domain andyit.com.au, and that was updated somehow last month, but no active name servers. I run one of them, ns1.lemis.com, so it's worth looking more carefully. Why can't I resolve the name? Jan 28 19:06:54 lax named[26775]: transfer of 'andyit.com.au/IN' from 210.1.210.40#53: failed to connect: timed out Jan 28 19:08:24 lax named[26775]: transfer of 'andyit.com.au/IN' from 202.87.175.55#53: failed to connect: timed out That goes back as far as my logs go (about a month).
More infrared photo processing
Yesterday was house photo day, and once again I took some comparison photos with my full-spectrum Olympus E-PM1. Out of the box they look like this: OK, first thing is to get a profile for the camera from Rob Shea's collection. Much reading. No, no E-PM1, but other cameras with the same sensor. Wikipedia tells me: Panasonic G1, G2, G10, GF1, GF2; Olympus E-P1, E-P2, E-P3, E-PL1, E-PL2, E-PL3, E-PM1. And Rob's list includes multiple profiles for that sensor. Which do I download.
Catching the scammer
Just before going to bed, Yvonne called me: her Facebook ?chat? with Nicole Toohey had come back to life: It seems that the ? at 20:07 was today, and it reinstated the whole ?conversation?, allowing me to copy it with infinite pain and xv, not made any easier by Yvonne's German-layout keyboard and poor office lighting (which I must fix). That was just as well, because Facebook has still not sent the data that we requested yesterday. Is this maybe just an alibi function for them? At any rate, my opinion of Facebook, already low, has dropped further.
Facebook: on the side of the scammers
Clearly the first thing to do with the Facebook scam is to save the message exchange. Once that worked, but now I can't select the text. With some pain discovered that I could ?archive? the message. But what can I do with it then? I still can't save it anywhere. Much more pain trying to find how to get a copy outside the Facebook domain, and finally came up with a particularly painful download method. Activated that and was told that it could take a while, without any clarity of how long. At any rate it was more than the time that remained until we went to bed.
A new lawn mower
We still don't have a new carburettor for our lawn mower! It's been out of commission since mid-December, and we've been waiting for a new carburettor for over a month. And they still don't have any! OK, this can't continue. Clearly I made a bad choice buying the mower, and at least I have learnt to steer well clear of Jono and Johno. Let's buy a new mower, have the old one repaired if we ever get a new carburettor, and sell it come spring. Yvonne put a posting in a Facebook group, and how about that, we got a response, and a good one at that: Nicole Toohey offered a John Deere Z445 mower for only $1200!
hydra migration SNAFU
I've noticed several times this month that processing my photos loses old index entries. Why? It didn't take long to find out: the control files for /grog/photos/dirlist is on /src/Sysconfig/eureka/MasterRCS/home/grog/public_html/photos/RCS. And /src is a symlink to /home/src. I had copied eureka:/home to hydra:/home some time ago, with the intention of only using /hydra:/home. But somehow links leaked through, and now I have two of them. It's not an a small quantity of data, round 3 TB, though only a small amount of data has been changed. How do I find it?
Academia: coming into the 20th century
I have a number of ?papers? on Academia, some uploaded by others. I have free access, not because of the papers, but because of Academia's policies. They continually try to get me to sign up for paying features, and I get silly messages like ?Claim ?Treasurer? for your profile?. What's the document? No idea. I have to pay to see it. Today I got one that was even more interesting: ?Congratulations! " The Vinum Volume Manager" just got its first reader?. What's that? Again, I can't say for sure what they have there, but my best bet is the paper on Vinum that I presented at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference in Monterey on 9 June 1999, just shy of 25 years ago.
Outsmarting the Ports Collection
So it's relatively clear that my weather station no longer communicates reliably when it's in my office. In principle it should be in the lounge room anyway, since that's where the inside temperature is of interest. So why not connect it to tiwi? I forget why, something to do with MySQL. OK, try: === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/11) ~/src/weather/WH-1080-tiwi 6 -> wh1080 ld-elf.so.1: Shared object "libmysqlclient.so.18" not found, required by "wh1080" In fact, no MySQL component was installed. OK, pkg is your friend. But only if you maintain your system the way the ports team wants.
Power fail!
Woke up round 4:00 this morning to hear significant thunder. Damn! What's the chance of a grid power failure? But I couldn't be bothered to go and check. Woke up round 8:00 and into the office, where I saw the too-familiar Boot: prompt. Damn. eureka had gone down again. So had tiwi, because it's still on this silly interrupting power supply. And Yvonne's bedside clock had also reset. Nothing else had: in other words, a sub-second interruption, possibly triggered by a power surge. The sooner I get hydra completed, the better. And the failure itself? From 3:42 to 4:02, so it was pretty much over by the time I woke up.
hydra: the next step
Another 4 days with no work on hydra. Time to finally finish the window manager configuration. Spent some time this afternoon and came up with some files that looked worthwhile. It builds! Ship it!
Weather station woes
My Fine Offset WH-1080 weather station must be one of the most unreliable devices that I have ever had, and I've been grumbling about it for nearly 15 years. But things are changing: it's getting worse. Specifically, it can no longer communicate with the outside unit from my office. I've put it in the lounge room, where it has direct line of sight (about 15 m) from the outside unit, and it works there, but for the while I don't have any recording. Why? The strange thing is that another device with an external wireless thermometer, but without computer attachment, does the same thing.
Google Translate, two years on
Two years ago I found a strange problem with Google Translate : the translation from English into German depended on whether the initial letter (I) was in upper or lower case. The sentence ?I will meet you at half eight? was mistranslated as ?Wir treffen uns um halb neun? (?We will meet at half eight?) , but ?i will meet you at half eight? was mistranslated as ?Ich treffe dich um halb eight? (?I will meet you at half seven?) . Two different errors, depending on the capitalization of the first word. Have they fixed it? Well, partially. The sentence with lower-case i is now correct: ?Ich treffe dich um halb neun?.
Full spectrum panoramas?
House photo day again today, and as planned I took some photos with my ?new? full spectrum Olympus E-PM1. Started off with the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 8 mm f/1.8 Fisheye PRO. It proves to be really irritating that I can't use the VF-2 viewfinder; without it I had great difficulty reading the displays. I really need to get these cataracts seen to. After that, I also took a panorama with only infrared. That required the Zuiko Digital ED 9-18 mm f/4.0-5.6 lens. The results? We're not there yet. Somehow, despite all claims to the contrary, the first two fisheye sets were out of focus.
Strange Emacs message
Seen on an Emacs today: Error running timer `mouse-avoidance-fancy': (wrong-type-argument number-or-marker-p nil) What does that mean? My guess would be another mouse driver issue.
Still no advance on hydra
Somehow I can't get myself to migrate further to hydra. An obvious reason is because it more or less works as it is. But it's inconvenient to have two sets of keyboard, mouse and monitor. So what's holding me up? Little details. While I'm quite happy with the new LG 27UP850-W monitor, but it's clear that ?modern? software?and even some older software?has issues with it. A web browser is a catastrophe, and I haven't found a way to tell the window manager how to enlarge its icons and things. Even finding the mouse cursor is non-trivial. So switch it down to 2560×1440, like the old monitor?
Still more X indecision
So I've established why my Elisp scripts were misbehaving. Time to fix things. But while thinking about it, discovered that running fvwm2 on eureka to control a hydra window was even more suboptimal than I thought: every program that it starts is on eureka, not hydra. So it looks as if that isn't the solution. Should I really go to the trouble of finding the bug? Compared to ?modern? software, fvwm2 is positively tiny: when I built it, it happened so fast that I thought it hadn't done anything.
More server overload
The www.lemis.com web server continues to suffer under extreme overload, with load averages up to 120. And for once I let my daily sync run. Normally it runs for 30 seconds to a minute, checking through the 15,000 odd files. Today, though, I had: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/41) /home/local/X/.fvwm 21 -> time syncgrog Wed 17 Jan 2024 13:04:44 AEDT ... sent 494,660 bytes received 256,471 bytes 89.92 bytes/sec total size is 4,487,460,324 speedup is 5,974.27 Wed 17 Jan 2024 15:24:13 AEDT real 139m29.308s user 0m2.956s sys 0m0.278s 2 hours, 20 minutes!
Modern exposure correction
Decades ago, exposure for a photo was mainly guesswork, helped with little tables like this one that came with my FED-1, since most people didn't have any kind of exposure meter: How accurate are they? Looking back through the photos I took at the time, I got reasonably good results, though they could be out by 1 or 2 EV. Today I don't need that, but I can still mess up exposure, like with this photo I took today: I had taken that with the camera set to manual exposure.
Still more fvwm configuration
Why am I having so much difficulty configuring fvwm? Part of it is the historical background, coming on 28 years, part of it is my lack of good Elisp debugging?something that I should investigate more?but it seems that part of it is simply that the original was also buggy. Why did I write this script in Elisp? It's predominantly string-based, and something like PHP would have done better, but when I wrote it I didn't know PHP. But since then it has been through 116 revisions and more than tripled in size. So: after much pain I've established a bug in the original, but ran out of energy to fix it.
X display: finally?
I've been running a mixed X environment for some time now, trying to decide what to do next. My issues are: fvwm2 still crashes sporadically. While fvwm3 reads the fvwm2 configuration files and doesn't complain, it doesn't obey them completely either. In particular, it doesn't present the icons as I want, and that proves to be particularly painful. On hydra:0.1 (the 4K monitor) I can't distinguish between a maze of twisty little icons, all with minuscule dark grey on light grey inscriptions.
Web server: the solution?
So how can I fix the load situation on my external web server? The issue is at least that crawlers overload it by requesting the same page multiple times with different image sizes. The obvious solution is to migrate the image resizing to the browser. That means Javascript, something that I barely know. Spent some time looking at the function oneimage () that prepares the images. It's 750 lines of particularly convoluted code, some of which may be obsolete. But converting it is non-trivial, and for the moment the load is down, so I'll put that on the tuit queue.
DDoS?
Why was my network upload so slow yesterday? Did some checking, first with my network statistics page. It showed complete nonsense. Then with traceroute, which showed latency of round 250 ms down my network link. Problems at Aussie Broadband? First I need to understand why my network statistics were so crazy. That was simple: firewall misconfiguration. I had blocked all incoming ICMP packets, and that included outgoing pings. I do need to do something to limit the amount of incoming ICMPs, which are round 300 per second, but in principle it doesn't help to just reject them. That would only work if the pingers decide to give up.
Slow network performance
Every day I sync my diary and other web files to the external web server www.lemis.com. It usually take a couple of minutes. But today it hung in the middle. Why? Yet another thing to investigate.
Still more full spectrum investigations
Spent a lot of time this afternoon looking at further videos on full spectrum photography. In particular, Rob Shea produces a surprising amount of content. Today I looked at a video titled DxO PhotoLab 7 for Infrared Photography : I'm still using DxO PhotoLab 5, and so far I haven't seen any reason to upgrade. Is this the reason? No, I don't think so. Nearly all the functionality he describes is in version 5 as well. And some of the ideas are worthwhile, like this transition: This is an image I took 10 years ago, and with which I wasn't ...
Data breach checks
So what caused yesterday's loss of data? Was it really a security breach? And did more get lost than I thought? How do I check? The most important things, of course, are my photos. And that proved comparatively easy. I do an automated backup every night, and this morning the output showed: Fri 12 Jan 2024 05:05:01 AEDT Greg Photo Backup disk 8 -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 25 11 Jan 05:34:05 2024 /photobackup/Iam Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on /dev/da3p1 7,629,565 7,217,012 336,257 96% 1,743,234 1,500,412 54% /photobackup sent 34,480,155 bytes received 190 bytes 36,123.99 bytes/sec /dev/da3p1 7,629,565 7,217,012 336,257 96% 1,743,234 1,500,412 54% /photobackup Fri 12 Jan 2024 05:21:40 AEDT Photo backup ended ~ ...
Where did my weather data go?
Looking at the weather observations today, discovered something disturbing: no data. The entire directory /var/db/mysql/weather was empty! The modification timestamp of the directory showed that it had last been changed at 13:14. How can that happen? My programs can't do that, because they don't delete entire directories, and they don't know about some of the files in there. In any case, nothing for it: that's what backups are for, so restored all my MySQL tables, including the ones in other databases that weren't deleted, and noted with a certain satisfaction that I didn't need to restart MySQL. And then they were gone again, at 15:48!
Where's my mail?
Despite my overflowing mail inbox, it seemed that I wasn't getting as much mail as usual, in particular from news sources. And Quora seems to have stopped altogether. OK, check the mail logs. To my surprise, I found a whole lot of things like this: Jan 5 15:53:31 eureka postfix/smtpd[25111]: connect from mx2.freebsd.org[96.47.72.81] Jan 5 15:53:31 eureka postfix/spawn[25649]: warning: command /usr/local/bin/perl exit status 2 Jan 5 15:53:31 eureka postfix/smtpd[25111]: warning: premature end-of-input on private/bld-policy while reading input attribute name Jan 5 15:53:32 eureka postfix/spawn[25649]: warning: command /usr/local/bin/perl exit status 2 Jan 5 15:53:32 eureka postfix/smtpd[25111]: warning: premature end-of-input on private/bld-policy while reading input attribute name Jan 5 15:53:32 eureka postfix/smtpd[25111]: warning: problem talking to server private/bld-policy: No error: 0 Jan 5 15:53:32 eureka postfix/smtpd[25111]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mx2.freebsd.org[96.47.72.81]: 451 4.3.5 <[email protected]>: Recipient address rejected: Server configuration problem; from=<owner-src-[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP ...
Mobile phones out of desperation
I spent over an hour at the hospital waiting for Yvonne. What could I do? Play around with my phone. I had tried to send her some photos of fish in the Box Hill shopping centre, but I hadn't been able to work out how to do it. Finally I found out. I should have written it down: it's so non-intuitive that I have forgotten again. The other surprise was the amount of credit that mobile date uses. It's difficult to get an overview from ALDI Mobile, but it must have been about $20. Given that I used to get by for a year on a $15 recharge, that's clearly a lot.
ARD download fixed
Finally yt-dlp has been updated to download videos from ARD. A good thing, too. I've been through a whole set of alternatives, all with their own problems: The old version of MediathekView just fails. New MediathekView seems to be incompatible with the old one. In particular, it doesn't find some programmes that the old one does, and one programme (?Dem Himmel ganz nah?) seems to have incorrect links, to the 4 MB preview that expired some time ago.
Still more hydra delay
I really should be moving my displays to hydra, and if I had more time, I would do so. But maybe the delay isn't such a bad idea after all. It's becoming clear that while the new LG 27? 27UP850-W 4K UHD monitor is excellent for photos, it causes problems for much software, in particular ?modern? things like web browsers, which can't scale correctly. But how do I even resize the cursor? So maybe it's a better idea to move it to position 0 in the new layout, where I don't use it all the time, but where it's available for photos.
Finally! Hugin on hydra
House photo day, and once again I tried doing it on hydra. Success! Well, sort of. These strange screen blank events on the root window still occur, but they prove to be harmless, and xearth soon clears up the mess. About the only problem that occurred is something that I have seen before. For some reason, this view continually gives me problems with newer versions of Hugin. Here as stitched with the same commands on hydra (Hugin version 2023.0.0) and eureka (Hugin version 2018.0.0): But that's nothing to do with X, just another hurdle to cross when the time is right.
hydra conversion: minimizing down time?
I'm using hydra more and more, which currently means that I have a total of 7 active displays. But that's only part of the desktop: From left to right, that's: hydra:0.0, 1920×1200 (2,304,000 pixels). hydra:0.1, 3840×2160 (8,294,400 pixels). hydra:0.2, 1920×1080 (2,073,600 pixels) hydra:0.3, 1920×1080 (2,073,600 pixels) In the foreground, no display: Nominally eureka:0.0, 1366x768 (1,049,088 ...
A new mouse?
Using a mouse with a cable is a pain! Time to buy a new one. I've been using the Logitech M705 for over 6 years, without being overly happy with it. But it works. Still, that's a long time. What has changed? Off searching the web for ?best mouse? and such things. but didn't come up with anything overly interesting. Mice are beginning to look even more bizarre, but I couldn't find the details I wanted. I could, however, pay up to $200 for a ?gaming? mouse (is that a wild mouse?) .
Much work, little result
Somehow I spent most of the day catching up with documenting the problems I've had so far this year. And I'm still dawdling with moving my computer display to hydra, at least partially because it's going to be a lot of moving monitors around. But it's uncomfortable the way it is now, so I should really do so.
hydra mail: finally fixed?
Yesterday I found a solution for the mail replies to hydra.lemis.com: add an MX record. And it worked, at least for me. I couldn't put in mx1.lemis.com, because it doesn't know hydra. But it's still broke! Only mx1 can access mx0. I'm not sure how I tested it, but ?it worked for me?. And for nobody else. So, the correct workaround is (finally!) === grog@freefall (/dev/pts/0) ~ 8 -> host hydra.lemis.com hydra.lemis.com mail is handled by 20 mx1.lemis.com. hydra.lemis.com mail is handled by 10 mx0.lemis.com. And finally all the waiting mail came from. It's interesting to note how many people contacted me about it, assuming that it was a permanent error, though they typically got messages like this saying that the server will retry for 5 days: #################################################################### # THIS IS A WARNING ONLY.
hydra X configuration: next problem
I'm almost ready to move my main desktop monitors to hydra; all I need to do is to fix my window manager configuration. But before I got very far with that, I discovered that another issue still hadn't gone away: from time to time the window manager crashes, which initially I blamed on x2x. But I'm not doing that any more, and today the window managers for hydra:0.1 and hydra:0.2 crashed, and nothing I could do would restart them: === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/15) ~ 30 -> fvwm2 -s -display :0.2 -f /home/local/X/.fvwm/fvwm2rc-hydra:0.2 [fvwm][FlocaleGetFontSet]: (-*-*-medium-r-*-sans-12-*-*-*-p-*-*-*) Missing font charsets: ISO8859-5, KOI8-R, ISO8859-7, JISX0208.1983-0, KSC5601.1987-0, GB2312.1980-0, JISX0201.1976-0 Assertion failed: (ret != inval_id), function _XAllocID, file xcb_io.c, line 626.
Configuring mouse in the new scheme of things
So how do I map the side keys on my Logitech M705 mouse? Off searching and came up with this response, which conveniently included a script showing that the replyer has a directory called /temp. With a bit of modification and testing, it works. Put this into my .xinitrc: # Logitech unwired: find the ID MOUSEID=$(xinput | grep -m 1 "Logitech USB" | sed 's/^.*id=\([0-9]*\)[ \t].*$/\1/') # And set middle button to 8 and 9 xinput set-button-map $MOUSEID 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 2 2 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 So at least one problem has been solved.
Christmas message: the sting in the tail
Message from Alan Kennington today, mentioning strange log messages from his mail server: 2024-01-01T20:45:40.804505+11:00 condor postfix/qmgr[28568]: 32A9C120D94: from=<>, size=3436, nrcpt=1 (queue active) 2024-01-01T20:45:41.432611+11:00 condor postfix/smtp[21039]: connect to hydra.lemis.com[192.109.197.129]:25: No route to host 2024-01-01T20:45:41.634015+11:00 condor postfix/smtp[21039]: 32A9C120D94: to=<[email protected]>, relay=none, delay=17157, delays=17157/0.01/0.62/0, dsn=4.4.1, status=deferred (connect to hydra.lemis.com[192.109.197.129]:25: No route to host) It was quickly followed up by similar messages from a number of other people. Oh. hydra shouldn't be visible to the mail system. I had already noticed this shortly after sending it, but of course it affects replies too.
Picking up the pieces
After yesterday's catastrophic failure, spent most of today documenting the problems that occurred, and recovering from them. The main issue today was the mouse. I'm sure I had a second Logitech M705 mouse, but I couldn't find it. But I tried out both dongles on hydra, and how about that, one worked. The other was presumably the one that Powercor destroyed. So at least I have one mouse. I left that on hydra and tried out the other mice and dongles. Two appeared to be the same kind, and probe as Jan 3 14:38:54 eureka kernel: ugen0.11: <DaKai> at usbus0 Jan 3 14:38:54 eureka kernel: ukbd1: <DaKai 2.4G RX, class 0/0, rev 1.10/3.11, addr 17> on usbus0 Jan 3 14:38:54 eureka kernel: kbd3 at ukbd1 Jan 3 14:38:54 eureka kernel: ums1: <DaKai 2.4G RX, class 0/0, rev 1.10/3.11, addr 17> ...
Power fail: the long recovery
So why did I find eureka stuck in the initial BIOS screen? When the power came back, tried again. No, it wouldn't go any further, and it didn't react to the keyboard. Dead in the water. OK, from decades ago the sequence is: remove everything connected and see if something is holding it up. Started with the USB connections. Bingo! It came up and started doing normal things. But I need the USB stuff, so started replacing connections one by one. The 7 port hub was the culprit. Change for the 4 port hub that I had lying around. Still it didn't work.
2024: The end of time
Took my first photos of the New Year with my Olympus E-30 yesterday. Processed them. The time didn't show. What's wrong there? Did I forget to set the clock? No, the time was set correctly, and it had chosen a file name based on the date (101 in the second to fourth place in the file name), but: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/6) ~/Photos/20240101/orig 14 -> exiftool 51012647.ORF|grep Date File Modification Date/Time : 2008:01:01 10:00:00+11:00 File Access Date/Time : 2024:01:03 11:29:53+11:00 File Inode Change Date/Time : 2024:01:02 10:39:43+11:00 Modify Date : 0000:00:00 00:00:00 Date/Time Original : 0000:00:00 00:00:00 Create Date : 0000:00:00 00:00:00 ...
Merrellshoes scam: the sting in the tail
I still haven't done anything about the presumed scam that we fell into trying to buy riding boots last week. There's a bare chance, despite all indications, that they're legitimate, and for $50 I'm not sure I want any more pain. But today, just before going to bed, I had another as a result. DigitalOcean sent me a mail saying that my credit card had been refused. Yes, of course: I had locked it. Off to the web site, fought my way through the billing pages (which claimed that I owed $0.00) to find the right page, and changed the credit card number.
More thoughts on network throughput
Yesterday I discovered that MediathekView throughput under Microsoft was round 10 times as fast as under FreeBSD. I recalled having done some half-hearted tuning attempts, and discovered that I had done some ten years ago. At the time I had issues with the RSP, which is probably why I didn't follow them up. But clearly now I should investigate again.
MediathekView on hydra
Yesterday's issues with MediathekView were irritating, but solvable, once I found out how to install Java. So today I did that. Then used my old invocation: === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/38) /usr/local/MediathekView 123 -> java -DproxySet=true -DproxyHost=allmine.lemis.com -DproxyPort=3128 -jar /home/local/MediathekView/MediathekView.jar JavaFX wurde nicht im klassenpfad gefunden. Stellen Sie sicher, dass Sie ein Java JRE ab Version 8 benutzen. Falls Sie Linux nutzen, installieren Sie das openjfx-Paket ihres Package-Managers, oder nutzen Sie eine eigene JRE-Installation. ?JavaFX? (whatever that might be) not found in the class path. OK, what does the official start method say? === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/38) /usr/local/MediathekView 124 -> MediathekView .
New Year's letter again
Another new year, and with it the New Year's Letter. In past years I have just sent a brief message with the URL, at least partially because the idea of creating a batch of photos with MIME attachments was too hard. But this year I found out how. My send script now looks something like for i in `sed < $CHRISTMAS_LIST 's:.*<::; s:>$::' | sort -u`; do mutt -s "Happy New Year from the Leheys" < Christmas-message -a New-Year.pdf -- $i done Christmas-message (a name chosen for hysterical raisins) contains the message with the URL.
Still more ssh issues
Seen today while syncing my web pages: === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/38) ~ 120 -> rsync /home/grog/public_html/photos/dirlist www:/home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/photos agent key RSA SHA256:S7sZHLcY4dgw53/rF70vrScdPuGef3enHdJzuYA1WDo returned incorrect signature type Sun 31 Dec 2023 12:55:35 AEDT I've had this kind of thing before, most recently last month, but I thought I had worked around them, and so far they have only ever occurred with freefall.freebsd.org. I can see more work coming up here.
Another MediathekView alternative
So installing MediathekView on FreeBSD and on Linux both went into the ?too hard? basket. But there's even another alternative: install on Microsoft, specifically distress. That sounds like anathema, but if it works... Installation is the typical Microsoft pain, not made any easier by the fact that the package didn't have Microsoft's quality seal. And once it was installed, I couldn't find it: not on the root screen, not on the task bar. I had to search for it. But it seems that I can manually ?pin? it to the task bar. And then, how about that, I was able to start it.
Java: the pain
Now I have VirtualBox installed on hydra, so I can install a Linux distro to run MediathekView. All I have to do is configure VirtualBox, find, install and configure a Linux distro, install MediathekView. And that's the workaround! MediathekView is written in Java, so it should also run on FreeBSD. I'm just applying this workaround because I don't want to investigate what went wrong with my last attempt to install a newer version. That's silly. OK, back to installing it on hydra. Download the tarball, unpack it into /usr/local/MediathekView, discover that it's all in a subdirectory, move around. How do I start it?
We don't need no steenking notifications
Last week I sent a message to the seller of my whetstone on eBay: a part was missing, as these photos show. The second is what I got. There should be retaining screws at the threaded end of the rails. Ask eBay to copy my email. I didn't get it. Repeat. Same thing. And nothing in my eBay Messages tab. Was the photo too big? Today I checked my messages, and discovered a number of messages that hadn't been sent to me, including one from the seller saying that the missing part was on its way, and giving a tracking number.
X on hydra: not there yet
House photo day today. Can I finally do the work on hydra? Switched to X server 1, which obligingly didn't display the fourth screen for quite some time. When it did, it was a duplicated of screen 3. And for reasons I don't understand, it takes a minute or two for screen 1 to come to life after I power it on (it's one of these silly old HDMI displays that displays a blue screen when the ?screen saver? should get it to display nothing). OK, start Hugin. Once again these white screens, and I couldn't get the ?fast panorama preview?
Installing VirtualBox, continued
This morning, of course, the installation of TeX that I started yesterday had completed, and I was able to continue building VirtualBox. It's too polite to use the standard clang compiler. Instead it wants it own version of clang, a program that I swear spends more time compiling itself than anything else.
Luminar: now you see it, now you don't
How do I remove the background from my Christmas photo? Yesterday I ran into problems just finding the buttons to press. After finally finding the Brush button, I couldn't get it to do anything useful. So, just erase the areas that I didn't want, without any intelligence, neither artificial nor natural? But I couldn't get a remote desktop to distress on the screen. More debugging: === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/2) /spool/Series/Die-jungen-Aerzte/02 517 -> /home/local/bin/dordesktop distress 1870x1030+0 User grog sword Ugh! Connecting to distress ATTENTION! The server uses and invalid security certificate which can not be trusted for the following identified reasons(s); 1.
New MediathekView?
I still can't download videos from ARD. The alternative via a web browser is particularly painful, and I can't do anything with the subtitle files that it produces?why are they different from the .ttml or .srt files delivered by the MediathekView program and until recently by ARD themselves? But it seems that the most recent versions of MediathekView can handle ARD. Install it! But there's a problem: I tried a more recent version last year and ran into some strange Java problem that I didn't want to investigate further. Neither did the authors: NIH. OK, what are virtual machines for? A good excuse to install VirtualBox.
Processing Christmas photo
It's been a little over a year since I purchased a 15 month license for Luminar Neo. I've had mixed results: it's very difficult to use, and I just can't find my way around it. On the other hand, I have had good results, like this before and after comparison: But it seems to be just what I need to process this proposed photo for our upcoming New Year's letter. But how do I do it?
dateconv unhung
Why did dateconv, a completely innocuous program, hang yesterday? It was still like that this morning, but reading the diary entries for yesterday suggested a possibility: dereel? Was the system hanging on trying to contact it? That's easy to check: reboot dereel. And bang! the dateconv program stopped, leaving behind the smallest kdump that I have ever seen: 99298 dateconv RET open -1 errno 2 No such file or directory 99298 dateconv PSIG SIGINT SIG_DFL code=SI_KERNEL And that's really all. I had set off a ktrace when it hung, but I had already tried to stop it with ^C (SIGINT), so as soon as it came out of its call to open, it stopped.
hydra hang
While processing some photos today, one of the scripts hung. It proved that a program dateconv was hanging in D (short term disk wait) status. Why? It's a really primitive little program that basically just converts a date in the form 20231227 into something like ?Wednesday, 27 December 2023?. Yes, it's NFS mounted, but so are hundreds of other programs. But I couldn't stop it, and when I started another instance, it, too, hung. A library, maybe? But that shouldn't hang forever. I recompiled the program, and it ran again.
Goodbye dereel
My switchover to hydra is taking a long time, as planned. But I'm making progress, though slower than expected. In particular, X configuration seems to be getting more difficult with the passage of time, rather than simpler. But I've been moving other services to hydra, and today I moved the daily source tree updates, which required installing git and cvs. And that was the last thing still running on dereel, which can now go back to being a test box when I need it. For now I have powered it down. Of course, that's only part of the story. For reasons I don't know (probably historical), the update script includes the NetBSD source tree.
Scam victim?
So who is shoppfun.com? What do the online sources know about it? Asked Bard, which came up with the interesting information: Is shoppfun.com a legitimate business? Determining whether shoppfun.com is a legitimate business requires careful investigation, as there are red flags and mixed information available. Here's what I found: Red flags: Limited online presence: The website itself is basic and lacks information about the company's location, history, or contact details. Negative reviews: On Trustpilot, shoppfun.com has a mixed rating, with some positive reviews praising product quality and others complaining about delayed deliveries, poor customer service, and difficulties with returns.
The joys of online shopping
Yvonne found a special offer online today, riding boots for something like 85% off the list price. Will I buy them for her? Is this kosher? Somehow if online offers are that good, they're suspect. But no, says Yvonne, she knows the company, and they're serious. OK, $37 is really a very good price for the shoes. And $17 odd postage is also acceptable. Try to pay for it. ?Something went wrong. Please contact ANZ at 13 33 50?. Now isn't that helpful? About the only interesting information is that the phone number wasn't the one written on the back of our credit cards (13 22 73).
Next X on hydra pain
It's really time to cut over my desktop from eureka to hydra. What's holding it up? The X configuration, of course. The configuration for server 0 (individual displays) works, but for some reason I had issues server 1 (one display over 4 screens). In particular, it didn't want to recognize the new new LG 27? monitor. I had messed around with nvidia-settings and got a functional configuration. So I saved it, but the resultant configuration didn't work! Looking at it, it only had a single entry, for the first monitor. But for whatever reason, not even that came up. OK, let's add the monitor definitions from server 0.
More monitor fade
My Matrix monitor has been behaving itself for a while now, but today I came into the office and found the display off and the monitor quietly buzzing to itself. Play with the power button. It came back immediately. So it really does seem to be an issue with the power button. I wonder how much longer the monitor will last.
Many photos
Double whammy today: yesterday's garden flower photos and today's house photos. I had planned to do them on hydra, but it proves that server 1 is still not ready for prime time. And surprisingly, despite a number of strange issues, I got everything done. Now
Amazon doesn't deliver
Message from Amazon today: Due to a lack of availability, we will not be able to obtain the following item from your order. We've canceled the item and apologize for the inconvenience. If you see a charge for the canceled item, we will refund you within 1-2 business days. If youare still interested in purchasing this item, it may be available from other sellers. Please visit the detail page for this item below. Order #503-... Placed on Sunday, September 17, 2023 Hock Lee Prawn Paste 225 g Sold by Amazon Commercial Services Pty Ltd I was half expecting this; after all, the order was 3 months ago, and they had promised delivery in 4 days.
Still more X investigation
Yesterday I decided to postpone further investigation of my X configuration problems. So of course I didn't. In fact, it seems as if almost everything does work as expected. The only thing that doesn't, and for no obvious reason, is the background colour of the xterms. I have selected a colour called BlanchedAlmond, but when I start the xterm from the window manager, it gets a white background. Why? It might just as well have got inverse video (a black background and white foreground). And if I set the colour in the invocation, all seems to work correctly. In particular, the font, size and icon location are all as I want.
X configuration: failure
So yesterday I came to the guess that my X configuration problems were related to the -name parameter on the startup line. Tried it again today. It still doesn't do what I want. Why is this all so difficult? I suspect that part of it is that I've spent over 30 years working around issues that I don't understand, and only now have I decided to try to understand and Do The Right Thing. But maybe I should just give in. In another 30 years I won't be around. Let's move on?
More X configuration fun
Why am I having so much trouble getting my X configuration sorted out? It's the work of decades. I found this comment in my fvwm2 configuration file: # Stuff added by Grog, 20 April 1996 I wasn't keeping a diary at the time, but I'm pretty sure this was round the time that I started transitioning from mwm to fvwm (fvwm2 wasn't around yet). And I basically just changed details of the base configuration without really understanding what I was doing. Today I spent a lot of time trying to find out why my xterms weren't being started with the correct parameters.
Consolidating X configuration
So how do I reorganize my X configuration files? The obvious solution is in a directory hierarchy. I already have /home/local/ to match /usr/local/, so programs used in the network are stored in /home/local/bin/, for example. So I created a directory /home/local/X/. What do I move there first? .Xdefaults, since that's what I want to use more. And before I start building it with a script, it makes sense to play around with the contents. The most important ones were the font and its size, which I want to set differently for each screen, since they're not all the same size.
Still more thoughts on ARD downloads
I've been waiting for a couple of days for the enxt ?nightly? update of yt-dlp, but somehow it has got stuck. I have a number of alternatives: Wait for a fix. Fight my way through this horrible web download. Try to understand this response to the bug report. It gives an example of how to work around the problem, but the quoted example makes no sense to me.
Another wasted day?
Somehow I once again spent all day writing up my fun with downloading ARD videos. It's beginning to look like an unintentional bug rather than any deliberate intention to limit access: the news programmes have a well-hidden ?download? button, but it doesn't work any more, at least not with firefox. But the excruciatingly complex method for downloading with chrome almost works: Search for the programme at https://mediathekviewweb.de/#query=fremd%20unter. Select the blue blob at the right, then the middle blue blob in the popup menu: ...
How to eat up memory
Seen today on hydra: Mem: 2248M Active, 166G Inact, 1274M Laundry, 7708M Wired, 1314M Buf, 10G Free 10 GB free out of 192 GB! How did that happen? A massive backup, I think, most of which is probably still inthe 166 GB of ?Inact? memory.
ARD does it again
Trying to download a video from ARD today was unsuccessful: === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/9) /spool/Series/Großstadtrevier/36 26 -> yt-dlp https://www.ardmediathek.de/video/Y3JpZDovL2Rhc2Vyc3RlLmRlL2dyb8Ofc3RhZHRyZXZpZXIvMjAyMy0xMi0xMV8xOC01MC1NRVo & [ARDBetaMediathek] Extracting URL: https://www.ardmediathek.de/video/Y3JpZDovL2Rhc2Vyc3RlLmRlL2dyb8Ofc3RhZHRyZXZpZXIvMjAyMy0xMi0xMV8xOC01MC1NRVo [ARDBetaMediathek] Y3JpZDovL2Rhc2Vyc3RlLmRlL2dyb8Ofc3RhZHRyZXZpZXIvMjAyMy0xMi0xMV8xOC01MC1NRVo: Downloading JSON metadata ERROR: [ARDBetaMediathek] Y3JpZDovL2Rhc2Vyc3RlLmRlL2dyb8Ofc3RhZHRyZXZpZXIvMjAyMy0xMi0xMV8xOC01MC1NRVo: Unable to download JSON metadata: HTTP Error 503: Service Unavailable (caused by <HTTPError 503: Service Unavailable>); please report this issue on https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues?q= , filling out the appropriate issue template. Confirm you are on the latest version using yt-dlp -U What's that?
More fun with X
Did some half-hearted playing around with X on hydra. Once again the LG 27UP850-W monitor didn't get any signal. Switch back to /dev/vty0 and it displayed along with the rest. But nvidia-settings claimed that it was ?disabled?. Somehow I managed to get it to enable it, but I could no longer set screen positions relative to other screens. The only thing I could do was to physically drag themto where I wanted them. It took a lot of messing around to discover that I had 8 screens (which nvidia-settings calls displays), not 4: I had to select ?X screen 0?, not ?LG ULTRAFINE?.
Aussie does it again
I had just written yesterday's article on the National Broadband Network anniversary when I received mail from Aussie Broadband. In the article I had written that I'm now only paying $69 per month for my Internet connection. And the message from Aussie, formulated as a reminder (?Your new Critical Information Summary Important information updated?) , told me: A friendly reminder that as of 21 November, our internet plans have changed price, and your new plan will be reflected in your December invoice.
10 years NBN!
Ten years ago today we had a significant development: We've been connected to the Australian National Broadband Network for ten years! It would be nice to say that all our network problems went away in one swell foop, but that wasn't the case. We probably had more network outages than before. But when the net was up, it was up, and throughput was reliably good. In recent times the availability has also improved. And possibly independently of the NBN, the traffic limits have increased dramatically, to the point where I have no limit any more.
hydra: What now?
I didn't do much work on hydra today, just documenting the day before. This seems to be becoming a habit: one day work, one day write-up. In principle things are looking good, but while I have the opportunity, I should really get round the issue of configuration files. And that's taking for ever. I really need to think how to do this cleanly; for the past 30 years or so I've been kludging things.
Bloody reproducible builds!
My last kernel on hydra reported itself as: FreeBSD 13.2-STABLE #1: Wed Oct 18 14:00:06 AEDT 2023 But the new one says: FreeBSD 13.2-STABLE GENERIC amd64 Where did the date go? There's something silly about the difference. If you build two kernels with the second kind of string, they will be the same. Build two with the first kind, and they'll be different: the date is different.
X setup on hydra: install 4K monitor
So now I have something like a usable X configuration on hydra. Time to finally unpack the new LG 27? 27UP850-W 4K UHD monitor?I've only had it for ten days. What a lot of plastic! Two large polystyrene forms weighing 490 g and no less than 9 plastic bags weighing 64 g. I'm sure they could have got by with less than half that. Do cables really need to be in individual plastic bags? To make up for it, there were no instructions whatsoever. Well, a single sheet of paper showing some of the connections, but not where they were, and?for illiterates?how to mount the monitor on its stand, something that still didn't make sense until I examined the device.
X on hydra: tidying up
So now I can display xterms on hydra with usable fonts. Time to cut over? No, I'm still not done. How do I start xterms? For the last 20 years I have been using a set of fvwm2 menus that do it for me. What do I need to change? Currently I have entries like + "eureka" Exec ssh -A eureka LC_ALL=en_AU.UTF-8 /usr/local/bin/uxterm -name "xterm" -bg BlanchedAlmond -s -sl 2048 -sb -ls -j -rw -display hydra:0.2 -geometry 100x65+53+0 -e /usr/local/bin/bash & + "hydra" Exec LC_ALL=en_AU.UTF-8 /usr/local/bin/uxterm -name "xterm" -bg BlanchedAlmond -s -sl 2048 -sb -ls -j -rw -display :0.2 -geometry 100x65+53+0 -e /usr/local/bin/bash & What do I need to change?
xterm fonts: solved!
Back to looking at the font issues with X, particularly xterm. I'd really like to complete the transition from eureka to hydra, and that's the main thing that's in the way. In particular, I don't have any usable fonts that will be readable on a 3840x2160 display. OK, Microsoft has fonts, but are they legal, and how do you install them? How to install Microsoft fonts on Linux for better collaboration seems to offer the answer, but in fact it only tells you how to install a font installer on specific Linux distros. But then I saw this article on FreeBSD forum, which pointed me to Freshports, which again pointed me to the Ports Collection.
Getting Emacs to work
Why doesn't Emacs on hydra handle the Multi_key correctly? None of the information I found on the web seems to fit. But there's one hope: the development version of Emacs (/usr/ports/editors/emacs-devel/ in the FreeBSD Ports Collection). Build that. It took 8 minutes! That's much more than the normal version I built last week. Starting it was interesting. I got this window, which didn't even have copyable text: What's that? I built the standard version. But so far it works, and not only does the Multi_key work, it's been enhanced.
Another monitor fade
Another brief monitor fade this morning. It went away before I could react.
Aussie Broadband: support or bureaucracy?
I've ranted about the quality of Aussie Broadband support enough in the past few months, most recently in August, where I left them with some suggestions for consideration by top management. But they're not letting up. Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2023 01:02:45 +0000 From: Aussie Broadband <no-[email protected]> Subject: How did we do? How satisfied were you with our fault resolution process? How would you rate your experience? Fault Reference: 25867367 And they had a web form for me to fill out to answer the question. Problem: what fault is this? I don't have any other reference to the number, and of course the ?My Aussie?
hydra: Back burner
The other things I have to do have put most work on hydra on hold. But I'm using it, although there are some strangenesses. Today I had another window manager crash, again on hydra:0.3. But this time it was with a normal browser display: console.error: "Experiment next-generation-accessibility-engine-powering-screen-readers has unknown featureId: accessibilityCache" console.warn: services.settings: Could not determine network status. Message: TypeError: lazy.gNetworkLinkService is undefined JavaScript warning: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/12/05/us-students-math-scores/?utm_campaign=wp_the7&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_the7, line 183: Script terminated by timeout at: trackChanges/<@https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/12/05/us-students-math-scores/?utm_campaign=wp_the7&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_the7:183:299 i@https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/12/05/us-students-math-scores/?utm_campaign=wp_the7&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_the7:183:1052 [Parent 88484, Main Thread] WARNING: Failed to create DBus proxy for org.freedesktop.UPower: Operation was cancelled : 'glib warning', file /wrkdirs/usr/ports/www/firefox/work/firefox-120.0/toolkit/xre/nsSigHandlers.cpp:187 ** (firefox:88484): WARNING **: 15:43:22.359: Failed to create DBus proxy for org.freedesktop.UPower: Operation was cancelled console.warn: services.settings: Could not determine network status.
xterm and TrueType?
One of the things on my list for hydra is getting xterm to work with TrueType fonts. I've found lots of web pages addressing the topic, but somehow they all seem to miss my point. OK, try it out. I have a directory /usr/local/share/fonts/TTF with file names like luxirr.ttf and luximri.ttf, which I guess to be Roman and monospace roman italic. Try it out: === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/57) /usr/local/share/fonts/TTF 21 -> xterm -fa luximr It works! Well, sort of. Here the comparison between the current xterm and what I get from luxi: What a mess!
Another monitor dropout
Another dropout on my ?Matrix? monitor this morning. This time I got to the power button in time, and yes, it came back. But clearly there's more to it than the power button: the sounds that I mentioned happen every time it displays after blanking, and I would have noticed them if they had happened earlier. So potentially there's another replacement monitor to be expected.
Scan or photo?
Scanning the spice paste sachet was fairly straightforward. But the results were less than spectacular, so I tried again with my camera (second image): I hadn't expected that. And somehow, given my current work flow, it's easier to take a photo.
Mystery paste
Last time I was in town I bought a bag of ingredients for Kung Pao chicken, a little too hastily. Firstly, I have no idea what that is, beyond the belief that it's something that's cooked in the USA, and secondly this was definitely not from the USA: Yes, there's something in English stuck on the back, but nothing that gives the slightest idea of how to prepare it. I need a translation.
Chasing down the Emacs bug
So the only big problem with X on hydra seems to be the Emacs Multi_key problem. I've established that it's related to the version of Emacs installed on hydra. OK, how about building from source? It takes a while, but at the least it could help me find what option might cause it. OK, ?make all?. Turned to other tasks and looked at the screen a few minutes later. Stopped. What went wrong there? As far as I can see, nothing. hydra had built the entire Emacs port on 220 seconds! And for some reason I didn't need to build any dependencies.
Australia Post: How did we do?
Mail from Australia Post today: ?How was your recent delivery??. Ah, a chance to say what I thought. Or at least, that's what they said. It took several minutes before their web site responded, not once, but twice. But finally it did. Ease of collection: 0. Why? Oh, they didn't want to know that, though I had had a chance to enter some text earlier on. Try again? Sure, and this time I was able to enter the reference to my rant. Why hadn't they noticed that I had already answered? Race condition, it seems. Much later I tried again, and got the message that I had already responded.
CAPTCHA: How to chase away customers
A lot of the useful web pages recently have come from Stackexchange. Sounds like a good idea to sign up with them. Oh. Are you a bot? Please look at this CAPTCHA and tell me which of the images contains a crosswalk. No, stackexchange, I'm not a bot. I'm also not a US American, so I'm not really sure what a ?crosswalk? is. But I am sure that I find it insulting. So what if 100 bots sign up for stackexchange? There are other, less obtrusive ways to deal with them (rate limiting, for example). So I haven't signed up. I've been ranting about CAPTCHAs for nearly 15 years, and I still don't know why people use them.
What use ChatGPT?
Everybody's talking about ChatGPT as if it were taking over the world. But what I see is a very poor solution for the Turing Test. Quora uses it for some answers. I don't know why. Sometimes they're correct, usually stodgily written, and frequently amazingly incorrect. Here a couple over the last few days: When it is 12:00 am at Greenwich, the local time of one place is 8:00 pm. What is the longitude of that place? ChatGPT: The longitude of a place can be calculated based on the difference between the local time and the time at the Prime Meridian (0° longitude) at Greenwich, UK.
hydra: tidy up?
So gradually my problems with X on hydra are resolving themselves. Time for another one to crop up: Xcompose. While doing normal work, tried to enter a composed character (something like ö). Instead I got ¨o, the characters entered. Bad keyboard mapping? No, the same key (marked Compose) on each keyboard was mapped to Multi_Key. More investigation. Do I need additional settings? Checked when ~/.XCompose was referenced. Yes, when I start an xterm. But not when I start an Emacs. OK, try to hunt this down. What happens if I get an Emacs running on eureka to open a window on hydra?
Continued hydra pain
So where am I now with X on hydra? I still don't get the correct Alt key bindings. Yesterday I concluded that it's probably an xterm issue, not a bash issue, and found a couple of ways to compare settings. So I started with that today. editres. Followed the instructions on this page, but they didn't work. Select ?Get tree? and I only got a message "message sent to client asking for widget tree". It seems that the client wasn't interested. xrdb -query. That worked, and the man page suggests that I can get even more information with the additional -all option.
What use Australia Post tracking?
I've been following the progress of the monitor that I bought last week, of course. Australia Post keeps me informed. Scorptec told me that it was sent on Monday, but AusPost said that it was sent on Tuesday at 7:33, not a likely time for a commercial company to send things. It later decided that it had received the shipping information on Monday afternoon, and had approved it as ?ready for processing? after only a little over 2 hours. They then stored it for 1½ days before actually processing it and sending it to Delacombe, where it arrived less than 5 hours later on Thursday morning?the only transport so far.
Which 8 TB SSDs?
Spent a little more time looking round for 8 TB SSDs. There's precious little choice: only the Sansung 870 QVO. Scorptec, Umart, Mwave offer it for $899. Megabuy has it for only $886.88, though it's not clear whether that's the cheapest, since all are too polite to mention shipping charges. That makes it almost worthwhile, except that I'd really prefer a 12 TB drive. But I think the days of spinning rust are over. Should I wait until the current drive shows more problems, or should I bite the bullet?
hydra: cutover?
So: what do I need to do to cut over the X display from eureka to hydra? In principle the only outstanding issue is that I still can't use the Alt key with bash. But that can be fixed later. OK, move to the left. It's amazingly uncomfortable. Yes, I knew that it was only a temporary arrangement, but I was surprised how uncomfortable it is. Different screen heights, drawers in front of the left end of the displays, a mouse with a cord! That, too, I had forgotten. OK, back to check the Alt key issue. When I first fixed it on eureka, I noted two things: set the values in ~/.Xdefaults and add some entries to inputrc.
More X woes
It's high time I complete my migration to X on hydra. There's something seriously wrong with x2x between eureka and hydra. The cursor seems to land at random places, not made any easier by the fact that I can't see it disappear left from eureka:0.0 (there's no monitor connected). And maybe another problem is related, the random killing of the window manager on hydra:0.3. I had blamed it on firefox so far, but today it happened while running chrome. High time to migrate. What's stopping me? For reasons I don't understand, I can't get the Alt bindings to work. I started without the all-important entries in ~/.Xdefaults: !
Keyboard remapping: done!
Why am I having so much trouble remapping my Sun Type 7 keyboard? It worked fine last time. But this time I've been trying to do things incrementally, and that seems to be a problem. OK, start again from scratch. What do I want to do? Save the default configuration as revision 1.1 of ~/keyboards/sun-map-hydra. Remap the keys above the main keyboard, marked F1 to F12. Set them to F21 to F32. The key codes are 67 to 76 (F1 to F10), then 95 and 96 (F11 and F12). The 2 keys to the left of the F keys (marked Help, Esc): Map to F11 and F12.
Yet more new hardware needed
Seen in my nightly log files: +ahcich4: Timeout on slot 11 port 0 +ahcich4: is 00000000 cs 00000000 ss 00000800 rs 00000800 tfd 40 serr 00000000 cmd 0000cb17 +(ada2:ahcich4:0:0:0): READ_FPDMA_QUEUED. ACB: 60 08 68 5a 6f 40 0d 00 00 00 00 00 +(ada2:ahcich4:0:0:0): CAM status: Command timeout +(ada2:ahcich4:0:0:0): Retrying command +ahcich4: Timeout on slot 24 port 0 +ahcich4: is 00000000 cs 00000000 ss 01000000 rs 01000000 tfd 40 serr 00000000 cmd 0000d817 +(ada2:ahcich4:0:0:0): READ_FPDMA_QUEUED. ACB: 60 08 a0 5a 6f 40 0d 00 00 00 00 00 +(ada2:ahcich4:0:0:0): CAM status: Command timeout That's my 8 TB photo disk.
The window manager killer identified
The problems I had last week with dying window managers haven't gone away. It happened again today, again while doing something with firefox. And restarting the window manager failed again with the same message: Assertion failed: (ret != inval_id), function _XAllocID, file xcb_io.c, line 626. OK, if it's firefox's fault, what happens if I shoot down firefox? I can restart the window manager. I was also able to restart it.
More hydra fun
So it's clear that my next step with hydra is to remap the keyboard. That would mean that I could use it normally, so it also makes sense to move the small monitor to the extreme left and use the other three normally. I've done this before. nvidia-settings to the rescue. But today it was obviously in a bad mood. Yes, I was able to move it, but nothing I could do would get it to renumber the screens, so I now have, from left to right, the sequence Screen 1, Screen 0, Screen 2 and Screen 3. What do I do?
Ancient history in configuration files
I have a list of TV programmes to search for, and once a month I send myself a list to remind me, using cron, of course. But where do I store the list? Off looking through crontabs to find it. I failed: it must be in a script with a non-obvious name. But while looking, I found this entry: 0 0 * * * root cp -p /src/FreeBSD/5.0-CURRENT/src/usr.bin/calendar/calendars/* /usr/share/calendar >/dev/null 2>/dev/null That made perfect sense?once.
Artificial stupidity
For reasons I don't completely understand, but which I suspect is related to Indian school syllabus, there are lots of questions on Quora like If the time is 12 noon at 0° longitude, what will be the time at 75°E longitude?, and also lots of answers from people who have never heard of time zones. But Quora can do better: a ChatGPT bot that not only ignores time zones, but also can't count: At 12:00 PM at 0° longitude, the time at 75°E longitude would be 4:30 PM.
Yet another Matrix monitor issue
Another short dropout with my ?Matrix? monitor today. Tried to touch the switch, only half managed. But it came back round that time.
ssh authentication issue, ancient insights
A year ago today I discovered that I couldn't ssh from tiwi.lemis.com to freefall.freebsd.org?but only when the X server was started from eureka.lemis.com. That confirms the suspicion that I had last week.
hydra: Next step
What do I do now with hydra? The good news is that I can use it, and I'm doing so. In principle I could completely move away from eureka, but I still need the correct monitor setup and keyboard mappings. It doesn't seem worth messing around with the monitors until the new monitor arrives, but I could do something about the keyboard. Or could I? After multiple RTFM I still don't understand the expressions for describing key bindings with xmodmap, like this one: keycode 67 = F1 F1 F1 F1 F1 F1 XF86Switch_VT_1 The man page does divulge that there are a maximum of 7 bindings for a keycode.
Hugin on hydra
House photo day again today, and for once the weather was appropriate. So, process the panoramas on hydra? Yes, it almost worked. Once again I had white blanked-out areas on hydra:1, but I also got the expected windows, here on the two monitors to the right. But the other two monitors were blanked out (completely ?white?) . And when I selected ?Crop?, the first image of the sequence appeared outside any window on the left-most monitor. Here a photo after that point, and just as the background on the small monitor was changing back to the xearth display: What causes that?
More Nvidia setup
In preparation for today's house photos I tuned the X setup for hydra:1, which I hadn't looked at for nearly two weeks. Based on my experience since then, fired up the server and ran nvidia-settings against it. Yes, I was able to move the displays around, set the resolutions and save the configuration file. But what a difference! The configuration file expanded from 69 to 178 lines, including detailed definitions for each monitor.
Calibrating the new monitor
I was right that the new LG 27? 27UP850-W 4K UHD has a calibration function, right? Checked the manual (with the descriptive file name ENG.pdf) and found nothing. More searching on the web brought me to this page, describing the calibration software. So yes, all seems well
New monitor: done
Spent several hours today trying to decide on a new monitor. How do I make a choice? Pages that I looked at included: Bestproductsaustralia, which recommended a BenQ SW270C. And again they were too polite to mention the price until I followed a reseller link. The price I saw may not have been the cheapest, but at $1,566.25 it was way out of my range.
Matrix monitor insights
My old ?Matrix? monitor faded again today, first briefly, then long enough to be annoying. OK, where do I go from here? Check the power supply? How about turning it off at the switch first? As soon as I touched the switch, it came back again. Is this a flaky switch? It's also interesting to note the strange chirping noises that it makes when it comes back. I'm not sure whether this is new, or whether I just hadn't noticed before. It could be trying to sync the input, for example.
hydra: what next?
On with hydra today. For the most part it's almost usable. Only minor things get on my nerves, in particular the realization that a 180° view angle is not good for my neck. hydra:0.0 and hydra:0.1 are almost useless as a result. I think that 4 monitors is probably as much as I can comfortably use. And then there's another strangeness with x2x. It works surprisingly well, but now I have one joining eureka:0.0 west to hydra:0.3. In fact, they're both on the same monitor, so I can't see the cursor move from eureka:0.1 to hydra:0.3; there's just no cursor while traversing where eureka:0.0 should be.
A new monitor?
So it's clear that I should be looking for a new monitor to replace they dying ?Matrix? monitor. Yes, 27" is really the widest I can do (about 64 cm). But shouldn't I really be looking for a 3840×2160 resolution? As it happens, Friday is Thanksgiving in the USA, and the following day is called Black Friday because of the time skew. And the idea seems to have taken hold with retailers round the world. So I got mail from Umart offering big discounts on monitors. Even one that looks useful, the LG 27? 4K UHD UltraFine? IPS Monitor. Only $449!
More hydra progress
More work on hydra today. First, how do I use my new-found screen real estate? Can I put a browser on hydra:0.3 (using the monitor for eureka:0.0, which thus became inaccessible)? Yes! Can I run mail on hydra and send mail too? That had been an issue with dereel that I had put into the ?too hard? basket. But here, too, it worked with no problems. I just needed to start an Emacs on hydra:0.3 to avoid the control character mutilation that I had experienced (c-f changed to c-s-f, for example). And that also worked! The only issue was missing spell checker support.
hydra installation: progress
So are my authentication problems with freefall related to eureka? Yesterday's investigations suggested ?yes?. This morning, first thing, tried to access freefall directly from hydra. Success! Well, I've worked around the issue. I still have not the slightest idea why, or what the problem was, but somehow it seems that something in X has changed since my last build on eureka in 2015. But in the 25 years before that I have never seen this kind of incompatibility. And then there's the issue with Emacs, where Emacs windows on eureka get control codes changed (c-f becomes c-s-f, making it useless). OK, those are open questions, but they don't stop me from continuing with the migration.
More monitor dropouts
More dropouts from my ?Matrix? (brand) monitor this morning, and they lasted longer, up to about a minute each. Clearly it's trying to tell me something, and it's time that I listened. Time for a new monitor. Daniel O'Connor pointed out that I can get a new monitor with similar specs for under $200. So now the question: do I want a monitor with similar specs? 27" seems to be about the biggest I can fit on my desktop. Should I stick with the current 2560×1440 resolution or go to 3840×2160? My eyes aren't what they used to be, and 3840×2160 might cause problems.
Understanding hydra ssh issues
So why can I connect from dereel to freefall with no issues, but I can't from hydra with the same credentials? Spent an inordinate amount of time today chasing things up. Firstly, to my surprise, hydra (last update 18 October) is running OpenSSH_9.2p1, OpenSSL 1.1.1t-freebsd 7 Feb 2023, while dereel (last update 20 September)) is running OpenSSH_9.4p1, OpenSSL 3.0.10 1 Aug 2023. But then dereel is running FreeBSD 15-CURRENT, while hydra is running 13.2 STABLE. It shouldn't make a difference, but is it worth trying running dereel's version on hydra? Well, it might be worthwhile, but nothing useful happens: === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/7) ~ 67 -> /dereel/usr/bin/ssh freefall ld-elf.so.1: Shared object "libcrypto.so.30" not found, required by "ssh" And the other way doesn't do anything useful either: ...
Another catchup day
Another day spent doing lots of things with nothing to show for it. Found the race condition in mkpto1 (temporary files with fixed file names), finished yesterday's panoramas, and somehow that seems to have been all.
House photo proceessing, another week
Saturday is house photo day, and for the past couple of weeks I've been trying to migrate the processing to hydra, which is much faster than eureka. Much of the photo processing is either on distress, my Microsoft machine, or done by scripts. Many of the scripts are single-threaded, so that seemed to be a good place to start. mkpto builds a project file (name ending in .pto), and it takes a certain time to process. Do all the .pto files (one per photo) to speed things up? That's almost as simple as changing a ; to a &. Then process on eureka:1 to select the view and maybe set some masks (not necessary today).
Updating window manager config
One of yesterday's action items was to update the window manager (fvwm2) configuration. And that relates to my gradual conversion from ISO 8859-1 to UTF-8. Currently I have two ways to start an xterm, one with each encoding. I seem to have fixed most of the problems with UTF-8, so it's time to remove the ISO-8859-1 versions. And in the process, I need to set my shell environment accordingly. In more details: Set the locale in /home/local/share/abbreviations, which gets read in by ~/.bashrc: -export LC_ALL=en_AU.ISO8859-1 +# Bite the bullet (20231116) +export LC_ALL=en_AU.UTF-8 ...
More keyboard insights
One of the things that I still need to understand is why the identical keyboards on hydra and eureka generate different keycodes under X. Today Callum Gibson suggested a few things not related to X on IRC. First, you can test your keyboard type from a vty with kbdcontrol: === root@hydra (/dev/pts/8) /etc/X11 56 -> kbdcontrol -i </dev/ttyv0 kbd0: kbdmux0, type:AT 101/102 (2) Oh. Not exactly the answer I was expecting, nor anything of use. But === root@hydra (/dev/pts/8) /etc/X11 56 -> kbdcontrol -d < /dev/ttyv0 | less # alt # scan ...
X keyboard insights
The other thorn in my side with hydra X setup is the keyboard, of course. This time I started X without loading a key map. I saved the defaults to use for comparisons later on. After loading the keymap and saving it, I was able to confirm that the map was the same as on eureka. And the F3 mapping? My fault. I had mis-mapped it from day 1, over 10 years ago, and never noticed. But there's lots of fun ahead comparing the maps.
X on hydra: progress
Why am I having so much difficulty setting up X on hydra? Surely there must be an easier way. So far, based on Nvidia's instructions for Configuring Multiple X Screens on One Card I have created a configuration file that should do the trick. But it doesn't. OK, copy the configuration details exactly from that page and try again. That doesn't work either! Off searching for web pages that go beyond the documentation I had already found, and came up with How to set up dual or multiple monitors, also from Nvidia. That looks promising. It starts with: Open the NVIDIA Control Panel.
X server 0 on hydra
Another issue with the X setup on hydra is that there seems to be no way to revert to a default key map. xmodmap is the program, and it'll happily modify the current key map any way you want. But to get back to the default, it seems that I need to restart X. And given the issues with Hugin, I don't want to do that yet: first I want to set up server 0 (one screen per monitor). In preparation, did a couple of other things. First, I'm using an old two-keyed mouse until I get the configuration finished. I've been here before, but the current way to set middle button emulation appears to be: xinput set-prop 10 287 1 # Logitech wired I've already found instructions for setting up one screen per ...
Understanding hydra problems
One of the reasons I'm taking such a long time setting up hydra?apart from the fact that it's possible?is that I want to understand the right way to do things. And currently I'm completely baffled by a number of things, notably the different characters generated by the same keyboard on eureka and hydra. Both keyboards are Sun Type 7 keyboards with a USB interface. In each case I load a key map file that, in particular, remaps the Control key to Alt, the CapsLock key to Control, the keys on the left to F1 to F12, and the keys at the top to F21 to F32.
Another monitor fade
Over the last couple of months, my old ?Matrix? monitor has given cause for concern, briefly turning off or distorting the display, only once per day. But it has behaving for some time now. The last time I noted any problem was on 26 October.. Today it gave me a distorted display, only for a few seconds, but 4 times in a row. And then nothing again...
Hugin on hydra, again
So what's the issue with Hugin on hydra? So tar I have: It worked normally a week ago. Now it stops without explanation before displaying the initial screen. Trying to run on eureka is bound to failure: Hugin is too polite to run across the network. But it does try, and it starts displaying the initial screen before dying, thus lasting longer than on hydra. So somehow it must have something to do with X on hydra.
Latest Academia nonsense
In the mail today: 27 N 11-11-2023 To groggyhimself@l ( 957) Academia.edu N You have 1 highly engaged reader What's a ?highly engaged reader?? How can I find out? Read the message and I get: You have 1 highly engaged reader A total of 7 people have read your papers on Academia. Click here to see who: https://www.academia.edu/keypass/bm1K... That goes on to tell me that, for only $5, I can find out who the ?highly engaged?
More hydra pain
House photo day today, time to play around with Hugin on hydra again. Not a success. In fact, an absolute failure. I couldn't even start Hugin! No obvious reason, just a couple of meaningless error messages followed by: /usr/local/share/hugin/data/plugins/top_five.py CAT:Control Points NAM:keep 5 CPs per image pair fails @api-max /usr/local/share/hugin/data/plugins/woa.py CAT:Control Points NAM:Warped Overlap Analysis fails @api-max What does that mean? Did some package upgrade break this horribly fragile python? Still, no time to do anything today, so I processed the photos on eureka instead.
50 years since COBOL
In my calendar this morning: Nov 11 Greg Lehey writes GOPU, 1973 What's so special about GOPU? It was the only COBOL program I ever wrote, and it wasn't very clever. It wasn't even completely COBOL: it was an extension designed to talk to a CODASYL database. But I, the master assembler programmer, hated the idea of having to write in COBOL, and I took it out on the layout of the program and the identifiers. Things like code reviews didn't happen in those days: it worked, and that was enough.
Weather station insights
It's really irritating that the weather station has died now, just as the weather starts to get interesting. Can it be that the USB interface (or whatever it is) has recovered in the meantime? Tried starting it again on eureka, with the same results. OK, shoot down the window to kill all the processes that won't respond to a simple ^C and try again. No go. Check with ps. Dozens of dorun processes! dorun is a simple script that ensures that all the other processes keep running, and I had thought that it would go away if I shut the xterm window, but it didn't.
More weather station pain
Since my workarounds last month, my weather station has been running relatively reliably. Until today: ./wh1080 starting Can't read device: Unknown error or Device busy (16) That's nothing new. It happens about 20 times a day, and I just restart the wh1080 process (I can't recover programmatically). But this time it just kept repeating, and on one occasion I even got: Can't query database: MySQL server has gone away (2006) That must be one of the report processes, since wh1080 only writes to the database.
All phones down?
I've been having issues with phones lately, notably Monday's call to the USA. I had attributed that to the configuration change to enable international calls But today I had more problems calling a number in Ballarat. Why? We'll see if they continue, but it seems that Optus had a significant outage that they still haven't completely fixed (nor even identified the cause). ?Over 10 million customers and 400,000 businesses are affected by the outage?. 10 million is 40% of the population of Australia, and Wikipedia states ?Optus is the second-largest wireless carrier in Australia, with over 10 million subscribers as of 2022?.
eBay: More security
Mail from eBay today, offering me a thing called a Passkey. To quote: Passkeys are an alternative to passwords that allow you to sign into your eBay account using biometric authentication such as a fingerprint, pattern or PIN. OK, let's think about this: Fingerprint: requires a mobile phone. What kind of security is that? Pattern: potentially to be investigated, but once again it seems to need a mobile phone, like some of the password equivalents that phones offer.
More work overload
The FreeBSD Core Team doesn't require much work, but when it does, it comes unevenly. And the last couple of days have been a particularly busy time. Once again my mail inbox has overflowed onto a second page.
Boiling what?
Question in the German Quora today: Wie lange sollte man seine Eier kochen? On the face of it, that's ?how long should you cook your eggs??. But ?Eier? can mean eggs or balls (testicles). And I've been there before.
Chromium and multiple profiles
One of the reasons I still use firefox?a browser that I have always hated?is because I couldn't get Chromium to support multiple profiles. But it seems that it does now. Does it also now work across a network? Tried it out. Not what I expected: === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/15) /etc/X11 70 -> DISPLAY=eureka:0.1 chrome [29146:-1859547136:1107/102603.781897:ERROR:process_singleton_posix.cc(353)] The profile appears to be in use by another Chromium process (60349) on another computer (dereel). Chromium has locked the profile so that it doesn't get corrupted. If you are sure that no other processes are using this profile, you can unlock the profile and relaunch Chromium.
Strange change in hydra security output
Seen in the nightly output from hydra today: - 6173502 -r-sr-xr-x 1 root wheel 8928 Oct 14 13:46:53 2023 /usr/local/libexec/Xorg.wrap + 6172201 -r-sr-xr-x 1 root wheel 8928 Nov 2 13:46:40 2023 /usr/local/libexec/Xorg.wrap What's that? The man page doesn't say. The DESCRIPTION only describes the permissions needed to run it, something that really needs fixing. But it seems to be something (new) that starts the X server. What starts it? I thought that maybe /usr/local/bin/startx might, but if so, it's well hidden.
Zoom pain, a year later
Spent fully 30 minutes this morning trying to set up a one-on-one Zoom conference with a FreeBSD team member in the USA this morning. Zoom means camera and microphone, of course, and that's only on bde.lemis.com, my hand-me-down laptop. But I was sent the meeting code by email on eureka. How do I put it into the browser on bde? x2x to the rescue. And once again I had problems, insurmountable ones. We tried for half an hour, and it wasn't until after the discussion (on the phone) that I discovered that I had exactly the same problem a year ago today.
hydra X installation, day 2
Spent most of the day with X on hydra. It was even more work than I expected. First updating my personal X configuration files on hydra: .xinitrc, .Xdefaults, and the non-existent .fvwm/fvwm2rc-hydra:1.0/ needed to start things properly. Also ~/xe, which along with its helper file ~/xemarkers. Restart X. ?Couldn't find any screens?. Huh? That was just running. More examination and discovered that the original xorg.conf file worked, but the new one, updated by nvidia-settings, didn't. More playing around with nvidia-settings, which was also not very cooperative: === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/2) ~ 1 -> nvidia-settings nvidia-settings: Fatal IO error 22 (Invalid argument) on X server hydra:1.0.
More firefox pain
Since my last update of firefox, to version 118.0.2, things have become much less stable, and once again I'm experiencing multiple crashes per day. That's presumably because I'm running across the network, and hopefully it will go away when the hydra migration is done. But I should really try to find out how to run multiple instances of chrome on one server.
X on hydra
Enough procrastination! Today I continued my work on getting X to run on hydra. In principle it should have been a no-brainer: I already had a configuration file and most monitors in place. Only one monitor was missing. Well, I had the 7" monitor for my cameras, but that was as good as useless. So today Yvonne went and picked up a loaner from Chris Bahlo. First, though, I've been migrating my photo processing from eureka to hydra, and I need a number of programs. One is s3cmd, which loads my photos to DigitalOcean. It's in the FreeBSD Ports Collection, but they have chosen to call it net/py-s3cmd.
Bank of Melbourne bugs: insight?
Bill from Devin Lafranchi today. Pay by bank transfer. I have enough in my ANZ account, so went through all the pain of setting up a new payee and paying him. ?We'll need confirmation that it's you. We'll send an email to [email protected]?. Maybe they did, too, but of course that's not my registered email address; they're just too polite to write the real address. But they have it on record, and I get mail from them from time to time. After 5 minutes, nothing. This happens far too often (every time, it seems). Cancel. OK, Bank of Melbourne it is. Logon fail: ?Please match the requested format?
hydra: next steps
Why am I not getting more done with hydra? One obvious reason is that I want to get things right rather than getting them done quickly. And this font stuff is still irritating me. But it'll have to go on the back burner for a while. It's time to finally get the X configuration working. At least I should be able to use the current configuration for server 1, and all I really need is another monitor for the transition period.
The daily font pain
I really should be doing something else, but my difficulties with X fonts are still getting on my nerves. Why can't I find a font that provides representations for all characters that I am likely to find? And how do fonts add up? I've installed additional fonts for East Asian character sets, and they seem to get found automatically. I'm missing a lot of basic understanding. One thing that really irritates me is that Microsoft has none of these problems. Why not? Off searching, and discovered: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/x-org-ms-truetype-fonts.617/ contains: just copy the ttf files from a windows install (c:\windows\fonts\ , I think) to /usr/local/share/fonts/ .
Yet another xterm font attempt
I still haven't found a good solution to my xterm font problem. More searching brought me to how to use ttf fonts in xterm, from the NetBSD project. That looked like just what I was looking for, especially since it was probably related in environment. It's simple: install the fonts/liberation-ttf package and enter: $ xterm -fa 'Liberation Mono' -fs 10 Oh. FreeBSD doesn't have a fonts/liberation-ttf port. A bit of searching showed that it's called x11-fonts/liberation-fonts-ttf, with the information Liberation fonts from Red Hat to replace MS TTF fonts OK, try that.
Replace xterm with rxvt?
One of the names that cropped up relatively frequently in my search for an xterm replacement was rxvt. Do we have one in the Ports Collection? Yes, x11/rxvt-unicode, and it promises: rxvt-unicode is a clone of the well known terminal emulator rxvt, modified to store text in Unicode (either UCS-2 or UCS-4) and to use locale-correct input and output. It also supports mixing multiple fonts at the same time, including Xft fonts. Well, if rxvt is so well-known, why don't we have a port? Anyway, installed it: ...
Fonts: still not done
Checking my diary today, I had a link to Burmese cats. Oh. For that, I need ?Burmese? and Thai fonts. I'm still not done. Have I missed something about TrueType fonts?
Missing photos!
Juha Kupiainen told me today that not all the photos in this month's diary were also displaying. Checking, I discovered that I was behind in syncing no fewer than 5 days' photos. How did that happen? In any case, time to resync all of them: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/23) ~/Photos 187 -> for i in [12]*; do (cd 1 && make sync); done That will take a while.
Photos the ?normal? way
Yesterday Yvonne had a riding lesson at Anke Hawke's clinic at Chris Bahlo's place. Yvonne asked Chris to take photos of her with her (Yvonne's) Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark III. But no, Chris, who herself has a Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark II, chose to take the photos with her mobile phone! Why? I still have no idea. One of the important things about this kind of photo is the distance, and mobile phones don't have zoom lenses. Still, she took them. Now how to access them? Yvonne received information via Facebook, but fortunately it was just a URL for a collection at Google Drive, also not my favourite system.
xterm replacement?
Didn't do much work on the computers today, but I did try a couple of sites looking for a replacement for xterm. As I feared, not much help. I'll try again some other time.
Fonts: Microsoft beats X!
Spent much of today consolidating and documenting my experience with X fonts. I had wondered whether I had messed something up with my ~/.Xdefaults file, but there is none on hydra. So what I got is standard X. What a catastrophe! While writing it up, accidentally executed (view-hello-file), which brings up the word or phrase for ?Hello? in multiple languages. And some of them didn't render correctly: That could match the web sites that I couldn't display yesterday. So: I can display the fonts that I want with both xterm (as long as I choose a font size that I don't really want) and with firefox.
More font pain
Why does xterm render different font subsets on eureka and elsewhere? Clearly eureka has more fonts, but which? I've been saving email messages, nearly all spam, which have non-renderable characters in the Subject: line, like this: The images can be enlarged, but the second is a detail starting at the subject field of message 16. Clearly there's not much to be found there. More reading, notably this one, which explains the .Xresources file that I've been seeing.
More font investigations
So, do I have the ClearlyU fonts? Yes, sort of. Part of an OpenBSD CVS repository, where I found: Version: 1.8 6 December 2000 Clearly that's an old, worn-out magic font. Callum Gibson came up with another link, https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Guide_to_X11/Fonts But then I came up with this document, explaining how to set fonts specifically for xterm. The specifications are in the .Xdefaults file. And of course I (once) knew that. But why has it taken me such a long time to find it again?
Alternative video access methods
For a couple of years now I have been using youtube-dl to download videos. Apart from the finer-grained approach to displaying the videos (in particular single frame forwards and backwards with mpv and the lack of network issues), it also seems to avoid the advertisements that are becoming ever more invasive online. But they're not the only game in town. Today I got some other points, incongruously from the Unix Heritage Society mailing list. Here a selection: You can enjoy non-chopped up videos by replacing youtube.com by yewtu.be in related URLs (easiest way to remember).
Next firefox trick
I run my :0 X server with 4 X screens, one per monitor, as opposed to a single X screen across 4 monitors for server :1, something that Callum Gibson doesn't understand. That means that I can place a different browser window on each screen (monitor). But firefox has always made it difficult. Two different firefox instances on the same screen refuse to work, even if they're started from different machines: the second one hands over to the first, meaning that I get all the settings of the first instance. That's one of the reasons why I have 4 screens in the first place.
Another monitor glitch
My old Matrix monitor came up with a new trick today: distorted display, again only a few seconds. Can it be that the problem is with the display card and not the monitor?
More artificial stupidity
Mail from Michael James today, pointing at the latest feats of ?Artificial Intelligence?. Here an answer from Bard to the question ?if it takes 3 hours to dry 3 towels on a line, how long does it take to dry 9 towels on the line??: If it takes 3 hours to dry 3 towels on a line, then it will take 9 hours to dry 9 towels on the line. Assuming that the drying time is directly proportional to the number of towels, we can use the following equation...
Processing photos on hydra
hydra is something like 8 times as fast as eureka, and its disks are even faster. Clearly photo processing is one of the things I should be doing next. And how about that, it almost worked! The only issue was ~/public_html/photos/RCS, a symlink to a file on eureka. But I still need to investigate how to tweak parallelism so that hydra can convert up to 40 photos at once. And then there's mail. Decades ago (2003/04/17 04:07:38) I started modifying /etc/aliases to create fantasy emails. Nowadays this is handled by /usr/local/etc/postfix/virtual, and I thought that /etc/aliases had done its dash. But no, /usr/bin/mail still uses it, so I need the one entry +# One Ring to rule them all +root: grog + Also decades ago I ran into trouble with mutt: I couldn't ...
More X font investigations
What's the most reliable description of X fonts? Clearly it should be what x.org publishes. But somehow it wasn't on the list of options that I got during my search. But it's there: Fonts in X11R7.7. And it's worth reading. In particular, on page 8: If no font path is specified in a config file, the server uses a default value specified when it was built. And that's how the current server on hydra manages to find things. But it's not enough. A lot of stuff has changed in the last third of a century, including how fonts are specified.
hydra and X: the next step
The functions that I'm using on hydra are now working well. The next step is to continue configuring X. And there the confusion starts. What fonts? I seem to have most fonts that I need on eureka, but not on tiwi. And how do fonts work, anyway? If I run a web browser on hydra and displaying on eureka, some fonts, notably Chinese, Korean and Devanagari, are missing. Clearly the client is looking for the fonts on hydra, but where? And the configuration file generated by nvidia-xconfig doesn't have any mention of fonts at all. On eureka, /etc/X11/xorg-0.conf contains: FontPath "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/misc/:unscaled" FontPath "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/:unscaled" ...
More weather station woes
Why isn't my weather station software running properly on lagoon? It looks like it's hanging trying to read the configuration, which is in a MySQL database on eureka. But there are no error messages. OK, gdb time: === root@lagoon (/dev/pts/2) /home/grog/src/weather/WH-1080-lagoon 40 -> gdb wh1080 bash: gdb: command not found What? No debugger? Ah, I recall that people were having difficulty keeping it in sync with upstream development. OK, === root@lagoon (/dev/pts/2) /home/grog/src/weather/WH-1080-lagoon 41 -> pkg install gdb Newer FreeBSD version for package zziplib: To ignore this error set IGNORE_OSVERSION=yes - package: 1204000 - running kernel: 1201503 Ignore the mismatch and continue?
Bloody weather station!
One thing that seems to have changed with the arrival in position of hydra is my weather station. It's the most unreliable thing I know, and it has an only marginal wireless connection with the outside station. And it seems that the presence of hydra has so insulted it that it didn't want to communicate at all. Tried various alternatives. tiwi, in the lounge room, seemed a good choice, since it has a direct view of the outside station about 10 m away. But I couldn't start the program on. First there was library hell. ld-elf.so.1: Shared object "libmysqlclient.so.20" not found, required by "wh1080" Oh, how about that, I never installed it on tiwi.
hydra consolidation
Somehow I don't have enough time to invest in setting up hydra. Today, apart from documentation, I did relatively little. I was able to get my mail client and firefox to run on eureka's X server, however. That's much faster than with dereel, which was continually running into memory constraints. And that went surprisingly smoothly; soon I'll be able to power dereel down.
hydra: progress
Cancelling the excursion meant that I could finally start the dreaded task of setting up X on hydra.lemis.com. The whole thing is complicated enough that I've started (another) web page describing what to do. First, what driver do I need? I had the link https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/ to find the drivers, and once again I had to search the drivers to find which supported my card. Fortunately it was the newest one, 535.113.01. Load from packages? Not there, only nvidia-driver-535.104.05_1. OK, load that, note the important parts of the pkg-message: To use these drivers, make sure that you have loaded the NVidia kernel module, by running # kldload nvidia-modeset OK, do that, also remove the old driver for whatever I was using in March.
More Microsoft distress
Another random strangeness from distress today: That was on not one, but two windows after I tried to start rdesktop. Closed both of them and started again, normally. Why is Microsoft so inscrutable? Arguably, of course, this is an rdesktop issue.
CAPTCHAs: How to insult people
Should I inform people that we weren't going to the wildflower show? Probably it was canceled anyway, but it can't do any harm to follow the convoluted ?contact the organiser? on the web site, so I did that. ?Prove that you're human?. Another bloody CAPTCHA! And when I had done that, another. They seem to be getting more common lately. A few days ago, Bendigo Discount Pet Supplies asked for one, after I had entered entered my password. People, are you really trying to chase off your customers? I didn't complete it, but found that I was able to complete my purchase without logging in and without a CAPTCHA.
tiwi panic
tiwi.lemis.com, my TV computer, has far too little memory. I should have replaced it with another machine months ago, but every time I've played around with it I have run into connector hell, which even resulted in me buying a new TV. So for the moment I put up with web browsers swapping for 10 or 20 seconds at a time. But today was different. The whole display froze, though the mouse cursor showed that the system was still alive. Into the office and checked: firefox 100% CPU, X 100% CPU. kill -9 on the firefox seemed to do nothing, but in fact it only took about 30 seconds.
Help configuring X
By chance, saw this in my mail inbox today: Setting up X11: A no-tears guide to XFree86 configuration. Just what I want. Oh, wait. Something's not right. XFree86? That's not new. Wikipedia tells me that the last release was in December 2008, nearly 15 years ago. And the title of the article somehow sounds familiar. Of course, I wrote it, in July 1995, and the mail was just part of Academia's daily spam: ?Claim ... for your profile?. Reading it is interesting. It is almost only concerned with mode lines, something that has become completely irrelevant since the introduction of digital displays.
hydra: progress?
For some reason I'm hesitating with setting up X on hydra. Part of it is simply getting all the hardware physically in place. There are no fewer than 14 cables and 24 connectors involved, and they need to be placed on a desk top that already has 9 computers on it. But I got started today, and it looks as if it will all fit roughly as planned. The next step is configuration. The display card is an GeForce RTX? 3060 GAMING OC 8G card, based on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060. Where do I find the correct driver? By searching their driver list; they don't have a direct link.
Historical problems building new machines
I built eureka, at least the current iteration, nearly 10 years ago. And the one before that, by coincidence, exactly 15 years ago. And in each case I grumbled about the appalling documentation. Still, there's reason to believe that it's getting even worse.
More hydra investigations
Spent much of the day documenting my fun with hydra. One thing that became evident was on the BIOS display screen: ?DDR? (they mean memory, not Deutsche Demokratische Republik) speed 3600 MHz? I paid for 5600 MHz components. Is this a tuneable? How can I tell? Where's the BIOS manual? Followed up with the MSI web site, which insisted on changing www.msi.com to au.msi.com and then hanging. More reading the documentation, which contained a link to the BIOS: https://download.msi.com/archive/mnu_exe/mb/AMDAM5BIOS.pdf. Is that even valid?
Setting up hydra
I had already put monitors in place to set up X, but that's jumping the gun. First we need an operating system. In principle I have that, from my work in March. So what do I do? Clearly I need to copy the system image, but first, what's already on the disk? Boot a live system from a FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE memory stick and go looking for the disks. gpart show should tell me what's there. No geoms found! After some searching, discovered that the M.2 disks have names like /dev/nve0, and sure enough, there's one, but no subdisks. Is it completely empty?
Looking at hydra
Before setting up the new iteration of hydra.lemis.com, it's interesting to take a detailed look inside. Things have changed in the last 10 years. Between the first IBM Personal Computer 42 years ago and when I built eureka, changes seemed to be relatively small. CPU on a motherboard, slots for expansion cards, power supply at one side. About the biggest difference was that the original PC was oriented horizontally, while most of my machines in the last 30 years have been oriented vertically (?tower? housing). But hydra is different. Open the case and it's mainly fans: I identified the RAM at the right, noticeable because of its violent nature: ...
distress wants attention too
Recently I've had various issues with distress.lemis.com, my Microsoft box. For a while it wanted me to enter a password every time I connected, but that went away. Today, though, things hung, notably DxO PhotoLab. OK, Microsoft solution: reboot. After 5 minutes it still hadn't rebooted. Time for the Big Red Button. And yes, after that it rebooted, still with the old windows open. Stop DxO and... it rebooted again, and then performed updates that I didn't ask for! How I hate Microsoft!
The new hydra
Into town in the afternoon to pick up the new machine. Everything went smoothly, though it's clear that times have changed. Detailed manuals for the coolers, just a wordless sheet of paper with diagrams of how to put things onto the motherboard. A couple of CDs, but nothing relating to the motherboard. To make up for it, there were lots of silly stickers: It's interesting to note that some of the images bear a marginal resemblance to Beastie: Back home, spent some time looking for documentation, and finally found the manual.
More amateur scammers
Seen in mail today: Subject: Australian Taxation Office: Refund Notification That's stupid enough that it could almost be legitimate. What's in the message? From MGstatter@t-online.de Tue Oct 17 08:06:11 2023 ... Received: from mailout02.t-online.de (mailout02.t-online.de [194.25.134.17]) by lax.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 64A252811D Subject: Australian Taxation Office: Refund Notification Dear Taxpayer, After the last annual tax calculation of your fiscal activity, we have discovered that you are eligible to receive a tax refund balance of 3,850.50 AUD. Kindly complete the tax refund request and allow 5-10 working days to process it.
Paying for hydra
In preparation to pick up my new machine this afternoon, I checked my bank accounts. Yes, I had enough in my ANZ account, but only just. What about Bank of Melbourne? ?Please match the requested format?! That's been going on for years! When are they finally going to fix it? Spent some time messing around, noting that it happened on all browser/computer combinations I had. Called up the help line, but then decided that I couldn't face the annoyance of talking to somebody whose brain is stored in a script. Finally, somehow, I managed to access the system, after they first tried to send me a ?secure code?
New computer on its way
Call from Seth at Leading Edge Computers this afternoon. My new computer, the first for nearly 10 years, is ready for pickup. Joy? No, not really. Now there's a lot of work to do to get the thing working the way I want it. And that will be fun, at least partially because I've decided to once again run two machines: eureka will stay roughly as it is and be the gateway machine, and the new machine will get the name hydra from the HP Z800 that I inherited from Bruce Evans last year. I had chosen the name because I thought it had 24 CPUs, but that proved incorrect: there are only 12.
ICMP limits: shut up!
Yesterday's rate limiting for ICMP packets works. And it has reduced the number of packets by over 95%. But why does the system have to crow about it so much? /var/log/messages is full of messages like Oct 16 16:07:10 eureka kernel: Limiting icmp ping response from 10 to 5 packets/sec Oct 16 16:07:12 eureka kernel: Limiting icmp ping response from 6 to 5 packets/sec Oct 16 16:07:13 eureka kernel: Limiting icmp ping response from 7 to 5 packets/sec Time to find a way to mute this message.
Monitor dropout again
Yet another short dropout on monitor 2 this morning, this time earlier than on other days. What is it that makes it happen only once a day, and that relatively early?
Greg Lehey reconsidered
Last month I was surprised when ChatGPT came up with a surprisingly accurate description of me. For some reason I looked again today. I have changed! Hi! Greg Lehey is a computer scientist and software engineer. He is known for his work in the field of FreeBSD, an open-source operating system. Lehey has made significant contributions to the FreeBSD project, including writing the book "The Complete FreeBSD" and serving as the project's release engineer for several years. He has also been involved in various other open-source projects and has a strong background in Unix-like systems.
Why are you pinging me?
For some reason I have a whole lot of ICMP traffic, apparently random scans, resulting in this kind of output: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/4) ~ 120 -> arp -a | grep incomplete hisen.lemis.com (192.109.197.237) at (incomplete) on em0 expired [ethernet] taskumatti.lemis.com (192.109.197.224) at (incomplete) on em0 expired [ethernet] ? (192.109.197.196) at (incomplete) on em0 expired [ethernet] monorchid.lemis.com (192.109.197.133) at (incomplete) on em0 expired [ethernet] dhcp-249.lemis.com (192.109.197.249) at (incomplete) on em0 expired [ethernet] brewer.lemis.com (192.109.197.147) at (incomplete) on em0 expired [ethernet] Why? Is it a preliminary to an attack?
Palestinian religious distribution: ChatGPT speaks
What was the religious distribution of Mandatory Palestine in 1920? Above I wrote that 12% were Christians, and I still think that that's what I read. But there are experts. Bard didn't want to know, but ChatGPT tells me: In 1920, Mandatory Palestine had a religious distribution that consisted of a majority Muslim population, followed by a significant Jewish minority and smaller Christian and Druze communities. The exact percentages were approximately 78% Muslim, 11% Jewish, 9% Christian, and 2% Druze.
Login failures
What good is login protection in an unreachable network? I still use passwords, because it ?feels right?, but I don't log in very often. And when I do, my password (a very unlikely character combination) is more finger memory than a recollection of the character sequence. But then I had repeated root login failures. Why? Which words capitalized? Which special characters? I couldn't work it out, and in the end I had to reset the password (from an open xterm) to what I thought it had been. But somehow I had the feeling that something was wrong. Had somebody changed it?
VicEmergency again
Why can't I get alerts from VicEmergency app on my phone? Spent a lot of time looking through their excuse for documentation, coming up with at least the fact that they have a ?test notification?. So I tried that. Check notifications, nothing there. But they also have a ?send email? function. Set that up. Test. Yes! That's so much better than a mobile phone anyway. More searching. There are so many notifications that I can hardly see anything. I get a notification every time I wake distress.lemis.com, which connects to the phone. Newspapers, notably the Washington Post, tell me of all sorts of things of only marginal interest.
More disk errors?
Checking my overnight logs today, saw this: Oct 11 21:11:19 eureka kernel: (da2:umass-sim2:2:0:0): WRITE(16). CDB: 8a 00 00 00 00 01 2f 4a 5e 68 00 00 00 80 00 00 Oct 11 21:11:19 eureka kernel: (da2:umass-sim2:2:0:0): CAM status: CCB request completed with an error Oct 11 21:11:19 eureka kernel: (da2:umass-sim2:2:0:0): Retrying command This looks like a recovered write failure. But it's still a failure, something you don't want on a backup disk. But is it a disk failure? This is USB, and in the past it has been horribly unreliable.
Bushfire!
Yet another bushfire warning from the Ballarat Courier today: bushfire south of Ballarat. Where was it? That's what the VicEmergency app on my phone should tell me. But it didn't. We've seen this before. OK, off to the web to see what it had to say. Berringa! That's in my watch zone, and that's what the app told me when I asked. So why isn't this HORRIBLE VicEmergency app informing me? No notification (though I get them for things like bad weather off the US coast.
No TV today
One of the first things I do in the morning is update my German TV programme list from mediathekview.de, part of which is a cron job that downloads the latest information from verteiler1.mediathekview.de. But today it didn't get loaded: verteiler1.mediathekview.de wasn't found. But why verteiler1 in the first place? It used to be verteiler.mediathekview.de, but that no longer exists. When the name finally resolved, I checked: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/4) ~ 101 -> nslookup verteiler1.mediathekview.de verteiler1.mediathekview.de canonical name = liste.mediathekview.de. Name: liste.mediathekview.de Address: 88.99.10.178 Name: liste.mediathekview.de Address: 88.99.10.179 OK, that's good to know.
Backup times
Chris Bahlo is back from Europe, and she is feeling somewhat under the weather. COVID-19? It's worth a check, and since we have a lot of RATs, she came by to pick one up. A good time for our weekly backup change. Quick backup of my photos, which normally takes 30 minutes. Tue 10 Oct 2023 11:42:02 AEDT Photo backup started Tue 10 Oct 2023 11:52:26 AEDT Photo backup ended Huh? That's not normal. A quick comparison showed: sent 25,284,870,629 bytes received 34,427 bytes 13,981,147.39 bytes/sec Sun 9 Jul 2023 05:05:00 AEST Photo backup started Sun 9 Jul 2023 05:38:28 AEST Photo backup ended sent 14,958,992,459 bytes received 18,774 bytes 9,942,845.62 bytes/sec Tue 22 Aug 2023 05:05:00 AEST Photo backup started Tue 22 Aug 2023 05:33:27 AEST Photo backup ended sent 4,151,516,529 bytes received ...
Software archaeology
Now I'm gradually in a position to debug my makefs bug. After some fighting changes in gdb, I finally got into the meat of the ffs_mkfs() function, which looks like being the culprit. It builds up a superblock, which is referred to as sblock. But gdb doesn't want to know: Breakpoint 4, ffs_mkfs (fsys=fsys@entry=0x7fffffffe8e1 "./image2", fsopts=fsopts@entry=0x7fffffffe2f0, tstamp=tstamp@entry=1696902845) at /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/git/main/usr.sbin/makefs/ffs/mkfs.c:193 193 sblock.fs_avgfpdir = avgfpdir; === gdb -> p sblock No symbol "sblock" in current context. Huh? Optimized out?
More bug hunting
I'm still working at a snail's pace on the makefs bug. One thing that it has brought home to me is how much the time depends on being active in the scene. And I really seem to have little time to spare, so I only work for the odd half hour or so. The other issue is: how do I proceed? I have two comparisons that show the difference between the bug and correct behaviour: FreeBSD without size specification, and NetBSD with or without size specification. The obvious thing is to step through the program along with one of the others and compare what happens.
More monitor dropouts
It's been over a week since a series of daily short dropouts on monitor 2. And then nothing?until today, when it happened in the same manner as before: a short dropout round 10:00. This time I didn't attempt any recovery, and it still returned after a few seconds. Then, for the first time, it was immediately followed by a second dropout, which again recovered by itself. What is this? Overvoltage? No, Powercor has lowered the mains voltage to ?only? round 240 V, and at the time that was the voltage; it was higher later in the day when I was feeding in power to the grid.
NetBSD again
It's getting high time to look at the makefs bug, as I've been saying for some time. How? I can work my way through the code, but there's a simpler way: I can compare it to a version that works?on NetBSD. OK, get an up-to-date source tree. Don't I have a script somewhere? Yes! #!/bin/sh # $Id: update-NetBSD-cvs,v 1.1 2003/07/20 03:42:35 grog Exp $ PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin echo ====== `date`: Getting NetBSD CVSUP updates cd /src/NetBSD/1.5-CURRENT/src cvs -d :pserver:[email protected]:/cvsroot update -P -d echo ====== `date`: Getting NetBSD CVSUP updates But look at that date! Over 20 years ago!
Strange error message sensitivity
Interesting mail from Michael Hughes today. Summarizing: Today I was working on a script and did the following command: echo "" > file 2>/dev/null When I tried this on a file my user didn't have write permissions on, I recieved the error: cannot create file: Permission denied The error message didn't go to /dev/null. But he didn't get an error message when when he tried: echo "" 2>/dev/null > file What's going on here?
Rumours of my demise, or, Microsoft hates me
Mail from Michael James today, with startling information: Oh. They say that if you're on the Internet, nobody knows if you're dead, and I can confirm that from my list of Facebook friends, which includes at least 5 dead people. But myself? I feel like Mark Twain. This particular claim came from Bing, a Microsoft product, which I don't use. It's in competition, if that's the word, with ChatGPT and Bard. Did a bit of playing around with it, and it seems that its output is very raw.
System down!
Part of my regular morning ritual is to check the state of my machines. Most are local, but one is in Los Angeles, and another is in Frankfurt am Main. And today I read: === grog@ffm (/dev/pts/0) ~ 4 -> date; uptime Thu Oct 5 00:34:27 UTC 2023 12:34AM up 13:37, 1 user, load averages: 0.19, 0.32, 0.36 Aaarrrgh! Yesterday it was: === grog@ffm (/dev/pts/0) ~ 5 -> date; uptime Wed Oct 4 00:19:25 UTC 2023 12:19AM up 2067 days, 9:22, 2 users, load averages: 0.50, 0.57, 0.48 System down after 5 years, 8 months!
Configuration strangenesses
It's high time to continue looking at the makefs bug. But as a result of Monday's panic, kimchi, my NetBSD VM, had gone away. Not a problem. Reboot. Oh. I had lost some of the VirtualBox modules necessary to run. Never mind, that's why I documented them. But it didn't work! Failed to open a session for the virtual machine kimchi. Failed to open/create the internal network 'HostInterfaceNetworking-em0' (VERR_SUPDRV_COMPONENT_NOT_FOUND). Failed to attach the network LUN (VERR_SUPDRV_COMPONENT_NOT_FOUND). Result Code: NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005) Component: ConsoleWrap Interface: IConsole {872da645-4a9b-1727-bee2-5585105b9eed} What's that? Much messing around, including (finally!) putting the load commands in /boot/loader.conf, but the problem persisted.
Weather graph strangeness
It's been nearly 14 years since I started using gnuplot to plot the graphs for my weather station, and from the start I had difficulties. One of them was to convert the time to gnuplot internal time (the number of seconds since 1 January 2000, 0:0 local time). That's clear enough: subtract the time_t value of the date. But for reasons I never understood, things only worked when Daylight Saving Time was active, and when it finished I discovered I had to adjust by 2 hours! Clearly a workaround, but it has worked for well over 10 years?until now. Now the time is correct, but the date is off by a day.
Human intelligence declining?
I'm still trying to understand people who tell me that mobile phones aren't computers, and that it makes sense to copy files to local destinations via Google at the other end of the world. But the nonsense continues. Today I read on Facebook that a class of science students wasn't able to find files on their computers: Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached... the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations' understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.
Artificial stupidity again
Silly question on Quora today: I am thinking of a three-digit number. The tens digit is more than the ones digit, the hundreds digit is seven less than the tens digit. What is the number? Well clearly that's silly. There are a large number of solutions to those constraints. But to my surprise, none of the answers were complete and correct. OK, once again artificial intelligence to the rescue. Bard tells me: There are only three possible three-digit numbers that satisfy the given conditions: 801 ...
Panic!
Into the office first thing this morning. Number 2 monitor on eureka displayed Boot: Another crash! Why? Recovered as normal, and then saw in the logs: panic: cannot reassign paging buffer Well, that's a different one, anyway. Fought my way through the reboot, but I couldn't start the weather station software: device not found. No obvious reason for that, so I shut down, powered off and restarted. Then everything worked, sort of.
Next bushfire!
The bushfire season is really coming early this year. Nothing more round here, but in Gippsland there are a number. This one concerned me: Where's that? North of Briagolong, where my cousin Gill and husband Kline live. How close is it? Compare with Google Maps: Now doesn't that say a lot? I have the exact coordinates (on nearly every photo I took at the memorial for my aunt Freda last January: the house is at 37°48'40.1"S 147°06'28.0"E).
Android networking: the expert speak
I have assumed that my problems with WiFi FTP Server were due to a poor reimplementation of the TCP/IP stack. But is that assumption correct? Asked my tame artificial Intelligence bots: ?Does Android have a full TCP/IP stack?" . ChatGPT tells me Yes, Android does have a full TCP/IP stack. It is based on the Linux kernel and includes all the necessary protocols and components for communication over the internet, such as TCP, IP, UDP, and ICMP.
Android networking: why so castrated?
Discussing my issues with FTP on hirse today. Android is based on Linux, which has a full-featured TCP/IP stack. Why did the author of WiFi FTP Server have to reimplement the stack? Once again people on IRC amaze me. They're not stupid?in fact, quite the contrary?but they seem to accept the bad design decisions as something normal, even necessary. ?A mobile phone is not a computer?. " Why use TCP/IP when you can upload to Google and back down again?" That kind of attitude is bad for my blood pressure. Of course, there's an assumption on my part here: Why, did the author of WiFi FTP Server have to reimplement the stack?
The daily monitor fade
It really seems that my number 2 monitor has one brief failure every morning. It the recovers and runs normally for the rest of the day. It happened again this morning. This time it faded more slowly, though still in less than a second, and then recovered by itself. What do I do? So far, I think, nothing. I'll wait until it fails more consistently. If it fails completely, I have other monitors to replace it with, though they're lower resolution (only 1920x1080).
Android networking errors?
I have a lot of GPS logs on hirse, my Android phone. How do I get them onto a real computer? FTP, of course. Android is based on Linux, so an ftp client should be part of the base installation, but no, Android is too Modern for that, so I had to install an app, WiFi FTP Server. Savour the layering violation in that name! But it works. Well, most of the time. Today I tried downloading all the files in the directory, and on one it hung: ?stalled?. After 10 minutes I gave up and restarted, this time selecting individual files.
ChatGPT: not that bad after all
I've had a hard time getting to accept ChatGPT, but it seems that various factors have helped. Last week I quoted an example published on Quora, which contained the nonsensical claim A 35mm lens is considered a "normal" lens, and the general rule of thumb for the distance between a subject and a normal lens is to be about the same distance as the focal length of the lens. So for a 35mm lens, the subject should be about 35mm away from the lens.
The daily monitor fade
Another short dropout of number 2 monitor today. I'm beginning to see a pattern: it happens in mid-morning, only once, and only lasts a few seconds. What can that mean?
VicEmergency: Decades of incompetence
I've been complaining about VicEmergency and its predecessors over 15 years, but they still don't have their act together. Now, of course, there's an app, and I have it set up to warn me if there is any danger within 20 km of my property. Today there were two bushfires about 3 km away. The danger area came up to 1 km from my house. What did VicEmergency tell me? Nothing. When I fired it up, it knew: The grey area in the second image is my ?watch zone?.
Bushfire!
I receive a news summary mail from the Ballarat Courier several times a day. Basically just a headline and an exhortation to pay up for a subscription price about 10 times the combined price of the New York Times and the Washington Post together. Today: ?Bushfire south of Ballarat?. OK, that's where we are. How far away is the bushfire? The horribly defective VicEmergency should tell me. Oh. It's between Dereel and Mount Mercer, about 3 km east of here. In fact, something that nobody seems to have noticed, there were two of them, both in a pine plantation. Arson?
The daily monitor dropout
Every morning now it seems that my number 2 monitor drops out for a few seconds. This time I got as far as locating the power button before it came back.
More ChatGPT surprises
I still can't get my head around ChatGPT's reputation. What I've seen is not overly convincing. But does it know me? Yes, it seems, but it scares it: That question was successful on the second attempt, and in fact the result was quite accurate: Greg Lehey is an Australian computer scientist and author known for his work in the field of Unix and FreeBSD operating systems. He is particularly well-known for his contributions to the FreeBSD project, an open-source Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD).
ChatGPT: Artificial stupidity
Yesterday I tested Google Bard as a supplier of recipes, but gave up on ChatGPT. Why? I don't recall, just that it tried to make life hard for me. OK, check again. Oh. It won't let me log in any more. And, not for the first time, it didn't send me a new password when I asked for one. OK, sign up again with a new email address. It wants my date of birth! That's one of the main security questions in Australia. Ah, ?We will only use this date to verify your age?. Isn't that stupid? If I'm an even marginally intelligent 13-year-old, I'll invent a date like 13 January 2000.
Finally! A git commit
I've been gathering courage to attempt to commit Saturday's man page change. Today I had enough. It should be simple enough: git pull to be sure that my tree is up to date, git commit to commit locally, and git push to commit to the global repository: === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/10) /src/FreeBSD/git/main/usr.sbin/makefs 11 -> git commit makefs.8 hint: Waiting for your editor to close the file... Waiting for Emacs... [main 915af883221a] Explain the -d option. 1 file changed, 6 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/10) /src/FreeBSD/git/main/usr.sbin/makefs 12 -> git push freebsd Enumerating objects: 9, done.
Another monitor dropout
Another very brief monitor dropout today. I wonder if it's the monitor or the (separate) power supply. I no longer think that it could have anything to do with the computer.
Artificially intelligent recipes
I'm gradually getting bored with the (mainly south-east Asian) breakfasts I've been making. Today I tried the Hokkien Mee that I first made in April. OK, but not spectacular. Can I improve on it? Recently I've seen some good results from artificially intelligent sites. Why not ask there? ?What is a good recipe for Hokkien Mee??. And how about that, it came up with a recipe that proved to be a rephrasing of this recipe. Rather unusual, but certainly worth thinking about. It also had two other drafts which proved to be other rewritings of the same recipe. It should have been able to find more.
AI assists spam?
Lately I've been getting a number of spam messages like this one: 86 N + 24-09-2023 To groggyhimself@le ( 322) Careers World ND+ -- 56 Committer Core Team Member jobs in Taunton -- OK, we have three keywords here: ?Committer?, somebody who commits to a source tree (when he's not too disgusted by git), ?Core Team?, something that also matches me?and Taunton, the town where I went to school 60 years ago. How could anybody come up with such a list of keywords?
Dying monitor?
Shortly after arriving in my office this morning, monitor 2 (the 2560x1440 one) turned itself off. No display, and the red power LED went on (to indicate ?power off?) . Only for a few seconds, but it repeated twice. Oh. Part of the decision on my new computer was to decide how to drive that monitor with its relatively uncommon dual DVI interface. But I've had it for almost exactly 11 years. It has certainly lasted longer than I expected, maybe longer than any monitor I have used continually; if it were to give up now I wouldn't be overly concerned. And then, obviously unrelated, my iftop display got corrupted: the local address field was replaced by * on every line.
No computer work
Somehow yesterday's experience with git completely demoralized me. Yes, I think I have identified the problem and worked around it, but I couldn't bring myself to continue, neither with git nor with my debugging. How I HATE git!
A use for ?artificial intelligence?
What do you serve along with kippers? I really don't recall what I used to eat. How about asking an artificial intelligence, in this case bard.google.com? kippers are a type of smoked herring that is popular in the united kingdom and other parts of the world. they have a strong, smoky flavor and are often served for breakfast or lunch. here are some ideas for what to eat with kippers: Eggs: Kippers are often served with eggs, such as scrambled eggs, poached eggs, or fried eggs.
Another NFS bug?
My mail inbox is located on eureka, but I read it from a number of locations, including dereel and tiwi. Today I removed most of the messages on tiwi, but when I came back later, dereel claimed that some were still there. Why? The file stats looked correct, but the contents looked different on dereel, including deleted messages and stopping in the middle of a message. It went away after about 10 minutes, but why did it remain in that state for so long?
Git, how I hate you!
More work on makefs today, making moderate progress. But one thing is clear: the man page needed updating, and I've done so. Now just to commit it. Oh, that's an old, worn-out magic word. Now I need to commit and push it. OK, first commit. Hang. After quite some time, an error message: === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/1) /usr/src/usr.sbin/makefs 17 -> git commit makefs.8 hint: Waiting for your editor to close the file... /usr/local/bin/emacsclient: can't find socket; have you started the server? /usr/local/bin/emacsclient: To start the server in Emacs, type "M-x server-start". /usr/local/bin/emacsclient: No socket or alternate editor.
NFS amusement
Strange message in the overnight logs from bde, the laptop. OK, fire up an xterm and see what's going on. No response. But ruptime tells me that it is up (for 320 days). Looking at the mail message, the headers said Received: from bde.lemis.com (flachmann.lemis.com [192.109.197.247]) Oh. That's a consequence of the playing around with the Netcomm NF20MESH last month. I had to get an address with dhclient, and that was the one. OK, stop dhclient and assign the address manually. Still no xterm! A bit later, though, one popped up.
More makefs insights
Now that I have kimchi running, I can compare the output of makefs on dereel (FreeBSD) and kimchi (NetBSD). Does the bug occur on NetBSD as well? No. But there are other differences of interest: On NetBSD it creates a file system with numerous cylinder groups, while on FreeBSD there is only one: -Extent size set to 32768 -density reduced from 1600880 to 8192 -./image2: 600.0MB (1228800 sectors) block size 32768, fragment size 4096 - using 1 cylinder groups of 600.00MB, 19200 blks, 76800 inodes.
More VirtualBox fun
So why can I run networking under VirtualBox with eureso (FreeBSD) but not with kimchi (NetBSD)? It must be the configuration. ?Power down? kimchi and look at the configuration. It's identical! OK, reboot and look at the probe messages. But I didn't need to: it came up with networking enabled. So it seems that a saved image state maintains some recollection of the network state.
Lying scales!
For 6 months now I've been weighing myself daily. TL;DR: I weigh about 86 kg, giving me a body mass index of round 23. But I'm doing this more out of curiosity than concern about my health. Yvonne got new scales six months ago, so I had a set in the bathroom. But I've noticed something strange: the scales have a resolution of 100 g, and very frequently I've had the same reading for days on end. Six days at 86.1 kg. That can't be right. OK, pick up a stool, weigh again. 87.9 kg. Put down the stool, weigh again.
Looking at makefs
Looking at the source for makefs was interesting. Nicely laid out, but not a single comment that I can see. Still, one of the more interesting things was a whole lot of debug code, invokable from the command line and clearly aimed at people like me who have to find out what the thing is doing. Once I understand that, the rest could be trivial.
VirtualBox again
makefs, the program that I'm looking at at the moment, was originally written by Luke Mewburn, who is a NetBSD developer. How does the program look under NetBSD? I have an old virtual machine; let's look. But once again I couldn't get networking working. I've been there before, more than once. Last time I wrote: The issue seems to be which klds to load. The important one is ng_ether, which in fact has nothing directly to do with VirtualBox. But just loading it doesn't seem to be enough; today it didn't work until I stopped VirtualBox, unloaded the kernel modules and loaded them again.
Paying for the computer
Seth wants a 50% deposit for the computer, which seems reasonable under the circumstances. OK, transfer the money. Dammit, another issue with the Bank of Melbourne web site. Login failure. Oh, I've changed it. OK, try again. How I hate these blanked-out fields (??????) ! At least they could give me the option to display them. Finally filled them all out, press the big button. ?Please match the requested format?! I've seen that before, though I haven't recorded it here for some time. OK, try with Microsoft and the correct credentials. Yes, I got in. Put in the transfer details, confirm 3 times, press the big button.
Next Microsoft distress
Processing photos on distress with DxO PhotoLab, I ran into an almost daily occurrence: it hung. OK, shoot it down. No can do, says Microsoft: What's that? A requirement that I restart the computer too? Tried that, and it displayed ?rebooting? for several minutes until I thought to stop the rdesktop session. And then it worked again. What a mess this system is!
Debugging again
It's been quite some time since I've done anything resembling programming on the FreeBSD code base, but today was the day: there's a bug in makefs, which proves to be an interesting program originally written by Luke Mewburn. OK, should be straightforward to fix, but first I have to find my way round the source tree again. Problem is repeatable as stated: use the -s (size) option and it generates an invalid file system, one that fsck can't fix, though it seems to work well enough apart from that. OK, build the program. How do I select debug? More to the point, though, where is the object?
Amazon security
Checking my Amazon order, I was required to submit myself to yet another 2FA authentication, which I am beginning to hate with a vengeance. It seems that somebody had tried to break into my account: Someone who knows your password is attempting to sign-in to your account. When: Sep 19, 2023 06:55 PM Pacific Daylight Time Device: Mozilla Firefox Linux (Desktop) Near: California, United States That was me, of course, at 11:55 AEST on 20 September in Victoria, Australia, using a FreeBSD.
ATO scare
Mail purporting to come from the Australian Taxation Office this morning: We're getting in touch regarding your recent request to either establish a new self-managed super fund (SMSF) or to make changes to your existing SMSF, LEHEY FAMILY SUPERANNUATION FUND. We have processed your request. To prevent fraudulent activity, the ATO sends this email when: You have been added as a member to a new or existing SMSF A new member has been added to or removed from your SMSF, or ...
Artificial stupidity?
I still occasionally answer questions on Quora, though I don't really know why. Today there was a question that I could skip: How far should a 35mm lens be from a subject?. The answer's obvious: so that it fills the frame. But Quora, after finally removing their spam generator, have now linked to ChatGPT, thus giving me the opportunity to evaluate its accuracy. Today was a low point: A 35mm lens is considered a "normal" lens, and the general rule of thumb for the distance between a subject and a normal lens is to be about the same distance as the focal length of the lens.
Amazon delivery times
I've been idly wondering how accurate Amazon's delivery time estimates were. On Sunday, before I paid, all was to be delivered on Friday. Then they split the order, and only the first part was to be delivered by Friday. Not a worry, since I can't pick it up until the following Wednesday. But that was making assumptions. Today a Toll van pulled up in front of the gate, and a bloke brought in a small package. My first Amazon delivery, due on Friday! Given the detail in which they report delivery times, that's inaccurate, of course, but a big difference from eBay.
technology, opinion
Nobody has been able to reproduce the bug building TeX that I reported at the beginning of the month. Why? Something in the back of my head whispered ?environment pollution?. Well, not in those words, but that sounds about right. What if I have an environment variable that confuses the port build? Simple: try without any additional environment variables and see if it still happens. But how do you start a shell without inheriting the variables of its parent. It's very difficult. But if I start from getty (in other words, log in on a vty or virtual terminal), there's not much to inherit.
Which domain registrar?
I've had the domain lemis.com since the days when there was only one domain registrar worldwide. Now there are hundreds, if not thousands. And most seem to be flaky. Since 2005 I've been using GANDI, and I've been relatively happy. I said so today on IRC, and was told that GANDI had been sold to a registrar with a poor reputation: <jamie> I don't remember the exact story, but gandi.org got bought out by someone and a whole lot of people moved their domains off them <Docco> jamie: from the orange site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37455998 * groggyhimself follows Docco' link and tries to guess dates.
FreeBSD: a complete system?
I've more or less made up my mind about my new computer; I'm just waiting to give the stragglers a chance to make an offer. But one problem seems to be common to all Ryzen motherboards: they use the RTL8125 Ethernet controller chip. And it seems that FreeBSD doesn't have a driver for it! Well, not quite. There's one in the Ports Collection (net/realtek-re-kmod, a name so obvious that it took me 10 minutes to find it even after I knew that it was in that directory. Is that the only one? The pkg-descr includes: This is the official driver from Realtek with a few patches to improve stability and performance.
Terrible rendering of photo screen shots
Whenever possible, I take a screen shot if I want to save a display, like the firefox's misbehaviour yesterday. But that's not always possible, and the alternative of taking a photo is orders of magnitude worse. No matter what I try, I can't get rid of the Moiré, and the gradation is just plain terrible.
Bloody firefox!
Yesterday I discovered to my annoyance that firefox allows sites to spam me even when no windows are open. My guess is that this is an attempt to emulate similar monstrosities in mobile phone systems. But I found out how to disable them. Did I? Today I got: Is that the same? No, not quite, but from the same site. I just blocked that yesterday! OK, how about notification settings? Not blocked! Is firefox teaming up against me? Blocked everything this time; I wonder if it will remain that way.
Catching up on the Seasiafoods order
I still haven't heard back from Seasiafoods about my order on Tuesday. Surely they must have a phone? Google to the rescue: yes, 0404 088 005. Called. No reply, finally voice mail. But is there not a real phone number? Google Maps shows a shop called Dong Nam almost exactly where they claim Seasiafoods to be, and it has the number 02 9211 1927. I seem to recall a mention of that name on their site, so I can always try that if all else fails. But some hours later I did get a call back, from a Chris, who explained that the web site might not be the easiest to understand, but that they don't post foodstuffs: they deliver.
Browser supported spam
While watching TV this evening, saw a popup at top right of the screen: ?Your computer is infected with a virus?. It went away before I could examine it more carefully. And it repeated many times, always elusive. Well, yes, teevee.lemis.com is a computer. But it runs FreeBSD, and we don't have no steenking viruses. Some web page in the browser? Stopped the browser, restarted. Still there! Stop, restart, not recovering any pages, Still there! Is it maybe something else that is doing it? Much checking with ps, without any results. Something accessing the X display from elsewhere? I don't think my firewall would like that.
Grandstream copout
Yvonne into the kitchen this morning to tell me that her phone wasn't working. When I had time to look, discovered that it was the cordless phone connected to the Grandstream HT802 that had already given me trouble, most recently on Sunday. Clearly it was wedged again, as the Aussie Broadband status page confirmed. OK, I've established that a reboot will unwedge it, and it did again. But then it occurred to me. Wasn't there a setting for periodic reboots? Yes! So they know of the problem, and this is their ?solution?! What a cop-out! In that connection it's interesting to see their syslog entries, many of which report memory allocation errors.
Next computer quote
Another quote for my new computer in today. Surprise! It looks almost good. They have even found a case that is not only not stupid-looking, but also promises good sound insulation. About the only thing to wonder about is the supply of a Microsoft ?Windows?. And so far also the lowest price, $3,899. Still 2 quotes outstanding, but I'm tempted.
Bloody robot traps!
Looking at IMDB today, I was presented with a couple of tests: Yes, bloody IMDB, I'm human, and I have human emotions. I don't need that kind of insult. Do it again and I'll stop using you. But in fact, it didn't. The next time I tried, it was normal again. Still, it's indicative of a worrying trend. I can understand that many sites want to ensure that they're not abuse by robots, but why?
Still more VoIP pain
Finally sent off my reply to my Aussie Broadband complaint, recommending My suggestions all boil down to one thing: improve communication between your departments. In particular, Establish clear and useful escalation procedures. In the current situation, two different level 1 support people came up with two different approaches to the problem that I had, both ineffective. In one case, it was clear that the consultant lacked the necessary understanding of the issue.
PC choice, from an expert
Over the past couple of days I have looked further at the two quotes for my new computer system. On Friday I came to the conclusion that the quote did not include a graphics card, but in fact it included two Gigabyte GTX 1650-D6 4GB. Once I fought my way through the description page, which once again highlights cooling, I discovered that they are, indeed, graphics cards, and the images suggest that they have DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs. But why should I have to fight my way through to discover that? Overall I have been rather disappointed with the two quotes for the new computer that I've had so far.
Hugin pain
House photo day today, requiring Hugin. I had set the ?Simple interface? recently to follow a bug, and I had to reset it. But it had removed all my settings! Well, that's what a backup is for. Found the last sane copy of ~/.hugin and restored it. And Hugin went and overwrote it! I'm not sure how, but part of it is related to the fact that ~/.hugin stores all sorts of things that it shouldn't, such as the last working directory, and I have a script that fixes that. But that was decades ago, and I had to find my way through the mess again.
VoIP pain without end
What are CJ Ellis' problems calling Aussie Broadband support? An obvious way to chase them down would be to swap the router/VoIP controller. I've been thinking of putting back the Cisco SPA122, which I have been calling an SPA112 all this time, but to do that I need to reset the thing. And for that I had already established: Connect an analog phone to the ATA device and access the IVR by pressing the asterisk key four times: **** Press the appropriate code to reset the unit: Press 877778# to reset the unit to the defaults as it shipped from the ITSP.
New computer: next quote
Today another quote came in for my new computer. Like the first, it's amazingly inaccurate. Although I had asked for an AMD Ryzen 7950X, it specified an Intel i9 13900K, with of course only 128 GB of memory. Yes, I suggested offering that as an alternative, but that's all I got. I need to check to see if the Silverstone SETA-D1 mid tower chassis has a window, but just in case, it also offers ?WIndows 10/11 PRO 64 Digital product ONLY?, although I had specifically mentioned FreeBSD. It also included a Corsair H100i Elite RGB, which I thought was a graphics card, but which proves to be a CPU cooler.
Next new system quote
Another quote for a new system today, showing that they hadn't read the specifications: only 64 GB of (violent) memory! And a couple of other details are strange too, including a case with a window in it, and they have quoted two display cards, each with one HDMI and 3 DisplayPort connections. I see that it's going to be fun going through these quotes. One thing of interest established itself during a discussion on IRC: currently FreeBSD doesn't have (adequate?) support for the Realtek 8125 2.5 Gb/s NIC. Neither does Realtek's web page: It seems that the currently usable driver is a port, net/realtek-re-kmod.
VoIP: The pain continues
CJ Ellis still has problems with his VoIP setup! I'm beginning to wonder if they're a case of PEBKAC, but if I decipher his statements correctly, he tells me that he can't call voice mail because he got a busy tone after dialing the first two digits. And he can't contact Aussie Broadband support for reasons that I don't understand: 1300 strtaight away to message , choose from the following ,residential services press 1 , small busiuness services press 2 , for enterprise servic es press 3 . I press one AT the first , then 2 then the 3rd , I then press 1 again , the message goes around again.
You have open ports!
Mail from CERT-Bund today: Over the past months, systems responding to SNMP requests from anywhere on the Internet have been increasingly abused for DDoS reflection attacks against third parties. Please find below a list of affected systems hosted on your network. I've seen that before. But I don't use SNMP. But the list explains: "asn","ip","timestamp","system_desc" "4764","192.109.197.198","2023-09-04 07:40:56","Brother NC-8500h, Firmware Ver.1.02 (13.03.07),MID 84E-403" My printer! I wonder if there's a way to disable it on the printer.
PC build questions
Call from Mark of Tower IT today, with a surprising number of questions. At first he had not been able to find an X670E or X670-based motherboard that would accept 192 GB of memory, though he later found one. Instead he suggested the B650 chipset. What disadvantages? That's for me to find out, and this overview should help. I'm happy to have the fastest, but would I use it? During the subsequent discussion it eventuated that I can use effectively the same graphics cards I have now, or pay up to $1000 for higher performance card. But I don't have any performance issues at the moment.
Build me a computer, next step
While in town, went round to the computer companies that I had identified last week. To my surprise, all were there, but they all appeared to have closed down. That's just a matter of lighting, I think: they were all open, and all were interested in building the machine for me. Probably the one that made the best impression was?despite the name?Plus Gaming, where the bloke I spoke to (and whose name I didn't get; based on his appearance I've called him ?Barbarossa?) gave me an interesting insight: Intel processors are better for virtualization than AMD. That's definitely something to follow up on, though the bloke at MR IT tells me that virtualization is something very new, and the current crop of processors are the first generation to do it.
Microsoft pain again
I really only use Microsoft for photo processing. Today the various software misfeatures ganged up on me. Today ?Perfectly Clear? came up in full screen mode. Normally that wouldn't be an issue: with X I do that all the time. But Microsoft doesn't really support that: to start programs you need to be able to click on the frame that does duty for the root window, and there's no way to lower a window. How do I get rid of the thing? I can't even stop it! Oh, yes, I can. But when I restart it, it's still in full screen mode.
Air conditioner maintenance
Tony Nesci along this afternoon to look at the air conditioner. As expected, he found that the refrigerant level was too low, and he had to add 500 g. He even found the leak, some loose seals round where the refrigerant was added. Stupidly, I forgot to get a photo, but it seems surprising that it was so obvious. And now, of course, we need to wait for the next sub-0 night. 10 months at the earliest?
Electric fence interference
Garry Marriott, our neighbour to the south, has a new TV and has installed a new antenna to go with it. And it seems that the combination is suffering from interference. He came over today with Karel, an antenna man who thought it might be our electric fence. Guilty as charged, I fear. But why only now with the new, better equipment? Karel thought that it was because our earthing rod was only 50 cm long: It should have been at least 80 cm. But that's clearly not the cause. And then the braid that we use, which is not as good as plain wire, he says.
Swap improvement
One of the first things I do in the morning is to load the latest German TV programme information with MediathekView. It's a behemoth of at thing, with a memory footprint of somewhat over 10 GB, and by morning it's usually swapped out. Getting it back in memory typically takes minutes. But now I have swap on SSD. Does it make a difference? Yes! It's still not instantaneous?part of that is simply the processing time?but it's at least one order of magnitude faster. And that's with an el-cheapo SATA disk.
Panic!
Came into the office to find eureka showing a Boot: prompt. Damn! But it had one advantage: I could finally put in the SSD that I had wanted to use for swap; java programs to magnetic disk can take minutes. The reboot went smoothly, but why? panic: handle_written_inodeblock: Invalid link count 56964 for inodedep 0xfffff80734f01e00 That must have happened during the monthly backup. Corrupted file system maybe? But looking down the backtrace I saw: #10 0xffffffff8030eba5 in dadone (periph=<value optimized out>, done_ccb=<value optimized out>) at /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/10/sys/cam/scsi/scsi_da.c:3077 Clearly that's a reference to a ?SCSI?
Who will build a computer for me?
So who should build my new computer? Just because the Computeralliance configurator is broken doesn't mean that they can't build good computers. I just need to talk to a human. But there are other games in town?literally. What about local builders? Spent some time looking around and came up with: Leading Edge, 918A Howitt Street, phone 5333 2955. MR IT, 907B Howitt St, phone 4368 7636, email [email protected] Ballarat IT Solutions, 623 Sturt St., Phone: 5379 9986 ...
Installing TeX, try 3
I've been waiting for a few days now for packages to appear for FreeBSD 15-CURRENT. Today was the day. After booting the package system and loading it again, off I went: === root@dereel (/dev/pts/4) /src/FreeBSD/git/ports 60 -> mailme pkg install texlive-full The following 600 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked): Installed packages to be REMOVED: ImageMagick7: 7.1.0.62_6 a2ps: 4.15.5 audacity: 3.3.3_1 bind916: 9.16.42 chromium: 115.0.5790.110_1 emacs: 28.2_7,3 exiv2: 0.28.0,1 firefox: 116.0_2,2 gcc11: 11.3.0_8 gdb: 13.1_3 ....
Bloody CapsLock! Reboot!
Later in the afternoon I was reading mail on tiwi.lemis.com, and it suddenly refused to obey my instructions. In fact, the whole X display behaved strangely. Finally found a shell window and discovered that CapsLock was set. On most computers that's not a problem. Press the CapsLock key again and it goes away. Only: I don't have a CapsLock key! I have xmodmapped it out of existence (the key with that inscription is Ctrl, like God intended). How do I get rid of it? Did some thinking, but couldn't come up with anything. Switch to ttyv0 and back again? All that happened was that the ttyv0 display was corrupt, like far too frequently on modern machines.
Build me a new machine
More investigation of the configuration for my new machine. The most important discovery was that the Computeralliance configurator is not very clever. It will happily offer me an AMD Ryzen CPU, an Intel motherboard and an el-cheapo processor fan. Clearly I can't rely on that. But why should I? I know what I want. Let the people who build it suggest the exact components. What I have is: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X processor. Appropriate fan. 192 GB RAM. X670-based motherboard with at least 4 PCIe slots.
More security strangenesses
I have two Microsoft machines, dischord.lemis.com (?Windows? 7) and distress.lemis.com (?Windows? 10), which I use for running photographic software. I only access them via rdesktop Today I decided to check something from tiwi.lemis.com, my TV computer. Nothing happened. OK, try from a shell: === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/5) ~ 247 -> /home/local/bin/dordesktop distress 1870x1030+0 wake: Cannot open bpf interface: Permission denied User grog sword scabbard! Connecting to distress ATTENTION! The server uses and invalid security certificate which can not be trusted for the following identified reasons(s); 1. Certificate issuer is not trusted by this system.
git pull, day 3
So, yesterday and the day before I failed in a real update to my ports tree with git pull. git merge --no-ff worked for a day, then I was back to the original problem. git rebase worked yesterday. And today? === root@dereel (/dev/pts/4) /usr/ports 35 -> mailme git pull --ff-only From https://git.freebsd.org/ports 54b3112625f8..ec04036bb656 main -> freebsd/main hint: Diverging branches can't be fast-forwarded, you need to either: hint: hint: git merge --no-ff ... It still doesn't work! OK, give up. Does merge still work? === root@dereel (/dev/pts/4) /usr/ports 36 -> git merge --no-ff hint: Waiting for your editor to close the file...
More PoS terminal fun
After the ultrasound treatment I had an appointment for an eye test. But I had 40 minutes to wait, so off to Big W to look for plants. That was simple: they don't do that any more. But while looking around I found a kitchen mixer, something in which I failed in January. But here I found one for $29, as opposed to the $60 to $500 range in January. So I bought that, with some difficulty. Self checkout: Do I need a bag?
More git pain
So yesterday I had problems with git which I fixed with a merge --no-ff. And today? === root@dereel (/dev/pts/4) /usr/ports 29 -> mailme git pull --ff-only From https://git.freebsd.org/ports 648c8874180a..c196d1f5ffb8 main -> freebsd/main hint: Diverging branches can't be fast-forwarded, you need to either: hint: hint: git merge --no-ff hint: hint: or: hint: hint: git rebase hint: hint: Disable this message with "git config advice.diverging false" fatal: Not possible to fast-forward, aborting. That didn't last long, did it? How about the other alternative? === root@dereel (/dev/pts/4) /usr/ports 30 -> mailme git rebase Successfully rebased and updated refs/heads/main. You have mail in /var/mail/grog === root@dereel (/dev/pts/4) /usr/ports 31 -> mailme git pull --ff-only Already up to date.
New web site scam?
The 404 document on http://www.lemis.com/ checks the referrer of a page and sends me an email if it's also from my web site. That helps find broken local links, along with lots of URLs with embedded JavaScript in the URLs. But lately I've been getting a surprising number of faked URLs of a completely different nature: 984 N + 26-08-2023 To [email protected] ( 6) World Wide Web Owner N + FAILURE: /collections/downloads/inga-juuso+h-moll+mendelssohn <- http://www.lemis.com/grog/Albums/Animals/Bruno.php?dirda 990 N + 26-08-2023 To [email protected] ( 6) World Wide Web Owner N + FAILURE: /de/service/downloads <- http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-apr2023.php?article=D-20230428-004023&subtitle=Aussie+i 991 N + 26-08-2023 To [email protected] ( 6) World Wide Web Owner N + FAILURE: /collections/downloads/inga-juuso+merging-clock-recording+matangi-quartet <- http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-apr 992 N + 26-08-2023 To [email protected] ( 6) World Wide Web Owner N + FAILURE: /collections/downloads/inga-juuso+wim-kegel+matthew <- http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-apr2023.php?dirdate=20230 995 N + 26-08-2023 To [email protected] ( 6) ...
Microphone battery life
Yvonne doesn't use her wireless microphones much, but she has been doing so more recently. In the past we had had issues with battery life with rechargeable batteries, so we used non-rechargeable batteries. But they don't last for ever, and the devices have particularly inaccurate battery state displays. Turn one on, note that it shows a fully charged battery?for 10 seconds or so. Then the display changes to ?discharged?, and unlike most devices I know, it immediately stops working. How long do rechargeable batteries last? They really only need to last the maximum of 2 hours or so that the PIXIO ?Robot Cameraman?
More ports hell
Nearly 30 years ago Warren Toomey published scans of John Lions' A Commentary on the UNIX Operating System on the Usenet alt.folklore.computers newsgroup. I formatted it and subsequently published it. It contains a number of scan errors. Recently I received updated versions of the sources from Conway Yee, and I've finally got round to incorporating them. But: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/21) /home/Book/Lions 116 -> make latex lionc.tex make: exec(latex) failed (No such file or directory) *** Error code 1 Oh. Has it been that long? OK, let's install.
Alternative video sources
ORF, the Austrian TV broadcaster, has just repeated all episodes of Stockinger, a series that I had been looking for. Today I finished downloading the remaining episodes, which they had provided out of order. Only one episode was missing: the first! Did I miss it? No, it seems. It was broadcast on ORF 3 on 19 August, but I couldn't find any reference to it in my lists. More searching suggested that I could find it on Serienjunkies. Yes! They're really trying to sell their services, of course, but they offer a free download service, and to make the paid version more attractive, they make the free version really difficult to use.
CJ's VoIP: done!
After all the fun with CJ Ellis' VoIP setup, I have finally got round to looking at my own setup. I have four lines, two of them accidents. The other two are the one I normally use and the one that's in the phone book. The latter one used to divert automatically to voice mail, along with a suggestion to call the other number if you know it. That worked well with MyNetFone, but Aussie doesn't inform you when a message diverts to voice mail. So why not divert to the answering service on the phone itself? One reason is that the phone doesn't have a configuration option to divert immediately, just after 3, 6 or 9 rings.
Ghostly music
It seems that Paul plays the Didgeridoo, and he was interested in the instruments I have in the cabinets, particularly the bassoons So I had to pull one out (the oldest, the Sautermeister), and of course Suzy and Linda had to pull out their mobile phones and take video of the matter. And how about that, it's haunted! Lots of orbs in the recordings! It seems that all four guests are interested observers of the paranormal, and this bassoon clearly has ghosts associated with it. Certainly the fact that both phones recorded them, while neither did when I brought out my Simiot-Tabard flute.
Honest scammers
Read in my mail inbox today: 401 N + 20-08-2023 To [email protected] ( 248) Australia Post Servi N + RE: Final warning: your package cannot be delivered. ! ! ! It wasn't until later that I saw these silly trailing ! ! !, but even without it something rang a bell. What does the content look like?
15 years of panoramas
Fifteen years ago today I did my first panorama shots, of the house in Kleins Road: I wasn't overly happy with the results even at the time. The gradation was bad, the cropping was bad. But since then I've refined my techniques, made scripts of them all. How difficult can it be to repeat and compare? The biggest issue, amusingly, was that each view was an individual shot, not the 3 bracket HDR shots that I did nowadays.
Aussie router: proof of the pudding
Aussie Broadband didn't crown themselves in glory by sending the new router to the wrong address. But I didn't have time yesterday to look at what they had sent. I managed to wait until after breakfast to ensure that I didn't get a stomach upset, and that proved to be a good idea. The agreement was to configure and test a new router and send it to me. They failed on the second by putting in my address but CJ's name. How about the first? In particular, does the default configuration really have open ports, as I could have deduced from Jeremy's mail yesterday: We supply our routers preconfigured for service and our ACS details are included by default with the configuration.
Next Aussie Broadband blunder
Mail from CJ Ellis this morning: his new router is waiting for him at the Napoleons post office. On the one hand, that's not bad. They really did get it sent immediately. But aren't the details clever? That's 32 km from his home, so he's involved in a 64 km journey over and above bringing it to me. And I had specifically requested and received confirmation that it would be sent to me. As it happened, I was in town in the afternoon, so on the way back I dropped into the post office. Yes, the parcel was there. But the address I gave (Derwent Jacks Road, Berringa) was wrong!
New computer, finally?
It's been over 9½ years since I built eureka, my main machine, and over 7 months since I last started planning a replacement for it. I really need to do something. Back to looking at hardware choices, and it occurred to me that I hadn't really considered Intel processors. One of the criteria was power consumption, also one of the factors limiting the speed of my chosen processor. 105 W I could accept; 280 W I couldn't. And 170? One of the reasons I hadn't made much progress. But why hadn't I looked at Intel? Did so today and came up with the Core i9 13900F.
VoIP setup, next step
Mail from a Jeremy from Aussie Broadband regarding the complaint about CJ Ellis' Netcomm NF20MESH router. I hadn't done anything more since Friday. He's the successor to Karen, who left at the end of last week. OK, time to do so again. Called up Aussie at 11:24, and almost immediately got a call back from Andina, if I got the name right. This time I started the authentication with CJ's name, explaining that I was authorized, and that I was setting up the router for him. This time she wanted the post code for Berringa, something that they otherwise don't think important enough to put on their pages.
Backing up bde
bde.lemis.com (the laptop) has been connected to CJ Ellis' Netcomm NF20MESH router since last week, so it didn't do the nightly backups. But why not? The other (WAN) side of the router is connected to our local LAN. Can't I just mount the file systems across the router? Yes, sort of. The router has its own view of the DNS world: === root@bde (/dev/pts/10) ~ 21 -> cat /etc/resolv.conf search home nameserver 192.168.20.1 ?home?. What kind of domain is that? Yes, I could replace it with the correct resolv.conf, but it doesn't seem to be worth the trouble when any reset would also replace it with this nonsense.
More air conditioner fun
To quote the Ballarat Courier: You were not the only one who struggled to get out of bed this morning, nor the only one who was frozen in their car or with pipes that just refused to work. Ballarat recorded its coldest morning for the year, with the Bureau of Meteorology's weather station at the airport hitting -3.6 degrees at 7am. It wasn't quite that cold here, for some reason, only -1,4°, but it was far too cold for our ailing air conditioner.
dereel: I give up
So what's causing my network problems with dereel? I give up. But it looks serious, and the last version of the kernel I bought had the version string FreeBSD 14.0-ALPHA1. That's potentially a release show-stopper. Sent off a message to the FreeBSD developers' list. Responses from Tomoaki AOKI and Kevin Bowling, the latter the developer responsible. He had added code for TSO to the driver, and with a little checking found that it was enabled: === root@dereel (/dev/pts/1) ~ 14 -> ifconfig em0 em0: flags=1008843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST,LOWER_UP> metric 0 mtu 1500 options=4e527bb<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,JUMBO_MTU,VLAN_HWCSUM,TSO4,TSO6,LRO,WOL_MAGIC,VLAN_HWFILTER,VLAN_HWTSO,RXCSUM_IPV6,TXCSUM_IPV6,HWSTATS,MEXTPG> ether 6c:0b:84:a5:c7:1c inet 192.109.197.135 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.109.197.255 media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>) status: active nd6 options=29<PERFORMNUD,IFDISABLED,AUTO_LINKLOCAL> Disable it: === root@dereel ...
Air conditioner problems
Funny noises from the air conditioner round 6:00 this morning. Not the loud noise of last month, just a too-short on and then off cycle. Out to take a look. Once again the temperature in the lounge room was a couple of degrees too low, but there was nothing obvious in the displays. ?Soft? power cycled the unit (from the control panel), and it displayed error code E14. From the error code list that I photographed on December 2019, that means: Not enough refrigerant?
More dereel pain
After yesterday's renewed failure with dereel, I started looking at other things. And the firefox that I ran on dereel, displaying on eureka, was ridiculously slow. And saving mail messages across NFS took so long that I aborted the attempt. What does ping say? === root@eureka (/dev/pts/5) /var/log 40 -> ping -c 100 dereel PING dereel.lemis.com (192.109.197.135): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 192.109.197.135: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=15.803 ms 64 bytes from 192.109.197.135: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=15.551 ms ... Huh? 15 ms? This is a 1000 Mb/s interface. Other systems? === root@eureka (/dev/pts/5) /var/log 41 -> ping -c 100 tiwi PING tiwi.lemis.com (192.109.197.177): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 192.109.197.177: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.330 ms 64 bytes from 192.109.197.177: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.338 ms ^C That looks better.
Cold!
Winter is drawing to a close, but last night was still one of the coldest, with a minimum temperature of -0.3° at the surprisingly late time of 7:01. And the air conditioner couldn't cope. It didn't really get the house warm until after 9:00. Hopefully we won't have too many cases like that.
More fun with dereel
How did dereel survive the night with the new kernel? Well, it seems. All was still up and running this morning. But then, while I was doing something across the net with firefox, it hung. I couldn't even ping it from eureka. It's beginning to look more like a network interface problem than an NFS problem. OK, build a new kernel, see how that goes.
Where's my phone?
While messing around with CJ's hardware, Yvonne came in and asked me if I had seen her (mobile) phone. No, but there's a way to find it, of course: call it from another phone and follow the ring. But this time we didn't hear anything. OK, plan B: ask Google Maps. I track Yvonne's location, clearly really the location of her phone. And sure enough, Google Maps said that it's here. Enlarge the map: by the shed, maybe? Off to the shed, where Yvonne had just found it in her saddle bag.
More VoIP pain
We had just settled down to breakfast when the doorbell rang. CJ Ellis. I had asked him to send me email before he came. But, it seems, that wasn't possible: his ?Internet? froze while he was writing an email message, and so he didn't have any phone either. He came with old ATA and new Netcomm NF20MESH gateway. OK, finish breakfast and set the thing up. That's fairly clear: go to the SIP Basic Settin tab and fill in the details: But it didn't work!
dereel hang
Into the office this morning to discover no windows from dereel open. But that's to be expected, since I rebooted (from the lounge room) and hadn't been back into the office since. But I couldn't contact it! And then I discovered that, according to ruptime, dereel had been down since about 21:00 yesterday evening. Powered on the monitor and saw a whole lot of last message repeated 10 times last message repeated 9 times last message repeated 9 times Tried to log in, but it hung.
Understanding SCSI return codes
One of the things that irritate me about the nightly backups are the ?error? messages that I get from some disks: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): READ(10). CDB: 28 00 00 00 01 68 00 00 40 00 (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): SCSI status: Check Condition (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): SCSI sense: NOT READY asc:4,1 (Logical unit is in process of becoming ready) (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): Polling device for readiness Clearly that's a feature, not a bug. I'm planning to suppress it unless verbose boot has been specified. But there are others: (da1:umass-sim1:1:0:0): READ(10).
Apologies from Aussie
Our ?experience? upgrading CJ Ellis' home networking has been less than positive. Aussie Broadband agrees. Profuse apologies, and an offer to provide the router free of charge, along, of course, with help setting it up. We don't really need that unless there's something unexpected, but it's a nice gesture.
Updating the E-1 firmware, try 2
Two years ago I tried to update the firmware on my Olympus E-1. I knew it would be a problem because the modern software no longer wants to know about it, so I found an old version of Olympus Studio 2, which should have done the job, but I ran into trouble: it couldn't even detect the camera. OK, I currently have lots of things that I need to do, so why not revisit the update? After all, I don't really need it. First, though, see what a real computer says about the USB connection: Aug 9 13:41:55 dereel kernel: ugen0.4: <OLYMPUS E-1> at usbus0 Aug 9 13:41:55 dereel kernel: umass0 on uhub1 Aug 9 13:41:55 dereel kernel: umass0: <OLYMPUS E-1, class 0/0, rev 2.00/1.00, addr 3> on usbus0 Aug 9 13:41:55 dereel kernel: umass0: SCSI over Bulk-Only; quirks = 0xc301 ...
News downloads: solved?
So it seems that my errors downloading Al Jazeera news are related to yt-dlp. That happens; the sites find new ways to trick it, and yt-dlp finds way to outsmart the tricks. I found a solution for that a couple of months ago: simply get https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp-nightly-build . But that (already!) no longer works: === root@tiwi (/dev/pts/6) /usr/local/bin 34 -> fetch https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp-nightly-build fetch: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp-nightly-build: Not Found Much searching around the yt-dlp site, which suddenly seems so much more opaque than last time. But finally I found it: === root@tiwi (/dev/pts/9) /usr/local/bin 20 -> yt-dlp --update-to nightly Available version: [email protected], Current version: [email protected] Current Build Hash: 68cfb85d91da7da1a1c6f0d01b0f488b89c3275ca89fb893d6e573ba07a30d9d Updating to [email protected] ...
Chasing the YouTube issues
After failing to find the cause of the news download issues, put more debug code in. Download the news twice in parallel: will both copies do the same thing? Also link the downloaded file to a second name so that I have a copy if ffmpeg deletes the first. The results were interesting: Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2023 15:30:00 +1000 (AEST) From: Cron Daemon <[email protected]> ln: /spool/News/AlJaz-15.part: No such file or directory Where did that go? It should have been there at the time. Date: Mon, 7 Aug 2023 15:00:02 +1000 (AEST) From: Cron Daemon <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: Cron <groggyhimself@tiwi> /home/local/bin/aljaz AlJaz-15 1920 Message-Id: <[email protected]> [youtube] Extracting URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCNeDWCI0vo [info] gCNeDWCI0vo: Downloading 1 format(s): 96 [download] Destination: /spool/News/AlJaz-15 [hls @ 0x85e7be000] Skip ('#EXT-X-VERSION:3') ...
The eternal system upgrade
The refereence to the garbled messages above brought me back to a topic that I've been postponing for years: upgrade eureka. It seems that I went to some trouble to document that, only a little more than 12 years ago. Will I ever finish?
More garbled log messages
Seen again this morning: bde.lemis.com kernel log messages: +Limiting closed port RST response from 213 to 193 packets/sec +nnfs sefrver s nsfeeurrsv esre revuerre ka:e/u:r eknao:t/ :r ensopto nrdeisnpgond +i +ng +e +ka:/: not responding +nfs sernverf s serveeurr ekeuraeka:/:: /: is ailive agains + alive again +nfs server eureka:/: is alive again +Limiting closed port RST response from 203 to 194 packets/sec +Limiting closed port RST response from 209 to 216 packets/sec +Limiting closed port RST response from 236 to 193 packets/sec +nfs server eureka:/home: nfsno t sreesponrdivnegr + +eureka:/home: not responding +n<6>nffss sseerrvveerr eeuurreekkaa:://hhoommee:: nnoott rreessppoonnddiinngg +nfs server eureka:/home: is alive again +nfs server nfse server ueurreka:/homee:k ais :aliv/e ahgaoinm +e: is alive again +nfs server eureka:/home: is alive again We've seen that before, and there are ways to fix it, but ...
News download problems
I download news streams from Al Jazeera multiple times during the afternoon: the news (32 minutes) and the first 18 minutes of the news at 14:00, 15:00, 16:00 and 18:00. The first 18 minutes are in case we want to watch them before the news broadcast is finished: look at the first 18 minutes, then get the rest from the 32 minute version. I do this with the invocation (sleep $2 && ps wwaux|grep $ALJAZ | grep -v grep|awk '{print "kill -INT " $2}' | sh) & LC_ALL=de_DE.UTF-8 youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=$STREAM -o $ALJAZ STREAM is the YouTube stream identifier, ALJAZ is the name of the file and $2 is the duration (1080 or 1920 seconds).
Caret browsing: caught in the act
Into the lounge room this afternoon, turned on the TV and saw: That's the thing that I had to remove on Thursday. But this time I know how it happened: Bruno had stepped on the keyboard. I should ensure that it's upright when I'm not there.
Chat transcript
What happened to the transcript of the chat that I asked for yesterday? My best bet was that it came from a server that didn't have reverse lookup, which I still reject. Today I was looking on the Aussie Broadband web site again, and another chat person offered himself. OK, what happened to yesterday's transcript? Usual answer: ?Check your spam folder?, ?Did you specify the correct address??. So I asked what the MTA name was. Not Aussie at all: livechat, which I interpreted (correctly, as it happens) as livechat.com. Now how was I to know that? And looking through the mail backup, I found: Date: Fri, 04 Aug 2023 04:58:03 +0000 From: LiveChat <[email protected]> To: 7973a0fd-c017-4359-90c6-65c4050d2aa0 <[email protected]> Subject: Verify your email address Message-Id: <204149cc-fe5e-4e4a-85c3-[email protected]> ## Verify your email address ## We'll send messages to this email address only if you verify ...
Checking CJ's ?modem?
CJ Ellis along this afternoon as planned with his brand new Netcomm NF20MESH ?modem?, really a home gateway with VoIP lines. Nicely packed with brochures from Aussie Broadband telling him how to connect the cables. That was necessary, too, because it has two inputs: And yes, that's about as clear as it can be. From left, 2 phone lines, DSL phone input, USB input (what for?) , 4 Ethernet lines (yellow), and only then the ?WAN? Ethernet input (red) OK, connect it up to bde.
Random cursor navigation with firefox
For reasons I don't understand, the firefox instance running on eureka:0.2 has gone crazy. Press PgDn and it goes to the bottom of the page. Press Home and nothing happens. In the middle of a long display PgUp and PgDn seem to position randomly. I've seen this before, and my workaround was to start a new firefox profile. But there must be a better solution. The main issue is how to search for the solution, but finally I found this page, which tells me that I have ?caret browsing? enabled. In firefox-speak that apparently means ?The caret is the name of the vertical "|" text cursor", and it allows you to navigate without a mouse.
The morning after the night before
Into the office to see how things were working after yesterday's panic. All went well, and even the backups that were halted by the panic completed afterwards, though I have my doubts as to their consistency. And an old friend resurfaced, the unprotected printfs: tiwi.lemis.com kernel log messages: +n<6f>sn nservfesrf ssnefrsveeu rs ersvere reuvrekea:r/he ka:e/ohuomer: enoktm ea: rneos:po/t hreondmineg: + not srponedinsg +p +onding +r + eureka:/home: not responding +nfs server eureka:/: not responding
Panic!
Finished watching TV round 21:45. The usual prompt: keep or erase. Erase. But then nothing. No new prompt. Not in that window, not in any other. Into the office to check. eureka dead, and bde also hung. Nothing for it: reboot eureka, which saved a dump. The accompanying core.txt tells me: panic: cannot reassign paging buffer The stack trace shows that that comes from reassignbuf, which seems reasonable. Tracing back takes me to softdep_process_journal, ffs_syncvnode and nfsvno_fsync. This was during the monthly backups, so it's clearly related.
Android reset
For reasons I haven't understood, enzian.lemis.com, our spare mobile phone (a Xiaomi Redmi 9A) has been glacially slow for most of the time we have had it, and it seems to be getting even slower. Recently I wanted to start a calculator app on it, but after I got tired waiting, I started it on my ?real? phone (Redmi 9T). And after that was displaying, I finally got a display on enzian. It must have taken 20 seconds. OK, some configuration issue? Some app that ties it in knots? Why not wipe it clean and reinstall everything? One good reason is because it's so much pain.
Still more panorama pain
Yesterday was the day for the weekly house photos, but I didn't get finished: one of the panoramas didn't work. I had taken it in bright sunshine, requiring shading to do the job well, but I forgot to take an unshaded version of one view, resulting in a black segment in the sky: I had noticed that before I finished processing, so I repeated the whole thing. In the meantime the sun had gone in, so I only needed 6 images.
AI
Why did Elon Musk change the name of Twitter to X? We already have an X, and this just confuses things. In particular, Twitter users used to tweet. What do X.com users do? OK, a good question for the latest batch of language synthesizers (?AI?) . I tried exactly that text. Here the results: ChatGPT Hi! X.com users engage in a variety of activities depending on the context of X.com. X.com could refer to a specific website or platform, so without more information, it's difficult to provide a specific answer.
2000 days and counting
Seen this morning on ffm.lemis.com: === grog@ffm (/dev/pts/0) ~ 62 -> date; uptime Sat Jul 29 00:07:25 UTC 2023 12:07AM up 2000 days, 9:10, 2 users, load averages: 0.50, 0.43, 0.40 Yes, I know there are systems that have been running without reboot for far more than 2000 days (a little short of 5½ years). A few months ago hubble had 4766 days, and it would now be 4897 days. But I've never had that before.
CJ's ATA, next step
So is CJ Ellis' ATA on its way? No response to my last email, so I called up. Voice menu gave me the choice of selection 2 for orders in progress or 3 for technical support. Clearly 2 is the selection. But after 5 minutes of talking to Georgia, she told me that it was a support issue and put me through to somebody who clearly had no understanding. At one point he said that the ?modem? had been sent, but then changed his mind. For more information, he needed further identification: he wanted to send me a PIN, which he called a 6-digit code.
Australian tax office fraud
Big news today: ATO reveals more than $557 million claimed by fraudsters exploiting security loophole. Who would have thought that? Remember, you saw it here first. And only a couple of weeks later I was involved in this kind of scam with the the ATO. Despite all my attempts to persuade them, they didn't follow up. As I said at the time, Government account security seems to be non-existent. All this, also the Centrelink matter, has been possible because of lack of basic security.
X sues Elon Musk
Elon Musk has done some strange things in the last year or so, but now he's being sued for trademark violation. He has changed the name of the social network (if that's the word) Twitter to X. But X has been the trademark of X.org for decades. How can he get away with it? Even the logos look similar: No wonder X.org has sued him. Now a ?billion?
Source IP address
Now that I have my /24 address block routed here, I have no need for Network Address Translation (NAT) any more. Without it, every machine on the local network can communicate with the global Internet using its own address. Every machine? No, there's one exception: eureka.lemis.com, address 192.109.197.137. That's the machine connected directly to the network link. Here a somewhat abbreviated ifconfig output: em0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500 ether bc:5f:f4:c9:9b:bf inet 192.109.197.137 netmask 0xffffff80 broadcast 192.109.197.255 media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>) status: active xl0: flags=8943<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,PROMISC,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500 ether 00:50:da:cf:07:35 inet 121.200.11.253 netmask 0xfffffc00 broadcast 121.200.11.255 media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX <full-duplex>) status: active Where does that 121.200.11.253 come from on interface xl0?
Luminar panorama extension
Yesterday was the release date for the panorama extension that Skylum had announced for Luminar Neo. No mail, which isn't like Skylum. Off to take a look: yes, it's available. Want to install? Yes, of course. What should I expect? Probably nothing like what I have now. I take weekly panoramas of the outside of my house, and that seemed a good thing to compare. My procedure is: Take 6 views of 6 locations, spaced at 60°, with my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II and the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED Fisheye PRO..
CJ's ATA, next attempt
CJ Ellis tells me that he has now contacted Aussie Broadband and authorized me to act on his behalf. So at 11:37 I called up Aussie and tried to arrange for a new Analogue Telephone Adapter. ?You are in position 25 in the queue?. No offer to call back this time?that didn't come until I had been waiting for 4½ minutes. Call back at 11:59. Please identify yourself. Explained the situation, but it seems it was too complicated for the consultant, who told me he would have to investigate and call me back later. Maybe his lunch time? Round 14:15, I decided that something had gone wrong.
An ATA for CJ
Called up Aussie Broadband this morning to arrange for a new Analogue Telephone Adapter for CJ Ellis. But I couldn't authenticate myself! Yes, I had my own details, they know (I think) that I have authority to do things on CJ's behalf. But I needed to give his street address to prove who I am! What nonsense! Samuel, the consultant, tells me that it's a legal requirement. If it is, it's a particularly stupid one. I didn't think of it at the time, but of course it's in the telephone directory. When are the Powers That Be going to come into the 21st century when it comes to security?
Video overflow
I now have over 13 TB of videos and similar files on tiwi: === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/13) /spool/Series 19 -> df -c /spool /VB2 Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/ada0p4 7,567,870 7,416,233 75,958 99% /spool /dev/da0p1 5,722,572 5,447,435 217,911 96% /VB2 total 13,290,443 12,863,669 293,870 98% They're spread over 2 disks, and moving things around isn't easy. In particular, most files have two names, one in the directory where I watch them, and one in a parallel directory Already.
CJ's ATA, next try
So, after some consideration designed to limit effort on my part, today I made another try at reprogramming CJ Ellis' ATA. Last time things failed because I couldn't talk to the box, but it's fairly clear that it should be accessed via the local interface. Quick reconfiguration of bde, the laptop, in the process discovering that I had apparently mapped the Ctrl key out of existence, and CJ came over. Yes! I can talk to it. But that's exactly what I tried last time, and it didn't work then. But the joy was short-lived: it wouldn't accept my password. Why not?
More panorama fun
House photos again today, and once again I had issues with the stitching?only 3 of 6 views stitched automatically, and I had to play around with the other three. Does this have something to do with the slightly lower viewpoint? It doesn't seem to. But somehow the control point detector gets confused if it has to find control points between all components. If I do them incrementally, first 2, then 3 and so on, they frequently work as expected. And now there's a new option on the horizon: Luminar Neo is coming out with a panorama extension. Along with their HDR extension, it could take over the work I currently do with Hugin and Photomatix.
Origins of spam
Watching South Pacific the other day, I noticed a interesting detail: That was made in 1958, long before the current use of the word ?spam? to mean unwanted digital information. Checked in the OED to be sure. Yes, the earliest use seems to come from 1991, though there's no reference to Monty Python, unlike Wikipedia. So: what does it mean? By chance, I was playing around with various ?Artificial Intelligence? sites, so I asked Bard and ChatAI.
Tortillas: Ask the AI pages
OK, if I can't find anything obvious on Google, can one of the AI bots help? Asked the same question of ChatGPT and Google Bard: ?Can I make Mexican tortillas from Doñarepa masa??. The answers were interesting: ChatGPT Hi! Yes, you can definitely make Mexican tortillas with Doñarepa. Doñarepa is a brand of pre-cooked cornmeal that is commonly used to make traditional Latin American dishes such as arepas and empanadas. However, it can also be used to make tortillas.
Commerce kills interoperability
From time to time I grumble about the death of the concept of interoperability. Individual communications are a good example. 30 years ago there was email and USENET news. And they were compatible: they used the same message format, and it was relatively easy to bounce a USENET news article via email. Now USENET news is dead, and email seems to be on its last gasp. Earlier this week I found that Carmel from Vonex either couldn't read it, or that their ticketing system had corrupted it to the point of uselessness. Instead we have SMS, MMS, myriads of ?Messengers?, Facebook and similar, Twitter, IRC and many more.
Online Unix
Following a discussion on the Unix Heritage Society mailing list, discovered a free online Unix system, sdf.org, and signed up for it, just for fun. What can I do with it? Precious little that I can't do more easily But a little bit of sniffing around showed: faeroes:/sdf/udd/g/groggy> ps aux You are on faeroes among 3241 users. ('validate' to see usernames) faeroes:/sdf/udd/g/groggy> uname -a NetBSD faeroes 9.3 NetBSD 9.3 (GENERIC) #0: Thu Aug 4 15:30:37 UTC 2022 [email protected]:/usr/src/sys/arch/amd64/compile/GENERIC amd64 faeroes:/sdf/udd/g/groggy> date Thu Jul 6 04:03:01 UTC 2023 faeroes:/sdf/udd/g/groggy> df -m Filesystem 1M-blocks Used Avail %Cap Mounted on /dev/wd0a 35011 3374 29886 10% / mx1:/sdf 50968848 7027397 41393008 14% /sdf ptyfs 0 ...
Vonex: where's my money?
Last Friday I finally gave in and sent Vonex a message containing my bank details, and asking them for an immediate transfer of the outstanding funds. No reply. Then yesterday I received email from a Carmel, same email address: We recently contacted you regarding your complaint about your refund, but we are still awaiting a response. Well, she should read the mail she has received (and of which their MTA confirmed delivery). Sent a message with the previous attached. No reaction. OK, send another message, including Friday's message and delivery confirmation and waving the threat of a TIO complaint.
More VoIP fun
Yesterday's installation of MizuDroid on hirse got me thinking. What is cheaper, direct mobile telecommunications or VoIP on a mobile phone? The standard mobile tariff costs 15¢ per minute. VoIP costs 15¢ untimed for ?landline? phones and 22¢ per minute for mobile. In all cases VoIP incurs an additional 6¢/MB for data. How long does that last? I have some recollection of 8 kB/s, so 1 MB would be 125 seconds, or about 2.5¢ per minute. So clearly it doesn't make sense to use VoIP for mobile calls, and even for ?landline? calls it's only interesting for longer calls. But what about service numbers starting with 13?
VoIP on Android, again
I'm still trying to work out how to set up CJ's VoIP lines with the least downtime and effort. Currently he has an account with Vonex, status unknown, and one with Aussie Broadband, which isn't programmed into his ATA. We need to do two things: Establish whether his existing ATA can be programmed to talk to Aussie, or whether it's locked in to Vonex, which would mean that it would need to be replaced.
Panic!
Last night was the first of the month, the time for the level 0 (complete) dumps. But that can take some time, and this morning I found in the logs: ... DUMP: 82.77% done, finished in 1:34 at Sun Jul 2 06:35:54 2023 zstd: error 25 : Write error : cannot write compressed block DUMP: Broken pipe DUMP: The ENTIRE dump is aborted. That must have been round 4:59, after 7½ hours of dumping. It's over NFS, and I've seen it before. Later I also got: find: /videobackup: Input/output error find: /eureka: Input/output error find: /dump: Input/output error Nothing for it, repeat the dump, even if it will run all day.
Landlines: gone!
Mail today from Harald Arensen about yesterday's artice about the demise of the ?landline?. This article described the end of the Norwegian copper network, which took place at the end of December last year. My Norwegian's not very good, but the translation refers to the delivery technology (copper), not the switching technology. But maybe that's not important. I'd be more interested in knowing how the transition was handled. Presumably VoIP would have caused the least disruption. Norway's not the only country doing this, of course. And while looking at web reports, I found this British document makes things clearer, though it contradicts itself in its definition of ?landline?.
The demise of the ?landline?
Interesting article in the Washington Post: mobile phones have long taken over from fixed (?landline?) phones. 70% of the US population use only mobile phones, compared to 1.3% who use only ?landline?. 25% have both. That's not quite what I predicted nearly 10 years ago in The Internet in 2034. In fact I didn't even mention mobile telephones. But it's interesting to note that two-thirds of ?landline? connections are really VoIP. I wonder how long we have to go before they start shutting down the POTS.
Fun with VicRoads
While trying to pay my vehicle registration, noted that I could sign up for direct debit with VicRoads. That sounded like a good idea, so went to the site to fight yet more bureaucracy. One thing they wanted, of course, was my driver license number. OK, got that... So nice, so nice, we do it twice! There were two identical driver licenses in my wallet! Yes, I lost my license last month and had to have it replaced. But of course while looking for the old one, the first place I looked was in my wallet. And now there are two of them!
Reinstating Bank of Melbourne account
It has been over a week since I tried to pay the registration fee for Yvonne's car, and failed because the Bank of Melbourne's web site was broken. OK, try again. This time I got: Oh. They're still broken, And once again I didn't receive a ?Secure Code?. Call them up on 1300 555 203 and fight my way through Yet Another Voice non-recognition system to be asked for my card number and key. Then the usual ?We are experiencing a higher than usual volume of calls.
ANZ: We will not recover your money
Not one, but two letters from ANZ Bank today,referring to Vonex' abuse of my credit card. ?Unfortunately, the outcome of this dispute has been unsuccessful. We will send you further details regarding the investigation separately?. Huh? But then there's the second letter: ?Unfortunately, we have not been able to continue our investigation as we have not received the information we requested from you. This concludes our investigation, and the case is now closed?. Huh? What's wrong with this response? They shouldn't need any information from me. If I dispute a transaction, it should automatically be reverted, leaving me responsible for any disputes from the payee.
Microsoft wakes eliminated
Another day has gone by since I fixed my power management network configuration on dischord. Now neither of the systems wake at random. Finally!
Another mystery message
Seen on a shell running on lagoon: ERROR: RDPSND: Extra RDPSND_NEGOTIATE in the middle of a session disconnect: The session was replaced. What does that mean?
Phantom calls logged
I still haven't fought my way through the mess of logging information that my Grandstream HT802 produces, but lately I've been seeing: Jun 24 07:12:53 homephone HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4]SigCtrl::SigRemoteConnect, Cannot take the call because SIP Incoming UID (100390237920793) does not match my UserID (09751721) Jun 24 07:13:18 homephone HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4]SigCtrl::SigRemoteConnect, Cannot take the call because SIP Incoming UID (1000390237920793) does not match my UserID (09751721) Jun 24 07:26:23 homephone HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4]SigCtrl::SigRemoteConnect, Cannot take the call because SIP Incoming UID (901146162016058) does not match my UserID (09751721) Jun 24 07:47:03 homephone HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4]SigCtrl::SigRemoteConnect, Cannot take the call because SIP Incoming UID (100) does not match my UserID (09751721) Jun 24 08:12:50 homephone HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4]SigCtrl::SigRemoteConnect, Cannot take the call because SIP Incoming UID (801146162016058) does not match my UserID (09751721) Jun 24 08:59:12 homephone HT802 [c0:74:ad:37:66:d8] [1.0.21.4]SigCtrl::SigRemoteConnect, Cannot take ...
Don't trust CellOPark
In April I commented about CellOpark, a mobile phone app that allows you to pay for parking via the phone?and that requires credit card details. Sorry, CellOpark, why should I trust you? And today I see that I was justified in not trusting it, though not for the reasons I expected: this article (probably hidden behind a paywall) reports that many people have been charged for parking that didn't occur. Now how do you prove that? Supply a GPS log to prove it?
?AI?: Passing the Turing test
What is Artificial Intelligence? I've known the term for over half a century, and from time to time I have been amused by how the media react. Now it's ChatGPT, a particularly good linguist. I looked at it 6 months ago and ran into problems with the user interface. In the meantime, according to the press, it seems that it is leading to Armageddon. I couldn't be bothered to try again, so I tried Bard, from Google, instead. What is a Cleveland Bay? Well, there's a place called Cleveland Bay in Queensland, but Wikipedia prefers to talk about a horse of that name, a breed even less common than the Paso Fino.
Sleepless Microsoft: solved?
For a month now I've been puzzling about why my Microsoft boxes dischord and distress keep waking up for no obvious reason. I've established that it must be something to do with the network: on distress, where I can get at the back of the machine easily, it doesn't happen if I disconnect the network cable. Yes, there's a ?Wake on LAN? setting that is presumably behind that, but where is it? In the past I've been through all the power settings, but I couldn't find it. Google to my aid. FOOL! You've gone through power settings, and of course it's a network setting.
More ATA hell
CJ Ellis along today, unannounced, and proving that our doorbell has failed. It's not even a year old! He brought his ATA with him, a Cisco <mumble> that looks quite like the non-functional PAP2T. He didn't bring the power supply, so I tried the power supply from the PAP2T, which has the same specs. No go. No red LED, of course, but no function either. Looked for the other power supply, but I couldn't find it. CJ back home to pick up the power supply. And it worked! So it does seem that the power supply is defective, and that I might be able to revive the PAP2Ts.
The next VoIP port
So how do I port CJ Ellis' phone number? Another hour waiting on the phone to talk to Aussie Broadband? First I went to the web site and discovered that all I needed was CJ's password and access to his webmail. So I was able to add a user so fast that I didn't realize that I had done it. But I wanted to port, so I entered the number to port, and after some searching discovered that CJ now has two VoIP lines, the first apparently already provisioned. All I need now is access to the ATA. Later CJ got mail from Aussie Broadband: Our Service Delivery has been trying to contact you in regards to your NBN order that we currently have in place but unfortunately haven't been able to reach you.
Goodbye Vonex... Hello Vonex
How happy I was to be finally rid of Vonex yesterday! But today an unfamiliar sight arrived at our doorstep: CJ Ellis, whom I haven't seen for a couple of years. And of course he had trouble with Vonex. I had recommended MyNetFone to him years ago, and of course he's suffering from the pain with the transition to Vonex. OK, at least I'm in practice: he's also with Aussie Broadband, so I just need to set up the configuration. Getting his money back from Vonex may be a different issue, of course.
VoIP: Ported!
Mail from Aussie Broadband this morning: Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2023 09:07:28 +1000 From: Aussie Broadband <no-[email protected]> Thank you for being patient while we wait for your VoIP number to be transferred over to us. We?ve received confirmation that the port will be completed on **2023-06-16**. But that should have happened 3 days ago, and I still had connectivity from Vonex. Should I reconfigure the ATA anyway? There are thousands of configuration parameters, and even the obvious ones (user name, password, SIP server) have strange names. Tried to call the existing number from my mobile phone and the other ATA, both with the same result: timeout.
The dangers of two-factor authentication
I have always hated Two-factor authentication, at least in the form that I know it: it's clumsy and means that I can't automate things. Today was a particularly bad day, but coincidentally I read this article: 'Invisible robbers' stealing millions in phone porting scam labelled as 'terrifying'. But the common practice of having a one-time code sent to your mobile phone number has enabled hackers to access thousands of people's personal information. ... Cybersecurity expert Ronnie Lowe said the measures did not go far enough and there was little people could do to avoid a sim porting attack.
Banks ganging up on me
Received a car registration renewal notice today. OK, fire up Bank of Melbourne's ?Internet banking?. What's up there? These are the same saved details that I have been using for months. OK, send me a ?Secure Code?. A warning: it can take up to one minute to arrive. But it didn't. Clearly the message in red (The login details entered don't match those on our system) is only partially relevant, since it knows (I think) my phone number. OK, has something in my saved password file been corrupted? Log in manually. ?Please match the requested format? against the ?Security number? (a 6 digit PIN).
RIPE NCC responds
Last month the RIPE NCC saga finished with a survey questionnaire. And of course I answered describing my pain. To my surprise, today I received a detailed response with explanations and acknowledging that there were things that they could do better. But the real issue was that, years ago, they had decided on specific procedures, one of which is that we are in general not able to transfer internet number resources from already closed legal entities. Followed by a resolution from the RIPE NCC Executive Board we can only transfer internet number resources from closed legal entities to the legal successor and only if the legal successor is confirmed with documents from 'a national authority'.
VoIP: another red LED
My surviving PAP2T VoIP adapter has failed! Another red LED, just like last time with the other device. That means that I only have one adapter. Is there anything I can do? Off searching and found this page and also this one. Some suggestion that it's the power supply, not the device, but that seems unlikely, since one worked with the power supply I was using, and the other didn't. Now both don't. I suppose I should go looking for another power supply and see if that helps. But I don't really need them once this pain with Vonex is over.
NSM: Not Microsoft
I still have no idea what is causing messages like these: Jun 13 22:04:28 eureka kernel: Failed to contact local NSM - rpc error 3 Jun 13 22:04:42 eureka kernel: Failed to contact local NSM - rpc error 3 One thing's clear, though: it wasn't dischord (the Microsoft box), which was disconnected from the network at the time. So what is it?
mklinks: eating own dog food
I still haven't got round to committing mklinks, but today, when I needed to reinstate Servant of the People, it occurred to me that it's exactly what I needed, but in the past I had always done it manually. I keep video series in a directory hierarchy two deep. The top level is the name of the series, the second the year. So for ?Servant of the People? I have: === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/13) /spool/Series/30-min 198 -> ls -l Servant-of-the-people/01 total 6399 -rw-r--r-- 2 grog home 300,212,123 8 Apr 2022 01-02.mp4 -rw-r--r-- 2 grog home 333,550,378 8 Apr 2022 01-03.mp4 -rw-r--r-- 2 grog home 302,893,643 8 Apr 2022 01-04.mp4 ...
Microsoft powers hell
Paid particular attention to the backups today after the change of backup disk configuration. All seemed to have run well, though I had disabled the eureka backup while rsyncing /src/FreeBSD. But the daily kernel log messages showed: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): READ(10). CDB: 28 00 84 c5 b2 a8 00 00 40 00 (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): CAM status: CCB request completed with an error (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): Retrying command There are subtle differences from yesterday. That was writing to /dev/da2, the old /dump disk. Today it was reading from /dev/da0, the /backup disk that I used for backing up eureka.
New backup disk
On 2 July, the monthly backup told me many: (da2:umass-sim2:2:0:0): WRITE(10). CDB: 2a 00 0a 93 c7 2e 00 00 10 00 (da2:umass-sim2:2:0:0): CAM status: CCB request completed with an error (da2:umass-sim2:2:0:0): Retrying command /dev/da2 is the /dump file system for all systems except eureka. Does that mean a hard error? I would expect to see a ?retries exhausted? for that case, and there were none. But clearly the disk is not in the best of condition. Time for a replacement, and while I was kicking my heels at the Ballarat Base Hospital yesterday, Yvonne picked up a new 10 TB backup disk from Officeworks: $359, and that for the equivalent of 6,250 fully equipped IBM 3330 systems.
TIO actions
Call from Zaf of the TIO today. It seems that they have heard from Vonex, a certain Sonya who was too polite to contact me. And they have refunded the money! Would I check, please? No, nothing in my account. And he found fault with the fact that I didn't explicitly tell Vonex that I would not give them the account details for which they had asked. It seems?he says?that the Australian banking system really does provide for companies to be able to deduct money from people's credit cards, but not refund them. So I had to write another letter asking them explicitly to send me a cheque if they can't access the credit card.
Big Cheese: caught in the act
On Tuesday I put some bait into the ?Big Cheese? electric mouse trap and took a photo to be able to determine if anything had been taken. Today I took a look. No need for a photo: no mice trapped, all the bait gone. Clearly the thing isn't working. But while I prepared to take a photo (I didn't), something strange occurred: I hadn't turned it off, and it started sparking across the ?death trap? plates. It seems that there's some kind of intermittent failure in there. Time to change it.
DENIC: Done!
Message from DENIC this evening: GL3-RIPE wurde wie gewünscht geändert. Maintainer ist jetzt LEMIS-MNT. And yes, how about that.
VoIP state of play
As expected, the deadline for my complaint with the TIO against Vonex expired without any contact at all from them. OK, renewed complaint to the TIO. > * What outcome would resolve your complaint? They should immediately refund the sum of $34.70 that they illegally deducted from my credit card. They should expedite the porting of my second phone number (currently pending) to another carrier. The last one took over a month, which I ascribe to their incompetence. Once I agree that the numbers have been transferred, they should immediately terminate all services and refund the remainder of my balance, including pro rata the yearly subscription.
Your phone number has been ported!
Call on my mobile phone this evening round 21:00. Michael of Aussie Broadband to tell me that my number had been completely ported. What, already? I only asked for it yesterday. Oh, no, he knew nothing of that, just that the first number. OK, the only issue there was that Vonex still hadn't fixed their internal configuration. Have they now? Who cares? But more to the point, this is the fourth time that they've called me on my mobile phone in the evening, though I've asked them not to.
Old LEMIS advertisement
For reasons I don't understand, DENIC wants to know my old address. But they have it: it's in the network handle GL3-RIPE: person: Greg Lehey address: LEMIS Lehey Microcomputersysteme address: Schellnhausen 2 address: D-36325 Feldatal address: Germany phone: +49 6637 1488 fax-no: +49 6637 1489 So what kind of proof do they need? I thought of the original mail from Unido, round March 1992, giving details of my connection, but I couldn't find it.
Failed to contact local NSM?
In today's system log messages: Jun 5 16:29:34 eureka kernel: Failed to contact local NSM - rpc error 3 Jun 5 17:40:32 eureka kernel: Failed to contact local NSM - rpc error 3 Jun 5 17:47:18 eureka kernel: Failed to contact local NSM - rpc error 3 Jun 5 17:48:49 eureka kernel: Failed to contact local NSM - rpc error 3 Jun 5 22:08:20 eureka kernel: Failed to contact local NSM - rpc error 3 Jun 6 09:21:17 eureka kernel: Failed to contact local NSM - rpc error 3 Jun 6 09:28:45 eureka kernel: Failed to contact local NSM - rpc error 3 Jun 6 09:36:04 eureka kernel: Failed to contact local NSM - rpc error 3 What's that?
More Microsoft pain
Strange message on distress, my Microsoft 10 box, today. Backup failed. OK, why? A typically stupid message, something like ?error 0x8000017a?. Discovered that, for some reason, the backups for distress (on eureka:/dump) were gone. Recreate the path. Different 0x8000.... error message, and a text that could barely be understood to mean EACCES, permission denied. OK, chmod and try again. A different error message, but it still didn't want to work. Much searching for a solution, but somehow Microsoft administration is a book with seven seals. By accident I had closed the ?retry? window, and setting up backups seems to be completely orthogonal to my way of thinking.
VoIP: The next step
I still haven't resolved the issue with Vonex, and somehow I'm concerned about Zadarma. In principle I want to sit out my subscription to MyNetFone Vonex until the year's prepayment expires some time in August. But Vonex's erratic nature means that I could end up with unexpected issues. The sooner I get rid of them, the better. So: called up Aussie Broadband and asked them to port my other number as quickly as possible, hopefully far faster than the month it took for the first number. And Vonex? Maybe Joey just can't read. Started my latest reply with This message contains 6 items, all of which require your response.
Reviving GL3-RIPE
Since Tuesday I have the ability to transfer maintainership of my NIC handle GL3-RIPE to somebody who can bring it up to date. How do I do that? Mark Price tells me that I can do it myself, which makes a lot of sense. Worked my way through the relatively copious RIPE NCC documentation, and before long I had a maintainer: LEMIS-MNT. And along with that I got a new personal handle, exactly what I was trying to avoid: GL12456-RIPE. The number of digits shows why I want to keep GL3-RIPE, but it's amusing to note that the digits in the new handle are almost, in sequence, 123456.
Aussie Broadband strangenesses
Strange message from Aussie Broadband support today: the email I sent them was empty! Huh? Which email? They were too polite to say. So I checked, and the only one I had sent had been addressed on Monday. So I sent them another message, and got another strange reply: Date: Wed, 31 May 2023 16:23:35 +1000 From: Aussie Customer Service Apologies again there, but it appears that email you've sent through again is also blank. Is it possible you can double check you're selecting the correct attachment and try sending it through again.
VoIP without end
Call on the phone from Joey Melendez of Vonex today. Why? I had sent her no fewer than 5 email messages last week, none of which she had answered, and I had asked her to not call me on the phone. An obvious reason: I find it hard to keep my temper when dealing with idiots. But I did make the mistake of demanding once again that they refund the money they stole. Sorry, can't do that, credit balance on an account can only be refunded when the account is closed. That's what the accounting department says. My guess is that she didn't give them the crucial detail that they weren't entitled to debit the money.
Fortune favours the brave
Yet another attempt to contact DENIC today, not made easier by a typo in the phone number. And once again I had difficulty with lines dropping and nobody in authority being able to address the issue. Though I called at 9:30 local time, only one person was available, and on another line. But my ?consultant? sounded concerned, especially given the time it has taken, and said that she would chase it up. Her name? Frau Fortuna: Mrs Fortune. And how about that, I finally got an email response: DENIC doesn't want to manage RIPE handles. Can I transfer it elsewhere? Can I!
The eternal VoIP
Surprising message on my phone today: AussieBB here. 0353461370 has successfuly ported. Call your previous provider to ensure the service is now closed. Why did they send an SMS? I almost never look at them. And of course it wasn't disconnected. Do I want the pain of calling Vonex again? No. It doesn't really make much difference who supplies it, and I have sent Vonex multiple messages telling them to disconnect it.
Aussie fixes phantom calls
Yesterday I had received mail on my mobile phone from Aussie Broadband about my phantom VoIP calls, but the fix didn't relate to the menus I found on the ATA. But I did ask him to ensure that I didn't get called on my mobile phone again. This evening, round 21:00, I got another call on the mobile phone. At least he knew the password I had given them (?pink elephant?) , but not that he shouldn't have called on that number. I must get them to ensure that they only call in the daytime. But he helped. He worked my way through the menus, and I was able to set the INVITE parameters to no.
Network trace for Microsoft
Disconnecting distress from the local net seems to have stopped the random wakes from hibernation. So clearly it's something on the local net that is waking it. But what? I ?haven't changed anything? there, but whatever it is affects dischord (Microsoft 7) as well. Clearly a trace on eureka isn't sufficient. There must be something like Wireshark or tcpdump for Microsoft. Off to take a look. Google has decided that I am now in Germany, or at least distress is. Everything was in German, and all the hits are from German sites. Found a Wireshark and installed it, but I couldn't get it to run.
Still more VoIP pain
I still don't have any useful response from Vonex, and it seems that Aussie Broadband's VoIP offering is a little too bare-bones. More investigation, though I really don't want to do this. Zadarma seems to have a number of things going for it, including no base fee and phone numbers in dozens of different countries. But to try it out means still more cables and another phone base. Do I want to do it? No. Should I do it? Probably. So, signed up with them. The usual ?make it easier for the crackers? password rules (?The password must contain letters and numbers, must be contain 8 to 30 characters in length?)
Why xterm for Android?
Mail from Mal White about last' month's article about xterm for Android. He pointed me to various ssh implementations, and of course I know about them. So why did I write that article? I no longer remember. What I need for Android is not an xterm, which is really not much more useful than ssh, but something that can display the Android screen on a real display. And I thought I had once had that, but I no longer remember. Doubtless some user-friendly Android ?feature? got in the way.
Image size strangeness
This morning I wanted to align two images for mouseover alternation: Somehow it didn't work as intended. The sizes of the images should have been the same, but the second one is higher. Why? But after processing, I had serious performance problems displaying the input images. After a bit of head-scratching, discovered: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/7) ~/Photos/20230528 577 -> file Computers-?.jpeg Computers-1.jpeg: JPEG image data, JFIF standard 1.01, resolution (DPI), density 150x150, segment length 16, baseline, precision 8, 19233x16154, frames 3 Computers-2.jpeg: JPEG image data, JFIF standard 1.01, resolution (DPI), density 150x150, segment length 16, baseline, precision 8, 19233x16512, frames 3 The images are round 317 MP ...
Still more Vonex frustration
This whole week I have been trying to get a response from Vonex about the many problems I have with them. My last message (yesterday) contained: 1. Today the DID number expires. PLEASE DO NOT RENEW IT. 2. DO NOT CANCEL the connection (MegaSaver), nor the other associated DID. 3. Please cancel the SuperSaver before migration to the new system. I do not wish to pay any money for this service. 4. Refund the money that you illegally deducted from my credit card NOW. This is a demand, not a request.
More distress distress
Shortly after arriving in the office, distress came out of hibernation again. What? I had firewalled everything going to it. And it had caught a lot of traffic: 00003 523950 32182090 deny ip from any to 192.109.197.172 via em0 That's over half a million data packets since yesterday. What are they? Last time I looked it seemed to be something on distress accessing the outside world, and possibly that's what it was. But since I've been blocking things, what could be waking it?
ZoiPer config again
I still can't get ZoiPer to connect to my VoIP services. The obvious thing to suspect was an incorrectly entered password, since there was no way to check whether it was correct or not. But there was! Yes, it displays as a row of stars, but this horrible keyboard replacement suggests a string: And that's correct. Isn't it also stupid? I also discovered typos in the user name. Fixed all that. No difference. Still can't connect.
distress distress
For the past week or two, distress, usually hibernated, has been waking up at roughly regular intervals. Why? External network traffic? I've blocked all incoming traffic (from the external interface), but it hasn't stopped. OK, let's see what happens if I block traffic on the internal interface. That means that I won't be able to talk to it, of course, but I can always remove the firewall rule when I do.
Goodbye phantoms?
It's been 2 days since I moved my Aussie Broadband configuration from the Grandstream HT802 ATA to the Linksys (or is that Cisco)? PAP2T so that I could trace the phantom calls more easily. But there have been none! Is this somehow related to the ATA? I can't see how.
Vonex again
It's been 4 days since I reported Vonex' fraudulent activities, 3 days since the TIO contacted them about it, and 2 days since Joey Melendez contacted me with content that bore almost no relationship to the matter. And today is the expiration date of my DID number. Have they disconnected it? No. Another email to them, specifying my demands. It's to [email protected], not to Joey personally, so somebody should be able to do something about it.
DENIC, where art thou?
Should I give DENIC another call or send them a mail message? The people I spoke to yesterday didn't seem to understand what I wanted, so maybe it would help to write email. Did that, and given the time difference it wasn't surprising that I didn't get a reply today.
Bloody monitors!
Round lunch time Yvonne called me. Bruno had jumped on her keyboard and reconfigured the display. Oh. The screen dimensions had changed, making things narrower, and clearly the monitor itself showed only part of the X display. I've used that before decades ago: it should be possible to switch between the display resolutions with Ctrl-Alt-+ and Ctrl-Alt--. But that hasn't worked for some time, and since I didn't need it, I didn't investigate why. It didn't work today, either. Dammit, restart X. It had only been up for 5 weeks. But it came up in the same resolution again, and so did the text display on the monitor: somehow the monitor had changed its parameters, not the computer.
Reinstating GL3-RIPE
It's been two weeks since I sent a message to DENIC asking for authentication to change my handle GL3-RIPE. Beyond two automatic responses with two different ticket numbers, no response. But the responses had phone numbers, so called them, first the DENIC Business Services in Frankfurt (+49 69 26235-272), ticket 2023051143000294. Automatic response ?we will be with you shortly?, then silence, not even canned music. After a couple of minutes called the other one, ticket 1848782 in Darmstadt, +49 6151 62 90 942, and almost immediately was connected with a Mr Ratna, who told me that they had considered the message (and presumably the reminder) as spam!
More VoIP investigations
What caused all the phantom calls on my Aussie Broadband line? Somehow the name ?sipvicious? looked suspicious. What does Google have to say about it? Ah, it's a OSS security tool, one that can be abused for the kind of call I have been getting. This page,?How do I stop SIPVicious attacks??, gives a solution: The only solution is to block these type of calls is to ensure that SIP ports such as 5060, 5061 are blocked on the firewall or router. Will that even work?
Still more VoIP pain
Call at 15:41 from Joey of Vonex, phone number 07 3667 8999, after I had stipulated that I wanted to communicate by email. The exhange speaks volumes: Joey: How are you today? Greg: Not very happy. Joey: That's good to hear. I must remind you that this call may be recorded for quality purposes. Greg: I've already told you that I don't want to communicate via phone. I want to communicate by email so that I can record the exchange.
VoIP phantoms
Woken up at 1:17 this morning by the phone ringing. Another bloody phantom call! And I had left the wrong phone connected to the Aussie Broadband line! Off to take a look at the details. It shows an invitation from 43.252.74.114. A traceroute shows that to be behind be3.core1.equinix-sg1.sin.aussiebb.net and 38758-sg1-ix.equinix.com, which I am guessing is one of the Aussie servers. Does that help? Not much. One thing's clear: MyNetFone generates much more traffic to the ATA than Aussie does, and it clouds the trace. How about putting the line on a different ATA? After all, there's one right next to it?a Linksys (or is that Cisco)?
Firewall docco
How do I specify a specific interface in a firewall rule? A quick RTFM didn't help much. This page did: the via keyword. It might be worth reading more generally.
Sound via HDMI
A thread on the FreeBSD-questions mailing list caught my eye recently: ?Why can't I output audio to HDMI??. I don't have an answer: I just discovered years ago that I couldn't, and since I had an amplifier connected anyway, I didn't bother much. But it's (maybe) worth following up on. This article points me to a device /dev/sndstat. And how about that, on tiwi I get: === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/3) ~ 42 -> cat /dev/sndstat Installed devices: pcm0: <NVIDIA (0x001c) (HDMI/DP 8ch)> (play) pcm1: <NVIDIA (0x001c) (HDMI/DP 8ch)> (play) pcm2: <Realtek ALC662 rev1 (Analog 2.0+HP/2.0)> (play/rec) default pcm3: <Realtek ALC662 rev1 (Analog)> (play/rec) No devices installed from userspace.
A day wasted with VoIP
Call from Ben at the TIO today, as expected. For once somebody sensible! Normally I don't like phone calls because of the communication difficulties, but this time it was probably a sensible way to go. The reason I didn't need to give any details about Vonex became clear: they're well-known to the TIO, simply because there's only a limited number of participants. But Ben only knew them as a supplier of commercial services, and hadn't heard of their takeover of MyNetFone. He explained the details: they will communicate (almost certainly now have communicated) with Vonex and give them 10 days to resolve the problem.
Reporting Vonex fraud
Still no reply from Vonex about the fraudulent deduction of sums from my credit card. I've really been dreading the work it would take to report it, and I was right: over 2 hours today, and I'm only about half way through it. First called the bank, fought my way through the voice recognition service, and spoke to Alvir, explaining the details: On 16 May Vonex deducted the sum of $34.70 from my credit card despite my express prohibition. Who? Vonex, like I said How much? $34.70, like I said. When? 16 May, like I said. Sometimes I wonder why I bother stating the case up front.
Vonex does it again
One of the issues that I have with Vonex is that I no longer get voicemail sent as email messages, nor even notification when I get a voicemail. OK, that's simple: disable voicemail and put it on the local phones, all of which have answering machine functionality. Oh. There's no longer a way to configure voice mail. All I can do is change the announcement. But while I was messing around, I got a stored voice mail from my daughter Yana. No date or time, of course, but I recognized the message: it was sent on 26 December 2021, announcing that she was a ?close contact?
Phantom phone calls?
One of the issues I have migrating from Vonex to Aussie Broadband VoIP is the issue of phantom phone calls. We've seen this before, and as a result we migrated to a different port (sip-tls, port 5061 instead of sip, port 5060). It has nothing to do with TLS, but it seems that the spammers don't try that port number?yet. OK, get Aussie to do the same again? Somehow the real solution would be to set a firewall rule, but that needs investigation.
Microsoft predators?
Recently I've discovered that my Microsoft boxes dischord and distress have randomly come out of hibernation several times a day. Why? Then it dawned on me. Network traffic? What does tcpdump say? ICMP6 echo requests! But I don't even use IPv6! OK, we can block that: ipfw add 2 deny ip6 from any to any But it didn't stop! Does that not block ICMP, maybe? Try blocking ipfw add 2 deny icmp6 from any to any At least tcpdump recognized that and changed it: 00002 4 196 deny ip6 from any to any 00002 0 ...
Vonex responds
Mail from Vonex: they're changing the ?plans?. This is presumably the message I should have received a little over a month ago. But it contains information that Joey was too polite to tell me: the prices are going up. $1 a month more for the line I'm using, and infinitely more for the ?SuperSaver?, which used to be free, and will now cost $5. Wouldn't you have thought that Joey would have told me that? By comparison, the fact that they have allocated the numbers incorrectly is more the kind of incompetence that I would have expected of them. They also have a link to a Residential Plans page, which contains information apparently unrelated to what they wrote on the other page.
OCR again
The report on my colonoscopy was on paper: I wanted to convert to text. There are so many programs that can do that, but years ago I bought a program from Ashampoo that captures the screen contents and can convert them to text. It only ran on Microsoft. What's it called? Something with OCR? The usual search functions didn't help, so I had to fight my way through a maze of twisty little icons, all different. Ah, there! ?Ashampoo Snap?. Why didn't I think of that?
SBS download: fixed
It's been nearly 2 months since I stopped being able to access videos on the SBS site. I need to supply user name and password, but that still didn't help, assuming that I had found my way correctly through the vague instructions. More discussion on IRC today, and it seems that I was the only person with such problems. Others managed it with no trouble. But on further examination, they were using the latest and greatest yt-dlp, while I was using the one in the FreeBSD ports collection. I've been trying to avoid using the version on the web site, because it's maintained with git, one of my pet hates.
More VoIP issues
Vonex has still not refunded the money that they illegally deducted from my credit card. Time for a complaint to the TIO, my bank and whatever authorities are responsible for abuse of this nature. Well, no, no time. But it'll happen. As if to prove the point, I discovered that voice mail is no longer being mailed to me as an email attachment. I found no fewer than four messages on my normal phone voice mail, one from Joey of Vonex, who should have known better, and none with any date information. Apart from their dishonesty, the functionality has reached a point that makes it useless.
SBS downloads again
It's been well over a month since I last tried to find an incantation to download videos from the new SBS web site. I was left wondering whether I had provided the correct cookies or not. I had established that yt-dlp uses cookies from firefox or chromium, but it wasn't clear whether the cookies I extracted were actually correct. All I established was that it still didn't work with them. OK, start with a clean (polished?) chromium, log in to SBS, stop chromium and see what I get.
Bloody Vonex!
Unexpected mail from Vonex today: they had deducted $34.70 from my credit card. What part of this mail did they not understand? - You will not deduct any further sums from my account without my written consent. Mail to Joey Melendez, who wrote: We cannot credit back or refund since the cancellation has been revoked and the services continue. That's nonsense, of course. My account is in credit, and direct debiting is a separate issue from having an account with them. Wrote back with a deadline of tomorrow. And if they don't refund (which seems likely)?
You have an open port!
Strange mail today: From: CERT-Bund Reports <[email protected]-bund.de> Subject: [CB-Report#20230516-10005299] Offene Portmapper-Dienste in Netzbereich 192.109.197.0/24 Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren, der Portmapper-Dienst (portmap, rpcbind) wird benötigt, um RPC-Anfragen einem Dienst zuzuordnen. Der Portmapper-Dienst wird u.a. für Netzwerkfreigaben über das Network File System (NFS) benötigt. Der Portmapper-Dienst verwendet Port 111 tcp/udp. Nachfolgend senden wir Ihnen eine Liste betroffener Systeme in Ihrem Netzbereich. What's that? Spam? No, it's a consequence of having my network block on the net again. I had set up the firewall to refuse most connection requests from outside, but this is UDP, a connectionless protocol, and I had only blocked some Microsoft-related ports.
More network problems?
While downloading videos today, I discovered that the downloading had stopped. Further investigation showed that the machines in other rooms (tiwi, lagoon) were not responding. Network switch problem? Into the pantry. Yes, the switch was dead. But so was the Wi-Fi access point. Power? Into the garage. Yes, the circuit breaker had tripped, and it stayed tripped. I've seen that before, more often than I like. The sump pump in front of the house? Disconnected it and things ran again. The pump's not that old, and it was installed by UPI. Called them up on 5336 3420 (now, at least, they show their phone number on the web) and spoke to Kylie, who told me that all people were out, but that she would call back.
50 years of microprocessors
It's been somewhat over 50 years since the Intel 8008 processor was introduced, and 48 years since I started programming one: It was a horrible processor, but it has left its traces even on the most modern processors. It's amusing to think that the original 8008 had only 3,500 transistors, and the current AMD Ryzen processors have round 3 million times as many transistors. But today I came across this article, which went further into the history of the 8008 than I had known.
Ports staging: beaten!
So clearly my issues porting mklinks from FreeBSD to FreeBSD are related to the ?stage? stage in the Ports Collection. And I hadn't read the Porter's Handbook from end to end. OK, read it and see what it has to say about staging. Almost nothing! Definitely no indication of what the ?stage? stage expects of the source Makefile. It really shouldn't have any expectations beyond that the file works. OK, how do other ports handle the issue? Went through the sysutils directory looking for small ports that use PLIST_FILES, and finally came up with sysutils/obliterate, a real file deletion program written by my good friend Wes Peters (as I only later discovered).
Next porting effort
So why am I having so much trouble porting mklinks? It compiles correctly, it installs correctly, and it was written for FreeBSD. But I've been chasing port issues (admittedly not very intensively) for days now. It's difficult to find the blame anyway than in the Ports Collection infrastructure. The first thing that I saw was that parts of the package Makefile were being ignored. I had a variable DESTDIR that overlaps with a variable of the same name in the Ports Collection. What happens if I change its name? It works! Well, partially. But there's something basically wrong if this sequence in a Makefile doesn't work: DESTDIR= /usr/local install: all cp mklinks ${DESTDIR}/bin Part of this is doubtless to do with ?staging?, where the files are first installed ...
mklinks port, day 2
A bit of idle thinking about why yesterday's port caused such problems. Which Makefile was to blame? The ports Makefile (/usr/ports/sysytils/mklinks/Makefile) or the package Makefile (/usr/ports/sysytils/mklinks/work/mklinks-1.0/Makefile)? At least I established that: mine, the package Makefile. But there's almost nothing in it. And for reasons I don't understand, it tried to put the man pages in work/stage/man/man1 instead of the work/stage/usr/local/man/man1 that it had waiting for it. But the Makefile contained: DESTDIR= /usr/local all: mklinks install: all cp mklinks ${DESTDIR}/bin gzip -c mklinks.1 > ${DESTDIR}/man/man1/mklinks.1.gz There are two issues here: first, it seems to have ignored DESTDIR, and secondly (presumably intentionally) the leading / got removed from the path name.
Porting again
Last week a question appeared on the FreeBSD-questions mailing list: To: freebsd-[email protected] Subject: Tool to compare directories and delete duplicate files from one directory I'm wondering if anyone knows of a tool like diff or so that can also delete files based on name and size from either left/right or source/destination directory? Well, of course, that's what mklinks is for. Just install the sysutils/mklinks port and RTFM. Oh. It's been decades since I wrote it?the first checkin was dated 1995/02/26?and I cleverly named it after a script of the same name in 4.4BSD, though the functionality is quite different.
Net block: tidying up
So my net block 192.109.197.0/24 is now officially mine, as whois shows. But I still need to update my net handle GL3-RIPE, and I don't have reverse DNS lookup. Message to DENIC about updating the handle, and hopefully we'll find out about the reverse lookup soon. About the only thing that's of interest is the now-you-see-it-now-you don't statement: === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/6) ~ 1 -> whois 192.109.197.0 % IANA WHOIS server % for more information on IANA, visit http://www.iana.org refer: whois.arin.net organisation: Administered by ARIN status: LEGACY ...
Aussie complaint resolved
Another email from Aussie Broadband today about my complaint. Yes, they take my suggestions on board. It looked well written, but didn't go into any detail beyond acknowledging At this point, we can take this situation as a learning experience and use it as an opportunity to improve. Your feedback has shed light on areas where we need to improve our knowledge, training, and communication channels for our customers, this will passed along as feedback so we can look to improve our handling of requests like this.
RIPE: All done bar the shouting?
I still haven't heard the last word about my network block transfer: there's still this proof outstanding that I am entitled to the legacy of LEMIS. But just before going to bed I got an email: Date: Wed, 10 May 2023 10:41:40 +0000 (UTC) From: "RIPE NCC ([email protected]) via Zonka Feedback" <[email protected]> Subject: How did we do? Reply-To: [email protected] Mail sent successfully Ah, they're too polite to use plain text. There's a link to a typical survey in the HTML version.
Vonex: We will disconnect whether you want or not
I've been exchanging mail with Joey of Vonex for a couple of days ago. Some time ago she said that I couldn't cancel the numbers before 25 May, and I had to make it clear that I wanted the service to continue until the date for which I had paid, some time in August, but the last couple of times she wanted to terminate on 15 May?next week! I still have issues with the Aussie Broadband VoIP service, so I don't want to be put under pressure. How do I get across to these people?
Network block: progress
Mail from Mark Price today: RIPE NCC has accepted my driver license as proof of identity, and Mark has managed to drive up a deregistration certificate for LEMIS, showing (hopefully to RIPE's satisfaction) that I was the sole beneficiary. Things are looking up, and I'm very impressed that Mark managed to find the document.
Aussie Broadband
Mail as promised from Lorens from Aussie Broadband. It's not even clear what he wanted, but I've been through this before, so I summarized the events of the last month, recommended that he pass them on to senior management (particularly my open letter), and even gave him an authentication method (one-time password ?pink elephant?) if he wanted to call me. Just before going to bed, I got an email from Melvin. Here are the only points of any interest: First of all, I would like to offer our apologies if it feels like we are unable to handle your previous complaint correctly within your expectations.
Aussie Broadband resolves complaints
It's been over 3 weeks since I raised a complaint with Aussie Broadband about the lack of availability of qualified support personnel. Today I got a phone call on my mobile phone from a Lorens, who wanted to know what the issue was with the network routing. But he couldn't give me any details until I authenticated myself: name, date of birth, etc. And how could he authenticate himself? He couldn't, of course. I have no doubt that he's genuine, but it's this kind of assumption that makes like easier for scammers.
Opening the flood gates
So now I have my /24 routed from anywhere in the world. Here the entries for the block last month and then today: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/24) ~ 33 -> whois -h whois.cymru.com " -v 192.109.197.0" AS | IP | BGP Prefix | CC | Registry | Allocated | AS Name NA | 192.109.197.0 | NA | AU | ripencc | 1991-05-01 | NA 4764 | 192.109.197.0 | 192.109.197.0/24 | AU | ripencc | 1991-05-01 | WIDEBAND-AS-AP Aussie Broadband, AU So basically I don't need NAT any more.
Limits on net accessibility
Finally it looks like the network block issue is being resolved. Mark Price seems to have all he needs to satisfy the bureaucrats, and I can sit back and recover from the stress. And then Juha Kupiainen piped up: from your diary "assuming that I don't run into bottlenecks." ... nbn - your wish is our command !! ... https://www.nbnco.com.au/utility/fixed-wireless-fair-use-policy What does that document say? It's really hard to understand. Despite the title, it doesn't contain a ?fair use?
ANZ does it again
My (ANZ) credit card payment is due in a few days. It gets deducted automatically from my ANZ bank account. But there's not always enough money in the account, so I need to transfer from another account. How much is the payment? About double the normal maximum! How did that happen? Looking at the statement, I found: 16 APR INTEREST CHARGED ON PURCHASES $17.50 16 APR LATE PAYMENT FEE $20.00 ...
Wi-Fi phone calls?
During a discussion on IRC this morning, Jamie Fraser mentioned the possibility of using Wi-Fi instead of the mobile phone network for making calls. Well, yes, of course. It's VoIP, and it has nothing directly to do with Wi-Fi. It's an Internet protocol, as the name suggests. But no, says Jamie, android and iphone have the ability to use your wifi instead of the local phone network to place the call. i'm not sure why you'd want that, i suppose if you live somewhere with spotty or high-contention GSM but have good wifi it's useful?
More RIPE fun
So now the transfer of my network block is well on its way, and I was asked to set up some kind of account at RIPE. I don't know why: all they wanted was my name and my email address?and NO LESS THAN 4 CAPTCHAs! The real work will be done by Mark Price. Having the network routed here is in fact more useful than I had thought. On the amusing side of things, I can now ping my mobile phone from anywhere in the world, as long as it's at home. More useful, though, is that I could really now host my web site at home.
Spam phone calls?
Just before we went to bed, a call came in on my second phone line, one of the Aussie Broadband numbers. Number ported already? I missed the call, but that didn't matter. I got another. And another. Tried to answer, but no sound. What's that? Mañana. For today I disconnected the phone connection.
X resource hog identified
Finally I've found the cause of the extreme X CPU usage that I had noted last month. It's www.fernsehserien.des episode pages. It also only seems to happen when the browser is running on a different machine from the server. Today I registered 35% CPU on the firefox process and up to 60% on the X server. My guess is that it's these rotating circles that never resolve: Somehow this site is broken.
RIPE: Tying up the loose ends
So what do I need to do to finally get rid of this thorn in the side that is RIPE NCC? A couple of messages from Mark Price today, in which he informed me that his LIR activity was not completely free: RIPE charge him 50 ? per year for the function! He will pass it on without any extras, which is generous. Followed up with a long phone call, during which he agreed that he could fix the routing issues easily. In the process he pointed me at https://www.irr.net/ and https://www.radb.net/, which I must investigate. But the real issues are?again?bureaucracy!
RIPE: Progress?
It's been nearly a week since RIPE NCC said that they would consider things and get back to me. They did that this evening, just before I went to bed, still refusing to accept any of the documents that I had supplied, but... After our internal evaluation, we have decided to make an exception this time and accept your transfer request... FINALLY!
Changing phone suppliers
So gradually I'm moving my VoIP service from MyNetFone Vonex to Aussie Broadband, despite the problems I have had with their documentation. In particular there seemed to be no documentation on setting up voice mail or call charges. I couldn't even update my profile: despite not presenting an ?Email? field, it complained because I didn't enter anything in it. Called up this afternoon and spoke to Jordan, who surprised me by sending me exactly the information I needed. Voice mail setup is via number 101, and there's documentation for the VoIP service on the web, just not linked from anywhere I have been.
Still more communication issues
Call from Joey Melendez of Vonex today, referring to the email I sent her last week. It's not clear why. She repeated what she had said last time, but said that my subscription (paid until the end of August) would end some time in June when all accounts were transferred. I suggested that they then refund pro rata, but I don't think that expression is in her vocabulary. In any case, she said that a ?senior rep? would contact me. Somehow the last 4 weeks have been full of miscommunication. It's amazingly frustrating.
It was IBM. It was UNIVAC.
Decades ago, I guessed round 1960, I heard a song, ?Automation? by Allan Sherman, one of the first songs about computers. And it contained the words ?It was IBM. It was UNIVAC.?. And somehow today's calendar entry reminded me of that: May 1 Greg starts working with IBM, 2001 May 1 Greg starts working with UNIVAC, 1973 50 years since I started earning money in the industry! In passing, a couple of points about the song. It was written by Allan Sherman, not Alan Sherman, a computer scientist who had only just been born.
Still more miscommunication: Vonex
VoIP seems to be on its way out. In fact, telephony seems to be on its way out, probably because modern phones have made it so difficult. Instead people ?text?, painfully typing into tiny, non-responsive ?keyboards?. That says something about the pain that making phone calls is. From our point of view, still with something resembling the old-fashioned telephone, things haven't changed much. But the world outside has made a change: Since people don't use phones as much, we don't make as many calls as we used to. And the ones made to mobile phones aren't free: in fact, they're more expensive with VoIP than with a mobile phone, so we don't use VoIP to call mobile phones.
Next AAMI response
Response from AAMI to the message I sent them 10 days ago: I tried calling to your number 03 53461370. However, it is not available. Could you please provide us the number that we can contact you or could you please contact us on 1300 041 691? Did my message not get through? No, it was attached, and contained: The number is connected. Did you maybe misdial? And why did you call this number? I gave you a different number to call (see the headers).
Aussie insights
I still don't have complete routing for my network block. But while writing my open letter to Aussie Broadband, re-read this message from John Alexander: What you do need to be able to do though is edit your apnic record to add in a route object for AS4764. Without that, our upstreams (NTT, HE.net) and peering (Equinix, soon to be Google plus more) will reject the routes from us. We need you to be able to do this otherwise the only path in will be via Telstra transit, so will have to think twice before advertising it for you.
RIPE response
Today's response from RIPE NCC was short, but double. They need more time for both tickets. On the other hand, I had a response from Mark Price of Tranquil Hosting; maybe he can finally convince RIPE that I'm the legitimate ?successor? to LEMIS.
Quora strangenesses
Over 5 years ago I answered a question on quora.com: ?What is the need of swapping of processes from end to memory??. Not a very clear question, and not a very good answer. I didn't even try to reinterpret it. And then I forgot it. And now, for unknown reasons, I've had a flood of upvotes, 92 in a single day. There are 2 or 3 other answers (Quora can't make up its mind), and they have had none. Why is this happening now?
Open letter to Aussie Broadband
My issues with Aussie Broadband support are still not over. My route is visible in some places, but not in others. That could be beyond Aussie's control, of course, but the fact that I can't contact anybody in support who even understands the concepts is not. TL;DR: I summarize the pain I've been through in the last couple of weeks. Further down I have suggestions on how to improve service. Today I got an email from them: We?re glad to see that the recent fault on your service has been closed! Fault Reference: OK, what fault?
More network routing thoughts
So how does network routing work? In principle I know the details, but what I saw yesterday was that some systems could see my 192.109.197.0/24 block and others couldn't. And that didn't change today. But what's the point of the second IP address (192.109.197.77) on the external interface? Nothing outside my network knows it. Remove it (leaving the DHCP-assigned address). Things still worked. And the other thing: how do I get eureka (the one connected directly to the WAN link) to send packets with eureka's source address (192.109.197.137)? The network stack automatically chooses the external address (currently 121.200.11.253). I really need to read up on this.
A route! A route!
More discussion on IRC about my issues routing my net block. What happens if I change the address of the external interface xl0 to something in my net block, say 192.109.197.77? Just what I had expected: no traffic. Problem proven. So I restarted dhclient to set up the link again. But then Jamie Fraser came up with something surprising: jfraser: traceroute to 192.109.197.77 (192.109.197.77), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets jfraser: 1 _gateway (10.8.0.1) 1.324 ms 1.941 ms 2.045 ms jfraser: 2 loop1591962320.bng.mel.aussiebb.net (159.196.232.1) 28.730 ms 29.955 ms 30.206 ms jfraser: 3 192.109.197.77 (192.109.197.77) 47.981 ms 48.060 ms 48.224 ms Huh?
Kicking, Aussie style
Friday's response to my complaint about the lack of support from Aussie Broadband included the request ?If you have notyet kicked your session ..., please do this?. And now, thanks to Juha Kupiainen, I know what it means: use the Aussie ?Service Test? app to, well, ?kick connection?. He gave me the URL ?Aussie broadband customers can now kick their connection?, explaining a connection ?kick? acts like a remotely-controlled fresh reboot but even more powerful. Rather than just the old switch on, switch off method for your modem when it?s playing up, the ?kick?
More phone scams
Yvonne received a strange call on her phone today, purportedly from ANZ. That's clearly a scam: ANZ doesn't make that kind of call. But by the time she handed the phone to me, the connection had been dropped. Still, not a problem. I got what was presumably the same thing myself later in the afternoon. It was an automated message, and it knew something like my name. It seems that my credit card with the "end numbers" 4337 was $59 in arrears. Nonsense! I always pay my credit card balance when it's due. Still, let's see what it wanted. I had various menus to go through, and in my case I was asked if I had paid.
Understanding Microsoft, part 4713
Part of my normal photo processing uses Microsoft-space programs, which I run on a machine called distress.lemis.com. Both Yvonne and I use it via rdesktop, each under our own account. But it seems that not all accounts are equal. Yvonne frequently has issues starting rdesktop, and sometimes she gets a login screen for ?Other User?. Then again sometimes the rdesktop screen pops up for less than a second and then disappears again. And sometimes it gets as far as displaying: There are no endpoints from endpoint mapper What is that?
Ballarat parking meters again
One issue with Peter Apostolopoulos is that he doesn't have any free parking, unlike the other dentist practices. So I had to find a parking meter. OK, time to try out this irritating Cellophane app that I installed a couple of weeks ago. Oh. It looks as if it isn't supported here, only these horrible parking meters with an ABC keyboard and an illegible display. Got as far as entering my registration number, and then something illegible appeared. Get a photo: The camera doesn't understand either.
More Google Maps fun
As a matter of course, used Google Maps to get to the periodontist. It's pretty straightforward. But when I forwarded the route to my mobile phone, I checked the times. Yes, this time it agreed with the web browser version. At least for the means of transport that I had chosen, car. But it also gave me a time for public transport: Public transport? There's almost no such thing. What does the web browser say? So it really seems as if there are two different teams at Google Maps, one for mobile phones, one for Real Computers?.
RIPE postpones
It seems that I have had partial success with my application to RIPE NCC. No further questions; they've just transferred it to somebody else, who will look at it next week. Does this mean that there are multiple hurdles to jump?
Aussie resolves complaint
Finally got feedback from Aussie Broadband about the complaint that I lodged a week ago: I have picked up handling of your formal complaint raised on your behalf regarding your request for a legacy IP Routing change. I have reached out directly to our NOC leadership, and our NOC team have progressed your request on 18.04.23. You should have access to this now. If you have notyet kicked your session and rebooted your router, please do this so your framed route to properly attach to the service. Now what does that mean.
Rewiring lagoon
Part of installing the UPS units 2 months ago involved tidying up the rat's nest behind lagoon, Yvonne's computer. Apart from the fact that I hate it, it's a lot of work. But Bruno forced my hand. Wandering about behind Yvonne's desk, he found a wobbly power connector, and later something changed the resolution of the display. Cat on keyboard? How do you change X resolution anyway? Ctrl-Alt-+ and Ctrl-Alt--? Didn't work. Dammit, if we have to stop X, we might as well reboot and use the opportunity to redo the wiring: At the end a surprising amount of stuff was left over: ...
192.109.197.0, the latest
Spent some time addressing the response from RIPE that arrived yesterday evening. Why isn't the information sufficient? Wrote a lot on the subject, explaining the significance of the documents I had sent. Then I looked again. I had sent the wrong statutory declaration! I had made a second declaration regarding my access to the RIPE database, just in case they caused problems there too, but that was the one I sent: OK, nothing for it. Sorry, mea culpa. Another day gone by.
Still more RIPE fun
No response from RIPE today, the deadline that they had set. Sent them a reminder and finally, just before I went to bed, I got a reply: Unfortunately the Statutory of [sic] Declaration which was made recently on 18 April 2023 is not sufficient to support 192.109.197.0/24 is transferred from LEMIS (SA) PTY LTD to you. Why? Ah, they're too polite to say.
What's legacy IPv4 address space?
So why did RIPE NCC tell me that my address block wasn't a legacy block? It predated RIPE (in fact, the creation date shows as 1 January 1970, in other words 0). But it seems that's not enough: this page tells me: Legacy space is the IPv4 address space that was distributed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority's (IANA) central registry prior to the formation of the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) system. After the RIPE NCC was established as an RIR, IANA authorised it to take over administrative responsibility of the address space that it had distributed in what is now defined as the RIPE NCC service region (Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia).
Google Maps times
I've been grumbling about the accuracy of GPS navigation software for as long as I have been using it, in particular the times it claims. Gradually it's getting better, to the point that it's almost worth looking at the timing information. Today I set up my route: Ballarat Base Hospital, police station, back to the Base Hospital, then back home. Driving time: 1 hour, 6 minutes: But when I sent the route to my phone, it disagreed: Now wouldn't you think that the same app would agree with itself?
Yvonne: heart problems?
While this was going on, Yvonne told me that she was not feeling well. Chest pain. Given her cardiac history, that could be serious, so when I left for Ballarat round 13:30, I took her with me to the emergency department of the Ballarat Base Hospital, in the hope that they'd give her priority based on her symptoms. Drove on to the police station to get the statutory declaration signed: It's amazing how few checks are made for such a formal document. I didn't even have to identify myself to the JP, a perfect stranger: my signature was enough.
UPS: More trouble than they're worth?
Turned on the printer to print out the statutory declaration, for the first time in months. BEEP! I had accidentally connected the printer to the new UPS instead of its own power point, and it overloaded. Instead of falling pack to passthrough, it simply turned off all power output, but not the beeping, which continued even after I removed all loads. I had to kill it separately. ANOTHER bloody power failure! Yes, of course, it was my fault, but what excuse is that? And this time, of course, I lost all the computers in my office with the exception of bde, the laptop.
LEMIS: Statutory declaration
First thing today was to write a statutory declaration about my relationship with LEMIS (SA) Pty Ltd, not made any more difficult by my discovery of no fewer than 3 copies of the Constitution of LEMIS (SA) Pty Ltd (?A company limited by shares?) . It's nearly all boilerplate, but of course there's a signature, where I declare that I am the sole member of Lemis [sic] (SA) Pty Ltd. Writing the declaration was straightforward enough, but somehow my text processing software has rotted, and I was unable to create a PDF output file (well, I created it, but it was empty).
AAMI again!
Finally a response from AAMI! But what kind of response? We tried to contact you on 03 53461370. However, the number is not connected. What's wrong there? Firstly, the number is connected, just with permanent voice mail. And my logs showed that no connection attempt had been made. And secondly, I had given them the correct number to call. Score 0 for AAMI. The message also included a number of photos, most probably of Helen's car. There seems to be damage that I didn't cause, but then, nobody told me what damage they're blaming on me. There were also photos of the inside of the car and other irrelevant things.
Aussie complaints
How do I complain to Aussie Broadband about their support (or lack thereof)? I asked for it in a response to the useless mail thread that I got from them last week. And how about that, I got a message: From: Aussie Broadband <no-[email protected]> Thank you for contacting the Aussie Broadband complaints department. Complaint reference number: **52729642** Please use this number when contacting Aussie Broadband about your complaint. OK, and how? The message went on: ### **What happens next?** If you have already spoken with one of our team, they should have outlined our complaint process timelines for your case.
More RIPE fun
On Saturday I discovered (I think) that my net block doesn't need to be in the name of a company, and as as a legacy network I don't need any involvement with RIPE. But the devil's in the detail, in particular the proof of ownership of LEMIS (SA), and it wasn't until today that I sent off a message offering a statutory declaration about the ownership of LEMIS, and also requesting non-involvement and a method to update the data for GL3-RIPE. The delay doesn't mean anything: it still arrived at RIPE at 4:53 UTC on Monday morning. The reply (in the evening due to the time difference) was also relatively fast, at 9:32 UTC: no, I'm not a legacy user.
Luminar HDR
Luminar Neo has functionality for focus stacking and HDR, both of which I use. I already have Photomatix for HDR and Zerene for focus stacking, but who knows, maybe Luminar has some advantages. OK, fire up. It still has photos open that I processed weeks ago. How do I get rid of them? All I could find was to select them all and then press the DEL key. Somehow that seems tacky. Next, load the images. Nothing showed. Oh, first I need to open the ?folder?, after which it went off and started displaying all 36 images in the directory.
Netblock ownership revisited
Yesterday I established that my network block had transferred to LEMIS (SA) Pty Ltd on 7 April 2015. And it was clear that it had nothing to do with me. Did I have any record? Yes, of course. And yes, not only was I involved in the transfer, I signed a document asking for the transfer. So why did I think I wasn't involved? The most convincing argument was that I used the old address for LEMIS, though I was in the process of moving. But that's a misunderstanding. I never migrated LEMIS to the new address: even then it was effectively non-functional.
Understanding the /24 transfer
The current state of play with deploying my /24 net block is that RIPE wants proof of ownership of the block, and that by Thursday. It's currently allocated to LEMIS (SA) Pty Ltd: inetnum: 192.109.197.0 - 192.109.197.255 netname: LEMIS-LAN org: ORG-LPL6-RIPE country: DE admin-c: GL3-RIPE tech-c: GL3-RIPE status: ASSIGNED PI mnt-by: RIPE-NCC-END-MNT created: 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z last-modified: 2023-03-22T09:43:24Z source: RIPE organisation: ORG-LPL6-RIPE org-name: LEMIS (SA) PTY LTD country: AU org-type: OTHER address: 47 Kleins Road Dereel Victoria AU mnt-ref: MP4204-MNT mnt-by: MP4204-MNT created: 2015-04-07T21:35:02Z ...
New keyboard
Received a new Sun Type 7 keyboard today. Well, not so new: it looks considerably older than the one I'm using. But it only cost $25, and it's a good backup if the other one fails. I'm using it now to ensure that it really does work well.
Aussie Broadband Service: not what it used to be
It seems that technical superiority is no longer a hallmark of Aussie Broadband. After Tuesday's message from a Real Techie, I replied: Thanks. Maybe there's a misunderstanding here. I've had this block routed (5 times) before, and in the past the ISP just advertised the block. I've never had to set up BGB or supply an ASN. As far as I can tell, there is no ASN. This is a legacy allocation (dating to March 1992), which might explain that. No response. Yesterday I resent the message marked ?Urgent? and asked for a call back.
Route my /24, more attempts
Discussion on the phone with Peter O'Connell. Can we register the /24 net block with the Lehey Family Trust? He's not sure, and wants to get back to me. In passing, ABR has an appallingly bad search function. Yes, I can find Lehey Family Trust, and also hundreds of Lees, Leahys and similar. Search just for ?Lehey? and it finds them too, overflowing its search results, with the result that I can't find if there are are any other companies with the name ?Lehey? in them. Apart from that, silence on all fronts: RIPE, Aussie Broadband. I even tried to contact Mark Price of RootBSD, now subsumed into tqhosting.com, or maybe NetActuate.
Is my email being blocked?
Currently I send my email via mail.lemis.com, and from time to time some misguided Big Company blocks it for reasons that they can't really justify. Today I was expecting a number of important mail replies, and I got none. Did my messages get through? What if I send them via Aussie Broadband instead? It's a two line change in main.cf: --- main.cf 2022/12/31 22:08:28 1.55 +++ main.cf 2023/04/12 06:37:37 @@ -319,8 +319,8 @@ #relayhost = uucphost #relayhost = [an.ip.add.ress] # One of these two should be right.
Bloody AAMI again!
I've now sent 2 emails to AAMI about the damage that they allege that I did to Helen Miller's car on 18 October 2022. I've responded twice, most recently last week, asking for immediate confirmation of reception. No response, so I tried again yesterday. Still no response. Time for a phone call. 13224411243351? No, of course not. That's just what my phone recorded. The number itself is 13 22 44, and the rest is a voice menu from hell, ending with a warning that I could be in for a wait of 30 to 45 minutes. They were at least partially right; after 30 minutes I hung up.
Route my /24!
OK, time is getting short for routing my /24 before I lose it. Do I need a business account? Off to the Aussie Broadband web site to look for pricing. Oh. First I need to log in! Why? And then they want me to go through this horrible 2FA! To make matters worse, it took several minutes for their email to come through. The interesting thing was that their business accounts cost no more than their ?residential? accounts. But they come with a static IP address?clearly nothing I need here?and that costs $5 extra for ?residential? connections, so they're actually cheaper if you need the static IP.
xterm for Android?
One of the most horrible things about ?modern? computer infrastructure is the lack of interoperability. How do I interface SMS with email with Facebook? How do I share files between Android and FreeBSD? All these things that should be easy have been made difficult for no good reason. On top of that, of course, there's one almost acceptable reason why Android is such a pain: it has to run on a device that is too small to have a usable keyboard. But even there things could be better. And an obvious interoperability feature would be a version of xterm that runs on Android.
Progress is coming. Get used to it.
Five years ago I read and commented on an article Why smart fridges are the future. I read it again today. Have things changed? I don't know. I change my opinions in the course of time?I've done it with Android, though I still find it abominable?but in this case, my opinions remain. About the only thing of interest in that article (apparently sponsored by Amazon) was the suggestion that Alexa could give you conversion factors and start timers: For example, you can say ?Alexa, how many tablespoons are in a cup??
Bloody cables!
Bruno ran around in the lounge room today, and somehow he managed to wobble on the HDMI output cable of tiwi. No picture. OK, I can do that too. Wobble. No picture. Wobble. No picture. How I hate HDMI! Dammit, finally time to put the computer in the cabinet where it belongs. Cables too short. Mess around and finally get them long enough to be able to boot tiwi on a side table in front of the cabinet. Turn on. Nothing. No power. Look round the back of the cabinet. All seems well. More cursing and swearing didn't help, so I get a new power cable and finally powered it on.
Cellophane? Cellopark?
The parking signs that I saw on Wednesday included a reference to a mobile phone app to pay for parking, or conceivably to park for free: Off searching today, and found it, with the strange name Cellopark, which sounds like cellophane. How did they come up with such a silly name? OK, install. Configure. I suppose that it's par for the course that I can only configure the thing on the phone, but what a pain! In addition, I have to enter information that it should know, like the phone number.
Car insurance: the pain
Yvonne's car is still not insured for third party and stuff. In view of the pain we've just had with AAMI, it's time to do it. My interaction with Budget Direct last month was particularly painful. How about RACV again? Called up, gave the details. No, sorry, we can't renew the policy: it has lapsed. We need to do a new one. Various silly questions, but at one point it occurred to me: how much money are we looking at? The last yearly premium was $212. This time it would be $350 odd! I no longer get the membership rebates. Sorry, RACV, that's the final nail in the coffin.
More photo processing videos
After spending more money than I really wanted on Luminar Neo, I should get the most out of it. There are a surprising number of videos about how to use it, and I've been watching some of them. And how about that, I have learnt something. Probably the most interesting one is that they have a surprising number of key bindings that can be useful if I can only remember them.
What's annoying Xorg?
For some days now I've seen this kind of output from top: PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND 2768 grog 1 52 0 3470M 43664K select 1 218.8H 41.55% Xorg This instance of Xorg was started a month ago, so it's using about 7 hours of CPU time per day. What's it doing? The obvious answer would be that it's handling data, but it's not displaying anything significant.
Ukraine refugees in UK: animal import only via Google or Facebook
I receive a regular newsletter from the UK Government about the Ukraine crisis. Refugees are allowed to bring in their domestic animals, something that in the past has been almost impossible for mere mortals. But there are conditions: Before you travel to the UK, apply to bring your pets to Great Britain from Ukraine. You will need a Google or Facebook account. O tempora! O mores!
Why is my phone so slow?
enzian, the Xiaomi Redmi 9A that I bought for Yvonne, proved so slow that I had to buy her another phone. Since then, enzian has been on my desk for playing around with. And yes, it's amazingly slow. Why? I've had cheaper phones that weren't that bad, and the phone is several orders of magnitude faster than my 1970s supercomputer benchmark, the Control Data 7600. Has anybody else found insights? Off looking, and came up with a number of pages, none of them overly convincing.
Use a mobile phone!
Strange error message from Google Maps today: ?Something went wrong, please reload? or some such. And of course a link to a ?learn more? page that didn't address the issue at all. But that's modern. What's also modern is apparently that I'm not using the right kind of ?device?: Your account, [email protected], is signed in on a device that doesn't have a screenlock. If your phone is lost or stolen, a screenlock helps protect your personal info. Add a screenlock.
Another system crash!
My IRC proxy wasn't running again today. It's really very unreliable, so in to restart it. But this time things were different: === grog@lax (/dev/pts/3) ~ 4 -> uptime 12:57AM up 16:45, 4 users, load averages: 0.59, 0.49, 0.51 The system was restarted! That's the second time in three months!
/24 for sale
I've received a message from RIPE: I am no longer entitled to the /24 network block (192.109.197.0/24) that I have had for 31 years, nearly as long as RIPE has been in existence. Oh. That's sad. Somehow it's part of my life, and I use the block every day. Just not on the Global Internet. And it's nice to know that the address range is so low in what used to be called a ?Class C network? that it's considerably lower than the RFC 1918 range of 192.168.0.0/16. But the writing's on the wall: LEMIS no longer exists (closed down in 2007, deregistered in 2019), and since I haven't found a good way to use the address block on the Internet, it's not clear what good it is to me.
Understanding Android, next step
Discussed my Android documentation problems on IRC today. TL;DR: <fwaggle> You're not imagining it, that UX is fucked Swap one lack of documentation for another. UX? Like Tandem Computers' NonStop UX that I knew and loved decades ago? No, it seems to be a modern term for ?user experience?. Various people on IRC showed the contents of their corresponding screen, whose name I still don't know. They had one thing in common: they were all different. And modulo lack of documentation, they weren't any better than the MIUI screen.
Understanding Android, yet again
Yvonne is somehow a master of accidentally setting obscure things on digital devices. Last Tuesday she managed to set ?Airplane mode? on her phone. I still don't know how, but I do now understand that I can reset it by pressing the aeroplane icon on this page, which, for want of better documentation, I call the settings overview page: Some of that information is perfectly clear: it was taken at 14:02 today, mobile data is turned off, I'm connected to a Wi-Fi network L3M15, Bluetooth is enabled, and I have a field to shine a torch if I wish.
Car insurance over the web
We've been driving our cars without third party, fire and theft insurance for over a year now, since RACV bungled our renewals. No particular harm: the most important insurance is included in our registration, but clearly we need to do something. On Juha Kupiainen's mention, tried Budget Direct, who offer a web signup. But it doesn't work! Some parts of the signup process are so slow that I couldn't finish. Clearly they think that I'm too stupid to enter the expiry date of my credit card directly, so they produce selection lists which take over 20 s to react. When I finally did, pressed CONTINUE and watched the thing hang.
Understanding X fonts
One of the things that is holding up my system upgrade is the question of X fonts. I have a list of things to investigate, but basically it's far more complicated than it has any right to be. One of the things that puzzles me is things like this: Yes, they're all spam, in different character sets. But once upon a time I could display them. What has gone wrong? Spent some time investigating the matter. xterm has a font selection menu with very few fonts dating back decades.
Getting emergency warnings
Mail from a Free Thinker today?that's the name he uses?to tell me of an alternative to this horrible VIC Emergency web site. It seems that there's an XML feed with the information, and he includes a script to download it and send it to a mobile phone. I haven't examined it yet, but it looks like it would be relatively easy to modify it to send it to a Real Computer?.
You want uptime?
Now that ffm.lemis.com has exceeded 5 years uptime, I've been keeping an eye on it daily: === grog@ffm (/dev/pts/0) ~ 19 -> date; uptime Mon Mar 20 03:11:10 UTC 2023 3:11AM up 1869 days, 12:14, 2 users, load averages: 0.15, 0.18, 0.15 But that's nothing. carn/carneous on IRC (I don't know his real name) has a machine called hubble: hubble# uptime 2:22PM up 4766 days, 20:35, 1 user, load averages: 0.06, 0.01, 0.00 That's a little over 13 years.
Bushfire!
Strange weather today. It started out normally enough, except for heavier than usual winds?the dreaded north wind that changes to west during the day. When it's coming from the north, it spreads bushfires south. When it turns from the west, it spreads the whole length of the bushfire to the east. So we kept a careful eye on the paddock to the west, which is grass for about 200 m. In principle, the wet summer means that there's not much to burn. Here the area round the house, taken today: Still, a good idea to try to squeeze some useful information out of this horrible VIC Emergency web site.
Bushfire alert!
It's been a cool, wet summer, and we're well into autumn. But the fire danger still isn't over, as this article in the Ballarat Courier reports. Tomorrow could be the worst day of the season. To quote: ?We've had no real significant rain so far this year,? he said. (Assistant Chief Fire Officer Mark Gunning) And here's me thinking that we had record-breaking rainfall.
Another strange error message
Came into the office this morning to find an xterm window full of: console.warn: services.settings: Could not determine network status. Message: TypeError: lazy.gNetworkLinkService is undefined A quick Google brought me to a surprisingly accurate explanation. This is on eureka, with an ancient firefox, so I think it's a case of ?well don't do that then?.
More PHP debugging
A lot of the remaining error messages in my Apache error log relate to my PHP code. How do I debug it? For example: [Thu Mar 16 01:40:48.975295 2023] [php7:warn] [pid 71294] [client 185.191.171.6:29298] PHP Warning: A non-numeric value encountered in /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/php/includes/utils.php on line 180 OK, I can check utils.php and discover that it's in a function addrows(), which sums columns (yes!) in a table. Where's it called from? What has it been passed? Clearly I don't want any of this information to appear in the page that I deliver, but it's very likely that the resultant page is broken.
More web site tidying up
Spent some time today tidying up various issues with the external web site. There are a surprising number of them. I really need to tidy up my logging.
Fixing web pages
While chasing up yesterday's log file problems, came across a number of log entries that I can't blame on anybody else: they're relatively benign PHP errors. Spent a considerable amount of time following up there; there will be more to come.
No mail!
Into the office this morning to find that no mail had been delivered from outside overnight. Why? Off to the external mail server to take a look. (Only) file system full! A bit of searching led me to /var/log/www/, where the error log was fully 27 GB in size! How could that happen? Clearly I need to pay more attention to the daily status reports. But it wouldn't have helped. Checking again, the last mail (16:54 yesterday) contained: Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/ufs/rootfs 53G 41G 8.3G 83% / So overnight I had written something like 10 GB of error messages to the log file!
Sunday, day of rest
McLaren Vale Cellars have a new wine in their catalogue: ?Legion Chardonnay?. I've had the Legion Shiraz, and it's one of their better ones. Chardonnay is not my particular preference (I go for Sauvignon blanc instead), but on one occasion I bought some by accident, and it didn't taste bad. So: let's try a carton of the Legion and see what it's like. Follow the link in the mail and come to... ?Black Market Chardonnay?. Not what I was looking for, but clearly a web site problem. OK, email to Mark Curtis asking what I should do. An answer came almost immediately, on a Sunday afternoon.
Next X attempt
Why couldn't I start X on teevee with two display cards? The problem is clearly in creating the configuration file, which (as far as I can see) is absolutely necessary if you have more than one card. But how do I create it? X -configure doesn't know about drivers. Juha Kupiainen suggested nvidia-xconfig, which I knew, but for some reason I hadn't thought of using it. OK, new day, new display card: vgapci0@pci0:1:0:0: class=0x030000 card=0x85761043 chip=0x128b10de rev=0xa1 hdr=0x00 vendor = 'NVIDIA Corporation' device = 'GK208B [GeForce GT 710]' class = display subclass = VGA vgapci1@pci0:5:0:0: class=0x030000 card=0x375a1458 chip=0x128b10de rev=0xa1 hdr=0x00 vendor = 'NVIDIA Corporation' device = 'GK208B [GeForce GT 710]' class = display subclass = ...
Next X configuration pain
During the week I tried to start X on the ThinkCentre incarnation of hydra. ?No screens found?. Strange. This box was effectively the old teevee with a second display card, and both had been recognized. And after the inevitable search I discovered that the driver I was using (340.108) supported both cards. OK, eliminate one potential problem and replace the old, dying teevee disk in the box. No change. OK, remove my guess at the ?wrong? card (GT218 [GeForce 210]), which I guessed to be the one with the larger heat sink. Reboot. Worked immediately. So clearly it's related to more than one card.
Hydra surprises
Not much time to do anything with hydra today, but one thing had puzzled me: why was the SSD so slow on the HP Z800? Tried the same tests on the ThinkCentre and got completely different results. Here first the Z800 and then the ThinkCentre, running the same disk and the same OS: === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/13) ~ 2 -> diskinfo -t da1 Seek times: Full stroke: 250 iter in 0.016239 sec = 0.065 msec Half stroke: 250 iter in 0.016996 sec = 0.068 msec Quarter stroke: 500 iter in 0.079407 sec = 0.159 msec Short forward: 400 iter in 0.044783 sec = 0.112 msec Short backward: 400 iter in 0.043068 ...
Hydra, continued
How do I proceed with hydra? It's clear I need a new base system (motherboard, memory, case, power supply), but the display configuration is still an issue, and I still don't know an easy way to find out what driver I need for a specific Nvidia graphics card. For each card, I need to search. OK, I have a pile of at least 4 cards, all different. What are they? Take out the disk from hydra and put it in the old teevee, a ThinkCentre. Got it up with surprisingly few issues (mainly editing /etc/fstab to change da0 and da1 to ada0 and ada1.
Error reporting by guesswork or frustration
A couple of days ago I had an error backing up the root file system on tiwi: DUMP: mapping (Pass II) [directories] DUMP: estimated 1730498 tape blocks. DUMP: dumping (Pass III) [directories] zstd: error 25 : Write error : No space left on device (cannot write compressed block) DUMP: Broken pipe Well, sure, you can run out of space, and it happens from time to time. But not this time: there was plenty of space. But somehow that number rang a bell, and it wasn't ENOSPC.
Retouching photos
As planned, got out Luminar Neo today to retouch yesterday's sunset photo. It's a good thing that I had made notes about how to use it; it's anything but intuitive. In particular, it's remarkably difficult to save a file. Still, the results are particularly good this time: Encouraged by that, I tried another photo that Yvonne had asked me to process: remove the tree in this photo: That looks as good as impossible, and the results confirmed my suspicions: ...
More Nvidia ?documentation?
While looking for something better than the documentation I found yesterday, I found the NVIDIA Accelerated Linux Graphics Driver README and Installation Guide. Clearly that's not directly related to FreeBSD, but equally clearly it's the Linux version of the NVIDIA Accelerated FreeBSD Graphics Driver README and Installation Guide. Only this one has an Appendix A, ?Supported NVIDIA GPU Products?. And it's newer than the corresponding Appendix E for FreeBSD. It goes as far as the 390 driver, and it even mentions my GT 710, unfortunately without divulging the driver version. It wouldn't make much difference: it, too, is way out of date.
Diary tidy-up
This diary is written as a PHP script, which allows me to include additional information only for myself, such as restricted content, drafts, comments and notes. This all gets discarded when PHP runs against it. In particular, I have a call '<?php exit (); ?>' after the last day, and after that I have notes for myself. But they have a way of accumulating. The last two days typically have 300 to 400 lines of content, but the file has grown to over 2,000 lines, mainly comments. Spent some time sifting through the oldest, which prove to be round 4 years old.
Nvidia drivers: the mess
So what do I do about a display card driver for lagoon? A bit of checking suggested that maybe the Nvidia driver version 510 would work; the ones I have been using had numbers starting in 3, not 4. But I don't have time for that; instead I should find a central set of documentation. So far, for example, there only way I know to find out what driver(s) support a specific card is to search for it in a list on the Nvidia web site. It's valuable information, which is presumably why almost nobody gives links to it. What I have found so far is: The driver archive.
Phone fail
Call on the (?landline?, really VoIP) phone today. Tried to answer it, but it kept on ringing. Further investigation showed that the phone (Uniden 1735)) wasn't communicating with the base station. None of the four handsets were. They made a ?bump bump bump? noise, and after a while they gave up. The ?bump? matched the dial tone, which should be continuous, and I've heard this before, three or four times before the continuous dial tone came. So maybe that's an indication of communication issues. Never mind, we have another one (Uniden 1635, effectively identical). And of course the batteries were discharged.
More lagoon fun
Yesterday's attempt at upgrading lagoon didn't get me as far as I wanted. About all I could establish is that the Nvidia driver documentation is an absolute catastrophe. For today, I put a ~/startx script in Yvonne's home directory to start X with TCP connections available, like God intended. It wasn't helped by the fact that stopping X garbles the display, and it seems it also leaves the keyboard unresponsive, so the easiest way to recover was the Microsoft way: reboot. But it works, and now Yvonne can run a second, up-to-date firefox from bde.
Repairing Yvonne's car
Yvonne's car has been in the dock since Monday waiting for a new replacement ?computer? to do unspecified things that at least include running the traffic indicators. Into town with her to pick it up. Still not ready! ?Ten minutes?, said Leigh, holding a tablet used to configure the electronics. And he more kept to that time, it seems, while I had my hair cut just down the road. Only: it didn't fix the problem (?sticky? indicators). So we need a better diagnosis and more time in dock.
Panic!
Checking the overnight backups this morning, one of the first things I do, I found: Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on eureka:/videobackup 7,813,215,884 7,812,627,724 0 100% 96,659 983,915 9% /videobackup Thu 2 Mar 2023 04:01:41 AEDT Video backup started rsync: [receiver] write failed on "/videobackup/spool/Download/..." : No space left on device (28) rsync error: error in file IO (code 11) at receiver.c(379) [receiver=3.2.4] rsync: [sender] write error: Broken pipe (32) Oh.
Upgrading lagoon
So, whether I like it, I need to upgrade lagoon to the latest and greatest FreeBSD. When was it installed? === root@lagoon (/dev/pts/2) /destdir/usr 10 -> uname -a FreeBSD lagoon.lemis.com 12.1-STABLE FreeBSD 12.1-STABLE r355358 GENERIC amd64 Dammit, this horrible lack of information! Somewhere there's a knob to get useful information, like: === grog@bde (/dev/pts/5) ~ 1 -> uname -a FreeBSD bde.lemis.com 13.1-STABLE FreeBSD 13.1-STABLE #0: Wed Nov 2 13:52:12 AEDT 2022 [email protected]:/usr/obj/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/git/stable-13/amd64.amd64/sys/GENERIC amd64 OK, look at the kernel file directly: === root@lagoon (/dev/pts/2) /destdir/usr 12 -> l /boot/kernel/kernel -r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 31,364,536 12 Dec 2020 /boot/kernel/kernel That's not as accurate, since I could touch(1) the file, but it's ...
Firefox breaks system again
Yvonne has not been able to use the Facebook ?Messenger? feature for a couple of days now. Why not? Ignoring helpful answers on Facebook (?it will work if you reboot?) , off to find out. It works on Microsoft! Yes. It seems that Facebook has relied on a new firefox feature that isn't in the version (73?) on lagoon. pkg upgrade? Yes, willingly, in the process removing avidemux, ImageMagick and mpv. Damn! I couldn't even build it, because it wanted a different version of perl.
Preparing for Microsoft ?Windows? 11
So it's clear that the HP Z800 that I inherited from Bruce Evans isn't appropriate to be my main machine: only marginally faster than my current machine, and uses more power than all the other computers in my office put together. But what about using it as a Microsoft box that mainly sleeps and just gets woken for a few minutes a day? It's certainly faster than the current distress and dischord. But now the current version of Microsoft is ?Windows? 11. What do I need to install it? With some discussion on IRC I discovered that I had the choice of Windows 11 Pro, Windows 11 Pro N, Windows 11 Pro for Workstations, Windows 11 Pro N for Workstations, Windows 11 Pro Education, Windows 11 Pro Education N, Windows 11 Education, Windows 11 Education N, Windows 11 Enterprise and Windows 11 Enterprise N.
Power fail!
Into the office this morning to see the display Boot: on eureka's console. Another grid power failure that found its way through the inverter! Again! This is impossible! The best thing about it was that it gave me the opportunity to put the new UPS in circuit. It's a nasty thing. There are only two buttons: a power button that doubles as secret handshake, and a red button to reset something that could signify overload or power surge (in each case, presumably, negating the claim of being an uninterruptible power supply). One of the secret handshakes was to tell the thing to shut up when source power goes away.
Updating the yt-dlp port
Yesterday's update to yt-dlp clearly requires committing to the FreeBSD ports collection. That's Yuri Victorovich's (surname uncertain) baby, and clearly it's a one-line patch. But is my ports tree up to date? More pain with git. === root@dereel (/dev/pts/7) /src/FreeBSD/git/ports 1 -> mailme git pull From https://git.freebsd.org/ports 600101b2ff88..77a91720bc14 2023Q1 -> freebsd/2023Q1 error: Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by merge: www/yt-dlp/Makefile www/yt-dlp/distinfo Please commit your changes or stash them before you merge. Aborting With CVS, of course, it would just be flagged and left to the programmer to sort out.
Next computer problem
We watch the news on TV round 15:30. But today I discovered that nothing had been recorded since yesterday. Tried it manually: === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/1) ~ 14 -> LC_ALL=de_DE.UTF-8 youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=$STREAM -o blah [youtube] GEumHK0hfdo: Downloading webpage [youtube] GEumHK0hfdo: Downloading m3u8 information [youtube] GEumHK0hfdo: Downloading MPD manifest ERROR: Unable to extract uploader id; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type youtube-dl -U to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output. Huh? How did that happen?
The customer lies!
Off to Ballarat today as planned to buy some UPSs at Officeworks. Their web site had shown stock of a number of devices that came into the question, but when I got there, almost none were there, and then ones that were were too polite to call themselves UPS: Found a somewhat reluctant Rowan Atkinsonesque salesperson and asked him, but he didn't want to know: ?If you have an issue with our web site, call them on the phone?.
Next computer issue
Tried to read in photos to the computer today. No communication with the E-30. A bit of investigation showed that it was related to the USB adapter, the one with the power switches. All was on, but the system didn't want to know about that port. Put the cable on a motherboard port and all was well. But why do these things keep happening?
Analysing the tiwi crash
So how much damage did the tiwi:/spool file system suffer yesterday? Made a list of the inodes, and found: inode 1727507 was an active news video download: 1727507 -rw-r--r-- 1 grog home 213,647,360 17 Feb 14:13 AlJaz-14.part The modification timestamp corresponds to the time of the power outage. I suppose that's understandable, though it's not clear why the file size should be bigger than advertised.
Another PV inverter crash! Another!
In mid-afternoon, into the kitchen to heat something up. Turn on the cooktop and BEEP! The PV inverter failed again! Why? Whatever it was lost power to the whole house. Of course, it was only temporary, maybe 3 seconds. But that was enough. Dammit, this is really unacceptable. One of the main reasons for the PV system was exactly to avoid this kind of problem. Reboot eureka. I'm getting far too adept at this. But first put a surge protector in front of the UPS for eureka and friends. Disconnect the UPS input, and everything died. The UPS claimed to have capacity for 30 minutes, but it lied.
Lies, damn lies and deadlines
I submitted my FreeBSD history article yesterday, just before the hard deadline. Mail back today: it'll be at least a week before he can look at it. So at least I have time to reconsider the content.
Dan Murphy responds
Reply to yesterday's complaint to Dan Murphy's: Thank you for contacting us and bringing this to our attention. I have sent this to our online team to rectify but if you would like to go ahead and place an order now, let me know and I will refund you the difference back to you. Apologies for the inconvenience caused. That's reasonable enough from her perspective, but it shows that she's not able to fix the problem immediately, nor even get the ?online team? to do so. So off to buy the stuff and hope that I'll get the remainder back some time.
FreeBSD article: done!
I was given a hard deadline for my article on FreeBSD history: today. Well, maybe tomorrow: 15 February. Got a couple of people on IRC to take a look at it, but they came up with nothing interesting. OK, it compiles, ship it! But it still took all day. While reviewing, Edwin Groothuis came up with a request: Can you put it in a Google Docs thingie so I can write my comments? Simple answer to that: no. I've reviewed things on Google Docs, but I don't know how to put things in there.
Thirty years of FreeBSD, continued
On with my article on the first ten years of FreeBSD, which is due on 15 February?two days' time, since the date is implicitly in the USA. But I want to submit it by tomorrow evening to be on the safe side. Gradually it's taking shape. All that I need to do now is to tidy it up a bit and decide how negative I need to be about trends into the future. One that still greatly irritates me is the way people can't express themselves in writing, very noticeable in email. Even people who wrote well 30 years ago now send out a mess that makes them seem illiterate.
FreeBSD article continued
In my first pass of my article on FreeBSD history, I've got as far as the year 2000. I still need to write up 2001 to 2003. And suddenly I've run out of things to say. By 2000 I had written the Vinum volume manager, played a significant part in the restructuring of the FreeBSD kernel to handle multiprocessors better, and become a member of the FreeBSD Core Team. What more is there? It seems that from then on it was mainly bureaucracy. I've already tried to read my old Daemon's advocate articles, and I worked on tidying up another one, but it's slow business, about half an hour per article?and I wrote 35 of them.
Off the net again?
Once again this morning Yvonne said to me ?are we off the net again?? Into the office to check. No, we still had our Internet connection, but eureka was waiting with a Boot: prompt. Why? Apart from dereel, which had also rebooted, nothing else seemed to be affected, and I had specifically connected the old office UPS in front of it to tide over short inverter outages. And nothing else in the house was affected. Something wrong with the UPS?
FreeBSD beginnings, continued
Spent most of the day working on my article on ?FreeBSD: The first 10 years?a personal timeline?. As I noted yesterday, it's not the writing that's the issue: it's knowing what to write. And in that context it's good that I have written a lot about FreeBSD at the time. In particular, it was interesting to look at the slides (PDF) from ?Two years in the trenches?, about the FreeBSD Core Team, which I presented in September 2002. It confirms my recollection: by then, nearly 10 years after the project started, we had transitioned from a group of hobbyists scratching an itch to a bureaucracy.
Mail corruption!
My email inbox is once again overly large, and there are important messages in there that are over a month old. One was from Peter O'Connell, my investment adviser. It started with: r.d=ppt.com.au;dmarc=pass action=none header.from=ppt.com.au; Received-SPF: Pass (protection.outlook.com: domain of ppt.com.au designates Now clearly those are mail headers, but they're displayed as part of the message. Something seems to have corrupted the mailbox. What?
Making history interesting
So I've decided on a topic for the upcoming 30th anniversary edition of the FreeBSD Journal: ?FreeBSD: The first 10 years?a personal timeline?, and I've written about half of it. But is that good? Yes, I can write it, and there's plenty of material. But is it interesting? It is for me: I always thought of myself as a latecomer in the project, but I made my first acquaintance on 27 September 1993, three months after the project was named, and I got actively involved two years later. And things like the new FreeBSD Core Team structure go back to noise that I made in early 2000.
Network outage!
Yvonne in this afternoon: ?Are we off the net??. In general the answer is ?no?, but this time she was right, and she found out before I did. The NTD showed a normal status, so for once it must have been Aussie Broadband. OK, wait a few minutes. No improvement. tcpdump showed lots of ARP messages going out, and no reply. Dammit, I'm going to have to use this horrible mobile phone app to see if they knew about it. It's not designed for mobile phones, something like Why d0 you torment me so merc1lessly?. How do you enter that on a mobile phone? Slowly. No, glacially slowly, because you have to watch each individual character before it turns into a blob.
Goodbye, hydra
Into the office this morning, and, almost as expected, X was dead. Restart? Yes, this time without rebooting. But there was a difference: these repeating messages in /var/log/messages: Feb 9 08:47:06 hydra kernel: NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:0f:00): 69, Illegal Class Error: ChID 0001, Class 0000503f, Offset 00000100, Data 8d8d0a00 Feb 9 08:47:06 hydra kernel: NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:0f:00): 12, COCOD 00000001 e0012d00 0000502d 00000100 8d8d0a00 Feb 9 08:47:06 hydra syslogd: last message repeated 1 times Feb 9 08:47:06 hydra kernel: NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:0f:00): 6, PE0001 They repeated at regular intervals, probably corresponding to flickering on the X displays.
New bathroom scales
Yvonne suspects that there's something wrong with her bathroom scales. OK, not an issue: they're on special at ALDI, so she can buy one and compare the results. Brought it home and discovered a little Bluetooth emblem. Oh. Clearly not the same as the old one. RTFM time. Download the Dr.Weight app from the toyshop, create an account, and follow the instructions. Did that, marvelling at the particularly poor reviews the app got, and tried to access the scales. Though I had paired, I couldn't find any way to get it to do anything useful. You'd think that at the very least it would display weights, but no.
Google Maps tracking
Wednesday is shopping day for Yvonne, and I follow her progress with Google Maps location sharing. But things don't always work the way I expect. In particular, on her way home she stops off at Chris Bahlo's, but Google Maps doesn't want to know when she leaves: it doesn't update her location until she gets home. It has done this consistently for the last 3 weeks. Today was different: Yvonne was at ALDI in Alfredton, and from then on her location didn't get updated for over an hour. Why not? Arguably it could be a data link issue. No mobile phone credit left?
More hydra failures
Into the office this morning to discover that X on hydra had failed once again. Things seem to be getting worse all the time. Once again I was able to restart it, but things can't go on like this. Time to get a new machine built. Long discussion on IRC. Why do I want to have the machine assembled rather than do it myself, like I have done with almost every other machine in the last 46 years? Laziness mainly, but also a question of compatibility. But with more consideration, there's not that much to consider. I have: Processor.
Another hydra crash!
Into the office this morning to discover that X on hydra crashed again, apparently just as I pressed a key on the keyboard to wake the server. Again the same error message, DMA issues. The problem seems to be accelerating, and maybe it's not due to overheating after all. Damn. I really don't want to have my hand forced in choosing a new machine, but clearly I need to do something quickly. Maybe the interim solution is the other machine that I inherited from Bruce Evans, the one he called zetaplex.
Another hydra crash
One of the issues I have with my current hybrid setup with hydra and eureka is that I no longer have a 4 monitor display for processing panoramas. The closest I come are the two monitors on hydra, so today I processed two that I took yesterday. While I was watching it, small ?worms? appeared over both monitors, and the display froze. Shortly after, X crashed. There's not very much information in the Xorg.0.log, but it's the same as before: [1031521.666] (II) NVIDIA(0): The NVIDIA X driver has encountered an error; attempting to [1031521.666] (II) NVIDIA(0): recover...
5 years uptime!
Since my Tandem days I've been fascinated by ?keeping it up?: rebooting is a no-no. And nearly 10 years ago, with a bit of cheating, I managed to approach the 5 years uptime mark. But then the system hosting w3.lemis.com failed, and there was no sensible recovery?after 4 years, 11½ months! New provider, new system. I didn't even mention it 5 years ago when I set up ffm.lemis.com. But it's been there ever since, and today I finally saw: === grog@ffm (/dev/pts/0) ~ 21 -> date; uptime Sat Feb 4 22:15:44 UTC 2023 10:15PM up 1826 days, 7:18, 2 users, load averages: 0.76, 0.59, 0.51 That was 9:15 this morning.
More Hugin strangenesses
Last week I had a strange problem with my house photos: the photo east of the house had strange artefacts. But I removed the image before I could save it, and I wasn't able to reproduce it. Never mind, a week has gone by, and I've taken the next round of photos. And the same problem happened again! This time I kept the image: It's not quite the same: this time the artefacts are sharper. But they happen on the same image in the same place: The disturbance at bottom left is the panorama bracket, but that's in every image in all of the panoramas, so its presence here is part of the issue.
Google knows where you are!
Found on a web page today: That's right! And it's the first time ever. I've had claims of being all over Australia, or in Europe or the USA. And the IP address hasn't changed. What has?
Old Unix sources
In the Good Old Days (last millennium), access to Unix wasn't easy. My first installation of Interactive Unix System V/386 came on floppies and cost an arm and a leg. Various people spirited away copies of Unix sources, notably Sun, for their own personal use. Times have changed. VETUSWARE claims to be ?the biggest free abandonware downloads collection in the universe?. And certainly their Unix collection is impressive. It includes both Interactive Unix and SunOS, the latter in source. I wonder what the copyright status is, or if anybody still cares.
X fonts revisited
I really need to do something about the X fonts on hydra. I seem to have Cyrillic fonts, but not east Asian ones. OK, what do we have in the Ports Collection? Lots of stuff, of course, x11-fonts/xorg-fonts seems to be the one I want: This meta-package installs all X.Org fonts and related programs. But it lies. The Makefile says: RUN_DEPENDS= xorg-fonts-100dpi>0:x11-fonts/xorg-fonts-100dpi \ xorg-fonts-75dpi>0:x11-fonts/xorg-fonts-75dpi \ xorg-fonts-cyrillic>0:x11-fonts/xorg-fonts-cyrillic \ xorg-fonts-miscbitmaps>0:x11-fonts/xorg-fonts-miscbitmaps \ xorg-fonts-truetype>0:x11-fonts/xorg-fonts-truetype \ xorg-fonts-type1>0:x11-fonts/xorg-fonts-type1 \ font-alias>0:x11-fonts/font-alias And they're already installed.
hydra fail
Into the office this morning, and pressed on a keyboard to wake my sleeping Xs. hydra didn't respond. Yes, the system was still up, but the display wasn't. A quick check showed that X was no longer running. Did I accidentally close the window from which I started it? No, /var/log/Xorg.log showed: [761020.873] (II) NVIDIA(0): ACPI: received event: !system=CAM subsystem=periph type=error [761020.873] (II) NVIDIA(0): device=cd0 serial="3C7126908574" cam_status="0x4cc" [761020.873] (II) NVIDIA(0): scsi_status=2 scsi_sense="70 02 3a 01" CDB="00 00 00 00 00 [761020.873] (II) NVIDIA(0): 00 " [761023.396] (II) NVIDIA(0): The NVIDIA X driver has encountered an error; attempting to [761023.396] (II) NVIDIA(0): recover...
Keeping distress asleep
It seems that my attempts to get distress (Microsoft ?Windows? 10 box) to stay hibernated were not successful: it keeps waking up, and I can't tell it not to. But there's another possibility: get it to sleep, like I do with dischord (?Windows? 7). That only goes via a secret menu, but it seems to work. Only: it still keeps waking up, apparently every 30 minutes. I had found a way to disable the timers, via a link ?change settings that are currently unavailable?. But it didn't seem to work.
A third of a century of FreeBSD?
It looks as if I'm going to write an article for the FreeBSD Journal about the Early Days. And by way of encouragement, they want the article by 15 February. I've been using BSD since 19 March 1992, but that was BSD/386, a commercial sibling. It wasn't until the following year (19 June 1993, it seems) that FreeBSD was born (or forked, or whatever). From the calendar.freebsd file: 06/19 Charlie Root <[email protected]> born in Portland, Oregon, United States, 1993 The original suggestion was that I should write about the issues relating to writing ?The Complete FreeBSD?, in the assumption that it would have been particulary difficult in those far-off days.
FreeBSD network performance
FreeBSD has almost the reference implementation of the Internet protocols, but that doesn't mean that it's perfect. Currently there's a mail thread on the freebsd-stable mailing list, in which the original poster only gets a fraction of the throughput on FreeBSD that he gets on Linux. Various suggestions on what to do, including setting undocumented sysctls?something that I have grumbled about in the past. I don't have time to look at the suggestions at the moment. One page that looks interesting is https://fasterdata.es.net/host-tuning/freebsd
Finding X fonts
One of the things that is definitely a problem with hydra are the X fonts, as I noted two weeks ago. How do I get a complete installation? Microsoft and Apple installations come complete; why not FreeBSD? Off looking, and once again came up with a maze of little twisty possibilities, all different. One of the more insteresting ones was to copy the Apple or Microsoft fonts. But there must be a simpler way.
Insomniac distress
I've already grumbled about the fact that I can't put distress, my Microsoft ?Windows? 10 box, to sleep. It keeps waking up. OK, one good thing about Microsoft is that you can probably find a solution to a problem online. Off looking, and came up with this page, which confirmed my suspicion that the problem was probably something in the system that was waking it again, and pointed me to a different way of the maze of twisty little passages that is Microsoft configuration: disallow wake timers. Only: mine refuses to allow any change. Is that because it's on a remote desktop?
MediathekView? MediathekWeb? MediathekViewWeb?
Why have I suddenly had so many problems with MediathekView? Is it the old version I'm using? I don't think so, but it's worth checking. There's a web version available. www.mediathekweb.de? Maybe it was, but it's now in the hands of a domain squatter. More searching: ah, isn't it obvious? www.mediathekviewweb.de? And yes, it has the same restrictions, though it can also download at even lower resolutions, in this case 291 MB instead of the 580 MB that MediathekView offers. I can't confirm, though: the page is terminally broken. I can't even decide if it thinks it can download or not.
Converting document formats
I've been asked to write an article about my experience with FreeBSD in the last third of a century. Really? That long? No, FreeBSD isn't quite 30 years old, but I've been using Unix on a desktop for nearly 33 years, and 31 of those were with BSD. Still, the part that got me was: >> The process is fairly simple: you write the article (plain-text or Word >> is fine) > > Now *that*'s a difference. Word! You mean Microsoft "Word", > presumably. We wouldn't have even considered it in those days.
The smart of phones
I've grumbled at length about the smart (pain) of modern mobile phones, but today I received support from an unexpected source: I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone. The author? Bjarne Stroustrup, not exactly a beginner.
More Hugin pain
As part of migrating to hydra, processed my weekly house photos on hydra. That started surprisingly well; the biggest issue was that I only had two monitors, while I used to do the processing on eureka server 1:, which spans all four monitors. And I no longer have that: the second monitor is no longer connected to eureka at all. And of course it all looks different, due to some library or another. And the fast preview window comes up blank. To get it to work at all, I need to click on the ?start fast preview? button. And for reasons I haven't investigated, it lists file names in reverse order.
More video download problems
One of the first things I do every morning is to download new videos from German TV providers. I use an old version of MediathekView because the newer versions are so Linux-centric that I have difficulty installing them. This is also an obstacle in my upgrade to hydra. But lately I've been having difficulties with some series: I get poorly defined ?permissions? error messages and have to download them manually. And then today a whole lot of older episodes of ?Notruf Hafenkante? cropped up?all only in low resolution and without subtitles. In addition there was a new episode of ?Der Staatsanwalt?, also low resolution.
More Microsoft pain
Some years ago I discovered that I could suspend a Microsoft ?Windows? machine to RAM and save a lot of power, and I still do so with dischord.lemis.com. But that was ?Windows? 7, and it's out of date. Now on distress.lemis.com I'm using ?Windows? 10, itself apparently on the way out, and I can't find a way to get it to suspend automatically. There's a SHUTDOWN command that will ?hibernate? (suspend to disk), but that has to be invoked from a command prompt. Still, that's worth it. Except that it doesn't work! Lately I've discovered that the machine will shut down for a few hours, and then it restarts for no obvious reason.
More power fail consequences
Into the office this morning. No mail since yesterday evening! More mail configuration pain? A quick look at /var/log/maillog showed: Jan 25 21:13:47 eureka postfix/cleanup[31862]: warning: 1822A2635C8: write queue file: No space left on device Where did that all go? I should have the best part of 10 GB free on the file system. Off to tidy up, and then check: the backup for eureka should have gone to an external disk mounted on /backups. Did it? No. /backups is normally not mounted. It gets mounted specifically to perform a backup of eureka.
How secure is my password?
I've grumbled about various stupid password rules in the past, but somehow others have found out too. There's this xkcd cartoon, which I have seen in the past: And it points to this page, which claims to be able to guess how easy it is to guess the difficulty of cracking a password. It's certainly interesting, though I have my doubts about its accuracy. It seems that the password ?Nospac3s? takes an hour to crack, while ?No spaces? takes a week. Thus the requirement to have a digit and no spaces, no doubt.
Powercor: the sting in the tail
Back home, put my camera in the office and saw on a monitor: Boot: eureka was down! How did that happen? Another power outage? Brought it back up and was just investigating things when I saw a panic message. Damn programs that pretend to be kernels and scare me unnecessarily. But no, it went on: Dumping 1300 out of 32658 MB: (CTRL-C to abort) (CTRL-C to abort) (CTRL-C to abort) ..2%..12%..21%..31%..41%..51%..61%..71%..82%..92% And yes indeed, eureka had paniced.
Another planned power outage
Powercor announced a planned outage last week, only 5 weeks since the last one. And again they informed me at length by snail mail, mobile phone messages and email. This one was relatively short, only 2 hours between 11:00 and 13:00. And the sun was shining, the PV battery was almost fully charged. What could go wrong? The inverter, again! That's exactly what happened last time. It turned off for the best part of a second, taking down all computers but nothing else. Damn! As it happens, I was just typing in yesterday's diary, and I had got as far as mentioning starting dbus, requiring a reboot.
Why backslashes are not slashes, revisited
Yesterday I was horrified to find that both firefox and chrome are unable to access /why\backslashes\are\not\slashes.html: they change the backslashes into slashes. And it seems to be new: the version of firefox on eureka does it correctly. So does Apple's ?Safari?. Ah, but that's an invalid URL, says somebody on IRC. Really? Off to check RFC 2396. No, it's allowed, just deemed ?unwise?. I can agree with that.
Browser insights
Continued trying to understand why I can't connect to an existing firefox instance on hydra, though it works with chrome. Bug in firefox? It looks like it. But in such cases it's good to check with the ?standard?: Microsoft. And with Microsoft that problem doesn't exist, though you can't just enter C:\Users\grog> firefox -new-tab www.lemis.com That's far too easy. Instead you need to enter C:\Users\grog> c:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe -new-tab http://www.lemis.com But that's the Microsoft that we know and hate.
More hydra stuff
I've paused my installation of hydra?again?while I think out the next step in ports installation. But gradually it's becoming important. As usual, broken web browsers are the main driver, though I also need to find a reliable way to install ports. Breakage in invoking firefox has forced me to use chrome instead. That still works, but it has even less of an idea of X than firefox. There can only be one! I want to be able to have a browser window on all screens, but chrome will only give me one. And it may not even be visible! The worst thing is when I'm reading mail on tiwi and I try to display a web page: Created new window in existing browser session.
Email formatting, yet again
How do you write a good email message? Clearly the point is to communicate, so a good message is one that communicates well. But many people have never learnt that. 25 years ago I wrote an article ?Internet mail? with recommendations on how to communicate, and a little later I wrote a document that has now become part of the FreeBSD web site: How to get Best Results from the FreeBSD-questions Mailing List. In part it recommends: Format your message so that it is legible, and PLEASE DO NOT SHOUT!!!!!. We appreciate that a lot of people do not speak English as their first language, and we try to make allowances for that, but it is really painful to try to read a message written full of typos or without any line breaks.
Understanding MMI
Yesterday I had pain trying to set timeouts for diversion to voicemail on our mobile phones. How do I find out what these codes mean? When I check the status, I get a fleeting ?MMI Code Started? message before the status display. What does MMI mean? With a bit of searching discovered that it's short for Unstructured Supplementary Service Data. Or maybe it's a superset of USSD, but the page is too polite to explain the TLA. Still, the fields in the command **61*101*11*30 mean: 61: call divert when not answered.
More hydra fun
I've switched to reactive mode on the hydra installation. I'll repeat it all from scratch when I install groggy (or whatever I decide to call the new machine), and in the meantime I've found what I think is a solution for my concerns with port installations: the basic installation (from packages until proof of the contrary), and an installation of the related configuration files. All I need is to fill in the details. Other random issues: My cleanup job didn't run again last night.
Daily hydra fun
Into the office this morning. No mail about the overnight backup job. What happened? Ran the cleanup job manually: dump -2uf - / | nice zstd -T8 > /dump/hydra-FreeBSD/2/root.bz2 DUMP: WARNING: should use -L when dumping live read-write filesystems! DUMP: Date of this level 2 dump: Thu Jan 19 09:10:55 2023 DUMP: Date of last level 0 dump: the epoch DUMP: Dumping /dev/da1p2 (/) to standard output ... That looks fine, but clearly the dump hadn't run before. Off to check the cron log: Jan 18 21:00:00 hydra /usr/sbin/cron[5778]: (root) CMD (/home/local/bin/cleanup) That looks fine.
More mobile phone pain
Reading my diary entry for a year ago shows how things haven't changed. I had difficulty findin a way to change the time before an incoming call on an Android phone diverts (to voice mail). I needed to call the support line to find out, and he gave me the code **61*101**30. But I also had a reference to a more detailed discussion 4 years ago, and there I had different codes, even different between Android and iOS. In this case, after substituting, the code should have been **61*101*11*30. There's also the code *#61# to check. It's only coincidence that 61 is also the international code for Australia.
System configuration, 30 years ago
I've had this scrap of paper behind my monitors for some time: It dates from 14 September 1991, and it's the I/O slot configuration for two machines, adagio and (I think) grave, two of my oldest Unix boxes. This was while I was still at Tandem, and my guess is that adagio was an Intel 80386 with 8 GB running Interactive UNIX System V/386, and grave might have been a smaller machine running SCO Xenix System V. It's not clear why I crossed out ?Grave?
More hydra progress
Gradually I'm getting hydra to a point where it's useful. An interesting point in separating the server functions (eureka) from workstation functions (hydra) is memory usage. When I boot eureka, it fills up its memory within a day or two, and before long I'm dipping into swap. Here the current situation: last pid: 41875; load averages: 0.92, 0.91, 0.90 up 36+02:51:59 12:10:11 554 processes: 2 running, 528 sleeping, 6 stopped, 18 zombie CPU: 23.8% user, 0.0% nice, 2.6% system, 0.2% interrupt, 73.4% idle Mem: 6959M Active, 21G Inact, 2881M Wired, 346M Cache, 1655M Buf, 61M Free Swap: 20G Total, 15G Used, 5271M Free, 74% Inuse But on hydra I have: last pid: 8002; load averages: 0.48, 0.31, 0.34 up 1+22:07:08 12:10:33 176 processes: ...
Modern tech nightmare
After listening to the news at 7:00 this morning, turned over, went to sleep, and dreamed. I was going through a toll tunnel by car, and I had forgotten to get my payment card out in advance. Never mind, at the toll booth at the other end, pull into a bay beyond the end and get it out. But something went wrong (I forget what), and it took a while to get back to the toll booth. Tried to talk to the person behind the thick glass, but I couldn't understand what he was saying. Tried to get him to come to the side where I could hear him, but he refused.
hydra, finally
So it's clear that hydra will only be a short-term solution for my ?desktop?. It's too weak and too power-hungry. But it's still worth setting up to refine my installation procedures so that the next system (what am I going to call it?) will be easier to install. The current state of affairs was carried over from last Thursday: I couldn't get X on eureka to display only on the right two monitors. Fix that first. The config file that I had was derived from the configuration for server 0, with just the screen information for screens 2 and 3. And only screen 2 worked.
A use for OI.Share?
I've grumbled about OI.Share at length in the past. It seems to have been written by a team that ignores the rest of the camera development. Insists on JPEG images. Downloads images in a different format from normal. Can only connect to one camera, and if it is configured to connect to another, it forgets all about the first. Insists on being an AP, thus ensuring that you need a separate operation to move the images to a real computer. And everything is slow, probably because of hardware restrictions. In general, uselss. But for one minor detail: if you use it in remote control mode, it resets the camera clock to the phone time (presumably NTP adjusted).
System configuration, next step
More thoughts on a replacement for hydra today. On IRC, discussed the amazing difference between component pricing and complete systems. Yesterday I had found a system similar to the one that Daniel O'Connor described on Friday. Daniel came out under $1000; the offer I got was for $2,259. Why? Well, there's the case and the power supply, and some of the details don't quite match. But somehow there's still a big gap. Before I compare oranges with oranges (no Apples needed here), I need to decide what kind of display card(s) I need, and as always, that's painful. One option seems to be a refurbished card; currently there's a NVIDIA Quadro P600 available with 4 outputs for $129.
Goodbye hydra?
Today I again spent more time thinking about how to complete the hydra install (peripherally including setting up the X server 3: on eureka) than actually doing anything on the machine. Somehow the noise and power consumption mean that I won't be able to use it very much. What's the alternative? Long discussion with Daniel O'Connor and Juha Kupiainen on IRC. How about that, there are relatively fast machines available for reasonable prices: <Doco> Ryzen 5 5500 with a lowend motherboard and 64GB of RAM is $600 (no case, PSU, HDs etc) That corresponds to the cost of power for hydra for 15 months.
More X fun
Didn't do any work directly on hydra today. Instead I turned my attention to another X server on eureka. Server 0 has 4 screens. From the configuration file: Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "Layout0" Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0 Screen 1 "Screen1" RightOf "Screen0" Screen 2 "Screen2" RightOf "Screen1" Screen 3 "Screen3" RightOf "Screen2" InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard" InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer" Option "Xinerama" "0" EndSection The rest of the file describes the individual components.
Google Translate fun
I have a certain love-hate relationship with Google Translate, but I have to admit that it's getting better. But then, looking at what it did 7 years ago, that shouldn't be difficult. So: for the benefit of the non-German speakers who might be interested in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung article above, I tried to translate it into English. I almost failed. They seem to have changed the interface to be more ?modern?, and it no longer works the way I know. Neither does the method they recommend on most browsers. Only Chrome on Microsoft manages it, after much mouse pushing.
rwhod works!
Why doesn't the version of rwhod on hydra work? I still haven't investigated. But today I discovered that distress has once again taken it into its own hands to install software updates and reboot! I noticed it because === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/34) ~/Photos/20230113 429 -> ruptime distress up 15:46, 0 users, load 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 hydra down 19:27 That reminded me that I have other issues with rwhod: so far, every time distress reboots, it loses rwhod.
Mobile phones: the smart
Tried to call Yvonne on the phone in town today. No answer, followed by a call back: she hadn't been able to answer the call. So I picked up my phone, which was in landscape orientation and displaying one of its call indications: Dismiss/Accept? Turned it to portrait orientation. It dismissed without me coming anywhere near the screen. Why does this keep happening? Is it my specific brand (Xiaomi)? Why is answering an incoming call such a minefield?
Hydra: done?
Further work on installing hydra today. There wasn't really too much more to do. The most obvious thing was to get X up and running. In preparation connected a second monitor to the machine, and noted that that one (lower connector on the back of the machine) is the primary monitor: that's where the console appeared. So it seems that it can handle having only the second monitor connected. As I discovered yesterday, I needed to add this to the configuration file to get X to run: Section "ServerFlags" Option "IgnoreABI" "1" EndSection Did that and tried again: === grog@hydra (/dev/pts/1) ~ 2 -> startx X.Org X Server 1.21.1.4 X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0 Current Operating System: FreeBSD hydra.lemis.com 13.1-STABLE FreeBSD 13.1-STABLE #0: Mon ...
How I hate git, once again
Why couldn't I find chromium in the list of packages? There's a directory /usr/ports/www/chromium in the FreeBSD Ports Collection. What does /usr/ports/UPDATING say? Only that I haven't updated the tree in over 6 months. OK, === root@dereel (/dev/pts/5) /src/FreeBSD/git/ports 42 -> Log git pull hint: You have divergent branches and need to specify how to reconcile them. hint: You can do so by running one of the following commands sometime before hint: your next pull: hint: hint: git config pull.rebase false # merge hint: git config pull.rebase true # rebase hint: git config pull.ff only # fast-forward only hint: hint: You can replace "git config" with "git config --global" to set a default hint: preference for all repositories.
More hydra fun
Spent a considerable amount of time today consolidating yesterday's experiences. And clearly there was a lot to consolidate. What else is there to do? Install more ports. But I couldn't find Google chrome! All I found was: === root@hydra (/dev/pts/0) ~ 13 -> pkg search chromium chromium-bsu-0.9.16.1_2 Arcade-style, top-scrolling space shooter ungoogled-chromium-108.0.5359.124 Google web browser based on WebKit sans integration with Google What's that nonsense? Yes, I was able to install ungoogled-chromium, but that's not what I'm looking for. Some discussion on IRC, where I discovered still more undocumented details: there's a file /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf, which is only mentioned in passing in pkg.conf(5).
hydra: taking the plunge
I've been thinking for a long time about how to proceed with hydra, the new HP Z800 that I inherited from Bruce Evans. I have had a basic install of FreeBSD 13.1 on it for weeks, but I wasn't sure how to continue. Today I took the plunge. And yes, it wasn't anything like what I had planned. TL;DR: even working out a strategy is an incremental process. Bootstrapping First there's a certain amount of bootstrapping. The install scripts are on eureka, so I have to be able to reach it.
Goodbye Johnbot
Network throughput problems again today. Uploading files slowed from 200 kB/s (a limit set by my TCP parameters, which I must fix) to about 15 kB/s. Why? I didn't find out before it got better again, but I was able to establish that the problems weren't local. But the traceroute output was interesting for other reasons: === root@dereel (/dev/pts/3) ~ 4 -> traceroute www traceroute to www.lemis.com (45.32.70.18), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets 1 eureka (192.109.197.137) 0.372 ms 0.367 ms 0.358 ms 2 radiation-tower.aussiebb.net (121.200.8.1) 27.376 ms 33.867 ms 20.654 ms 3 HundredGigE0-0-0-8.core2.vdc03.mel.ByeJohnBotThankYouForEverything.aussiebb.net (159.196.252.154) 178.964 ms 169.305 ms 183.004 ms 4 10.241.5.56 (10.241.5.56) 189.950 ms 10.241.4.156 (10.241.4.156) 190.197 ms 173.706 ms 5 be23.cfl1.nextdc-s1.syd.ByeJohnBotThankYouForEverything.aussiebb.net (180.150.1.144) 182.201 ms 196.911 ms 192.211 ms 6 10.241.13.104 (10.241.13.104) 170.963 ms 189.428 ms 186.806 ms 7 be30.bdr1.coresite-la1.lax.ByeJohnBotThankYouForEverything.aussiebb.net (202.142.143.199) 172.025 ms 179.606 ms 200.801 ms ...
Ten years, still the same old procrastination
Seen in my diary for January 2013: Once again I've been dragging my heels on my system upgrade method. In principle amd64-stable now contains all the ports I asked for and a relatively recent version of FreeBSD 9-STABLE, but I still need to customize it, and then I'll be in a position for the first upgrade. Spent some time customizing /etc/group and /etc/master.passwd; the latter contains a lot of history, user IDs and passwords from people who must at at least one time in the last 20 years have accessed the machine.
Installing hydra
I've been dawdling with installing a replacement for eureka for nearly 6 years now. Since May last year it has been the HP Z800 that I inherited from Bruce Evans. Why haven't I done anything yet? Why, haven't I done anything yet? Yes, I've done a lot of thinking. But the delay has two main reasons: I want to get it right. I've really been thinking about system upgrade methods for over 20 years now, and I still haven't come to any real conclusion.
Domain name renewal, the easy way
The domain name registration for lemis.com needs renewing. Straightforward, right? Well, yes, in principle: go to GANDI, select lemis.com and renew. But: I want to pay by debit card in Euros: PayPal charges too much for international transactions. And I should check that I still have enough credit. OK, off to TransferWise to check. What a pain this site is! Every time I go there I need to find my way around it again. But yes, I had enough ? credit, just not enough USD. Transferred some money from my bank account, which of course arrived in AUD. How do I transfer it?
Registering Perfectly Clear
I've been using ?Perfectly Clear? for touching up photos fo some time now, but Yvonne doesn't. And she needs it. OK, install. Oh. It's there. Load some photos for processing: Well, I have a license. It's just not associated with this (Microsoft) user on distress. How do I enter the license key? Buy? No, that just takes me to the user manual, after starting a non-default web browser (?Internet Explorer?) . Looked through the menu at the top. Nothing obvious. ?Get Support?? No, that gives me the user manual too.
Sending the New Year's message
New Year, new New Year's message. I dread sending it: it gives me all sorts of problems with email. Today I decided that it was no use fighting the big companies that have come into existence long after I started the LEMIS mail server nearly 31 years ago. Instead I'd relay it through Aussie Broadband's server. But: Jan 1 09:01:08 eureka postfix/smtp[75154]: F3A442635E3: to=<[email protected]>, relay=mail.aussiebroadband.com.au[121.200.0.25]:25, conn_use=4, delay=0.62, delays=0.15/0.37/0.04/0.05, dsn=4.7.1, status=deferred (host mail.aussiebroadband.com.au[121.200.0.25] said: 450 4.7.1 Error: too much mail from 121.200.11.253 (in reply to MAIL FROM command)) Jan 1 09:01:08 eureka postfix/smtp[74950]: 016DB264AAC: to=<[email protected]>, relay=mail.aussiebroadband.com.au[121.200.0.25]:25, conn_use=4, delay=0.62, delays=0.16/0.37/0.03/0.06, dsn=4.7.1, status=deferred (host mail.aussiebroadband.com.au[121.200.0.25] said: 450 4.7.1 Error: too much mail from 121.200.11.253 (in reply to MAIL FROM command)) That wasn't a Christmas message, it was spam!
lax crash!
I connect to IRC via bip, a particularly unreliable proxy, so I have a script that restarts it when it crashes. That was the case again today. But no script! And then I saw: === grog@lax (/dev/pts/1) ~ 3 -> date; uptime Sat 31 Dec 2022 07:43:18 UTC 7:43AM up 43 mins, 2 users, load averages: 0.33, 0.37, 0.34 My server had crashed! It hasn't even been up very long. From yesterday's output: Local network system status: lax up 46+16:33, 0 users, load 0.44, 0.45, 0.45 That's nothing like the other external machine, ffm.lemis.com: === grog@ffm (/dev/pts/0) ~ 15 -> date; uptime Sat Dec 31 07:45:23 UTC ...
New electric fence energizer
Into Napoleons today to pick up the new electric fence energizer. It does look rather like a toy, but if it works, who cares? The biggest issue was getting the wires on the too-small terminals. OK, finally mounted, test: 600 V? That should be round 8 kV! What's wrong? It could be the unit, or it could be a short circuit in the fence (or, of course, both). What's it like without a load?
Your answer has been deleted!
Quora are at it again. They have deleted two of my answers as spam because they contain URLs. That's not surprising: the question asked for URLs: Q: What are the best IPTV service providers for German channels? A: Much of German TV content is available online via HTTP. Take a look at ARD Mediathek: Videos von Das Erste und den Dritten Programmen der ARD, Filme online schauen - ZDFmediathek, Play SRF (Swiss) and ORF-TVthek (Austria).
Where's my electric fence energizer?
It's been over a week since I ordered the new electric fence energizer. Where is it? Yesterday Australia Post and eBay were in agreement: Received and ready for processing at the post office where it was posted, 17:28 ?5.28pm? last Friday. What have they been doing in that time? Today, though, things were better: it has been in SUNSHINE WEST since 0:17 ?12:17am? yesterday morning. Can that be right? No, this time AusPost disagrees: it's In transit in WENDOUREE, VIC since 8:25 this morning. I know that. What they really mean is ?it's in NAPOLEON [sic] waiting for collection?. And sure enough, there was a pickup slip in the letter box.
OpenAI: Intelligent?
It seems that there's a new craze (is that ?virus??) going around: ChatGPT, a chatbot made by OpenAI and powered not by a GUID Partition Table but by a Generative Pre-trained Transformer. That sounds interesting, so I tried to sign up for it. I failed. Why? Well, I had to sign up. The usual stuff: give an email address, choose a password, wait for the message, sign in. But this one was different. While I went to create an email address for it, it apparently timed out on me and said: OK, sign in again.
Doc Martin, further investigations
Why did the ABC have difficulty in (read: fail to) playing the final episode of Doc Martin yesterday? I had guessed that it was related to network addresses, but is that correct? The fact that it failed with Microsoft ?Windows? 10 and the latest version of firefox strengthens that hypothesis. But what about other browsers? Tried with Chromium and... it worked. Why? Surely they support firefox? Off searching, and found:this at ?On Your Computer?: What web browser can I use to watch ABC iview? The ABC iview website is best viewed using the following operating system and browser combinations: Operating System Supported Browsers Microsoft Windows 7 Google Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Ed...
Christmas photo again
It's been ten years since we started sending an annual web page instead of Christmas cards. And or course the first thing we need is a photo of ourselves with as many animals as we can keep still. Once that was simple: ten years ago we took a total of 4 photos. But in the course of the years it has become ever more complicated. This year we started early, on 10 December. I took 15 photos, of which this was the best: That's clearly not the best background, and the fact that the dogs kept moving didn't help.
ABC and Doc Martin, day 3
Today's the third day that I have tried to access the advertised final episode of Doc Martin on ABC. Was the silly error message that I received yesterday really trying to tell me that the programme hadn't been broadcast yet? Yes! Now it's there, so I get a different error message: Video Player Error Sorry, there has been a problem playing back this video in your browser. This error has been logged with our technical team for investigation. Please check the iview support pages for recommended web browsers.
X preservation society
Discovered today that there's an X11 Conservancy Project. That sounds like they've pronounced X dead (or that they've come out with an X12, which sounds even more unlikely). But it's not quite as bleak as that. Yes, X is well over 30 years old?I've been using it for nearly 33 years?and not much is happening with it any more. But the project is akin to Warren Toomey's Unix Heritage Society, saving old code. I suppose that's a good idea.
More ABC fun
Yesterday I tried in vain to find where ABC had hidden the final episode of Doc Martin. But there's a service for finding things on the web: Google for doc martin christmas iview. And sure enough, there it was. But what use is a search function on the ABC site if it fails where a generic Google search succeeds? Of course, it still didn't work. ?This program [sic] is not currently available in ABC iview. You might like similar programs to this, shown below. Learn more in ABC iview Support.? What does that mean? My guess is ?we haven't broadcast it yet, and until we do, you don't have access, but we're not telling you that?.
Random photo postprocessing
A couple of days ago I tried this focus stacked photo of a mystery flower that I found in the forest: Oh. Only the front half is in focus. I need more focus steps. I can't do anything about that at the moment: the flower has wilted. But the white balance is also out. It should be more like this: OK, I have software that should be able to do that.
Finding TV programmes
ABC, our national broadcaster masquerading as an ISP (abc.net.au) has a couple of specials on over Christmas. I got email about it 10 days ago, announcing that the final episode of Doc Martin would be broadcast at Christmas. OK, it's Christmas. Where's Doc Martin? Spent quite some time looking, but there's no mention of a Christmas special. The search function was obliging, though: The very first episode is the ?best match?! People, you promised the very last episode.
Black Friday all year round?
Today's the first day of Christmas, right? And Black Friday was a month ago? But not in Cyberspace. I'm continually bombarded with Black Friday offers: 70 N + 07-12-2022 To groggyhimsel ( 250) groggyhimself@ N + Black Friday: Aspirador Portátil sem Fio Vacuum Cleaner 134 ND+ 08-12-2022 To groggyhimsel ( 226) groggyhimself@ ND+ Black Friday: Dispenser de água recarregável luxo 90 N + 08-12-2022 To groggyhimsel ( 617) Amazon Business N + BLACK FRIDAY : créez votre compte gratuit et profitez de 50% de remise 206 N + 08-12-2022 To groggyhimsel ( 717) groggyhimself@ N + Black Friday: O SMARTWATCH MAIS TECNOLÓGICO E COMPATÍVEL DO MUNDO AGORA EM SEUS BRAÇOS 46 ND+ 10-12-2022 To groggyhimsel ( 225) groggyhimself@ ND+ BLACK FRIDAY: Instant Past ?
tiwi down!
Came into the office this morning and noted that a number of xterms were gone from display :0.1. No tiwi xterms any more. Yes, tiwi was running. But: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/12) ~ 473 -> ruptime bde up 50+18:31, 0 users, load 0.03, 0.11, 0.08 dereel up 12+02:36, 1 user, load 0.04, 0.11, 0.22 dischord down 3+00:07 distress up 10+18:16, 0 users, load 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 eureka up 12+02:34, 17 users, load 1.08, 1.13, 0.92 lagoon ...
Modern times
A year ago I started using ?Perfectly Clear?, a product of Eyeq, for postprocessing my photos. And within a few months they decided to discontinue the product and replace it by a much more expensive thing called Radiant Photo. I can survive without that. At least ?Perfectly Clear? is a lifetime license. But now they have come up with the same thing for only $99, round what I paid for ?Perfectly Clear?. Have they realized that their prices were too high? Or is it just a typical offer? One thing that caught my eye was one of the products bundled in the offer: Mylio Photos keeps your photos (and more) safe thanks to its unique backup technology.
eBay: So nice, so nice, we do it twice
A few days ago I finally resolved my most recent issue with eBay returns. And then I got a ?survey? from eBay asking me how I liked the return ?experience?. OK, as I said last month, bad eBay, good consultant, very slow return (21 November to 20 December!) . And then today I got another ?survey?. OK, eBay, this time I'll share: How satisfied were you (0 to 10): 2 Please tell us how your Return experience could have been improved. Please be as specific as possible. It should have been automatic.
Rechargeable batteries revisited
I've been using rechargeable AA and AAA batteries for years now, but somehow I'm still not satisfied. Where have they all gone? Some have failed, others are decades old. And somehow they never come anywhere near the claimed recharge count (180 to 2000 times) for NiMH batteries. I doubt any of mine have made 50 recharges. I've been looking for replacements for some time now, but ALDI seems to have stopped selling them. Maybe that's significant. Today I missed photo opportunities because the batteries were flat. Time to start looking for alternative suppliers.
Rain!
We haven't had significant rain for nearly a week now, but today things made up for it: what proved to be 20 mm of rain in a couple of hours. And again the water was up to the doorstep: No, the extraction pump was working just fine, but it took a while to get rid of all the water. Should I replace it with something more powerful? And how much did the weather station report?
A new electric fence ?energiser?
Yvonne didn't pick up a new electric fence device (which they call ?energiser?, or even ?energizer?, for some reason) yesterday, but it seems that it's getting urgent. What do we do? We've had two JVA devices that survived for about 4 years each. Before that we've had battery driven ones that only lasted a few months. How about a more expensive brand-named device? Gallagher comes to mind. And Chris Bahlo had recommended Electric Fencing Supplies & Products. OK, they're in Ballarat, though Google Maps isn't quite sure where. Take a look at their web site, climb through the menus to Small Energizers 0-10 Acres ( 0-4 Ha ) / 240 Volt Mains (their punctuation and choice of units).
hydra: power consumption
Somehow I never have enough time to complete my computer upgrade work. That's the situation once again. But I've discovered two things about hydra: firstly, it's noisy. I don't know if I can improve that by cleaning the fan, but it's worth a try. And then the power consumption: I turned it off until I have time to look at it. And my power consumption display dropped by 250 W! If that's true (and I need to confirm), that's 6 kWh per day, nearly $2. Over $700 a year. For that I might be able to buy a faster, more economical machine.
Microsoft strangenesses
After one of these automatic updates from Microsoft, I endured: === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/4) ~ 4 -> /home/local/bin/dordesktop distress 1870x1030+0 ATTENTION! The server uses and invalid security certificate which can not be trusted for the following identified reasons(s); 1. Certificate issuer is not trusted by this system. Issuer: CN=distress Review the following certificate info before you trust it to be added as an exception. If you do not trust the certificate the connection atempt will be aborted: Subject: CN=distress Issuer: CN=distress Valid From: Tue Aug 2 10:42:25 2022 To: Wed Feb 1 11:42:25 2023 Certificate fingerprints: sha1: 25005f571c5a8eea58cef2eb629187b56c75a2cf sha256: 8e1bc5c92a2049ae3df28906c1acc6f1eadad711055a6199a51f977e88bfa23a Do you trust this certificate (yes/no)?
ANZ card: done?
As planned, called up ANZ relatively early this morning. It didn't help much. I was still put on hold for 15 minutes, and just as somebody replied, the battery in my phone gave out. Damn! Got another phone with (hopefully) a better battery and tried again. Now I'm getting used to the dialogues, so I was prepared: Bot: So that I can direct your call, can you tell me the purpose of your call? Me: I need a replacement ATM card for an existing account. Bot: Now is this for a new account? Another 15 minutes and was connected to Geil, who spells his name ?Kyle?.
System installation part 2: /etc
After installing a system from the installation medium, the next step is to set up the configuration files in /etc. The FreeBSD does some of this, such as setting up file systems, basic network access and users. But that's only scratching the surface. What do we need? Here's a first cut of Yet Another attempt to understand things. It's important to know that this is a trusted network, so there's little attention to security. Preparation For the moment I have a series of half-prepared scripts and data files in the hierarchy eureka:/home/Sysconfig/Install. I'll refer to these as I go.
More upgrade pain
tiwi is now working relatively well, but there are still a couple of loose ends, like the subtitle problem on Friday: === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/12) /spool/Series/Großstadtrevier/35 5 -> ttml2srt Die_schlafende_Unschuld_481.de.ttml Traceback (most recent call last): File "/home/local/bin/ttml2srt.py", line 12, in <module> for elem in root.getiterator(): AttributeError: 'xml.etree.ElementTree.Element' object has no attribute 'getiterator' Time to find out what the problem is. ttml2srt is written in python, something that seems to delight in having hundreds of sub-ports: === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/5) ~ 20 -> pkg info | grep ^py | wc -l 86 === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/12) ~ 96 -> pkg info | grep ^py | wc -l 53 That's the number of python ports.
Replacing my ANZ ATM card
It's fairly clear that I won't find the ANZ ATM card that I lost 2 months ago. Why haven't I called ANZ and to ask for a new one. Oh, no, it's not that easy. Voice recognition system that tells me to please call from a mobile phone. If you really have to call on a normal phone, please enter your multi-digit Customer Registration Number. Sorry, no. Give me a human. ?This is going to take a while. Did you know that you can order a replacement card from the ANZ App or on the Internet??. No, I didn't. Off to take a look.
Reviving hydra
Finally got round to installing FreeBSD on hydra.lemis.com, formerly epsplex.bde.org. It wasn't easy. First, do I have an install image? Lately I've been installing from SD cards, and I found one (unmarked, of course) lying on top of dereel. What is it?
A new obsolete unit
Read in a US newspaper today: The federal government has called on the seven Western states that rely on Colorado River water to cut usage by 2 to 4 million acre-feet Acre-feet? What kind of unit is that? A quick Google search tells me that it's 1233.48 m³. But what pain! I suppose it makes sense to irrigators: they want to know how deep they can irrigate on their land.
System upgrade, never done
Read in my diary of 10 years ago: It's been over 10 years since I first tried to find a simplified way of staying up to date with FreeBSD. I still haven't succeeded. It's becoming an issue again: teevee is running relatively well, but the installation is about 18 months old, and it's running firefox 6.0. Not that much of a problem, but for reasons I don't understand it now pops up an additional ?Please upgrade?
More hydra thoughts
The HP Z800 is a very different kind of machine from the ones I have had before, and I've spent some time examining it. Just about everything seems to be accessible without tools, and there are few loose cables: In particular, the disks are in trays that connect directly to a socket: Problem: how do you connect an SSD?
More upgrade issues
After Wednesday's outage, I have a couple of issues that I hadn't expected. tiwi interprets the Alt key bindings correctly, but for some reason eureka doesn't. Probably I forgot to update a config file, but each case requires research to find out why. Another issue is probably older: === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/12) /spool/Series/Großstadtrevier/35 5 -> ttml2srt Die_schlafende_Unschuld_481.de.ttml Traceback (most recent call last): File "/home/local/bin/ttml2srt.py", line 12, in <module> for elem in root.getiterator(): AttributeError: 'xml.etree.ElementTree.Element' object has no attribute 'getiterator' Fired up teevee to compare, and it works fine there, so once again it's presumably a configuration problem that I need to research.
Luminar again
Processing yesterday's photos posed an interesting issue: power lines. And that's exactly the reason I bought Luminar. OK, how well does it work? Quite well, it seems. It removed all of the power lines I presented it, leaving only bare power poles. Here a ?before and after? of one of them: One image was a particular problem: The lines were no particular issue, but the power poles were, particularly the big one.
Mobile phone pain?
Calling Paul wasn't easy. My phone claimed no signal. Is that real? Off to compare with Yvonne's phone. Not much of a signal either, but there was one. My phone still didn't want to know. Rebooted, and it was back to normal. I've seen this before. Is this a sign that it's beginning to fail? After all, it's nearly 2 years old, which seems to be an eternity in the mobile phone world.
More Luminar experiments
Somehow my results with Luminar haven't been as satisfactory as I had hoped. Last time was particularly frustrating?I couldn't even find the Power Line Removal tool. Today I tried again and found the tool hidden under the Erase tool. I applied it first, and how about that. It did an almost perfect job. That in itself is frustrating. Why did I get significantly different results in the three times I tried to process the same photo? I still don't know. Still, move on. Remove the fenceposts. How accurately do I need to mark them? This time I marked them generously. It worked up to a point, but I ended up with a second segment of tail: At least that gives some insight ...
NBN has you covered
While investigating network coverage at the Bahlo/Papenfuss property in Rocklyn, looked at the current iteration of the NBN rollout map. All of Victoria is covered! And the technology is fixed wireless. Do I believe that? Reading an oversized disclaimer doesn't help: While most premises in the purple ?Service available area? can connect to services over the nbn? network, some premises may require additional work to be completed first. On rare occasions, some premises cannot be connected.
Preparing hydra
Somehow I'm not making much progress with my computer upgrades. The system on eureka is now 7 years old, and I've been planning to upgrade it for over 5 years. Why the delay? Apart from laziness, it's this ?let's get it right? concept. And strangely the system has been remarkably stable since installation. Still, there are issues. I can no longer run the latest version of firefox on eureka (nor many of the not-so-late versions), and various sites don't want to talk to me. And it seems that the firefox team is getting modern and making it more and more difficult to run firefox over a network link.
More Luminar fun
Yesterday's photo processing with Luminar was less satisfying than it should have been. Time to RTFM. Oh. That's an old, worn-out magic word. First I read some of the copious emails I received from Skylum, some of which ask me to buy things, and others that show individual functionality. The confusion is illustrated in the ?Help? selection, which offers me a user manual but takes me to this FAQ page, which starts with the following helpful information: Where do I find my Extensions after installation?
Viewed video log
I keep various logs of videos that I have watched. The canonical one ends like this: Sun 2022-12-04 19:14:31 -> 21:21:52 x /spool/Series/90-min/Bergretter/13/13-06-Augen-auf-20211223-201500.mp4 Sun 2022-12-04 21:23:02 -> 22:24:34 x /spool/Series/Hubert-und-Staller/10/10-05-Mord-mit-1.600-Umdrehungen--153--20220209-185000.mp4 Mon 2022-12-05 10:14:11 -> 10:14:20 k /spool/Series/Alles-Finster/Folge_1_-_Alles_finster_S01_E01.mp4 Mon 2022-12-05 15:38:59 -> 16:00:01 k /spool/Docco/AlJaz-15.mp4 Mon 2022-12-05 17:30:25 -> 17:30:30 x /spool/Docco/Putins_Propagandamaschine_-_Das_manipulierte_Volk.mp4 Mon 2022-12-05 19:08:16 -> 20:14:55 x /spool/Series/Notruf-Hafenkante/04/04-06-Kais-Entscheidung-20170111-103000.mp4 Mon 2022-12-05 20:15:08 -> 20:58:41 x /spool/Series/McLeods-daughters/4/4-21-Secrets_And_Lies.mp4 Mon 2022-12-05 21:10:37 -> 21:59:07 x /spool/Series/Koeter-Rex/05/05-07-Blinde-Wut-0707167312.mp4 That's one entry per video, showing start time, end time, end status (x means deleted, k means kept; I think I once had others) and path name.
More Luminar fun
Somehow Luminar shows itself from two different perspectives. On the one hand I'm almost bombarded with suggestions about how to do clever things. But they're not what I'm looking for right now. On the other hand, I still want to process my kangaroo photo. Last time I just went off and played around, and I had surprisingly good results under the circumstances. But they weren't spectacular, and today I tried working on the background image on tiwi, effectively the same photo cropped. This time things didn't go as well. In particular, the ?remove powerlines? didn't work At All. After expending considerably more time than on Friday, I was left with this transformation: Yes, the fences are gone.
Getting to know Lumninar Neo
Finally the Luminar Neo installation is finished. Please reboot! They're really doing everything to make me love them! OK, reboot, move the image to the task bar, start. I really wanted this to process this photo, one of many that I took on 14 August 2018: OK, work round the typical Microsoft space pain, create a new directory /Photos/1-Skylum, link the photos to it (for the fun of it I used the raw images, which it claims to handle), and start: That's a minimalist view.
Luminar after all?
I've been looking at Luminar photo processing software for 4 years now, and I've never found a good reason to install it. But it came close. In April this year I considered it to fix the artefacts in this photo and others that I took at the same time: At the time I discussed the issues in some detail, and also the confusion I had between their two products ?Luminar AI? and ?Luminar Neo?. The reviews were also not overly encouraging, so I left it.
Hanging daily cleanup run
For the last couple of days I've been getting mail messages like this: Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2022 03:01:00 +1100 (AEDT) From: Charlie Root <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: bde.lemis.com daily run output bde.lemis.com daily prior run still in progress What's that?
More eBay pain
While in town, sent off the rain gauge that I finally got round to return. Next step: report it as sent and give the tracking number. But: It's worth reading the fine print, which contradicts the coarse print. Found a way to access the information after all and enter the tracking number. But what's wrong with these people? A change of generation? It's interesting to note that all people who communicated with me via ?chat? said things like: Hello Greg.
Shopping again
Into town again today for the weekly shopping, or at least the rest of it: we managed most of it on Monday. About the only thing of interest was that Google Maps suddenly stopped reporting in mid-message. And that proved to be because I no longer had mobile phone reception! Drove like that from Sebastopol to PETstock in Latrobe Street. Still no signal. That can't be right. Power down the phone, pop the SIM card and replace, reboot. And yes, I had reception again. What caused that? The phone had recognized the SIMM card before I powered it down, so probably a simple power cycle would have done the trick.
Google wisdom
While searching for COVID-19 vaccinations on Google, got this helpful information: OK, Google, I'll bite. How are those diseases related to COVID-19?
Latest eBay pain
One of the good things about eBay is that it's relatively easy to return merchandise if it's defective or not as described. But when I tried to return the defective rain gauge, I got a different reaction. First a message titled ?Some issues with your recent orders? with a lot of vague stuff about ensuring that things work for everybody, but with a link to their abusive buyer policy, and then one telling me to buy a return label. What's all this nonsense? Has some artificial stupidity program decided that I have returned too many items? That should be a feature, not a bug.
More tiwi pain
First thing this morning I took a look at the display from tiwi, which had looked completely messed up when I went to bed. But now it was fine. Then into the office to check the overnight logs: tiwi.lemis.com kernel log messages: +NVRM: GPU at PCI:0000:01:00: GPU-85983119-e9ef-ac66-6817-fbed5657b871 +NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:01:00): 32, Channel ID 0000000f intr 80040000 +NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:01:00): 39, CCMDs 00000010 000090b5 +NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:01:00): 31, Ch 00000001, engmask 00000101, intr 10000000 +NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:01:00): 31, Ch 00000001, engmask 00000101, intr 10000000 (hundreds of repeats) What's that?
Gradually completing tiwi
More very little work on tiwi today. Spent some time looking for a mailcap file, and came up with the obvious /usr/local/etc/mailcap. Yes, the file on eureka has invocations for firefox, and there was none on tiwi. So copy it across and try to access a web page from mutt. Nothing. ?For every problem there is a solution that is elegant, obvious and wrong?, to (apparently) misquote H.L.Mencken. More searching. Ah, there's a ~/.mailcap. That, too, was missing, and when I added it, things worked as expected. So: what's /usr/local/etc/mailcap there for? In the evening, just before going to bed, firefox hung up on me, to the point that the display became inaccessible.
Unwriting history
While writing up the story of the lost mobile phone yesterday, I went back to Facebook to see what I wrote. Nothing! It has been wiped off the face of the earth, it seems. It doesn't even show in ?my content?. My best guess is that somebody thought it appropriate to remove both the thread I started and the thread that Kerrianne started a couple of weeks ago. How this irritates me! Here I am keeping records for decades, and things I have written are removed without even asking.
More TV issues
Into the lounge room to watch the news today. Oh. No recordings. Run the script again? It failed: === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/9) /spool/Docco 35 -> /home/local/bin/aljaz AlJaz-16-1 1080 [youtube] -upyPouRrB8: Downloading webpage [youtube] -upyPouRrB8: Downloading android player API JSON ERROR: [youtube] -upyPouRrB8: Private video. Sign in if you've been granted access to this video What did I do wrong this time? Nothing, it proved. They have just changed their stream ID, like they do about twice a year, and they chose the time that caused the most confusion.
Goodbye teevee
So now tiwi is set up well enough that I don't really need to run teevee any more. Shut it down. tiwi died! Huh? It took me longer than it should to realize that I had started X on tiwi from teevee, so when it went down it took tiwi's X with it. But by that time I was rebooting tiwi, showing that I didn't get a console display. That must be related to the BIOS settings for the display, something that I should examine Some Other Time. But at least the cutover is mainly complete.
Found: mobile phone
It didn't take long for my post on Facebook about the mobile phone I found yesterday to bear results. I got a call on the phone itself, from Kerrianne Frost, who lives around the corner in Progress Road, and whom we know from horsey stuff. Yes, it belongs to her son, and it was lost 12 days ago, and GPS logging showed that it was last seen at the junction of Swamp and Ferrers Roads, 3 km away, and that it had a red cover on it. So how did it end up where we found it? Much discussion, in the course of which two other people mentioned that they had seen it, but thought that it was broken.
Found: mobile phone
Walking the dogs this afternoon, Yvonne saw a mobile phone on the side of the road. Looks just like my enzian. What make? I couldn't see anything obvious. It has clearly seen better days. There's a piece of adhesive tape on the left, and the screen protection is peeling off: OK, put it on charge. That worked. Fire it up. That worked too, showing that it's a Samsung Galaxy A11 and that the display has damage: And that's basically as far as I got.
Director ID, try 2
Finally I have brought up enough courage for another stab at applying for my Director ID . This time the call back promised less than 18 minutes. It barely made it: after 17 minutes I got a call from somebody who eventually claimed to be Ariana (again, my spelling). And, as I feared, she wanted all the information over again. First, will you answer a secret question? Yes, prepared for that. Long silence, then ?what is your home address??. My guess is that she didn't want to ask ?what's the purpose of all these silly questions??. So I have tricked the system.
tiwi: the next step
It's clear that the disk on teevee is deteriorating rapidly. Time to catch up with my installation of tiwi. In principle there were only two issues: Alt key bindings on bash on xterms, and the lack of an Emulate3Buttons on the mouse. I had already found, and lost again, some suggestions for the bash issue. More searching, and came up with this page, which suggested two steps: Add these entries to my ~/.Xdefaults file: !
Director ID: so nice, so nice, we do it twice
While I had Marcio on the phone, I got him to issue an ID for Yvonne, who had never heard of the thing. Similar questions: tax file number (which I had ready), Medicare number, passport number. Wait a while, the passport expired in 2014. Never mind. To identify yourself with an Australian passport, it needs to be valid or to have expired not more than 3 years ago. For foreign passports, that's not a requirement, as long as she entered Australia on it. He didn't even want the visa number, which is what I would have expected, and he didn't ask the nationality of the passport, which is presumably encoded in the number.
Getting a director ID
The Australian Government has discovered that there are a number of companies with fake directors. The solution: register them based on their known identification, a ?Director ID?. And their preferred method is this horribly insecure myGovID, which was used last year to steal money from Centrelink, who made me pay for their mistakes. No way I was going to do that again. What are the alternatives? Can I get my accountant to do it for me? No, says Peter O'Connell, they're not allowed to do it. I must do it myself, and the easiest way has proven to be by telephone.
Goodbye Twitter, hello Idiot
The news of the month is how Elon Musk bought out Twitter and proceeded to dismiss more than half of the work force. Latest rumours are that he requires his employees to produce voluminous new code to show their worth. Some discussion on the UNIX Heritage Society mailing list. As Dan Cross put it, Well, if I ever go to work for Twitter, I know how I'm initializing large arrays. But of course Elon is following the old adage ?when in a hole, dig faster?.
Last Core Team video conference
The last of the three video conferences about the charter for the FreeBSD Core Team today. At least I managed to get my thoughts across about the usefulness of this kind of discussion as compared with email, but I don't know to what extent the others agreed.
Firefox changes
One of the consequences of teevee's problems was that it was no longer a good idea to run firefox from teevee. OK, start from tiwi. But it didn't respond to invocations from mutt on eureka. Instead it started a local firefox. After analysis, it seems that this is a fixed bug. In the past you couldn't start a separate firefox from two different systems on the same display: the second attempt would just attach to the first, even if it was running on a different system. Now, it seems, it is possible, but that means that a mutt running on eureka can't attach to a firefox running on tiwi and displaying on the same display; instead it tries to start a new instance.
Migration pressure
Reading the nightly log summaries this morning, I saw: Checking setuid files and devices: find: /usr/local/lib/bonobo/monikers: Input/output error find: /usr/local/lib/colord-sensors/libcolord_sensor_argyll.a: Input/output error find: /usr/local/lib/colord-sensors/libcolord_sensor_argyll.so: Input/output error That was from teevee. Oh. What's in /var/log/messages? Lots of: Nov 17 04:00:33 teevee kernel: g_vfs_done():ada0p4[READ(offset=3944546304, length=32768)]error = 5 Nov 17 04:00:36 teevee kernel: (ada0:ahcich1:0:0:0): READ_FPDMA_QUEUED. ACB: 60 40 28 8f f5 40 07 00 00 00 00 00 Nov 17 04:00:36 teevee kernel: (ada0:ahcich1:0:0:0): CAM status: ATA Status Error Nov 17 04:00:36 teevee kernel: (ada0:ahcich1:0:0:0): ATA status: 41 (DRDY ERR), error: 40 (UNC ) Nov 17 04:00:36 teevee kernel: (ada0:ahcich1:0:0:0): RES: 41 40 48 8f f5 40 07 00 00 40 00 Nov 17 04:00:36 teevee kernel: (ada0:ahcich1:0:0:0): Retrying command, 3 more tries remain ...
Another Core team teleconference
Another teleconference for the working group to establish a charter for the FreeBSD Core Team this morning at 7:30. Last time I was quite impressed by how it ran, maybe because I had few positive expectations. But today was less positive. One of the ?participants? showed up at the start, said a word and disappeared. Another one had difficulties once again with the video interface throughout the call. I did too at the start, but fortunately Adam (the coordinator) set me right before the meeting got started. But clearly the technology is getting in the way, and I'm not sure what it adds to the meeting.
lax down!
While watching TV this evening, an Emacs popped up over the film we were watching. ?Reconnecting to lax.lemis.com?. Dammit, another network outage? No, only lax wasn't reachable. OK, finish the film and check. Yes, lax is there again. But: === grog@lax (/dev/pts/1) ~ 1 -> uptime 10:51AM up 25 mins, 2 users, load averages: 0.26, 0.33, 0.24 Oh. It crashed! And that after being up for over 15 months: Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2022 03:03:36 GMT From: Charlie Root <[email protected]> lax up 478+08:07, 0 users, load 0.57, 0.47, 0.45 Still, it's not as bad as if ffm.lemis.com had gone down: === grog@ffm (/dev/pts/0) ~ 7 -> uptime 1:31AM ...
Chromecast revisited
Reading back in my diary, came across this article on watching TV. Jamie Fraser had bought a Chromecast box, something that I found far too limiting. How do you single step? How do you take a screen shot? Can Jamie live with it? Asked him on IRC. Yes, it seems. Single step? No. Screen shot. No. As others said, who needs them? Somehow people are all stuck in their boxes.
Olympus webcam, retried
Following some discussion on IRC, once again tried to connect my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II to distress as a webcam. The main issue I had last time was that I didn't have a microphone. But of course I do: the Saramonic UWMIC9 wireless microphones that, I discover, I have had for over 4 years. They're not suitable for continuous use, since they're heavy on batteries and too polite to use rechargeables, but for a test they should be more than sufficient. So: first recall what I need to do to connect the camera. Focus mode to C-AF (continuous) to keep my face in focus.
Overly eager bots
Received in my mail this morning: From: World Wide Web Owner <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: FAILURE: /booquoo/nooquyj.php <- http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-sep2008.php Referrer: http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-sep2008.php Referenced URL: http://www.lemis.com/booquoo/nooquyj.php Request URI: /booquoo/nooquyj.php Remote IP: 151.237.184.66 Surely I didn't have a reference like that? No, I didn't. Coincidentally it was another strange mismatch. This time is easier to understand: some over-eager bot has decided not to check if a URL-like text is really a link before trying to resolve it.
Olympus cameras as webcams
I wasn't at all impressed by the image quality produced by my laptop during the teleconference. But then, it's a toy camera. And I have at least two real cameras that claim to be able to function as a webcam, as I noted a couple of years ago. Off to look at the details. Not encouraging: Olympus is gone, OM System is here, and the app is apparently still in Beta. And it doesn't run on Microsoft ?Windows? 7, the version running on eucla, my Microsoft laptop. OK, not that much of a problem: I can connect my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II to distress.
Wither FreeBSD core team?
Up early this morning for a 7:30 teleconference to discuss a charter for the FreeBSD Core Team. Not my idea of fun, but despite my objections I found that we came up with some useful results. I still think that we could have done better with more conventional means, but that requires the others to also be prepared to use these means (email discussions, for example). Certainly the ability to write up a collaborative document during the meeting was interesting, in particular because it was relatively tidy; my drafts look really messy, maybe because they can. The other thing that I hadn't expected was less positive: somehow the whole day was out of sync as the result of my early rising.
Zoom again
Yesterday's tests of Zoom on FreeBSD were a complete waste of time. Try as I might I couldn't get any audio. So today, painful as it was, I tried on Microsoft. Surprise, surprise! First, it wanted to install an app, and then it presented an almost completely different interface: My guess is that under FreeBSD a firefox plugin provides the equivalent functionality, thus explaining why I always get firefox even when I'm running Chrom* and it's my ?default browser?.
More Zoom pain
It's high time that I get my act together with Zoom: our meeting is very early on Tuesday morning. OK, fire up again. Things are glacially slow, and top shows: PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND 1832 grog 41 27 0 28G 952M select 2 282:38 309.53% firefox Maxing out 3 CPUs! And that on a relatively modern laptop. Is this a firefox issue? Tried starting chrom*, but that didn't help.
More web cam stuff
Finally got round to upgrading the installation on bde, slightly complicated by the installation process that I'm developing, a completely unrelated issue. How do I install the packages? ntpd needs starting, and it needs a local configuration file. To start it, I also need the cuse module, along with a very specific invocation of webcamd: === root@bde (/dev/pts/2) ~ 7 -> webcamd -N Chicony-Electronics-Co---Ltd--HP-HD-Webcam-Fixed -S SN0001 -M 0 webcamd 1783 - - Attached to ugen1.4[0] webcamd 1783 - - Creating /dev/video0 webcamd 1783 - - Creating /dev/video1 But the good news was that it worked, as did x2x, though it ran glacially slowly in a Zoom browser window.
Video recovery, day 3
In principle I have completely recovered my video data. This morning the daily cron backup job ran, and I got up a little apprehensive of what I might find: if I had forgotten to restore some files, the backup job would ensure that they were lost forever. But no, quite the opposite. Lots more files got backed up than I had expected. Old files that I had already seen. It almost looks as if my scripts foo and bar missed some files. But how? It's interesting to note in that connection that there is 50 GB less free space on /spool than there was at the beginning.
Video recovery, day 2
By the middle of the night my reconstruction of tiwi:/spool/Series was complete. But things didn't look quite right: === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/3) /spool/Series 240 -> l -rt total 1 drwxr-xr-x 4 grog home 512 1 Nov 12:31 Call-the-Midwife drwxr-xr-x 5 grog home 512 1 Nov 12:31 Morden-im-Norden drwxr-xr-x 3 grog home 512 1 Nov 12:31 New-Gold-Mountain drwxr-xr-x 3 grog home 512 1 Nov 12:32 Doc-Martin drwxr-xr-x 2 grog home 1,024 1 Nov 12:32 Jewel-in-the-Crown drwxr-xr-x 4 grog home 512 1 Nov 12:32 HIP drwxr-xr-x 6 grog home 512 1 Nov 12:32 Rentnercops drwxr-xr-x 13 grog home 1,024 1 Nov 12:55 30-min drwxr-xr-x 3 grog home 512 1 Nov 12:55 Dr-Kleist drwxr-xr-x 10 grog home 512 1 ...
Video conferencing on bde
I still haven't got completed the webcam setup that I started a week ago. How do I test it? We're using Zoom, and how about that, I'm already set up for it. Started zoom and... no picture. But I've seen that before too: I was only able to start cheese as root. All this requires more keyboard access to the machine than is bearable on this mutilated keyboard on bde.lemis.com: due to only partially successful keyboard remapping, I don't have a control key any more, and I can't restart X easily, since it has lost its vtys. OK, that's what x2x is for.
Catastrophe!
Checking my video downloads before breakfast this morning, I discovered that I had created a directory /spool/Series/Fisk/02. But why? Surely I already had /spool/Series/Fisk/01. Oh. It's a series with 30 minute episodes, so the correct directory name is be /spool/Series/30-min/Fisk/02, and that exists. So delete the new hierarchy: === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/2) /spool/Already/Series 123 -> rm -rf /spool/Series/ === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/2) /spool/Already/Series 124 -> AAARGH! Something must have interrupted me before I finished typing, and I removed all of my active series, some 2.5 TB of them!
System upgrade, next delay
I'm still dragging my heels on system upgrades, but we're heading for another set of video conferences (why?) , and I want to ensure that my laptop is capable of handling them correctly. So what do I use to test it. Is Skype available on FreeBSD? A quick locate shows: yes. OK, is it named correctly? === root@bde (/dev/pts/6) /usr/ports/net-im 14 -> pkg search skype pidgin-skypeweb-1.7,1 Plugin to use Skype chat from Pidgin(without Skype running) Damn. What's wrong there? Try again on dereel: === root@dereel (/dev/pts/2) /home/grog 7 -> pkg search skype pkg: repository FreeBSD contains packages for wrong OS version: FreeBSD:14:amd64 Huh?
More Android fun
Since my Android system upgrade a few months ago, I haven't been able to access the data from the Mendhak GPS logger: they have ?secured? the system so that nothing except the app itself can access it. So I had to use the workarounds that the logger provides: regular email or (my choice) ftp. That works, but it comes with a delay: it gets sent at regular intervals, typically one day. If I take a photo and want the location information, I have to wait until it is transferred; previously my tagging scripts loaded the files automatically. It does, however, offer to store the files elsewhere on the device.
Elon Musk saves the world
The current story of the day is that Elon Musk has bought Twitter and started firing everybody from the top down. And some people are complaining. But they haven't read my diary. Nearly 6 years ago a majority of people wanted to kill off Twitter. Now Musk is, it seems, doing just that.
Service Victoria: beyond worse
Now that the COVID-19 pandemic is ?over? (never mind that at the beginning under 1,000 people had died of COVID-19 in Australia, and now it's over 15,000), I don't pay as much attention to the statistics as I once did. But today on IRC Callum Gibson mentioned a fourth vaccination. What, a fourth? I hadn't heard of that. But I can check that on my mobile phone with this horrible Service Victoria app, which maintains ?digital certificates? of my vaccinations. Fire it up: Yes, that's old.
Webcam with FreeBSD
Whether I like it or not, I'm due for a few video teleconferences in the near future. Last time I did it with my mobile phone, which was suboptimal for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because the app insisted on using mobile data where it had a perfectly good Wi-Fi connection, thus using up all my phone credit. In the meantime I have set up Bruce Evans' old HP EliteBook 8750p laptop, and that works as well as a machine with a hard-wired CapsLock key can work. And of course it has a webcam. How do I set it up?
High resolution panoramas
House photo day today. I normally take 6 360° panoramas, each of which has a size of between 60 and 80 MP. But the camera has a high resolution option for roughly 4 times that resolution. Why not try it? One issue is that I normally use exposure bracketing (+1.7 EV, +4.7 EV and -1.3 EV) and for whatever reason the camera won't do that in combination with high resolution shots, so I have to take each image individually. But that can be done. I can also just do individual exposures (0 EV offset) and stitch them together.
Another mobile phone reset!
On Tuesday, as I was leaving for Geelong, I put my mobile phone in its holder... and it reset. I wondered at the time if something was wrong. But today exactly the same thing happened! It seems that it wasn't in a reboot loop: it wanted to feel wanted, and when I touched it the right way, it completed the reboot. But why did it happen? Did I touch it the wrong way when mounting in the holder?
The daily smart phone smart
Lots of emergencies at the moment, of course. And that's what the Vic Emergency app is all about. But I haven't been receiving any information. Fool! Of course you have. Those are the little popups that appear while you're doing something else, and disappear before you get time to look at them. And if they show up in the notifications, they're behind more important things like PetaPixel's review of the Leica M6 (how did they find out how to spam me?) , or a message from ALDImobile from 6 June telling me that it's time to recharge. And once you locate the message, you just need to deal multiple swinging blows at your phone to discover a flood warning between Lake Eildon and Seymour, only 250 km away and on the other side of the ranges, or (if you look in the wrong place) that there are no total fire ...
Reading rain gauges
I've come to the conclusion some time ago that my eyes aren't what they once were. In particular, I have great difficulty reading the rain gauges. Admittedly they have also seen better days, but how about photos? That's with high microcontrast to emphasize the readings. I still have difficulty! No wonder I normally do.
Power fail, the rest
By chance I woke up at 2:35. We still had power. We still had no grid power. While I was contemplating the situation, the power went out, at 2:40. Almost exactly what I had guessed. How long would the outage last? We've heard of people who have been off the grid for days. Spent some time considering how to handle the situation, and during that time the power was restored, at 3:09. We had missed weathering the outage by 29 minutes! I later discovered that the state of charge of the batteries was only 94% when the power failed, and for some reason?I suspect Luke Parry of Effective Electrical?the ?turn off?
X and UTF-8: Hope?
A thread on the NetBSD mailing lists today: how do I generate Alt key codes with X, specifically xterm? Some of this seems to overlap with my issues with tiwi. There seem to be some solutions there too; I just need time to look at them.
Understanding false positives
Clearly Google Maps got confused by the fact that there's more than one Victoria Street in Ballarat and surroundings. An avoidable kind of false positive, something that happens more often with peoples' names. One of the strange things about my name is that I seem to be the only person who has it. Just about everybody seems to have a Doppelgänger, but not I. Even Yvonne, born Yvonne Ködderitzsch, the name of a tiny village north-east of Weimar, has not one but two Doppelgängerinnen. This search page suggests that there might be even more. But what are surnames? Yvonne (mine) has been treated by numerous medical professionals over the last 10 days.
Google Maps: bad day
I had already noted that Google Maps wasn't much help today. Yesterday I had asked it to take me to the Queen Elizabeth Centre, which it knew, and it transferred the route to my phone. But today the route was gone! Somehow the user interface for the phone app is very different from (and much worse than) the web browser interface. To its credit, it got us there at exactly the estimated time, something that many navigators have had trouble with in the past. But it took me to the wrong place: Is that wrong?
Panotools-Script
Manipulating Hugin files is not the easiest thing in the world, and a while back I investigated the project file format, with only moderate insights. But today I heard of Panotools Script, which appears to have a number of functions that could help. If I only had time...
Faster DxO
15 years ago yesterday we toured the Great Ocean Road and Maits Rest, and of course I took a lot of photos. But at the time I had had my Olympus E-510 less than 2 months, and the results weren't that good. In particular, I took all photos as JPEGs, and in this photo Yvonne's face was burnt out: OK, time to reprocess with the latest and greatest DxO PhotoLab. Yes, they're marginally better, limited by the choice of JPEG images (in turn decided because I didn't have any useful raw image processing software at the time).
Fun with DxO PhotoLab 6
The photos that I took at the Ballarat Base Hospital on Friday proved particularly difficult to process for a number of reasons. Firstly the white balance was all over the place, and since I took things with available light and ISO sensitivities up to 3200/36°, I needed careful processing to render the images well. So far this has been with DxO PhotoLab's DeepPRIME setting. But now there's an even deeper PRIME, DeepPRIME XD (whatever that is intended to mean), and it is even much slower than DeepPRIME. Today I tried to fix some of the white balance and also measure timing, in particular whether PhotoLab 6 is really faster than PhotoLab 5.
DxO speed improvements
DxO have released a new version of PhotoLab, 6.0, as Digital Photography Review informs me: DxO is too polite to spam its customers with such information. OK, try it. Oh. For some reason their web site only wants to speak German to me, and then refuses my password and my browser (firefox). Went to some trouble to download it, but finally succeeded: it's 765 MB in size and took about 3 hours to arrive. That seems to be somehow related to my link. I was able to download it to ffm.lemis.com in 7 seconds: === grog@ffm (/dev/pts/0) ~ 18 -> fetch https://download-center.dxo.com/PhotoLab/v6/Win/DxO_PhotoLab6_Setup.exe DxO_PhotoLab6_Setup.exe 100% of 764 MB 115 MBps 00m07s But copying it here again came across at about 100 kB/s, less than ...
Fast bank transfers
Yesterday I transferred some money from my Bank of Melbourne. Nowadays that's normally instantaneous, but this time I got a timeout saying that the transfer was in progress, and ?check back later please?. I did that, and the money had gone through, but where was the notification email to the recipient? That arrived today: From bounces+18703364-aeed-[email protected] Thu Oct 6 15:32:03 2022 Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2022 04:32:00 +0000 (UTC) The Payer has requested we send you an email with details of a Payment made through Bank of Melbourne Internet Banking. Date: 05/10/2022 Time: 03:31 PM AEST That's 24 hours' delay, so exactly that it almost seems symptomatic.
Problem report: 20th anniversary
Received an email notification for a couple of updates to Bug 44034. Clearly a little too early: next Friday it will be 20 years old. And it's still open! But I couldn't change the text. Attempts to log in failed, and the system refused to let me change my password. Discussion with Philip Paeps, who is almost in our time zone (Hong Kong). He fixed it for me, but how did it happen? It seems that I changed it by accident using a completely different kerberos interface. That, too, should be better documented.
Travel and email false positives
So do I go to Europe in December? I really don't want to, but if I have to, I should combine it with a few visits. For various reasons I want to go to Hamburg, and it occurred to me that there's a relatively active group, BSDHH, which meets once a month at a Chinese restaurant (Lotusblüte?) in Eppendorf. Would the time match when I might be there? Where's the last mail message on the topic? === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/35) ~/Mail 4 -> grep BSDHH * david.purdue:16N8Qv8AkB2//Xyv/oL15zjI6fpTReC/hBz7n6cUY9s/rR9cfiBSDHHT8qZ1i/gP0NH5fpR7 iracarmel:wwwuuaRJDS6x0MlOM6Mygw43ueBSDHHN5BJMmuMEg4sv0H3zSimtUlOKL3zGwkox7VDDSikP sandraellis.pi:bGGfrmbQly77BJBxhKV+AroJT7kjZ+Yh6pjbRuBpr3pMen1qa2SiR5UqBSDHHEhUfE4t1p3c tessaa:mDrsRKLDTiQ67GxDh51t6LATiQ47kZiBSDHHeH3rE1sTyUtbS7a+SfK2qrbayf4NJzCadUgg03ie tomt:Zu5JJSiOHZZlnxnss5xeST3SSiE8IsaydOkkhSScBSDHHsUlMISRfReeyf7O4+ARoqQpI/2bxcFI === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/35) ~/Mail 5 -> grep Lotusb * frolley_zuideveld:VvOvLotusb8ut1MTEo5nDjxkJGp5MjYhaw2NdTGWVqtDxMmPIROvWf8ALgEI7Ki8mfWEFSB6 That's amazing!
Bloody DST!
First day of Daylight Saving Time today, time to reset dozens of timekeeping devices. Fortunately computers, even Microsoft, Apple and Android, now do that automatically. But there are still 8 cameras, two watches, two microwave ovens, one conventional oven, two conventional clocks and two car clocks, a total of 17. The older cameras are clear: go through the menu and set the time. Three of them are so old that I won't bother until I really take a photo with them. But the newest ones (Olympus OM-D) can communicate with the horrible Olympus Image Share mobile phone app. Ah, no, it's not Olympus any more, it's ?OM Systems?.
More tiwi experience
So now I have tiwi up and running to a point where I can use it. I didn't get round to doing much with it today, mainly just discovering new issues. They include: Compose key doesn't work. This could just be a question of the keyboard mappings, but I need to investigate. It seems that I have visited the issue multiple times over the last 12 years, and I really wish I didn't have to do so again.
Teaching COBOL inheritance
Traveling again?
The FreeBSD Core Team and FreeBSD Foundation are considering the current charter of the core team, and we've set up a working group including me. How do we communicate? Teleconferences! I've expressed my dislike of teleconferences in the past, but I'm in the minority, so it's going to happen. This time of year is more conducive: 12:00 in California, 15:00 in Ontario, 21:00 in West Europe and 7:00 (next day) here. It's unpleasant, but we can do it. But today the other shoe dropped: at the end we will need a face-to-face meeting of all core members and at least some Foundation members.
tiwi cutover: doing it
It's been over a month since I did any real work on installing tiwi, my replacement TV computer. One of the big issues was just setting up X with enough time to spare in case things went wrong. Since tiwi is continually recording, it's not easy. I have to do it in the morning, and then I'm cooking. Today was the day: Yvonne made breakfast, so I had time to play around and reboot if I really had to. I still have one issue open with UTF-8. This is one of the first machines I have with the UTF-8 locale as standard, and on Monday I established that, though I'm out of options, the problems only seem to occur with a remotely started xterm.
Android file access: I give up
I've been trying to access images on hirse, my Android phone, for four days now. Every avenue I have tried has failed. The only possibility that I had still seen was to look in backups. But they, too, didn't help: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/36) ~ 55 -> l /src/Phones/enzian/Backups/ -rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 6,731 16 Sep 10:59 Blocklist(com.miui.securitycenter).bak -rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 107,589 16 Sep 10:59 Camera(com.android.camera).bak -rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 7,751 16 Sep 10:59 Clock(com.android.deskclock).bak -rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 54,336 16 Sep 10:59 FM Radio(com.miui.fm).bak -rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 6,212 16 Sep 10:59 Gallery(com.miui.gallery).bak -rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 6,208 16 Sep 10:59 Notes(com.miui.notes).bak -rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 7,243 16 Sep 10:59 Phone settings(com.android.phone).bak -rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 6,222 16 ...
More Android image searches
Spent some more time looking for ways to access the originals of images sent with Android messages today, and still failed. It's reasonable to assume that the images are stored in a directory associated with the app, whatever it might be called. More investigation with the phone mounted on distress, starting from this screen: OK, there's a directory folder called This PC ? Redmi 9% ? Internal shared storage ? Android ? data ? com.google.android.apps.messaging ? data. What's in it? Nothing! But maybe it's lying. What about this directory tree that I found yesterday? COMMAND.EXE shows: But it lies!
Accessing Android photos: the pain
Tony Nesci sent me this photo yesterday, I think: Why ?I think?? This was the best I could extract after a couple of hours' work. He took it with his phone, of course, which was so proud of the feat that it watermarked the image. He then sent it to my phone with only 20 or 30 swipes. And then I got: It's amazing how hard to read Android displays are when shown on a real display.
Quora ?spam? understood
Once again Quora has deleted an answer, and once again I ?appealed?. But this time I got a sensible answer: Jeff, Sep 25, 2022, 4:51 PM PDT Hello Greg , Thank you for writing in. The quality control systems that we have in place will detect when a link and/or the same information is repeatedly being posted on Quora. Posting the same link and/or the same information over and over in a short period can result in your content being moderated. It?s fine to post about a product, company, or blog on Quora - as long as it's _directly relevant_ to the discussion - but repeatedly posting the same link/information may be considered spam.
Cornering the UTF-8 issues
For months now I have been running two TV computers: teevee.lemis.com, the ?real? computer with a dying disk, and tiwi.lemis.com with a valid disk and up-to-date but no display. And I've been dragging my heels. Why? The X installation requires me to have time when it's not recording something, and there isn't much of that. In addition, I've had some bad experiences with HDMI cables, and I want to be sure that I don't end up in a situation like last year, where the TV no longer worked. The other is more important, though: why can't I use normal keyboard bindings with bash on tiwi?
Making money with free software
An interesting thread on the Unix Heritage Society mailing list recently got me thinking. Andy Kosela wrote: That reminds me of the excellent dissertation of Gerald Holzmann on Code Inflation. The situation is even worse now and honestly I don't see it will improve in the future. My take on the code inflation problem is that today without paid "volunteers" (from IBM, Oracle, Google, etc.) a large chunk of our modern software landscape would just collapse. It is not 90s Internet anymore where hobbyists did it for fun, because frankly back then it was fun...
Quora apologizes
Unexpected mail from Quora moderation today: We are very sorry for this experience. Your content, https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-fix-a-broken-lens-on-an-SLR-camera-without-replacing-the-whole-thing-expensive/answer/Greg-Lehey, was mistakenly removed as a violation of our spam policy, but it is now reinstated. That's the response to my complaint on Monday. As I said at the time, I wasn't really expecting that. And since then I have received no more questions from the Spam Generator. Have they removed it, or just blocked me from seeing the questions?
Rare Space Phenomenon Alarms NASA
Mail from ABC today: 29 N + 19-09-2022 To groggyhimsel ( 63) ABC News N + Rare Space Phenomenon Alarms NASA Sensationalists! What's it about? From: ABC News <[email protected]> Subject: Rare Space Phenomenon Alarms NASA Message-ID: <ym552wd6ufwr37cr-j6momakct6r63e87-16650-[email protected]> http://visceration.co/vhQcm_PDJAncjN1ckCqDras0UjvIRKRzQru4PR_Q9wwRQQ http://visceration.co/EjeJ-LEaSESFjBY09zOcWu4PnQx9St2zYJ6G7sF28PImJQ izabeth was born at 02:40 (GMT) on 21 April 1926, during the reign of her paternal grandfather, ... Elizabeth's only sibling, Princess Margaret, was born in 1930. The two princesses were educated... I've seen that before, most recently 2 days ago. The URLs point to a different domain, but the layout and the spurious plain text are similar in concept.
The eternal system upgrade
Seen in my diary 20 years ago: More work on upgrading systems today. It's terrible work. I spent most of the day trying to find a clean way to upgrade /etc, and failed. mergemaster produced a lot of output, but didn't do very much else. Left me with about 80 files which had to be merged by hand, including such no-brainers as /etc/defaults/rc.conf. This system is just about unworkable. So I've been trying to get things right for over 20 years! Today, though, I did make some progress.
Goodbye Quora?
Quora seems to be as good as dead. Just about all questions now come from the Quora Spam Generator, and I've been responding with my opinions of that. But it seems that I have offended the spambot. Today I got a message: Your answer has been deleted as it was found to be in violation of our Spam policy. To learn more about Quora's policy, click here: https://help.quora.com/hc/en/articles/360000470266. If you think this is an error, you can appeal here: Spam from me? ?Appealed?
Exploring rc again
As planned, spent some time reading up on /etc/rc and subsidiaries. They prove to go back to work done by Luke Mewburn in the NetBSD project. And it seems that both /etc/rc.d and /etc/rc.conf.d/ are intended to hold complete scripts, not just the definitions that I'm looking for. What I want is a way to include snippets like this only once: nfs_client_enable=YES # This host is an NFS client (or NO). nfs_server_enable=YES # This host is an NFS server (or NO). rpc_lockd_enable="YES" # Run NFS rpc.lockd needed for client/server.
rc revisited
Ever since 4BSD, BSD machines use a set of scripts, starting with /etc/rc, to start the machine. /etc/rc itself is invariant, but it reads a configuration file /etc/rc.conf to set the machine up. How do I set this up programmatically with my new system install scripts? My idea had been to create a directory /etc/rc.conf.d/ and put individual configuration routines in there, then modifying rc.conf to read them in and apply them. But rc is a moving target, and it's not clear where it's going. My recent installations all have a directory /etc/rc.conf.d/, but there's nothing in them, and there's almost no mention of it in the man page.
Spam: ain itself
Spam message today: 615 N + 18-09-2022 To groggyhimsel ( 60) Delta Airlines Shopp N + Congratulations! You can get a $90 United Airlines gift card! OK, I was once a Delta airlines frequent flyer. Is it possible that it isn't spam? Look at the text version in case they're tracking me by URL: From 55938-91728-3085-13531-[email protected] Sun Sep 18 16:35:31 2022 DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha1; c=relaxed/relaxed; s=k1; d=glucofreeze.buzz; h=Mime-Version:Content-Type:Date:From:Reply-To:Subject:To:Message-ID; [email protected]; Congratulations! You can get a $90 United Airlines gift card! http://glucofreeze.buzz/4PZeX4I0jm_9Vo13QmHwmB38ujYaqqtomTA_TDu8qsMEddHTfw http://glucofreeze.buzz/6hswYE2c8beUBRrrXG10Ju3qL8YzX0TMHUJMstLRZ0A_bm7lEA attached by wires.
Android MAC addresses, continued
Mail from Bartosz today, who pointed me at this page. It explains that yes, indeed, Android uses random MAC addresses as a ?security? measure to make people harder to track. And it shows how to disable it on a per-network basis. OK, take a look. To my surprise, the method still works, but the settings I found were surprising: it was already set up for ?use device MAC?. So presumably the change only happens when the network is set up. Bartosz was surprised; he has checked the code and found no way that that could happen.
More Android fun
By this morning my reconfiguration of enzian, the Xiaomi Redmi 9A was complete. Well, almost complete. At least two of the apps that I use regularly, WiFi [sic] File Transfer and Mendhak GPS logger, weren't installed. And there were more surprises. My main intention was to maintain configuration, but that didn't happen. The FTP server was installed with default configuration, and for some reason it buzzes when I perform certain functions, like display home screen. That might actually be useful: the thing is so glacially slow that it's good to know that it has taken note. And the MAC address change? Yes, Andy Snow confirmed that this is a feature and not a bug, or that at least the Android developers think so.
A change of pain
So what do I do with bde? The keyboard has a hardware CapsLock key that I can't remap. And my fingers are so used to having Ctrl in that position that that's a show-stopper. Yes, I can almost certainly connect an external keyboard, but that negates the purpose of a laptop. So: the obvious thing to do is finish setting up tiwi, which has been hanging for a couple of reasons. Here the change to UTF-8 breaks a number of things, including grep and my shell interface?the keyboard issue again. I also need to finish installing X on that machine, but that's nothing by comparison.
Off the Net!
Say what you will, mobile phones can be a source of information. This time last week I missed the news at 7:00, but when I got into the office I swiped my phone and got the startling news that Elizabeth II had died. This morning it beeped at me and told me that we were off the net. And so we were, sort of. More a case of extreme flakiness, which my scripts reported as no fewer than 26 outages with an average duration of 110 seconds. The reality was a little different: times of relatively good connection, times with very poor connection.
Laptop installation: impasse
Spent some time tuning my ?new system install? scripts today. Made reasonable progress until I tried my standard keyboard remapping, in particular Ctrl next to A, Alt in bottom left corner of keyboard. Then I got === grog@bde (/dev/pts/43) ~ 6 -> xmodmap ~/xmodmap.bde xmodmap: /home/grog/.xmodmap-bde:2: bad keysym in remove modifier list 'Caps_Lock', no corresponding keycodes xmodmap: /home/grog/.xmodmap-bde:6: bad keysym target keysym 'Caps_Lock', no corresponding keycodes xmodmap: 2 errors encountered, aborting. What's that? After some investigation, it seems that the laptop keyboard has a hardware CapsLock key which can't be remapped.
Fastest Internet service
Another statistic from Statista today: That's supposed to be the mean downlink (?download?) speed. I have a hard time believing that. I think I only know one person with a downlink of over 100 Mb/s (Jari Kirma). Certainly such speeds aren't generally available in Australia, and as long as they charge a premium for higher speeds, it's not clear why anybody would want them. I can get nominal 75 Mb/s, but I've chosen to stay with 25 Mb/s simply because of the price.
Installing BSD, 30 years later
It's been well over 30 years since I first installed BSD on a PC. It was challenging then, and in 1998 I did an all-day tutorial on the subject at the AUUG annual conference?and didn't finish. And of course I've written a book on the subject. In the course of the years, installing the base system has become trivial much easier. Everything that I described in September 1998 is now a matter of 10 minutes and a few almost routine inputs. But things don't end there. What I still can't completely get my head round is how to maintain continuity. At the very latest, I started writing configuration files such as ~/.bashrc and ~/.emacs when I did my first BSD installation, but there's also a chance that I started even earlier with my first Unix installation in about 1987.
Device reliability pain
Into the office this morning to hear beep-beep-beep at regular intervals. My weather station software telling me that the internal unit wasn't getting any data from the external unit. Damn! This happens far too often. The units are only about 20 m apart, but from time to time they don't communicate. And then things come good again, for reasons that I don't understand. Took the internal unit into the lounge room, where it has direct 10 m line of sight through the windows. No data. Batteries in the internal unit low? Take them out and measure them. The readings were all over the place, from almost nothing to over 2 V!
Installing bde
I've been dragging my heels on my computer configuration for years now. In the meantime, I need to: Finally update eureka, my main machine. The current installation dates from 25 November 2015, and I've been procrastinating on this one for at least 2 years. Finally migrate tiwi to teevee. Continue the installation of bde, a laptop I inherited from Bruce Evans. I started this three months ago, but ran into problems and put it into the ?too hard?
More exploit blocking
Spent some time tidying up yesterday's code for the web exploit, greatly hampered by web browsers that cache old contents. It seems to work now. And then there's another! I wish I understood how this stuff gets executed before I refer to it.
Understanding the web exploit
I've worked around yesterday's security issue, but I didn't really understand. But today it came clear, at least partially. The page in question has input fields, and they look like: <form action="$me" method="get"> <td> <input type="submit" value="Search keywords in description:"/> ... </form> $me is set in a header file: $me = $_SERVER ["PHP_SELF"]; /* name of this script */ And $_SERVER ["PHP_SELF"] includes all the trailing nonsense that the crackers used.
Maths for the masses, part 2
The Reserve Bank of Australia has raised the interest rate again, for the 5th time in 5 months, and this time by 0.5%, as the ABC reports. To help understand what it means, they write: According to analysis by RateCity, the latest increase will add a further $216 a month to a $750,000 mortgage. OK, I'll bite. 0.5% interest on $750,000 are $3,750. You don't need an ?analysis? to come to that conclusion: you should be able to do it in your head. And that's $312.50 per month.
Maths for the masses, part 1
Another almost meaningless statistic from Statista today: Africa Leads the World in Solar Power Potential. What does that mean? They provided this image: What does ?kWh/kWp per day? mean? kWh is clear: it's a kilowatt hour, a marginally metric way of saying 3.6 mJ. But ?kWp?? They're too polite to assume that I don't know. After a lot of searching it proved to mean ?Kilowatt peak?, the rated output of the panels. But in my experience that's not the peak: it's (barely) possible to exceed that value.
Web security breach
Mail from openbugbounty today, telling me of a security breach on www.lemis.com: the URL http://www.lemis.com/grog/photos/photos.php/x"><svG onLoad=prompt(9)> gave rise to this result: Huh? What's that? The URL makes no sense to me at all. Where do I find something that explains it? About the only interesting thing is that this part of the URL: photos.php/x. I didn't know that you could extend a PHP script URL beyond the final .php. But a bit of examination shows that phpinfo() returns that part as $_SERVER ["PATH_INFO"].
Best Asian supermarkets in Ballarat
There aren't many grocers in Ballarat that cater for non-Western food. The only ones I regularly visit are the Fruit Shack, the ?Ballarat Asian Grocery? next door and the Indian place next to the Curry Star in Dana Street. But while looking for something else, advertising caught my mind: ?Find the best Asian Supermarkets [note that plural] in Ballarat?. OK, I'll bite: BEST Asian Supermarkets in Ballarat VIC Need an Asian grocery store? These 0 results are waiting for your call.
Welcome, new RACV member!
Received a strange letter in the (snail) mail yesterday: a membership card from RACV. I've been a member since this month! Problem: I have another card with the same membership number which says that I've been a member since May 1997. It's also a pretty gold colour, while the new one is blue. Should I care? Yes. RACV has proved to be the cheapest car insurance, and the discount I get depends on years of membership. OK, bite the bullet, call up their help line and fight my way through the menu (4, 7). ?Hello, welcome to RACV. This is mumble.
Kitchen scales strangenesses
While preparing dinner this evening, discovered: That's not as strange as it might seem: I had had a pot on the board which weighed, well, about 620 g, and then used the tare function to weigh something in the pot. But when I removed the board, I discovered: Underflow!
No tiwi work
Why am I having so much trouble setting up tiwi? One thing's clear: I need to do this stuff in the morning, when nothing much is happening. But in principle things should Just Work. Part is the concern about the problems I've had in the past with HDMI, which seems not to like me. But there's still this issue with locales. There must be some other variable that I haven't identified yet, and until I do, I can't complete the changeover.
More tiwi configuration
It's been nearly a week since I last worked on making tiwi the only TV driver computer. The issue was X configuration. That's nothing new. I've been configuring X (and talking about it) for over 30 years. But it's the details that count. The TV only has HDMI inputs. The ThinkCentre M91p that is tiwi only has a D-Sub video output, so I have an Nvidia GeForce GT 730 display card in it as well. But there's no output on the card. OK, today's task: connect up a monitor to the D-Sub output and configure it to display on the Nvidia card.
PJW's face again
Who is PJW? Depends on whom you ask. It seems that it was the abbreviation (user ID?) for Peter Weinberger, the W in awk, and the face on Bell Labs's water tower. It seems that nobody had the presence of mind to take a closer view of the tower (the right-hand one), but it's the one in the second image. I first heard of the story 21 years ago from Peter Salus, with the interesting twist that the stencil involved was in the possession of Warren Toomey, who was present at the time. But the story had gaps and errors. Originally we thought it was an image of Rob Pike, but a year later Rob confirmed that it was Weinberger.
State Library of Victoria: your membership has expired
Mail from the State Library of Victoria today: Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2022 00:01:14 +0000 (GMT) From: Membership <[email protected]> Subject: It?s time to renew your State Library Victoria membership Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit It\222s time to renew your State Library Victoria membership Your free Access membership expires tomorrow. Member type: Access Join date: 14/03/2021 Expiry date: 26/08/2022 Savour those markup errors. But there's more. Why has my membership expired? Something to do with the new password? And why do they state the ?join date?
enzian recharge
I still keep Yvonne's old Xiaomi Redmi 9A phone, named enzian.lemis.com (IP address 192.109.197.243 when it's at home) for various tests. It doesn't get much use, but it still wakes up from time to time to send me some useless notification, though it has been told not to. And it's on all the time. But the battery life! Battery charge dropped below 20% today?after two weeks! A far cry from 30 years ago with my Motorola Brick, which required two batteries to see it through a day.
Procrastination
Two years ago I came up with a list of things that I needed to do: Get the tiles for the verandah. Arrange for the ?shed? for the riding arena. Prune the roses, make cuttings of the dead Hibiscus rosa-sinensis, do random garden work. Finish the installation of dereel. Buy new photo backup disks. How much have I achieved in the last 2 years? We've shelved the idea of the tiles. The shed is finally finished, but only today.
Resetting State Library password
So now it's a new day, and Winsome told me that I could now change my password. Same procedure as yesterday: get it to send me a PIN to sign in, and change it. Only today it knew my email address. OK, what password? I'm sure they're not saying, but they're expecting upper case, lower case, digits and special characters. How about H0rrible Microsoft!? No, only after I tried it was I told the usual nonsense: OK, which of these requirements have I offended?
State Library of Victoria: Improvements
I must access the OED about 10 times a week. But yesterday evening I received a message telling me that my password was incorrect. Something to do with the rather unorthodox way I log in? Tried again today and was told that I had to change my password. For that they needed to send me a 6 digit code to the email address on record. OK, that's in my /usr/local/etc/postfix/virtual. Something not quite unlike [email protected]. Put that in, receive email with the code. An account could not be found for the provided user ID. Huh? They just sent me a code.
tiwi migration pain
I have a few particularly nasty scripts that keep track of which series I have seen when. They're full of grep invocations, about 3 per entry (currently coming up to 10,000 entries), and it takes a couple of minutes to run. During that time I didn't have access to the list. OK, a minor change writes the new list to a temporary file and then renames it. Problem almost solved. But then there's something strange on tiwi. The one script, seelist, produces: === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/19) /spool/Series/Rosenheim-Corpse/08 67 -> seelist grep: trailing backslash (\) grep: trailing backslash (\) grep: trailing backslash (\) ...
Bloody Microsoft!
Yesterday I noticed, not for the first time: Aug 19 10:54:00 eureka nmbd[2580]: [2022/08/19 10:54:00.228974, 0] ../source3/nmbd/nmbd_namequery.c:109(query_name_response) Aug 19 10:54:00 eureka nmbd[2580]: query_name_response: Multiple (2) responses received for a query on subnet 192.109.197.137 for name LEMIS<1d>. Aug 19 10:54:00 eureka nmbd[2580]: This response was from IP 192.109.197.134, reporting an IP address of 192.109.197.134. That's something to do with Samba. I have nmbd running both on eureka and lagoon (IP address 192.109.197.134). OK, we didn't need it there, so I stopped it. Today Yvonne (the owner of lagoon) came to me and told me that DxO PhotoLab wasn't seeing any photos, though she had put some in the designated directory /Photos/3-yvonne.
Reliance on digital devices
A couple of weeks ago I spilt some gravy on my infrared thermometer. I wiped it off immediately, but it didn't like it. It displayed temperatures in the order of 80° to 100° from surfaces at room temperature. Nothing for it: buy a new one. In the meantime the old one dried out and seemed to be showing correct temperatures, but how can you tell? Now I can compare them: the old one shows consistently lower temperatures, round 0.5° at room temperature. But when baking a pizza today, the old one showed that the stone temperature was round 258°, while the new one showed round 278°.
tiwi: the cutover
I've been working on tiwi, the next iteration of teevee, my TV driver computer, for 7 months now. It's gradually working, and in fact I'm using tiwi's disk for video storage, via NFS, since teevee's disk is flaky The next step is to put it into the lounge room and connect it up to the TV. That's mainly a matter of finding cables and another network switch so that both connect to the house network: That's tiwi on the table to the left, and teevee on the right of the top shelf.
Shopping in the time of the Internet
In March 2014 I wrote a paper Future of the Internet as part of an assignment. The future was set 20 years ahead, in 2034, so now over 40% of the time has passed. I've also been keeping a signs of the times page, effectively a score card to keep track of how accurate my predictions were. I've already commented on the number of closed shops in Bridge Mall (which they seem to now be calling ?The Bridge?) , once the main shopping centre in Ballarat. But recently I heard that about 30% of all premises are vacant, and they have decided to overhaul it to make it a more pleasant shopping experience.
POSTIDENT: enough!
As far as I can see, Deutsche Post's POSTIDENT app just plan Does Not Work, at least for me. I strongly suspect that they don't recognize even those forms of acceptable identification that really do exist. OK, send them an email asking them to explain.: Will I get an answer? Well, I did, sort of: Ihre Nachricht ist eingegangen. Eine schriftliche Eingangsbestätigung der Lebensbescheinigung ist wegen der großen Menge leider nicht möglich. Lebensbescheinigungen werden nur in folgenden Formaten berücksichtigt: Word ? PDF ? Digitalfoto JPG / JPEG ?
Aussie explains
Email from Aussie Broadband today, explaining the yesterday's outage. Apparently round 25,000 subscribers were affected, and as I had suspected it was a software issue, apparently overload. I suppose these things can happen; it's good to hear an explanation.
Quora: when in a hole, stop digging
I've been answering questions on Quora for about 6 years now, but during that time the quality of the site has gone continually downhill: apparently in an attempt to get more content, they started offering money to people who asked questions. Any question, no matter how silly, so it ended up getting lots of repeat questions. They should have paid the people who answer the questions, based on the number of upvotes (though that can also be abused). Yes, people can report questions, and I've frequently done so, but it doesn't seem to help. And so it was today: questions like What is the time difference between Florida and Texas?
Notwork outage!
On the whole the National Broadband Network has been working relatively reliably in recent months, modulo their continual ?scheduled maintenance?. But this evening things were different. Outage at 18:27. Their fault or mine? The NTD showed normal indication, which at least meant that it was probably not the NBN itself. My system? I've had issues in the past where dhclient hung itself. OK, shoot down and restart: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/8) /src 45 -> dhclient xl0 DHCPREQUEST on xl0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 DHCPNAK from 180.150.2.4 DHCPDISCOVER on xl0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 6 DHCPDISCOVER on xl0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 12 DHCPDISCOVER on xl0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 7 DHCPOFFER from 121.200.8.1 unknown dhcp option value 0x52 DHCPREQUEST on xl0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 DHCPREQUEST on xl0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 DHCPDISCOVER on xl0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 6 ...
POSTIDENT, next three failures
Do I trust POSTIDENT? Not further than I can throw it. So while I was in town, decided to get my ?life certificate? witnessed by a Justice of the Peace. To the police station, where I found: Nobody there. But then, there was nobody at the police counter next to it either. I was there at the right time (12:23), right? Yes: But elsewhere, far enough away to not be obvious, there was an exhortation to use one of the longest URLs I have seen in a long time: It's not just the Germans who make ...
More fun with POSTIDENT
Last month I had lots of fun with Deutsche Post's POSTIDENT app. But I have to prove that I'm alive, so a couple of days ago I ran the thing, which was relatively straightforward. It accepted my images and told me that I would be informed. That came today: leider konnte Ihre Identifizierung für rentenservice.de/DLN noch nicht abgeschlossen werden. Grund: Es konnten nicht alle Aufnahmen erfolgreich geprüft werden. Bitte führen Sie den Vorgang erneut mit einem unterstützten, gültigen Dokument durch. Sie können die betroffenen Aufnahmen erneut erstellen.
More Mod2 observations
Removing Mod2 from my X modifier map on teevee worked round the issue of stuck modifier keys. But why did it only happen there? A quick check on eureka shows: it doesn't exist there! I wonder why.
Translating Russian
Yesterday's attempts to translate the Kiev 3A instructions were less than successful. But surely there must be something on the web. Did a bit of searching and came up with this page, which offers a far-too-mouse-happy interface to first ?scan? and then translate pages. Here an example: The translation is less than stellar: - 32 -. gear, and the rotation of the lenses themselves for (Fig. 30). on the- focus ring roller , Rice.
X modifier issue: fixed
Last week I came up with a strategy to fix sticking modifier keys in X: remove them. How? xmodmap is your friend, and it seems that to remove NumLock (well, in fact all keys that are interpreted at mod2) from the modifier map, you get it to execute the command clear Mod2 I could also presumably have entered remove Mod2 = NumLock But I really don't want any kind of Mod2, so the first one seems better.
postfix/sendmail: latest discovery
Why do tiwi and dereel start sendmail when sending mail? eureka doesn't. Somehow this whole ?pretend to be sendmail? is going too far. In fact, it doesn't start sendmail at all. It starts mailwrapper: 4824928 lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 11 27 May 2020 /usr/sbin/sendmail -> mailwrapper And what does mailwrapper do? It starts sendmail! Details in /etc/mailer/mailer.conf: # Execute the "real" sendmail program, named /usr/libexec/sendmail/sendmail ... sendmail /usr/libexec/sendmail/sendmail ... So how do we get postfix at all?
Postfix fixed^W worked around
What's wrong with my postfix installation on tiwi? The identical configuration works on teevee, and there's no host name dependency anywhere. Have I missed out a configuration file? More searching through /etc and specially /etc/mail. Comparing with the settings on dereel, it seems that postfix has weaned itself a little more from sendmail, after only 20 years. /etc/rc.conf has removed these references: # This is for postfix! postfix_enable="YES" sendmail_enable="YES" sendmail_flags="-bd" sendmail_outbound_enable="NO" sendmail_submit_enable="NO" sendmail_msp_queue_enable="NO" In fact, I don't thing that the last three settings ever had any effect in postfix.
More X pain
More investigation of yesterday's problems with X fonts led to the interesting discovery that these are oversized fonts, and that there are some special hacks to get them to display. This also applies to Chinese fonts, it seems, but they work fine with uxterm and Emacs. So until proof of the contrary it appears to be a font issue. But wait, there's more! One of the really infuriating issues I have with X is when a modifier key gets out of sync. Normally, it seems, it's NumLock: it remains ?pressed? when I don't touch it, and it becomes ?unpressed? when I press it.
Automated install continued
Continued on my project to install FreeBSD systems ?automatically?, using settings common to all the secondary systems in the household network. The biggest issue was starting, and that gradually seems to be past. One of the issues I've run into again and again over the years was postfix. That should be trivial: save the configuration from teevee and replicate it on other systems (in this case tiwi), replacing system names where necessary (here they weren't). The results: didn't work! Jul 27 16:38:00 tiwi postfix/smtpd[23853]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from localhost[127.0.0.1]: 451 4.3.5 <[email protected]>: Recipient address rejected: Server configuration problem; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<tiwi.lemis.com> Why?
Understanding X fonts, 32 years on
I've been using X since at least April 1990, and in general I think I understand it pretty well. But my recent issues with tiwi still confuse me. Then today I ran into a different issue: Tobias Berner has written a script that uses specific UTF-8 characters that my system doesn't display: Since they're UTF-8, it's not surprising that they won't display correctly in an xterm, but then there's uxterm. And it displays: State Tally Own Vote 6, 0, 0, 3 5, 0, 1, 3 Look OK?
xterms: another surprise
So why are the xterms on tiwi started with a UTF-8 locale? Tried again today and noted that, in fact, I didn't have X running on tiwi. OK, start it and check. The xterms were normal! So the whole issue revolves around xterms started remotely. That's partially good news: I can (finally!) use it to replace teevee without running into the problem. But I still don't understand what's making the difference. I start the xterms from an fvwm2 menu: + "tiwi" Exec ssh -A tiwi /usr/local/bin/xterm -name "xterm-lx" -bg BlanchedAlmond -s -sl 2048 -sb -ls -j -rw -display eureka:0.0 -geometry 90x50+53+0 -fn 10x20 -e /usr/local/bin/bash & And the entries for other systems are almost identical; in fact I generate them from a script, changing only the client and server names.
Dan Murphy's: Hanlon's razor?
Received an interesting offer in the (e)mail recently: Oettinger beer for only $48 for a slab. In Australia, that's cheap. And we buy it regularly, so it makes sense to buy a few. Click on ?Add to cart?: Huh? Suddenly it's $3 more expensive. That's dishonest! Checking, there were indications that the prices differ from place to place.
Finally a simple git invocation
The FreeBSD Core Team has private data, of course. In my day we kept it with RCS, but that's no longer modern. So of course now it's kept with git. How do I access it? === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/2) ~/core 103 -> git clone freefall:/secret/core/mysecret/mygit.git Cloning into 'repo'... remote: Enumerating objects: 30603, done. remote: Counting objects: 100% (30603/30603), done. remote: Compressing objects: 100% (13306/13306), done. remote: Total 30603 (delta 13903), reused 29661 (delta 13265), pack-reused 0 Receiving objects: 100% (30603/30603), 8.35 MiB | 257.00 KiB/s, done. Resolving deltas: 100% (13903/13903), done. I've changed the pathname for obvious reasons, but it was really that simple.
Troy: the next delay
Troy Addicoat did respond to yesterday's SMS, at 16:31: I am sorry but were we are working has not got A lot of service and can't Cole I will call you tomorrow morning Where's the email copy? I didn't see one. Yet another reliability issue with these damned Android ?devices?. Called him up, and it he tells me that the weather has not been in his favour, and now it looks like it'll be the end of next week at the earliest before he can do our job.
Where have all my contacts gone?
Yvonne back from shopping and wanted to know why her phone no longer knew who I was. Instead of displaying my name and image, it just showed the phone number. Further investigation showed that almost, but not quite, all of her contacts had disappeared. Checked on a real computer and discovered the same thing: somehow they were just plain gone. How can that happen? Yes, of course it's possible to delete contacts, but Yvonne doesn't know how to do that, and I can't see her accidentally deleting 50 or so contacts. Went into settings and discovered that it's possible to restore older versions of the contacts list, and yesterday's seem to be OK.
Bluetooth earbuds
ALDI had Bluetooth ?TRUE WIRELESS? earbuds (the mind boggles) on special yesterday, and by chance Yvonne was able to find some, which bore no resemblance in appearance to the advertisements. Tried them out today. Good news: they work, and the sound quality appears OK, though I haven't tried speaking to them. The bad news: I can't get them to stay in my ears, and every time I try to adjust them, I end up turning off the sound source. I hadn't expected that. And of course the instructions were inaccurate and vague.
Gmail: finally dead
It took longer than advertised, but Gmail has finally implemented its irritating ?security? measures: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/8) ~ 9 -> fetchmail -a fetchmail: Authorization failure on [email protected]@pop.gmail.com fetchmail: For help, see http://www.fetchmail.info/fetchmail-FAQ.html#R15 fetchmail: Query status=3 (AUTHFAIL) Forwarding still works, so I don't really care.
More HP installation fun
If I can't build a new world on bde, my HP EliteBook 8570p, how about building it elsewhere and then just installing it on bde? That required cloning Yet Another source tree and building, which took half the day. Then mount eureka:/home on bde, bend a couple of symlinks, and install. C library problem: some version mismatch. That's what I get for trying to upgrade so old a system. I'm sure that there are various ways of recovering, but for me the simplest was to download a new DVD image of 13.1-RELEASE. And yes, that worked fine, once I recalled how to burn a DVD in this decade (cdrecord -r image), and after I discarded the coaster, uncompressed the image and tried again.
Recovering bde's laptop
The experience with the core team handover meeting on Friday made it clear to me that a mobile phone is not an appropriate device for participating in such meetings, and not just because of the excessive data costs. I need a laptop. Yes, of course I have a laptop, euroa.lemis.com, running Microsoft ?Windows? 7. But I should really be using FreeBSD, at least for core team teleconferences. Never mind, I have three other laptops from Bruce Evans. They once ran FreeBSD until Peter Jeremy vandalized them. I just need to reinstall the software. But how? Nowadays I install from USB sticks, but for some reason none of these laptops can boot from USB.
Google meet: the cost
During this morning's Google meet meeting, a couple of popups occurred. I read the last one before it disappeared again: ?Your ALDImobile PAYG credit is fully depleted?. And yes, I had used up all my credit. Why did it appear then? This morning I took a look at my usage. Normally I charge with ALDImobile's $15 plan, which lasts up to a year before expiry. Since using features like Google Maps tracking, a charge only lasts typically 2 to 3 months. But this time it only lasted 2 weeks! Checking further shows (eliminating sums below $0.20): Destination Duration/Data Charge Date ...
Core hangover teleconference
Today was the day for the handover meeting for the new FreeBSD Core Team. That's difficult for a number of reasons, the least of which is that I don't think much of teleconferences anyway. One of the worst things is that there's just no good time for the meeting. Finally somebody (core secretary) decided on a time: 14:00 to 15:00 UTC. That's 7:00 for people in California, 16:00 for the majority of new core in Europe, 22:00 for Li-Wen Hsu in Taipei, and 24:00 for me here in Dereel. And normally I go to bed at about 22:30. OK, used the waiting time to set up my phone with the Bluetooth headset.
Google Meet, again
What was the audio issue with my Google Meet yesterday? Put that in the ?too hard? shelf and tried the other thing, the one I really wanted to test: ?Companion mode?. The obvious thing was to add Yvonne: after all, she didn't need to do anything, just have the phone on. And while I was messing around, Ed Maste appeared on IRC, so I asked him in too. Three people. Worked fine, audio too. And ?companion mode?? It seems that it can't do what I want. It just adds other functionality, like automatically generated subtitles and out-of-band written comments. That could be useful, but it doesn't help me with my intention to display the meeting on the TV.
Video meetings: the details
So tomorrow evening we're having a FreeBSD core handover meeting, where members of the previous FreeBSD Core Team give us information that should probably better be done in writing. Did I say tomorrow evening? No, it's really Saturday morning. The meeting starts at 24:00/0:00 for me, and I'm jumping for joy about the fact. But video conferences are fun! OK, let's ensure that things work well. We're using Google Meet, and I already had a two person conference with Warner Losh yesterday. But that was on a mobile phone! It seems that you can run it on a normal web browser even if it doesn't have a microphone or camera (?companion mode?)
Ten years of Android
Ten years ago today I bought my first Android tablet. It wasn't love at first sight?if there be love, it is yet to come?but some things haven't changed. As I wrote, The most obvious thing missing on a tablet is the thing that I find most important: a fast, versatile way to communicate with it?in other words, a keyboard. How do you communicate effectively with a computer without one? Yes, it has a touch screen with a simulated keyboard, like my GPS navigator does, but apart from my aversion to making smears on any shiny surface, the lack of tactile feedback means that you have to look at the thing, and it slows me down to about a tenth of the normal typing speed.
Mail issues: partial solution
The instructions for setting up Postfix to deliver mail directly to freebsd.org are complicated enough that I put them off to my more general revision of my postfix configuration. But there are other methods too. mutt has a configuration parameter smtp_url where it can be told to send mail directly to an MTA instead of local sendmail. What happens if I set it to smtp_url=smtp://mx1.freebsd.org? Tried that, and within limits it Just Worked. Sending mail to myself at FreeBSD.org gave a header: Received: from eureka.lemis.com (121-200-11-253.79c80b.mel.nbn.aussiebb.net [121.200.11.253]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 (256/256 bits)) (Client did not present a certificate) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 4LGcfm0x44z3Jmm And the limits?
Crawler fallout and video editors
Received in the mail: From: Tia <[email protected]> Subject: Just wanted to reach out about something, Typical spam, right? I deleted it and then reconsidered. Not spam after all: Hi just a quick one, Tia here from VideoProc (Digiarty Software) - we blog all about the world of video and audio editing. Just a quick email regarding your piece here http://ns2.narrawin.com/grog/diary-feb2020.php?subtitle=Another%20grid%20power%20failure&article=D-20200218-002611. I actually recently wrote a piece on ?Best Video Editing Software? and was thinking it would make a great fit for your piece.
Where's my camera?
It's been two months since I bought a couple of cameras in Ukraine. The second one, a FED 1, had an estimated delivery date between 2 May and 13 May. That's optimistic, but it also causes a problem: if it doesn't arrive by a month after the latter date, and if I do nothing, I can't get my money back. eBay wants me to report it by then. So I asked for my money back, and got a very quick response from an unhappy seller who pointed me to updated tracking information (tracking number RH063075495UA): 30 May 2022 ?????????
More mail issues
Apart from my own problems with mail being accepted, there are questions like digital signatures. Today, as FreeBSD Core Team member, I got a message from the FreeBSD doc team announcing a couple of new committers. Digitally signed. With an expired key. Told the submitter, who created a new key and uploaded it. I downloaded the key?still the old one! But he pointed me at a list of keys for all project members, which somehow was not expired. It also saves me a lot of individual loads.
Still more mail pain
It's still not clear that I can even send mail to all of the FreeBSD Core Team members, and the basic breakage with SPF remains. Probably the most reliable way to solve the problem would be to give up running my own mail server. What, after 30 years? That hurts. But I'm not the only person who suffers from the problem. What do other FreeBSD project members do? Mail to the FreeBSD postmaster team got a reply from Baptiste Daroussin, coincidentally one of the new core team. He pointed me at this page, not classified but only usable by people with a FreeBSD login.
How to kill email as a communication medium
Mail from Jerry Dunham today: I contacted the insurance, and quickly discovered that I could receive e-mail from them, but they couldn't receive from me. This forced me to deal with them via Gmail. Since then I've discovered that I can't send e-mail from home to my boss at the IRS (irs.gov), something I normally do when I'm ill and can't come to work. Back to Gmail to report that I was ill with COVID. Apparently both the insurance company and the IRS are blocking messages from dunham.org. I don't send spam, so I'm left wonderring why and what to do about it.
Back on core
So starting at 0:00 UTC (10:00 here) I'm a member of the FreeBSD Core Team again. It didn't start slowly. I sent out a message asking for suggestions on how to organize things, especially since we're spread round the world (Li-Wen Hsu and I way ahead of UTC, John Baldwin 8 hours behind, Ed Maste 5 hours behind, and the rest in a surprisingly small area in France, Germany and Switzerland). The previous core teams have placed importance on video meetings, but the biggest time difference between members is 7 hours (currently John Baldwin and I), in the northern winter Li-Wen Hsu and the European contingent.
DxO: the pain
Yesterday's article on paying with TransferWise included a number of screen shots. Problem: some of them included things like my account numbers, which I didn't want to be seen. Simple: erase them with photo software. Did I say simple? I failed. DxO PhotoLab can do that, or at least that's what they claim. Downloaded the user guide (PDF), all 246 pages of it, but I couldn't find out how to do it. The functionality is mentioned, but it's more a description of how it works than how to use it, and all attempts failed. Maybe there's a video that shows how to do it, but the whole approach confuses me.
John's metal detector
Our neighbour John from Kleins Road (never did find his surname) showed up a couple of times asking for help with his old electronic equipment, and (surprisingly) I was able to help in both cases. But last week he came up with an ancient metal detector which no longer ?beeps? (and thus doesn't show whether it's even working).
Teamviewer for Android
It seems that lately a number of scammers are using TeamViewer to access people's computers and mobile phones. That's understandable. But mobile phones? I didn't know TeamVewer would work on phones. Off to search, running into the usual impossible maze of twisty little menus, all the same. Dammit, this is a program that I've used, and setup was relatively simple. Of course, it's so long ago that they have forgotten my login (or possibly changed their password rules to eliminate my password). Much messing around, and in the process the app simply disappeared: I had to reinstall it Maybe I reinstalled a different app, but after that it worked as I would expect?almost.
Paying concreters: the pain
Admittedly, Troy Addicoat was not due to arrive today, but he was supposed to call me to tell me about paying for the concrete. After two calls to his voice mail, he finally called back and gave me the details: Brad of Hanson's concrete, phone 5339 2030. OK. Should I just call him and give him the credit card details? Yes, Hanson concrete seems a kosher company, and the phone number was correct. But somehow I heard alarm bells. OK, pay with my bright green ?Hello world? (thus the punctuation) debit card from Transferwise. Oh. Not enough credit. OK, transfer money to it.
Solving the Gmail dilemma
So there are only a couple of days to go until Gmail requires OAUTH2. What should I do? Looking at my inbox, I discover that in the last week I have had about 10 messages, and that there are really only three sources of mail: McLaren Vale Cellars, who somehow picked up this address in addition to the one I gave them, Academia, who also somehow found out, and the Hugin user group. Of those, I only really need the Hugin group, and I don't see a way around that. But while snooping around I found that I can automatically forward messages.
Displaying SMS on real computers
Callum Gibson read Saturday's article on copying SMS messages and wanted to know why I don't use Google Messages. Simple: I forgot. I discovered it last June, and I have it on my private ?local configuration? page. Admittedly, at the time I was more interested in sending messages than saving them, but clearly it can do both.
Gmail change pain
Google Mail has come up with an important security upgrade: OAUTH2. Well, they've been using it for some time, but none of the software I use caters for it. What do I do? I have a gmail account, and I need it at least for the Hugin user group, because Google is too secure to allow their messages go out into the (by them) unregulated Internet. And I use fetchmail to pop it down every 5 minutes. Starting on 1 June they will accept mail only with OAUTH2 authorization, and as far as I can see, that means manual intervention with every download.
Roast chicken with Inkbird
Roast chicken for dinner tonight. I've been keeping a record of cooking times for some years now, but now (until Wednesday) I have this ill-fated Inkbird IBBQ-4BW thermometer, so I can keep more of an eye on what happens. I put one sensor on the grille of the oven, one in the breast and one in a leg joint. It wasn't at all what I expected. In particular, the temperature in the breast was much lower than in the leg. That makes sense, but it doesn't match my prior experience. And contrary to my previous claims, the temperature rose relatively linearly: According to my records, the chicken (1.825 kg) should have been cooked (78°) in between 55 and 73 minutes.
Google Maps link rot
Where was I on 2 May 1967? Driving from Madras (now Chennai) to Nellore, as I wrote in my diary. But I also wanted a map, so I used Google Maps to generate a map and a short link to it: http://g.co/maps/kwskt. But now Google doesn't want to know: Invalid Dynamic Link - Blocked We could not match param 'http://maps.google.com.au/maps?q=madras+to+nellore&saddr=madras&daddr=nellore&hl=en&sll=-25.335448,135.745076&sspn=64.250491,63.544922&geocode=FUZJxwAd74LIBClhM31P6mVSOjEz1GNoC6dhbg;FWdg3AAdGH_EBClxh5UOyoxMOjFVHxYlIGwD0w&t=m&z=9' with whitelisted URL patterns in this Google project. If you are the developer of this app, ensure that your Dynamic Links domain is correctly configured and that the path component of this URL is valid.
Android: the next incompatibility
Troy Addicoat sent me an SMS yesterday, and I quoted it in my article on the subject. But how do you copy an SMS to other media? With not one, but two apps, of course. Automatically forward SMS to your PC/phone, or maybe gawk or smsforwarder, forwards incoming SMSs, something very necessary for people who don't look at their phones all the time, and this app with an identity problem, your choice of two of SMS (Backup, Print, Restore) can, with only a few swipes, transfer up to 6 individually selected messages at a time into a specified directory on the device.
The future of the Internet, next step
It's been over 8 years since I wrote an essay The future of the Internet, really supposed to be titled ?how the Internet will be different 20 years from now? (in other words, 8 years ago). We're coming up to half time. How accurate are things? I'm tracking this up to a point at my ?signs of the times? page. Today I saw another sign: the BBC are stopping broadcast of some radio stations. As I said: Radio and TV broadcasts will gradually cease.
New FreeBSD core team
So the results of the FreeBSD Core Team, elections are out. I'm one of them again: The next core team will consist of: Baptiste Daroussin Benedict Reuschling Ed Maste Emmanuel Vadot Greg Lehey John Baldwin Li-Wen Hsu Mateusz Piotrowski Tobias C. Berner That also makes me the member with the longest span, from 22 years ago to now. The other thing, which I had noted last month, was how many of the members are not from the USA. Five are from Europe, one Chinese and one Australian.
Technical terms for real dummies
Seen today: Difference Between SSD and NVMe . Difference? They're different levels of detail. But no, our expert knows better: The main difference between SSD and NVMe is that SSD stores data by using integrated circuits while NVMe is an interface used to access the stored data at a high speed. NVMe is far advanced than SSD and hence is faster and better encrypted than the latter. In case that didn't come across, here it is again: SSD is a secondary storage device that uses integrated circuits to complete its work while NVMe is an interface that is used to access the stored data.
More thermometer insights
Finally I have a hit on a defrost cycle on the outside (correctly functioning) freezer: It started round 2:30 this morning and lasted a good hour. During this time the temperature in front of the baskets rose to about -6.5°, but the temperature in the baskets stayed below -18°. All well and good. But wouldn't it be nice to know more exact times and temperatures? Yes, of course. But what I got was anything but. After moving these horrible slider buttons, I reshaped the graph: Here the time scale is a little more detailed.
ACM digital library
The ACM has opened its digital library, now accessible for free. I haven't looked at much, though I did find an article on the original UNIVAC, which looks interesting.
Working around W3 bugs
The problem with the W3 validator that I mentioned last week is still there. Run the validator, find a problem, fix it, and the validator doesn't want to know: it still reports the old source. But I have a workaround: the URL for the validator is http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lemis.com%2Fgrog%2Fdiary-may2022.php%3Fvalidating%3D1. Just change that last digit from 1 to 2: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lemis.com%2Fgrog%2Fdiary-may2022.php%3Fvalidating%3D2, and it will force a reload. That works because the value of validating just needs to be non-zero.
GPS logging: solved?
On Thursday I discovered that my GPSLogger had not logged anything for half an hour. How could that be? When in Ballarat, took another look at the display: For whatever reason (probably because it was in the car) the readings weren't accurate enough for my settings, which told it to discard all readings accurate to less than 5 m. Changed that to 20 m, and the effect was immediate. From this track log: But why only 20 m?
ABC Listen App: useless
While preparing breakfast, heard some classical oboe music on the radio. Tomaso Albinoni? When it was over, listened to the announcer. No mention of a composer. OK, that's what the ABC Listen App is for, isn't it? Fire it up and discover that there's nothing like what we heard. Ah, for mobile phones, and apparently only for mobile phones, there's a second channel. Find the correct one, which shows what it's playing now. Ah, but there's ?more info?. That shows what is still to come. More searching, and finally found ?Full Tracklist?, showing not the full track list, but what they had already played, in reverse chronological order: And that's all!
ABC Listen App: useless
While preparing breakfast, heard some classical oboe music on the radio. Tomaso Albinoni? When it was over, listened to the announcer. No mention of a composer. OK, that's what the ABC Listen App is for, isn't it? Fire it up and discover that there's nothing like what we heard. Ah, for mobile phones, and apparently only for mobile phones, there's a second channel. Find the correct one, which shows what it's playing now. Ah, but there's ?more info?. That shows what is still to come. More searching, and finally found ?Full Tracklist?, showing not the full track list, but what they had already played, in reverse chronological order: And that's all!
Another total outage!
While sitting at my keyboard, heard a loud ?beep? and everything went dead. Dammit, not another inverter failure! Out to take a look at the inverter, which once again showed no power. Check the outside meter. Really no power. But this time the battery charge was round 52%, so there shouldn't have been any problem. Spent some time getting eureka back up again, much less than on other occasions?only 8 minutes?then checked the other computers in the house. They were all still running! It must have been a very transient problem. Gradually it dawned on me: the inverter carried on running normally.
More flaky apps
At breakfast we listen to ABC Classic, which has only recently dropped the suffix ?FM? from its name. And while there are no classic commercials, they beat their own drum loudly. ?Use the ABC Listen App?. What good is that? There's one way to find out: install it. Oh: Already installed! When did I do that? Off to take a look. Found nothing under ?ABC?, nor under ?listen?. Where is it? Try installing again? Now you see me, now you don't!. OK, installed: Where's ABC Classic?
Route maps: the limitations
I didn't have much choice on my way home if I wanted to avoid the roadworks: the more southerly roadworks started just north of Grassy Gully Road, so I couldn't take any route to the east. Off through Enfield State Park via Misery Creek to Berringa, starting in Incolls Road in Enfield. There I asked Google to take me to Berringa. Long delay: can't contact Google. OK, I still had the map, and managed to find my way to Berringa with only a couple of stops to check. Is the mobile network coverage there really that bad? It could well be.
ssh: No complete explanation yet
After last week's investigation, it's clear that the presence or absence of an ssh-agent will not necessarily stop ssh from establishing a connection with a remote system, though the result may be a key signed with a different protocol, and pedantic systems like freefall.freebsd.org object. But last week I tried from tiwi.lemis.com, which is running a very up-to-date version of FreeBSD. Today I tried with eureka.lemis.com, running === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/13) ~ 34 -> uname -a FreeBSD eureka.lemis.com 10.2-STABLE FreeBSD 10.2-STABLE #2 r290972: Wed Nov 25 11:38:38 AEDT 2015 [email protected]:/usr/obj/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/10/sys/GENERIC amd64 And there it didn't help.
More temperature insights
So it's clear not only that something is seriously wrong with the freezer in the pantry, but that it's related to the temperature control and not to the compressor. Modern freezers have a defrost cycle, but how often does it run and how high do the temperatures rise in that time? Connected it up to the other freezer and waited. I didn't see any obvious defrost cycle at all. It's difficult to say, since I open the freezer for normal use a couple of times a day, giving rise to views like this: Here the blue trace (in front of the drawers) goes up to -4°, and the temperatures inside the drawers goes up to about -14°.
Reverse engineering Inkbird
So the app for the Inkbird IBBQ-4BW is almost useless. Reverse engineer the protocol and collect the data myself? This article discusses the details. It seems to broadcast something. OK, For a first attempt, I took a look at what it had to say: 11:24:09.324696 IP inkbird.lemis.com.49154 > 255.255.255.255.6667: UDP, length 188 11:24:14.325785 IP inkbird.lemis.com.49154 > 255.255.255.255.6667: UDP, length 188 11:24:17.322125 ARP, Request who-has inkbird.lemis.com tell inkbird.lemis.com, length 46 11:24:19.326255 IP inkbird.lemis.com.49154 > 255.255.255.255.6667: UDP, length 188 11:24:24.324427 IP inkbird.lemis.com.49154 > 255.255.255.255.6667: UDP, length 188 11:24:27.321882 ARP, Request who-has inkbird.lemis.com tell inkbird.lemis.com, length 46 ...
More inkbird and freezer insights
I've had my Inkbird IBBQ-4BW up and running stumbling for a couple of days now. During that time I've discovered: The horrible app is almost useless. It drops data, it doesn't save raw data, so I'm limited to what little information it supplies in the way of graphs, and it continually crashes. It's interesting to note that the reviews of the app almost all seem to agree with me.
Doctor, heal thyself!
I had an appointment with my doctor, Paul Smith, this afternoon. Problem: he has COVID-19. Well, he's recovering, but not safe for a physical meeting. So we did it over the phone. Nothing much to report: blood test results as expected, though he's still puzzled by the high MCV (106 fl) and fasting glucose (7.2 mmol/l). But the HbA1c value was 6.0 and that's more important, though it seems higher than it has been. As he said ?All in all you're not dying any faster than anybody else?. On the positive side, I had no difficulty with the voice quality on the VoIP call.
Time to reconsider VoIP?
Lately I've had a lot of trouble understanding people on the phone. Am I going deaf? No, it just seems to be on the VoIP line, and Yvonne has noticed it too. Has somebody changed the codec behind my back? Off to look for the current configuration: What's the best codec to use? According to this page, G.711, G.722, G.729 and also rans. Where's PCMU? PCMA? The best I can find on this ATA is G.722. Spent some time reconfiguring before I discovered that PCMU and PCMA are varieties of G.711, so I had to replace it again.
More gpart/geom insights
Mail from Daniel Nebdal suggesting alternatives to rewriting gpart show. Doesn't gpart show -p do exactly what I want? It replaces the index numbers with ?provider? names. Surely I've seen that? Looking at the example I wrote last Wednesday, what I want is: Start Size Device Type Label 40 15628050976 (7.3T) /dev/ada0 GPT 40 128 (64K) /dev/ada0p1 freebsd-boot boot 168 83886080 (40G) /dev/ada0p2 freebsd-ufs rootfs 83886248 41943040 (20G) /dev/ada0p3 freebsd-swap swap 125829288 83886080 (40G) /dev/ada0p4 freebsd-ufs rootfs-2 209715368 15418335648 (7.2T) /dev/ada0p5 freebsd-ufs spool gpart -p -l gives me: ...
HTML validation problems
Part of writing these diary entries is checking the PHP output for validity. I do this once for the HTML version, using the W3 validator, and once for the XML version, using this validator. But lately the W3 HTML validator has been lazy. I find a bug, fix it, and it revalidate?and the bug's still there. Not in my source, but in the validator's view of the world. How do I report this problem?
More Inkbird insights
Mail from Malcolm Caldwell this evening: I have also setup freezer/fridge temperature logging. I looked at inkbird but in the end went with govee devices. But I did see that the protocols for inkbird are known. (As are the govee ones). For example you can find plugins for inkbird that work with open source home automation software like home assistant. https://github.com/stelford/home-assistant_inkbird Also this looks promising: https://github.com/tobievii/inkbird More fun to try out, even if they appear to be a layering violation.
What's this?
Found in the fridge: When I found it, is was in this opened plastic bag: Now doesn't that tell me what it is? But never mind, Google Lens to the rescue: The trouble with Google Lens' ?translate?
Freezer temperatures
To my surprise, the temperatures in the freezer were not only acceptable, but slightly low. Here a typical view: The temperatures range between -19° and -22.8°, a little cool. But then there's this: That's the culprit! It seems to happen 2 or 3 times a day, and it lasts for nearly 2 hours (this graph shows a time span of 6 hours). My guess is that it's related to the automatic defrost.
Measuring freezer temperature
Spent a bit of time with my new WiFi thermometer. It certainly shows Android apps from their worst perspective. One of my concerns when buying it was whether the cables were long enough. I shouldn't have worried: they're 1.5 m each, and they're rather unwieldy. And how do I arrange the colours? They're coloured red, green, blue and something that may be intended to be yellow. RGB sounds right, leaving Y for fourth place: But that turns out not to be the way the writers of the app think.
Icebird thermometer
Back home, unpacked my toys: an Inkbird IBBQ-4BW multithermometer with WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, and also an IHT-1P ?penknife? thermometer. How do I set it up? Very much RTFM, which was terrible. The instructions didn't match the behaviour, and for the WiFi connectivity they wanted me to sign up with an email address and password! Did all that, received a 6 digit confirmation number, which the app didn't accept. Asked for another one, but clearly the Inkbirds think that one is enough. Dammit, how about Bluetooth? How about that, for the first time ever Bluetooth paired immediately, bringing a particularly stupid display: Maybe it reflects the pain that even the developers had with the software.
New toy
Today the thermometer that I ordered last week arrived in Napoleons. By this time it was clear that Yvonne wouldn't be going into town to pick up Anke, so off to Napoleons to pick it up. They couldn't find it! In the process discovered that they don't have any network access to check tracking. Tried with my mobile phone, but the tracking number on the pickup slip was wrong, so it didn't help. Finally, after 15 minutes of searching, left with a request to call back when they found it. I hadn't quite made it home when I got a call from Yvonne to tell me that they had found it almost immediately, but that she hadn't been able to get me on the phone: this was the 5th attempt.
More ssh mysteries
Why does freefall.freebsd.org accept the same ssh key from some systems and not from others? On Tuesday I had established that the ones that were rejected were replying with the incorrect signature type: debug3: sign_and_send_pubkey: RSA SHA256:S7sZHLcY4dgw53/rF70vrScdPuGef3enHdJzuYA1WDo debug3: sign_and_send_pubkey: signing using rsa-sha2-512 SHA256:S7sZHLcY4dgw53/rF70vrScdPuGef3enHdJzuYA1WDo agent key RSA SHA256:S7sZHLcY4dgw53/rF70vrScdPuGef3enHdJzuYA1WDo returned incorrect signature type debug3: sign_and_send_pubkey: signing using ssh-rsa SHA256:S7sZHLcY4dgw53/rF70vrScdPuGef3enHdJzuYA1WDo But why? This was tiwi, running an almost completely new version of FreeBSD 13.1-STABLE. Clearly the ssh components were compatible. In preparation for a bug report, built a new world with today's latest and greatest: === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/3) ~ 8 -> uname -a FreeBSD tiwi.lemis.com 13.1-STABLE FreeBSD 13.1-STABLE #0 stable/13-n250745-1db9d7b7751c: Thu May 12 15:10:04 AEST 2022 [email protected]:/usr/obj/usr/src/amd64.amd64/sys/GENERIC amd64 And ...
GPS fail
One of the best uses I can find for a mobile phone is as a GPS navigator. It's not perfect, but I've decided that it probably works better than a dedicated GPS navigator. But today I got an unexpected message: Why that? How do you enable or disable GPS? It's not where you'd expect it on the right downwards ?swipe?. After much searching I found this: That's under Settings/Location, at the very bottom of the Settings strip, after enabling it.
Bruce Evans' disks analysed
With some difficulty I managed to navigate Google Drive and find some of the many disks that Peter Jeremy saved before he decided to destroy everything on the computers. This morning I had a 15 GB file ad0.img.xz waiting for me. How do I access it? file tells me: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/19) /src/Downloads 30 -> file ad0.img ad0.img: DOS/MBR boot sector; partition 1 : ID=0xb, active, start-CHS (0x0,1,1), end-CHS (0x3e8,254,63), startsector 63, 16081002 sectors; partition 2 : ID=0xa5, start-CHS (0x3e9,0,1), end-CHS (0x1e4,254,63), startsector 16081065, 57512700 sectors; partition 3 : ID=0xa5, start-CHS (0x1e5,0,1), end-CHS (0x3e0,254,63), startsector 73593765, 57512700 sectors; partition 4 : ID=0xc, start-CHS (0x3e1,0,1), end-CHS (0x11,80,63), startsector 131106465, 103335183 sectors OK, how do I look at it?
Identifying USB disks at boot
The real issue with booting, still unsolved, is: how do I mount my USB disks correctly? eureka has 4 external backup disks, and on every boot they come up in as different devices, as I have noted before. What do I do? I've thought about it from time to time, wondering in particular if I haven't missed some more obvious method. In principle I should be able to identify file systems by a label. The label is optional, but it would be a good start. But how do I find the label? One option would be to use gpart show, but the format is so confusing that I can't think of an easy way to parse it.
Power fail recovery, next attempt
Recovering from a power failure is always a pain, though it's getting easier. For reasons I still don't understand, eureka's hardware doesn't recover from a power outage: it requires manual operation of the power switch. And then it doesn't boot automatically: it stops at the Boot: prompt and waits for me to confirm with Boot. But then it came up without trouble. But there are still so many loose ends. I started writing all this stuff in a HOWTO page, but it still seems to be greatly out of date. I really should keep it up to date, and also with enough information for me to be able to apply it.
Power fail!
Shortly after 4:00 this morning it occurred to me that it had been quiet for some time. Normally I would expect to hear the air conditioner or the freezers. Power? Yes! Once again a total power failure. OK, where's my torch? I really need to have something in a known place. Tried some likely places, but there was nothing there. Finally it occurred to me: my phone has a torch function, and I know where it is. One of the few times where it's really of use. OK, check the PV inverter: no grid power. Out to check the meter. No problems!
Understanding my ssh problems
Why can I access freefall.freebsd.org from some machines and not from others, though I use the same ssh key in every case? Off to compare:. I added the colour highlighting later to make things more recognizable: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/44) ~/Photos/19670427 74 -> cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub ; uname -a; ssh-add -l; ssh freefall ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQDVYUjpMuqVqp/JR8ex/fzRpTb+ygOQDU/aaS40TNdCtXgcGjzYfAt0N5QtUX2IAJlgYvLaao+hAoXXfvKTs0rybhWBKuApxTOB7gVEYtNUz3qIkHsBun4FB8zNYCvL2DVTlB46xkbNYZoZB+Yh5TrbdiXyvO917k2Rj6jUGlcc1oQn6xqlSE0/qSByhsGfPV99S72DJdhGOCwRPbt35Co85dlJ6zh7Mj2+Im0m41SblbJ2JBvf4IPAn+YumkFWt3FJy1zKRgl3kxfh8yDZxgqrBaylGhaJZ9vCBW7WICKKZMm+ewuxFX9nFtPvB4OirRxCLgN6m3keSFpSH3nqS2Rb [email protected] FreeBSD eureka.lemis.com 10.2-STABLE FreeBSD 10.2-STABLE #2 r290972: Wed Nov 25 11:38:38 AEDT 2015 [email protected]:/usr/obj/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/10/sys/GENERIC amd64 2048 3b:c3:00:e1:ea:57:43:7f:14:78:90:58:c9:61:bf:d8 /home/grog/.ssh/id_rsa (RSA) Permission denied (publickey). === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/3) ~ 16 -> cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub ; uname -a; ssh-add -l; ssh freefall ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQDVYUjpMuqVqp/JR8ex/fzRpTb+ygOQDU/aaS40TNdCtXgcGjzYfAt0N5QtUX2IAJlgYvLaao+hAoXXfvKTs0rybhWBKuApxTOB7gVEYtNUz3qIkHsBun4FB8zNYCvL2DVTlB46xkbNYZoZB+Yh5TrbdiXyvO917k2Rj6jUGlcc1oQn6xqlSE0/qSByhsGfPV99S72DJdhGOCwRPbt35Co85dlJ6zh7Mj2+Im0m41SblbJ2JBvf4IPAn+YumkFWt3FJy1zKRgl3kxfh8yDZxgqrBaylGhaJZ9vCBW7WICKKZMm+ewuxFX9nFtPvB4OirRxCLgN6m3keSFpSH3nqS2Rb [email protected] FreeBSD dereel 14.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 14.0-CURRENT #3 main-n255108-9fb40baf6043: Fri Apr 29 09:53:15 AEST 2022 grog@dereel:/usr/obj/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/git/main/amd64.amd64/sys/GENERIC amd64 2048 SHA256:S7sZHLcY4dgw53/rF70vrScdPuGef3enHdJzuYA1WDo /home/grog/.ssh/id_rsa (RSA) Last login: Sat May 7 23:04:30 2022 from ffm.lemis.com === grog@lagoon (/dev/pts/2) ~ 7 -> cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub ; uname -a; ssh-add -l; ssh freefall ...
Bruce Evans legacy, continued
So what happened to Bruce Evans' legacy? Looking back through the email exchange, it seems that at the time Peter Jeremy went to some trouble to save all the data, making his subsequent behaviour even more surprising. Found a number of what I think are disk images on Google Cloud, and started downloading the smallest of them, 15 GB compressed. And that's about all I did; I'll find what it is tomorrow. But I've been in this kind of position before.
Destroying Bruce Evans' legacy
Clearly one person who might shed some light on my issues with Bruce Evans' laptops is Peter Jeremy, whom we entrusted to pick them up and distribute them. So I asked him whether the disks were encrypted: > I've taken a look at the laptops so far, and I've run into trouble > with all of them. All of them claim to have no bootable system, ... I did wipe all the disks, so that's why none are bootable WHAT? That's wanton destruction! I'm not exactly lost for words, but I'm amazed and deeply disappointed.
Still more laptop problems
So now I have an image of the complete disk of the HP EliteBook 8570p on eureka. It should be possible to recover an overwritten master boot record by searching for the magic numbers of the file systems. Started off a superficial search with strings(1). But it found nothing! A quick comparison with the disk on eureka showed that it should have found lots of things. Is the disk encrypted? During discussion on IRC, mentioned that I wasn't able to boot from a USB stick on that machine. Matti Kupiainen suggested that maybe the USB bus on one side of the laptop might be defective.
Credit card renewal
My credit card expires at the end of the month, and I'm getting various reminders to update my details with people authorized to deduct from the card. First Vonex, the company designed to make MyNetFone look good. Initially I couldn't even access the site. And when I could, it rejected my credit card details without explanation. Then came ALDImobile. No problem accessing their web site?some things have improved?but I only had the option of removing my payment method, not updating it. Called them up and was connected to mumble, which proved to be a way to pronounce ?Hazel?. She talked me through it: yes, first remove the payment method, then you can enter a new one.
More bde computer stuff
So far my experience with Bruce Evans' computers hasn't been overly positive. I can't boot either laptop from disk or USB stick. How about a DVD? Dragged out an old DVD, which might be appropriate for these machines, one 10, the other 20 years old, and tried to boot. The older one, a Compaq nx6325, booted from DVD, but then the display went blank and stayed blank. It's ancient (?Designed for Windows XP?) ; should I even bother. I have a Dell laptop of that era, and it's too old for anything useful. The newer one, an HP EliteBook 8460p, came up with a particular surprise.
Running bde's computers
I really don't have time to look at bde's computers at the moment, but how difficult can it be to fire up a laptop? More than I thought: after the extended time, the batteries were completely discharged. OK, charge batteries and try: Hewlett-Packard has never been my favourite brand, but that message (apart from the problem it reports) really presses one of my buttons. How can a reputable maker print messages that substitute backslashes (\) for slashes (/)? But what's wrong with the laptops?
The legacy of Bruce Evans
Bruce Evans died in mid-December 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic. We coopted Peter Jeremy to tidy up his computer remains, and he found these: Who wants them? Peter offered them to Warren Toomey and me. Warren wasn't interested. I thought that some of them could be useful, so I put my hand up. But how do you transport them? Shipping could be expensive, especially as one of the computers (HP Z800, not exactly a name I would have thought modern) is very heavy.
eBay strikes again
The thermometer I was looking at, the Inkbird IBBQ-4BW, was advertised for about $122, with an additional $3 postage. But eBay offered 10% discount with a promotional code. OK, Buy It Now, apply the code, get a price round $112. But for 50¢ more I could get express postage. Normally I don't bother, but that's a ridiculously low supplement. OK, select. And my discount went away! Back to normal postage. Still no discount! Much examination with different browsers and systems, and finally discovered that they had cancelled the discount in mid-purchase! BAD eBay. More looking and found an item that they hadn't seen fit to display before, although it matched the search criteria: IBBQ-4BW and an IHT-1P penknife-format temperature probe, for $115 including postage, somewhat less than $3 more.
More temperature measurements
One of our freezers is clearly defective. When I open it I frequently find that the temperature on the front of the baskets is round 0°: they're moist. But it seems to cool. Is it a thermostat issue? Hysteresis? Offset? For that I need to know how the cooling cycle works. I've measured freezer temperatures in the past with a meat thermometer, but they show only the current temperature. I really need a min/max thermometer. Surely they're available on eBay? Indeed, and not even expensive. You can get thermocouple probes on their own for about $13, but you can also get a dual thermometer (digital, of course) with min/max and two probes for $35.
More slide scanning
Scanning slides is a slow process, and there are many issues to solve or work around. As I said yesterday, the Epson ?Perfection? 4990 is not perfect, especially not its software. There are many things that could be done better, including cropping: there's no way to adjust the crop. I had that issue with the Penang Street photos that I processed on Thursday, and it hit me in a different guise today. It seems that it doesn't handle cropping portrait format slides. I have to put them in in landscape orientation and then rotate them. The difference is significant, though it wasn't immediately obvious that the landscape format also truncates: Apart from that, first indications are that the results are much better.
More eBay surprises
Yesterday I received a second refurbished Braun electric toothbrush. I hadn't bothered mentioning the first (early last month), but it had been satisfactory, so I ordered another one. It was at least interesting from the point of view of the tracking. It took a long time, and every time I checked, it showed ?Received and ready for processing?, dated 19 April. But on Tuesday I received information that it was ready for pickup. What did the tracking look like? eBay told me that it was both ?Sent? but not yet ?in transit?, but also ready for pickup: And the detail tracking?
Custom spam
Spam's a fact of life, but I find it interesting to try to guess the languages in which it arrives. Recently I got this one: To undisclosed- ( 131) Mrs. Kristalina Kæri styrk?egi! Icelandic? It had lots of text: Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2022 09:28:05 +0000 From: "Mrs. Kristalina" <[email protected]> Subject: Kæri styrk?egi! Reply-To: [email protected] Kæri styrk?egi! Reyndar höfum vi? fengi? heimild frá n?jum fjármálará?herra og stjórnarrá?i Peningamálaeiningar Sameinu?u ?jó?anna til a? rannsaka óinnheimta fjármuni sem lengi er skulda?
Scanning old photos again
Mail from Patrick Cheah today, asking for permission to use this photo: Why that? It's for a Facebook group dedicated to the Straits Echo, which seems to have only just survived the time of this photo. And that's the building in the middle: OK, can I improve on it? It's old enough that I still have the negatives, some of the first that I took with my Pentax SV.
The demise of national postal services
Is salesforce.com really a subsidiary of Australia Post? It certainly doesn't look like it: # whois.markmonitor.com Domain Name: salesforce.com Registry Domain ID: 4623063_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.markmonitor.com Registrar URL: http://www.markmonitor.com ... Registrant Name: Domain Adminstrator Registrant Organization: Salesforce.com, Inc. Registrant Street: Salesforce Tower, 415 Mission Street, 3rd Floor Registrant City: San Francisco Registrant State/Province: CA Registrant Postal Code: 94105 Registrant Country: US Registrant Phone: +1.8006676389 Registrant Phone Ext: Registrant Fax: +1.4159017040 Looking at their web site, they offer all sorts of services, so many that email doesn't even show on their first list.
More Australia Post pain
Call on Yvonne's mobile phone today. Robyn, from Australia Post, clearly in relation to Yvonne's damage report. First questions about email, giving me ample opportunity to view my opinions about Australia Post's outsourced mail system. No, Australia Post doesn't outsource its mail. And of course they can't accept unsolicited mail: it needs to be an answer to an existing question so that they can associate it with an existing problem. So I pointed out that the Subject: line contains the case number, which should eliminate any issues?she had no answer to that?and that email came from salesforce.com and not auspost.com.au. ?That's us!
More Academia strangenesses
Another message from Academia today: 19 N 01-05-2022 To acd@lem (1114) Academia.edu Connect with 2 co-authors of "Porting UNIX Software: From Download to Debug" on Academia.edu What's wrong with this message? What's right about it? Firstly, I'm the only author of the work, but assuming that there had been others, wouldn't you think that I'd know them and not use Academia to connect with them, especially since they want me to pay money for the privilege? And how do I get them to stop this false claim?
More security issues
While doing something completely unrelated, discovered today: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/39) ~ 20 -> ssh freefall.freebsd.org Permission denied (publickey). Disconnected at Sun 1 May 2022 14:42:30 AEST Huh? I've been connecting from eureka to freefall for decades, and ?I haven't changed anything?. In fact, I'm still logged in from a different xterm: === grog@freefall (/dev/pts/54) ~ 27 -> w 3:44AM up 81 days, 1:15, 55 users, load averages: 0.20, 0.26, 0.23 USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE WHAT ...
Zoom again
Why couldn't Mark and I hear each other during our attempted Zoom conversation yesterday? The Setup was relatively painful (or I have repressed the experience), and it even accepted the password that I chose (?Type 4771?) , though once again it claimed that my newly invented email was a ?frequently used email?. But when I tried to sign in, it wouldn't accept the password. OK, new password, not overly different. Failed again. But then I discovered (how? I forget) that it had removed the space in the password and not even told me! I've had some bad password processing, including from Zoom, but this is the first time that I've found a program that changes the password, and that without telling me.
Zoom: I still hate you!
Finally got round to my video call with Mark Murray today. We've been planning since January 2021. By contrast, my call with Dan Langille in January required no preparation, as you'd expect from a phone call. Why the difficulty? Part was because Mark is in Cambridge, 9 to 11 hours behind me. When do we talk? During the summer it's more difficult, but I like doing these calls before 17:00, which is 8:00 his time. And then there's the choice of conference software. I was pleasantly surprised by WhatsApp, but Mark, a respected security guru, tells me that the license terms are inappropriate.
Segmentation fault: core dumped
While investigating the currently running FreeBSD Core Team elections, fingered the candidates, something that can only be done locally. One ended with Plan: https://myname.org https:/Segmentation fault (core dumped) I've seen that before. In fact, mine might be the original. I first committed the .plan on 2003/04/08 06:25:10. Currently it reads: Plan: 2022: Dereel 2023: Goldfields 2024: Victoria 2025: Australia 2026: The world 20Segmentation fault (core dumped) I had really wanted it to end with an arithmetic overflow, but you don't see that on FreeBSD.
Understanding AusPost exploit
So what went wrong with the Australia Post interaction yesterday? How did salesforce.com get wind of my messages to Australia Post? Looking at the original message to Yvonne, I found: Received: from smtp07-hnd-sp1.mta.salesforce.com (smtp07-hnd-sp1.mta.salesforce.com [101.53.172.230]) by lax.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id EA84B2808A for ; Thu, 21 Apr 2022 00:46:09 +0000 (UTC) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/simple; d=auspost.com.au; s=auspost; t=1650501968; bh=Fa+eVlPSGLEdIU7gsq/YWvDtYI8NMZFZvmnNewJyoVE=; h=Date:From:To:Subject:MIME-Version:Content-Type; b=hYDyUn73CefbqV4giiub23npnW4aLFR+53X/fVa/2WcZSlSrDdOpiRN4lzbs89+Pu TJNpNNTCEnzidbxlUj0zumm2PzFRr3b3Qmvvo1XN+XLLWVBl0x9kYzebUnKNqE9XtO HJYLPbMJZu8babArp0b1U0fk65Hf/GEN++PMNosc= Authentication-Results: mx4-hnd-sp1.mta.salesforce.com x-tls.subject="/C=US/ST=California/L=San Francisco/O=salesforce.com, inc./OU=0:app;1:hnd;2:hnd-sp1;3:ap15;4:prod/CN=ap15-app2-10-hnd.ops.sfdc.net"; auth=pass (cipher=ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384) Received: from [10.219.232.171] ([10.219.232.171:38864] helo=ap15-app2-10-hnd.ops.sfdc.net) by mx4-hnd-sp1.mta.salesforce.com (envelope-from ) (ecelerity 4.2.38.62368 r(Core:release/4.2.38.0)) with ESMTPS (cipher=ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 subject="/C=US/ST=California/L=San Francisco/O=salesforce.com, inc./OU=0:app;1:hnd;2:hnd-sp1;3:ap15;4:prod/CN=ap15-app2-10-hnd.ops.sfdc.net") id E9/62-31316-059A0626; Thu, 21 Apr 2022 00:46:08 +0000 Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2022 00:46:08 ...
Apple in kitchen?
I still have an Apple computer in the kitchen. Now I have removed the upper part of the cupboard where I had it before, so I can access the keyboard more easily: And how is it? The more I try these things, the more I get the impression that there's only one good way to access a computer, and that's sitting in front of a good keyboard. In days gone by I used laptops, but they're barely acceptable, and you really need to be sitting to have good control of a keyboard.
AusPost: scammers?
A few weeks ago Yvonne received a package transported by Australia Post: Despite the ?Do not bend?, it had been bent and badly damaged. On 21 April Yvonne entered a formal complaint and demanded compensation. OK, receipts please. Yvonne sent them last week. No reply. Lost in the post, maybe? On Wednesday she went in person to the appropriate place, and later received an email: Date: Wed, 27 Apr 2022 02:08:13 +0000 (GMT) From: Australia Post <[email protected]> Subject: Australia Post Investigation - Case: 48079138 Message-ID: <Ut0tQ000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000RAZ6YS00K0FjMGtWT8CaroQgfb5jlw@sfdc.net> We recently contacted you regarding your enquiry, and need some additional information in order to ...
More git strangeness
Bringing dereel up to date again today: === root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /usr/src 72 -> igitt up fatal: unsafe repository ('/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/git/main' is owned by someone else) To add an exception for this directory, call: git config --global --add safe.directory /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/git/main I've seen that before. But that was with -STABLE, and this is -CURRENT, which I have only used on dereel. Why has git decided that the repository ?is owned by someone else?? And who is this someone?
Fixing corrupt videos
Lately I've been running into an issue with streams of Al Jazeera news downloaded from YouTube: I can't search back, getting messages like AV: 00:00:57 / 00:18:05 (5%) A-V: -0.000 [ffmpeg/video] h264: Missing reference picture, default is 0 [ffmpeg/video] h264: decode_slice_header error AV: 00:01:00 / 00:18:05 (5%) A-V: -0.000 [ffmpeg/video] h264: Missing reference picture, default is 0 [ffmpeg/video] h264: decode_slice_header error AV: 00:00:49 / 00:18:05 (4%) A-V: -0.000 That's new, and clearly there's some format corruption there. Can I fix it by recoding? It took quite a while to find out, but this page proved useful.
Testing MediathekView on dereel
So finally I have dereel up to date and with linux64 compatibility. Test MediathekView: === root@dereel (/dev/pts/7) /usr/ports/multimedia/mediathekview/work/MediathekView 49 -> export JAVA_HOME=`pwd`/jre === root@dereel (/dev/pts/7) /usr/ports/multimedia/mediathekview/work/MediathekView 51 -> $JAVA_HOME/bin/java -jar MediathekView.jar /usr/ports/multimedia/mediathekview/work/MediathekView/jre/bin/java: error while loading shared libraries: libjli.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory Huh? That worked on tiwi. Yes, I've seen this message before, but it went away when I used the native Java. But looking at what happened since then, that seems to almost be a coincidence.
dereel: next upgrade
Yesterday I started installing Linux compatibility on dereel. This morning I read: ... [83/83] Fetching linux-c7-alsa-plugins-pulseaudio-1.1.6_1.pkg: ...... done Checking integrity... done (0 conflicting) [1/83] Installing linux_base-c7-7.9.2009... Cannot install package: kernel missing 64-bit Linux support pkg: PRE-INSTALL script failed Now isn't that clever? First download all the stuff, then complain that the kernel can't install it. Clearly it wants: === root@dereel (/dev/pts/7) /home/grog 40 -> kldload linux OK, next time should be faster.
Updating dereel
So now I have MediathekView running on tiwi. Before I commit it, I need to have it running on FreeBSD-CURRENT. That's what dereel is for. But first it needs to be up to date. OK, pkg upgrade: ===== Tue 26 Apr 2022 15:05:31 AEST on dereel: pkg upgrade Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue... Fetching packagesite.pkg: .......... done Processing entries: Newer FreeBSD version for package rbllookup: To ignore this error set IGNORE_OSVERSION=yes - package: 1400056 - running kernel: 1400053 Ignore the mismatch and continue? [y/N]: Huh? I have a -CURRENT kernel built earlier this month.
Next Academia surprise
After yesterday's acknowledgement of ownership of ?Closed Source Fights Back?, it wasn't surprising that I got a message from Academia telling me: Someone confirmed that your paper, "Closed Source Fights Back" mentions them. Yes, that's the ?pay us money and we'll tell you who? message that I continually see. But no, this time it was straightforward and presumably correct: Peter H. Salus recently confirmed that your paper Closed Source Fights Back mentions them.
Core team again?
Nearly a quarter of a century ago I nominated myself for the FreeBSD Core Team and was elected. But after a few years, along with my other work, it seemed too much trouble, and I stepped back in 2004. Now elections are coming up again. I have more time, and there are surprisingly few nominations. Should I stand again? I have until 4:00 on Thursday morning (so effectively tomorrow evening) to decide.
More Academia strangenesses
Somehow Academia.edu has been particularly active lately, and it has been the source of some surprises. Today I got a message asking ?Are you the Greg Lehey who wrote "Closed Source Fights Back"??. Am I? Possibly. How do I find out? It proved to be about the SCO fiasco, but I didn't have anything in that directory that matched. It took quite some time to find out that it was an article that I wrote for ACM Queue in 2003. So yes, my article. But how much time it took to find! Of course, Academia is sure that I've written other stuff too.
DxO virtual copies
DxO PhotoLab has a strange feature called ?virtual copy? of an image source file. What's it for? I don't know, and I don't really care. How do you get one? I don't know, and I only care because I sometimes make them accidentally. How do you get rid of them? I don't know, but I really care. Processing yesterday's photos, I somehow managed to create virtual copies of every one of 144 source images. How do I get rid of them? I can select the rubbish bin icon on each image, but as they say in German, I can rivet pancakes to my ears and claim to be a Dachshund.
MediathekView: done!
After my lack of success with MediathekView, most recently 19 April, I identified a forum for MediathekView (or MV, as it proves they call it) developers and asked for help. FreeBSD? Who cares about that? But the message in the middle of the verbose stack trace is clear: Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException: Cannot read the array length because "this.screens" is null at java.desktop/sun.awt.X11GraphicsEnvironment.initDevices(X11GraphicsEnvironment.java:235) That's Java's way of saying ?No screens found?. Clearly a FreeBSD problem. More discussion with little of use. ?Which version of FreeBSD?
Another fence removal?
Mail from Kevin Koster today: Your recent diary entries talking about removing wire fences from a photo reminded me of playing with a free open-source program called Seam Carving GUI many years ago. There doesn't seem to have been any new development since, with the last version (from 2009 I believe, based on file dates) mirrored here: https://github.com/tari/seam-carving-gui. Most of the stuff about seam carving on the web talks about resizing images, but the program also has the function of removing highlighted objects.
Academia surpasses itself
I've commented a number of times recently about Academia.edu, most recently on Tuesday. But they're not letting up. Today I received a message that surpassed all I have had so far: What does that mean? About the only thing that's clear is that the title has nothing to do with me. Why do they come up with this stuff?
Academia revisited
Chris Bahlo around for dinner this evening, and since she's a real live academic, I asked her about Academia.edu. Yes, she too gets the same kind of mail from them, though not as bad as I had last week, and it irritates her too. But she did have some insight: she once got a mail asking if she was the author of a paper co-authored by Tony Papenfuss. No, no such paper. But she's not the only Bahlo in academia, and her sister Melanie Bahlo is married to Tony. So clearly Academia is mixing up first names. And that could explain some of the bombardment.
MediathekView again
Another attempt at getting the latest version of MediathekView to work on FreeBSD. Last time things failed with an initialization error: Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError ... Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException: Cannot read the array length because "this.screens" is null OK, that was with the FreeBSD Java installation. It should be compatible, but who knows? MedithekView comes with its own Java system, and maybe there's a good reason for this. Run that instead? How do I do that? It's a Linux program, so first install Linux compatibility.
Upgrading tiwi
In preparation for another Mediathekview port attempt today, built a new system on tiwi. First, of course, git to update the source tree: === root@tiwi (/dev/pts/1) /usr/src 3 -> git pull --ff-only fatal: unsafe repository ('/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/git/stable-13' is owned by someone else) To add an exception for this directory, call: git config --global --add safe.directory /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/git/stable-13 Huh? What does that mean. /usr/src is a symlink: === root@tiwi (/dev/pts/1) /usr/src 4 -> ls -l /usr/src lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 26 28 Mar 15:43 /usr/src -> /src/FreeBSD/git/stable-13 Previously I had updated it from dereel, and that still works: === root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /usr/stable-13 25 -> git pull --ff-only remote: Enumerating objects: ...
More Luminar investigations
Yesterday's investigation of Luminar didn't produce any spectacular insights. Is Luminar Neo so much better than Luminar AI? Should I buy it on the off chance? That way madness lies. Off searching on the web and came up with The complete Photofocus guide to Luminar Neo, which certainly gave me some interesting insights. It addresses my ?power line? issue: This tool is effective when the power lines are up against the sky, but if there are lines in front of architecture, foliage or other intricate details, the results can be unpredictable.
Removing power lines
Four years ago I was lucky enough to get an almost perfect scene from our lounge room window: But only almost perfect. Yes, both kangaroos have clearly visible joeys in their pouches. But that fence! How do I get rid of it? Over the months that followed I tried inpaint and movavi, and then a number of other products. They all had the same issue: identifying what you want to remove. So I gave up, waiting for a better product. Now Skylum has come out with a new product, Luminar Neo, which claims to be able to do almost exactly what I'm looking for.
Greg Lehey, famous author
I continually get bombarded with emails from Academia asking me if I have written some paper or book. Usually I have, and I've already told them several times?there aren't many. And then there are these messages: Subject: ?G Lehey?: The name ?G Lehey? was mentioned in a paper recently found by Academia written by Antti Kantee Subject: The name "Greg Lehey" is mentioned by a Political Science researcher in a paper uploaded to Academia Subject: ?Greg Lehey?: 1 Mention in a paper uploaded to Academia by someone in Algeria In every case, for more details I need to sign up for the full programme, something that isn't interesting enough.
Zoom: modern communications
I have to connect with a friend who uses Zoom. Why can't he use Whats App? That at least has a FreeBSD connection. OK, install Zoom on my camera. It doesn't make me fall in love with it. First, I get: There's so much wrong with that! It's useless for verification. It's one of these silly ?secret? bits of data that have special significance in Australia and shouldn't be divulged. There's no way to check whether it's correct or not.
45 GB throwaway data
Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a total of 51 episodes of Servant of the people, of which I have 23 or 24: the first season should be 24 episodes, but I only got 23, the first of which is double length. So probably I have the complete first season. OK, there are sources with better quality and all episodes. 45 GB! But when the National Broadband Network works, it works well, and I have unlimited data, so I was able to download them overnight at about 3 MB/s. No subtitles, only original Ukrainian! I can't do anything with that. Well, yes, I can: remove them again.
igitt! Again!
It's time for the MFC of the commits to the FreeBSD repository that I made a couple of weeks ago. ?MFC? (?Merge From Current?) is an old, worn-out magic TLA meaning moving the commits from the -CURRENT branch (thus the name) to the -STABLE branch, or whatever git calls it. How does that work? In fact, it's quite straightforward, especially for git. Learn another redefinition. You don't need this to do the work: No, ?cherry-pick? seems to be a US English redefinition of the word.
More port upgrade fun
So now I can finally upgrade my ports on dereel. I started yesterday, but the transition from 13-STABLE quarterly to 14-CURRENT latest certainly made its presence felt: ===== Tue 12 Apr 2022 11:47:35 AEST on dereel: pkg upgrade Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue... Newer FreeBSD version for package tdb: To ignore this error set IGNORE_OSVERSION=yes - package: 1400056 - running kernel: 1400053 Ignore the mismatch and continue? [y/N]: Processing entries............. done FreeBSD repository update completed. 30988 packages processed. All repositories are up to date. Checking for upgrades (754 candidates): .......... done Processing candidates (754 candidates): ..........
Where are my cameras?
I now have two cameras on their way from Ukraine. How are they progressing? eBay gives (usually somewhat out of date) tracking information. For the Kiev, after fixing the back-to-front representation, it's (conveniently hidden in a too-small window) Ukrposhta tracking #RH062990804UA 6 Apr 2022 8:59pm Tracking number provided 7 Apr 2022 11:19am ????????????
Kitchen computer pain
While cooking the mee, I needed access to the recipe. Exactly the reason why I put the Apple (almost) in the kitchen on Sunday. So I used that. It really isn't good. It started by using Safari instead of the firefox that I know, if not love. And that is just plain confusing. OK, install firefox. That made things easier, once I discovered that c-f no longer works for ?find?. It's m-f, though only because it's not a real Apple keyboard; otherwise it would be some silly Apple name. And this silly Apple mouse takes getting used to as well. But I can put up with that.
Tracing the pkg issue
So why can't I do anything with pkg any more on dereel? Conveniently the messages gave me the exact URLs of the failing download, such as http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/FreeBSD:14:amd64/quarterly/Latest/pkg.txz. And of course a browser confirmed that the file doesn't exist. http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/FreeBSD:14:amd64/ has only one directory, latest. There are two main ?mirror? sites and a number of ?mirror? ?mirror? sites, and they all agreed. OK, mail to the ports mailing list: I've checked both IPv4 sites, and http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/FreeBSD:14:amd64/ only contains a "latest" directory, not "quarterly". Got an answer from a top-poster, appending my message unchanged: Only latest pkg sources in current (now is 14).
Kitchen computer?
Decades ago I kept a laptop in the kitchen, mainly for access to recipes. That was before the days of the World Wide Web, but it was still useful. Since then I've taken laptops into the kitchen from time to time, but with graphical displays I've come to the conclusion that laptops are a pain to use. What I need is a Real Computer. And of course, I have plenty of those. The closest is fwaggle, my Apple iMac that has been sitting in the dining room doing nothing for months. How about putting it closer to the kitchen? Yes, that works, but it still seems wrong.
More air conditioner problems
It's been a month since I discussed our air conditioner problems with Tony from Atmos. I was to check the connections of the sensors to the main controller board. No hurry: the machine is working fine. There don't seem to be any issues when using it to heat, though it produces more E25 statuses than before. But today it was warm again. Air conditioner off, change from ?Heat? to ?Cool?. Turn on. It turned itself off again, repeatedly. OK, time to finally check the connectors. They're the ones at bottom left on the board: Somehow I had a recollection of a looser fit, like connectors on a computer board, which can get loose.
pkg problems
In the night's security run output today, found: pkg: Warning: Major OS version upgrade detected. Running "pkg bootstrap -f" recommended Huh? Oh well, it's straightforward enough: === root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /usr/local/etc/postfix 180 -> pkg bootstrap -f pkg: Warning: Major OS version upgrade detected. Running "pkg bootstrap -f" recommended pkg(8) is already installed. Forcing reinstallation through pkg(7). The package management tool is not yet installed on your system. Do you want to fetch and install it now? [y/N]: y Bootstrapping pkg from pkg+http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/FreeBSD:14:amd64/quarterly, please wait...
More mail server problems
After getting dereel's mail system working properly, it's straightforward to migrate it to tiwi. After all, I installed both systems in the same way. Surprise, surprise, it wasn't. I had assumed that it would be straightforward, so I didn't assign much time time it. But what I saw was anything but straightforward. After making the appropriate configuration changes, Apr 7 09:44:45 tiwi sendmail[80071]: 236Nijid080071: from=grog, size=26, class=0, nrcpts=1, msgid=<[email protected]>, relay=grog@localhost Apr 7 09:44:45 tiwi postfix/smtpd[80033]: connect from localhost[127.0.0.1] Apr 7 09:44:45 tiwi postfix/smtpd[80033]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from localhost[127.0.0.1]: 451 4.3.0 <[email protected]>: Temporary lookup failure; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<tiwi.lemis.com> Apr 7 09:44:45 tiwi sendmail[80071]: 236Nijid080071: to=grog, ctladdr=grog (1004/1000), delay=00:00:00, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=relay, pri=30026, relay=[127.0.0.1] [127.0.0.1], dsn=4.3.0, reply=451 4.3.0 <[email protected]>: Temporary lookup failure, stat=Deferred: 451 4.3.0 <[email protected]>: Temporary lookup failure Apr 7 09:44:45 tiwi postfix/smtpd[80033]: disconnect from localhost[127.0.0.1] ehlo=1 mail=1 rcpt=0/1 data=0/1 rset=1 quit=1 ...
Backup failure
Seen in the system logs this morning: dump -2uf - / | nice zstd -T8 > /dump/lagoon-FreeBSD/2/root.bz2 DUMP: WARNING: should use -L when dumping live read-write filesystems! DUMP: Date of this level 2 dump: Tue Apr 5 21:00:00 2022 DUMP: Date of last level 0 dump: Fri Apr 1 21:00:00 2022 DUMP: Dumping /dev/ada0p4 (/) to standard output DUMP: mapping (Pass I) [regular files] DUMP: mapping (Pass II) [directories] DUMP: estimated 153867 tape blocks. DUMP: dumping (Pass III) [directories] DUMP: dumping (Pass IV) [regular files] zstd: error 25 : Write error : cannot write compressed block DUMP: Broken pipe DUMP: The ENTIRE dump is aborted.
Understanding postfix
I've been running my own email server for over 30 years. It seems that I'm one of the few people who still does. That's not overly surprising: you can get free email services on every street corner. But I want to do it My Way, and things aren't getting any easier. 30 years ago I installed sendmail, the only game in town. Less than 9 years later, some time between 16 November 2000 and 29 January 2001, I migrated to postfix, mainly because sendmail had changed its configuration file format to be even more difficult (sorry, Eric). But postfix is also anything but easy.
Understanding O[IM].Share
Spent much of the morning writing up yesterday's rant about OI.Share. That was useful for a number of reasons, most importantly because I now understand the bugs features better. First, what is the name of the app? What would you like it to be? OM Image Share? OI.Share? It seems that both are correct. On the one hand that means that the name of the app hasn't changed to add further confusion, but it also allows mistakes to take place, and there seem to be many of them. Most importantly, the only OI.Share that I can find in the toyshop is the old Olympus one, the one that installs and offers to install the new version.
Upgrading MediathekView
MediathekView is a program for downloading videos from European TV broadcasters. I've been using it for nearly 5 years, but I never really got round to making it into a FreeBSD port. Now I'm trying, and I've discovered that Lars Engels beat me to it?and then gave up again because of problems with Java. Now it's my turn. === root@tiwi (/dev/pts/0) /usr/ports/multimedia/mediathekview 155 -> mediathekview Error: A JNI error has occurred, please check your installation and try again Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: mediathek/Main has been compiled by a more recent version of the Java Runtime (class file version 61.0), this version of the Java Runtime only recognizes class file versions up to 52.0 at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method) ...
DST end, more OI.Share pain
Daylight Saving Time ended this morning, with the usual issues of resetting clocks. The biggest was with the cameras. The older ones are simple: go to the menu and set it. But the three newest (Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark I, OM-D E-M1 Mark II and OM-D E-M5 Mark III) have a remote control program that also sets the time from the computer device mobile phone to which they can connect. And that's more accurate. But this horrible OI.Share app makes it such a pain! In the spring I gave up, but today I tried again. One more surprise: the Toy Shop offers: after installing it on Yvonne's phone, it came up with ?Ha, ha, I'm the wrong OI.Share.
More DMARC investigations
Why did the GLOCK APPS web site refuse to continue yesterday? Clearly it's a badly written web page, possibly designed for Microsoft. So I tried it on distress, my faster Microsoft box. And how about that, still using firefox, it positioned the warnings outside the field that they had previously obscured. And it reacted when I pressed SUBMIT. It didn't like ?N0 future!? as a password (too weak, which it let me deduce to be the reason for not continuing). OK, try ?Is this str0ng enough, Idiots??? No, too long! So why did they let me enter it? Finally got something set up.
DMARC?
Last month I set up DMARC for my external mail server, and almost immediately I started getting messages that I can't parse: [-- Attachment #2: protection.outlook.com!lemis.com!1648512000!1648598400.xml.gz --] [-- Type: application/gzip, Encoding: base64, Size: 0.8K --] [-- application/gzip is unsupported (use 'v' to view this part) --] Clearly I need software to decipher it for me. But how? A google search brought a number (well, 210,000) of hits, including The Ultimate Guide to DMARC Reports in 2022 from GLOCK APPS and Understanding DMARC Reports from EASYDMARC (no I dea why they shout).
Quora responds
Response from Quora about my ?appeal? two days ago: Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2022 22:39:11 +0000 We are very sorry for this experience. Your content was mistakenly removed as a violation of our spam policy, but it is now reinstated. That's something, but I think it's still clear that my Quora time is over. There are no sensible questions to answer any more, and moderation is (probably unintentionally) on the side of the abusers. Remove answer immediately, take 2 days and an appeal to reinstate it.
More system upgrade problems?
Now that I have upgraded dereel to FreeBSD 14-CURRENT, I'm still discovering strangenesses. Hitting c-p to get the previous command gives me: === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/4) /spool/Series/Doc/01 18 -> <t https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/video/1891506243952 I've seen that before, but not for decades. The < at the beginning of the line is an indication that it's not the start of the line: there's more to the left. Press c-a for the beginning of the line and I get === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/4) /spool/Series/Doc/01 18 -> yt https://www.sbs.com.au/ondema> What causes that?
Returning the wine
Yesterday I sent a mail to McLaren Vale Cellars about the damaged wine shipment. No response. OK, enter a ?dispute?, a rather heavy-handed term for what I wanted to say. But that's modern web sites for you, and McLaren Vale Cellars have a very modern web site. First I had to choose from a limited set of reasons. ?Damaged in transit?? No, nothing like that. The closest I came was: I did not receive an item I purchased, or the item I received is dead on arrival, not working, not the one I ordered or significantly different than [sic] what was described.
More ssh pain
I've upgraded dereel to FreeBSD 14-CURRENT, which currently seems to be very stable, and which makes it easier to build and test source upgrades. But once again I have had trouble with ssh. After make installworld I could no longer connect. What does /var/tmp/auth.log say? Mar 29 14:21:51 dereel sshd[68066]: userauth_pubkey: key type ssh-rsa not in PubkeyAcceptedAlgorithms [preauth] OK, that message is (almost) clear enough. But what's PubkeyAcceptedAlgorithms? Off looking online and found a suggestion to run: === root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /usr/src/bin/date 50 -> ssh -Q PubkeyAcceptedAlgorithms unknown option: '-Q' ...
Goodbye Quora
I've been answering questions on Quora for years now, in the process watching its quality deteriorate from a serious question and answer site to a purveyor of nonsense and pornography. Today I received a message from their ?moderation?: Your answer has been deleted as it was found to be in violation of our Spam policy. To learn more about our Quora's policy, click here. If you think this is an error, you can appeal here. Spam? I don't send any steenking spam! What was the question, anyway?
More git fun
Now that I have broken the ice using git, time to catch up on other things that I was planning. The obvious one was the update to date(1) that failed two weeks ago. I had planned to investigate how to recover from that situation, but then a week later the source tree fell apart, and I had to recreate it. No git-oriented recovery possible any more. OK, put the file into a fresh tree, in the process finding more details to change. Push! === root@dereel (/dev/pts/1) /src/FreeBSD/git/main/bin/date 35 -> git push date.1 fatal: You are pushing to remote 'date.1', which is not the upstream of your current branch 'main', without telling me what to push to update which remote branch.
More weather station problems
My Fine Offset WH-1080 weather station is not the most reliable device in the world. Apart from strange USB issues, it has great difficulty communicating with the external unit. And so it was again today: I came into the office to discover that it had not been communicating at all for over 10 hours. Normally it recovers if I disconnect the receiver and walk closer to the transmitter. But today that didn't work either. What should I do? Buy another one? They're not made any more. Buy a different model and go through all the pain that I went through 12 years ago?
Igitt! again
Now that I'm gradually recovering from my first experience with git, I wondered if anybody else had come up with the play on words ?igitt?. Yes: IGitt is ?a simple library that allows you to access various git hosting services like GitHub, GitLab and so on via one unified python interface?. And at the end of the page it confirms the etymology. But it seems to add Yet Another layer of abstraction on an already completely overloaded system.
igitt!
Yesterday git annoyed me by coming up with (or at least claiming) spurious changes in my source tree. I still can't understand what went round there, though I should probably go and examine the differences that it claims. But the xkcd cartoon won, I cloned Yet Another source tree and added my changes. Build Yet Another kernel. All well. OK, the point of no return. Commit and push. === root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /src/FreeBSD/git/main 8 -> git commit On branch main Your branch is up to date with 'freebsd/main'. Huh? I had just changed two files! It seems that I had to dig to find them: === root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /src/FreeBSD/git/main 9 -> cd sys/dev/usb/ === root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /src/FreeBSD/git/main/sys/dev/usb 10 -> git diff diff --git a/sys/dev/usb/quirk/usb_quirk.c b/sys/dev/usb/quirk/usb_quirk.c index cab6f1b7c074..d86ca5643515 100644 --- a/sys/dev/usb/quirk/usb_quirk.c +++ b/sys/dev/usb/quirk/usb_quirk.c @@ -353,6 +353,39 @@ static struct usb_quirk_entry usb_quirks[USB_DEV_QUIRKS_MAX] = { ...
VirtualBox again
In preparation to commit the quirk entries for Olympus cameras, I need to build a FreeBSD kernel against CURRENT main. But I don't have a system running CURRENT any more. OK, that's what virtual machines are for. Fire up VirtualBox and create a virtual machine with a recent CURRENT kernel and build the kernel with my changes. And once again I ran into issues with networking. The workarounds I established last time didn't work, at least not the way I described them. The issue seems to be which klds to load. The important one is ng_ether, which in fact has nothing directly to do with VirtualBox.
git, how I hate thee!
In preparation for committing the USB changes, I need to have an up-to-date CURRENT source tree. OK, I can do that: === root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /src/FreeBSD/git/main 21 -> Log igitt up ===== Tue 22 Mar 2022 12:56:52 AEDT on dereel: igitt up This seems to be a src clone From https://git.freebsd.org/src 8e72f458c6d3..fd6ca665d206 main -> freebsd/main 210991b1f28b..b8ae329db949 releng/13.0 -> freebsd/releng/13.0 fa67c45842bb..928e649f6818 releng/13.1 -> freebsd/releng/13.1 8342c11f27eb..931c75bf01d6 stable/11 -> freebsd/stable/11 6fa8af618475..bf8cb490e27d stable/12 -> freebsd/stable/12 9f600a260a73..812638797d59 stable/13 -> freebsd/stable/13 error: Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by merge: contrib/libcxxrt/atomic.h contrib/libcxxrt/exception.cc contrib/libcxxrt/guard.cc contrib/libcxxrt/memory.cc lib/libcasper/services/cap_fileargs/cap_fileargs.c lib/libkvm/kvm_proc.c lib/libmixer/mixer.3 sbin/sysctl/sysctl.8 sys/compat/linuxkpi/common/include/linux/pci.h sys/compat/linuxkpi/common/src/linux_pci.c ...
Fixing Olympus quirks
More looking at the camera USB issues. It's been a while since I've messed around in the FreeBSD kernel, but it was less work than I expected. In this particular case, I needed to update /usr/src/sys/dev/usb/quirk/usb_quirk.c with the quirks, and also /usr/src/sys/dev/usb/usbdevs to define the devices. A typical entry looks like: USB_QUIRK(OLYMPUS, E_M1MarkII, 0x0000, 0xffff, UQ_MSC_NO_GETMAXLUN, UQ_MSC_NO_TEST_UNIT_READY, UQ_MSC_NO_PREVENT_ALLOW, UQ_MSC_NO_SYNC_CACHE), That could almost be generated from the dmesg output. But of course I needed to define E_M1MarkII, and that's why I needed to change usbdevs: product OLYMPUS E_M1MarkII 0x012e Problem: Olympus is too stingy to allocate a new product code for every product code, as I noted on Sunday.
USB issues again
Reply from Hans Petter Selasky, the FreeBSD USB man, about my USB issues with the latest version of FreeBSD. You should add the quirks that appear in dmesg to: /usr/src/sys/dev/usb/quirk/usb_quirk.c You can test the quirk by adding: hw.usb.quirk.0="0x07b4 0x012e 0 0xffff UQ_MSC_NO_TEST_UNIT_READY,UQ_MSC_NO_PREVENT_ALLOW,UQ_MSC_NO_SYNC_CACHE,UQ_MSC_NO_TEST_UNIT_READY,UQ_MSC_NO_START_STOP" To /boot/loader.conf Also you can use usbconfig's add_quirk command to test these quirks for your device. Three different workarounds. The first clearly requires rebuilding the system, the second rebooting, and the third RTFM. And that gave me ample opportunity to think about man page updates.
30 years of fun
Read in my calendar today: Mar 19 Greg installs BSD/386 0.3.1, 1992 Those were the days. My copy of BSD/386 was ?beta? (thus the < 0 release number), and in those days I took beta releases seriously; it was less than 3 weeks since I had left Tandem, and at Tandem people expected reports, which I dutifully provided. How times have changed!
More Google Maps fun
There are two vets in Bannockburn: the Bannockburn Veterinary Clinic and the Golden Plains Animal Hospital, apparently without a web site. We wanted to go to the Bannockburn Veterinary Clinic, so I said to my phone ?Hey Google, take me to the Bannockburn Vet Clinic?. Yes, no problem. But when we got to Bannockburn, it tried to take me to the animal hospital. That wasn't a big issue, since we don't need guidance to get there. But how do you tell Google that it's wrong? You can enter feedback after arriving, but it didn't think we had arrived.
More USB camera attachment issues
Took photos with the Olympus OM-D E-M1 and the OM-D E-M1 Mark II today. Read them in to dereel, which is conveniently located. The photos from the E-M1 Mark I came in fine. No photos from the Mark II. Cable problems? Checked the connections, plugged into the other USB port (where the Mark I had been). Same thing: Mar 17 11:28:43 dereel kernel: usb_msc_auto_quirk: UQ_MSC_NO_TEST_UNIT_READY set for USB mass storage device OLYMPUS E-M1MarkII (0x07b4:0x012e) Mar 17 11:28:43 dereel kernel: usb_msc_auto_quirk: UQ_MSC_NO_PREVENT_ALLOW set for USB mass storage device OLYMPUS E-M1MarkII (0x07b4:0x012e) Mar 17 11:28:43 dereel kernel: usb_msc_auto_quirk: UQ_MSC_NO_SYNC_CACHE set for USB mass storage device OLYMPUS E-M1MarkII (0x07b4:0x012e) Mar 17 11:28:44 dereel syslogd: last message repeated 1 times Mar 17 11:28:44 dereel kernel: usb_msc_auto_quirk: UQ_MSC_NO_PREVENT_ALLOW set for USB mass storage device OLYMPUS E-M1MarkII (0x07b4:0x012e) Mar 17 11:28:44 dereel kernel: usb_msc_auto_quirk: UQ_MSC_NO_TEST_UNIT_READY set for ...
git?
It's clear that I need to take several steps back to really understand git, or at least what was going on in the minds of the people who wrote it. Received another mail message from Jashank Jeremy in the evening, basically confirming my suspicions, and also offering suggestions that I will follow up on Some Time Soon. This xkcd cartoon seems particularly appropriate:
Phone answering pain, yet again
Called Yvonne (who was shopping in Ballarat) on the phone today. No answer. I've seen this too often. Why can't she do something as simple as answer the phone? She called back. My phone rang, but nothing appeared on the screen. ?Swipe? down from top right. No answer indication. Hoist with my own petard! Finally she got through to me, but clearly something is seriously wrong here. I can't imagine that it's both of us. Could it be Xiaomi or MIUI? Maybe, but they're a very widely distributed make. Other possibilities include: I noted that the phone was reacting sluggishly before.
git, how I hate thee!
Yesterday's attempt to commit to the FreeBSD repository using git failed due to an incorrect template. Back to look at the git primer today, and it seems that the conflict was my fault: instead of using the script that I had carefully set up, I did it by hand and lost the checkin template. But while reading the primer, ran into some strangenesses: Clone the repository: % git clone -o freebsd --config remote.freebsd.fetch='+refs/notes/*:refs/notes/*' https://git.freebsd.org/${repo}.git Then you should have the official mirrors as your remote: % git remote -v freebsd https://git.freebsd.org/${repo}.git (fetch) freebsd https://git.freebsd.org/${repo}.git (push) OK, so far, so good.
Upgrading dereel
Now that I have git more or less working, I can upgrade some of my secondary systems. Today it was dereel, which is now effectively on the same release as tiwi: === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/0) ~ 2 -> uname -a FreeBSD tiwi.lemis.com 13.1-STABLE FreeBSD 13.1-STABLE #0 stable/13-n249989-b85d0d603c57: Sat Mar 12 13:23:39 AEDT 2022 [email protected]:/usr/obj/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/tiwi/amd64.amd64/sys/GENERIC amd64 === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/2) ~ 3 -> uname -a FreeBSD dereel 13.1-STABLE FreeBSD 13.1-STABLE #0 stable/13-n249995-80bab8aa7ed8: Mon Mar 14 13:20:09 AEDT 2022 grog@dereel:/usr/obj/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/git/stable-13/amd64.amd64/sys/GENERIC amd64 Why does tiwi report itself as tiwi.lemis.com, while dereel is simply dereel?
First git commit
So finally I'm in a position to commit to the FreeBSD source tree again. Asked Peter Jeremy to review it (?OK, but why don't you use Phabricator??) and hold my hand while I committed it. First surprise: you don't just commit, you also push. I'm still trying to find out the distinction, but so far it looks like ?push? is the git word for ?commit?, and git ?commit? doesn't actually affect the copy in the repository. But I needed to document the commit details in the ?commit? stage, and the template I was presented didn't match what I should have got.
tiwi ?upgrade?, yet again
Finally managed to check out the correct branch of the FreeBSD repository today, and despite reservations it built cleanly in less than 2½ hours, considerably less than the time it took for -CURRENT main. Rebooted nicely, then make installworld. But next time I tried, I couldn't access the machine. === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/35) ~ 1 -> ssh tiwi ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host Disconnected at Sat 12 Mar 2022 16:28:10 AEDT Huh? I still had one ssh session open to tiwi, but I couldn't connect any more. ssh -v didn't help much (it never seems to).
Upgrading tiwi
Despite all the frustration, I'm making progress with my TV computers. And my disks on tiwi and teevee are filling up. Time to continue the stalled migration from teevee to tiwi. OK, check out the latest stable/13 tree, not made any easier by the difficulty of finding the branch abbreviations. And somehow I ended up with the tree in /usr/stable/13 instead of /usr/src. OK, I can rename it. But git doesn't like that. It knows the name, and I had to stick to it. Nothing for it: a symlink to /usr/src. 3 hours of building clang later and it booted happily, so much so that I checked that it was really the new kernel: === root@tiwi (/dev/pts/2) ~ 2 -> uname -a FreeBSD tiwi.lemis.com 14.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 14.0-CURRENT #0 main-n253735-832acea92fc8: Fri Mar 11 17:07:51 AEDT 2022 [email protected]:/usr/obj/usr/stable/13/amd64.amd64/sys/GENERIC amd64 ...
Civilizing git
Mail from Jashank Jeremy about my problems with how less handles gratuitous colour. Specifically, he pointed to how to stop git from misbehaving. Yes, I knew that. I thought. But he pointed to a man page git-config, only 93 pages of printed output, clearly too little for them to include examples of how to just shut the bloody thing up. Jashank included that: To set it for one invocation:: $ git -c color.ui=no [... the remainder of the invocation ...]
More bash bug investigations
Followed on investigating yesterday's investigation of the bash problems on tiwi. So far I have practically eliminated bash itself, X, the keyboard drivers and my environment. What's left? In each case, I start the bash in an xterm. What happens if I use ssh to access the system? Tried that: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/34) ~ 1 -> ssh tiwi ... === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/5) ~ 1 -> ps aux And how about that, after the output, I can edit the command line normally. Same xterm, same bash, same environment, just not started via the window manager.
More control character pain
Spent a considerable period of time today trying to corner the bash control code issue. Where does it come from? Yesterday's investigation didn't address all the possibilities. There were more environment variables which, though unlikely, could have had a bearing on the problem. Ended up changing them all to the versions on teevee. It didn't make any difference. So what do I have? It's not bash, because it happens with bashes from other systems. It's not the keyboard driver, because I've looked at the codes it generates, and they're the same It's not the environment, beacuse I've changed anything that could be relevant.
Catching up with workarounds
Over the years, I have run into a number of issues that have irritated me, and I've found workarounds for them. But they're adding up. Somehow I can no longer enter a file name into a selection box in firefox. Instead it gives me a tree that I need to climb to find anything. Particularly when uploading photos, this is a real pain: my ~/Photos/ directory has nearly 6,000 entries, and it expects me to scroll through them! There used to be a way to use a bash-like file name completion, but that was clearly too convenient.
man pages again
I'm preparing to finally commit something to the FreeBSD source tree, which involves using git for the first time. OK, first try with a man page, specifically date(1), which still doesn't know anything about time zones! And how about that, I have forgotten all my mdoc-foo. Where's the documentation for the documentation? Looking at mdoc(7) wasn't very helpful: it shows standard GNU macros. Off searching on the FreeBSD web site, and found the information in the Documentation Project Primer, which pointed me to... mdoc(7). But it bears no relationship to mine. More searching shows that it has been completely replaced since I installed eureka.
Origins of ICMP
Recently saw a link to ?Ping! I love that duck! on the Unix Heritage Society mailing list. Fascinating reading. Who would have thought that it has such a long history?
Google: MY way
Gmail continues to annoy me. Yes, I can fix the authorization this time?maybe?but what will they come up with next? The real issue is that they want me to do things their way, and that seems to increasingly mean Microsoft or Apple. Not my way. The simplest solution is clearly to have nothing to do with Gmail. In fact, I don't have very many mail subscriptions that point to Gmail. Let's change the address. The biggest is Hugin, also the one that Gmail loves to classify as spam the most (and that despite it originating within Google!) . Off to change the email address.
Google ?security?: just to annoy me
Message from Google today: To help keep your account secure, Google will no longer support the use of third-party apps or devices which ask you to sign in to your Google Account using only your username and password. Instead, you?ll need to sign in using Sign in with Google or other more secure technologies, like OAuth 2.0. Email software, like Outlook 2016 or earlier, has less secure access to your Gmail.
eBay customer service again
Call on the phone today, asking me about my ?customer experience? with the mobile phone. That's really quite extraordinary. Have they changed, or have I achieved some special status through having been with them for nearly 23 years? At least it gave me the opportunity to suggest a change in policy where they don't unilaterally decide to close a case without contacting the other party.
eBay: Resolution!
Finally my issue with the Xioami Note 9T has been resolved. Clearly the seller, mobileciti_estore, had attempted to close the case without fulfilling his part of the bargain, and eBay had closed the case without consulting me. But after ?appealing? they checked and fixed things. And I got a surprisingly friendly, almost bending-over-backwards message from them: Good News! I have closed this case in your favour with partial refund. Thank you for contacting eBay regarding the item "Xiaomi Redmi Note 9T 5G" Item Id "402894423229" for which you had opened the return case on 19th Feb 2022.
Google Pay in Russia
Russia's invasion of Ukraine of Ukraine is the topic of much talk, of course. Today Jamie Fraser wondered on IRC: <jfraser> i guess russians are pretty dependent on things like google/apple pay? Google Pay? Who uses that? I don't, and I have no intention of doing so. My guess was that they don't use it much in Russia either. But off to check. And without so much as a by-your-leave I got a message that I had been signed up for the service! You added your account, [email protected], to the new Google Pay app.
Understanding Service Victoria
Service Victoria: has been a pain since I first installed it. How do I tell if my ?digital certificate? is up to date or not? As I grumbled only last week, it no longer shows the dates of the vaccinations: And now it has removed the history from the display on fossil, Yvonne's new mobile phone, as I grumbled yesterday, and it wants a login. But today I got a message on my phone: What's the difference?
More mobile phone insights
Yesterday's setup of fossil.lemis.com, Yvonne's new mobile phone, went surprisingly smoothly, but there were still some strangenesses to iron out: Google Maps didn't want to know about Yvonne's location. It required simply to be enabled (?fixed?) . This appears to be a ?there can only be one? issue: enzian still had location tracking enabled, and after ?fixing? things on fossil, it was no longer enabled on enzian.
Recovering from power failure
Recovery from power failure wasn't that bad this time. Though I had lost a total of 7 computers, I was done in an hour. Here an overview of the issues: eureka's hardware doesn't recover from a power outage. For some reason the BIOS doesn't have a ?start running when power is connected? setting. It needs to be turned on manually. By this time, a number of other systems will be running.
Mobile phone setup, yet again
So now Yvonne has a new phone. Most important thing: what are we going to call it? Previous phones have been called talipon.lemis.com (the old Malay word for telephone), hirse.lemis.com (German for ??, pronounced xi?om?) and enzian.lemis.com (because of the colour). Yvonne tended to names like dopey.lemis.com or stupid.lemis.com. Jamie Fraser (on IRC) suggested scomo.lemis.com: ?because it's guaranteed to piss you off and probably not do the one thing it's supposed to do?. In the end I chose the name fossil.lemis.com: that should match Yvonne's derogatory opinion, and it matches the appearance (anthracite). And how do I set it up? How about that, it provides a migration function from an old phone, as long as the old phone still works.
A new phone!
I've been following the erratic path of the replacement phone that the eBay seller promised me a while back. On Wednesday he applied for and got a tracking number, but didn't post the item. I've seen that before; the item shows up in tracking, but may never actually get sent. But that wasn't the case this time: yesterday midday it was finally delivered to the post office. And today it arrived in Napoleons. Here Australia Post's upside-down and misspelt view of things: Awaiting collection at NAPOLEON CPA NAPOLEONS VIC Fri 25 Feb, 11.09am In transit LUCAS VIC Fri 25 Feb, 7.37am Unable to deliver - Item carded and transferred to post office for collection LUCAS VIC Fri 25 Feb, 7.32am Arrived at facility WENDOUREE VIC Fri 25 Feb, 6.37am In transit to next facility in BALLARAT VIC Fri 25 Feb, 12.38am Item ...
ALDImobile ?plans?
And then, for some reason, I checked my mobile phone account. Two payments via the ALDImobile app: a $15 ?Pay As You Go? (really ?advance payment?) update, and a $15 ?Mobile plan?. What's that? It seems it's 3 GB worth of data, fully $5 per GB! Having just fought my way through the app, it's clear that Yvonne had accidentally chosen the ?plan?, greatly hindered by the terminology: Mobile Plans? That looks right. What about the others? ?Data Plan? looks like what she got, ?Family Plan?
How to answer mobile phones, yet again
Yvonne called me just as I was taking my analemma photos, so I had to hang up and call her back. And of course she didn't answer. Hung up, and she called me back. She couldn't find a way to answer the phone. When she got home, I checked. For some reason the phone only displayed this: OK, that's not very obvious, but it's there. The problem is that Yvonne had expected this: And since she still refuses to wear glasses, she couldn't recognize the display.
More mobile phone pain
Yvonne off shopping today. I normally follow her on Google Maps, but today her location stayed stubbornly at home. Damn phones! Why are they so unreliable? What's the chance of being able to get it fixed on warranty? After all, it's only 4 months old. But what's the chance that I'll find somebody to repair it under warranty? Off yet again trying to find a new phone. Yes, there's a Redmi 9T available at a usable price, but first we need to complete the ?return? of the undelivered Redmi Note 9T, due to lapse on Saturday. So wait. But almost on cue, I received another message from the seller.
Where am I?
When we went to Bannockburn this morning, I showed Yvonne how to find a route on Google Maps and download it to her phone. But 2 km after we left it still showed ?Searching for GPS?. Huh? My phone worked fine. Reboot, no change. Go to GPS logger on her phone. Working normally, and had been for some time. But when we returned to Google Maps, it, too, knew where we were. What's going on here? It suggests some software issue if one app can access the device and the other can't. Somehow this phone was not the best choice. And the replacement that I ordered over a week ago seems to be vapourware at best and fraudware at the worst: after I refused to close the case until I receive the refund and replacement, my seller (mobileciti_estore) has gone quiet again.
Gmail's idea of spam
Since tidying up my Gmail account a couple of weeks ago, I have received less spam. And for once the mobile phone connection helps: though I don't read mail on a phone (how could you?), it informs me when something goes into spam. Today I found 8 messages: The interesting thing is that they are all, without exception, mail from a Google mailing list. Will they ever get their act together?
Animated images in web pages
I wanted to show the wobble in yesterday's article about the ALDI table grill. How do you do that? How about an animated GIF? Off looking, and came up with a couple of likely-sounding options for doing them online: Adobe and Convertio MP4 to GIF converter. OK, upload. Adobe hung. While waiting for it, looked at Convertio. Yes, it did its job and gave me a GIF that I couldn't find a way to display. I'm sure I would have found one, but the 7 second clip had blown out to 54 MB. That's far too much to put in a web page.
Flaky Internet link
In the evening I noticed significant performance issues with our Internet link. It proved to be high packet loss. Evening overload? No, whatever it was lasted through the night. Fortunately it was gone by morning. That's twelve hours with packet loss over 25%, and the third and worst such problem in the last month, after 21 January and 22 January. Hopefully they'll ensure that it doesn't happen again.
teevee problems
As usual, my migration from teevee (the old TV computer) to tiwi (the new one) has stalled, mainly because of some strange issue with bash input. But things seem to be getting worse. This morning's backup showed: g_vfs_done():ada0p4[READ(offset=3919478784, length=98304)]error = 5 (ada0:ahcich1:0:0:0): READ_FPDMA_QUEUED. ACB: 60 40 e8 cf f4 40 07 00 00 00 00 00 (ada0:ahcich1:0:0:0): RES: 41 40 e8 cf f4 40 07 00 00 40 00 g_vfs_done():ada0p4[READ(offset=3919478784, length=32768)]error = 5 pid 51923 (firefox), jid 0, uid 1004: exited on signal 5 swap_pager: indefinite wait buffer: bufobj: 0, blkno: 717040, size: 32768 ...
Answering Android phones, attempt 9312
Calling Yvonne on her phone is never easy. But today, it seems, she ended up with a different display. It should look like this: But, she says, instead of the green phone symbol at the bottom she got a red one. Clearly she can't have imagined that, and I thought I saw something similar on my phone. Crossed ?wires??
dischord backup
So: I have identified 345 GB of data in \\Windows\\Temp on dischord. Some of the files were 8 years old. Doesn't Microsoft ever tidy up after itself? Can I just remove them all? Consensus on IRC was ?yes?. But I was terrified by the thought of having to recover the thing if something went wrong. Time for another backup? Moved the current one away from the almost full /dump and tried again. Yes, this backup was smaller, helped by the presence of even older partial backups on /dump. OK, remove the files in \\Temp. Yes!
Disservice Victoria, part 2
After the pain with Service Victoria, discovered that my phone performance was terrible, to the point that it hardly reacted at all. It's not the first time I've had this, and Yvonne's phone has performed so badly that I have decided to replace it. But she uses Service Victoria all the time. Could it be to blame? How can I tell? And the old Microsoft trick of rebooting doesn't necessarily help, because the app gets restarted! Still, today it was a lot better after a reboot that requited holding down the power button for something like 20 seconds. Of course, this is just a suspicion.
Disservice Victoria, part 1
Yvonne is thinking of travelling interstate soon. What evidence will she need? The vaccination certificate is in her phone, and now (presumably coincidentally after I suggested it in this diary) it even displays a QR code. But what does the QR code say? Sorry, can't tell you that. You'll need to scan it in. OK, here's the ?certificate? and the scan results: So yes, it's me, or maybe somebody else called Gregory L.
ANZ: Déja vu
It's been 12 March 1997 almost exactly 25 years since I opened my account with ANZ bank. Times have changed, but today Yvonne received an unexpected parcel in the mail: What's that? A pseudo-random number generator. We've seen this before, 25 years ago. It changes the number every 60 seconds (used to be 30) and can be used as a response to a challenge by ANZ to prove that you have the device in your possession. Isn't that a little old-fashioned? Yes: the new way of doing things is with your mobile phone.
A new phone for Yvonne: done!
What new phone for Yvonne? By chance today I saw a Xiaomi Redmi Note 9T going for only $299, about $100 less than normal. Problem: it's grey. But after some discussion with Yvonne, we agreed to buy it. Looking a the comparisons, such as I could find, it seems to have marginally better performance and other specs than my Redmi 9T (why do they have so many models with almost identical names?), potentially offset by having ?only? 4 GB of RAM. So I ordered that.
Tidying up Microsoft
My /dump file system is nearly full: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/14) ~ 382 -> df -i /dump Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on /dev/da2p1 1,907,067 1,720,304 34,197 98% 55,019 2,112,787 3% /dump === root@eureka (/dev/pts/14) ~ 383 -> du -sc /dump/* | sort -n 1 /dump/Iam 9373 /dump/tiwi-FreeBSD 18293 /dump/eureso-FreeBSD 33559 /dump/teevee-FreeBSD 44264 /dump/dereel-FreeBSD 110932 /dump/euroa 163533 /dump/distress-Microsoft 594567 /dump/dischord-Microsoft 745756 /dump/lagoon-FreeBSD 1720273 total All values are in megabytes.
DMARC? Google? Spam?
Strange mail today: Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2022 15:59:59 -0800 From: noreply-dmarc-[email protected] To: dam-[email protected] Subject: Report domain: lemis.com Submitter: google.com Report-ID: 12348256022164262136 Spam? It was sent to my DMARC mail address. But ZIP attachments are suspect at the best of times. The headers suggest that it's kosher: From noreply-dmarc-[email protected] Fri Feb 11 22:02:15 2022 ... Received: by mail-qt1-f202.google.com with SMTP id a6-20020ac844a6000000b002cf3968d32aso6528910qto.1 for <dam-[email protected]>; Fri, 11 Feb 2022 03:02:14 -0800 (PST) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=google.com; s=20210112; OK.
date(1) through the ages
The current man page for date(1) on FreeBSD doesn't even mention /etc/localtime, which I consider to be essential for any system. And the mention of tzdata is cursory at best. In addition, there are remnants of older methods of telling local time: -d sets the DST flag in some kernel structure, and -t sets local time as a negative value in minutes (so UTC-5 would be 300). And then there's timed(8), which should be obsolete since the introduction of NTP. The man page for timed notes that it will be removed from base in FreeBSD 13.0, but there are still hooks in date.
Aussie responds
Mail from Aussie Broadband support today, a response to the report I made only 17 days ago: I've taken a look at your service and ran a Service Health Summary check to see what could be the issue. I cant seem to see any issue at the moment, if you are still experiencing issue with the service please give our team a call so we can further investigate the issue. No indication that he had even read my report, which contained: $ dig pkg.freebsd.org @202.142.142.142 ; <<>> DiG 9.10.4-P3 <<>> pkg.freebsd.org @202.142.142.142 ;; global options: +cmd ;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached This has been happening at least since 17 January.
Wikipedia on drugs?
While looking at GUID Partition Table on Wikipedia today, found this: The GUID Partition Table (GPT) is a world boss found in southeastern Azshara. The blue wyrm Azuregos is a trusted lieutenant of the aspect Malygos. As a blue dragon, he is incredibly interested in magical artifacts and their protection. For this reason he guards the ancient night elf Ruins of Eldarath, in modern day Azshara. Vandalism, of course, and I fixed it.
Configuring DMARC
How difficult can it be to configure DMARC for my mail server? That depends on whom you ask. But I suppose I can risk it, and in the end I added a pretty meaningless record: _dmarc IN TXT "v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:dam-[email protected]" Sent a message to Gmail to see what happened: ARC-Authentication-Results: i=1; mx.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: domain of [email protected] designates 45.32.70.18 as permitted sender) [email protected]; dmarc=pass (p=NONE sp=NONE dis=NONE) header.from=lemis.com Received: from lax.lemis.com (www.lemis.com.
distress: rwho?
Why is rwho no longer running on distress? Off to look for it, and discovered that this was not the first time that I had had problems with it. But today was different. Searching there showed me a program RWHODINSTALL.EXE which, well, installs rwhod (Why does Microsoft need a search box when it has a search path in the ?shell??) . This is clearly the same one that I installed a long time ago. Run it, answer the questions, and it starts. How do I get it to start automatically when I reboot? I don't know, but when I rebooted later it didn't restart.
The trigger for the Microsoft issues?
Only later did I discover that we had been off the net for a considerable part of the night: Start time End time Duration Badness from to (seconds) 1644415823 1644423575 7752 0.017 # 10 February 2022 01:10:23 10 February 2022 03:19:35 1644426258 1644437658 11400 1.342 # 10 February 2022 04:04:18 10 February 2022 07:14:18 1644437903 1644437973 70 14.694 # 10 February 2022 07:18:23 10 February 2022 07:19:33 Timestamp Outages Duration Availability Date (seconds) 1644411600 3 19222 77.75% # 10 February 2022 5?
New SSD for distress
OK, since I've got this far, time to finally install the SSD that I bought for this purpose over 4 months ago. That's relatively simple: both the old disk and the SSD are 250 GB in size, so I should be able to just copy the partitions. Oh. 250 GB isn't always 250 GB. My image was: -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 250,059,350,016 10 Feb 13:02 /Photos/distress And the SSD has 250,059,309,056 bytes, 40,960 bytes or 80 sectors less. What can I do? First, look at the partition table.
More Microsoft update pain
Now that I had a backup of the disk, tried to reboot from the old one to see what happened. Once again the boot behaviour was different. It spent an inordinate amount of time checking things and producing strange messages: Working on features 64% Don't turn off your computer. ... Your system is restarting due to a configuration task (reboot) We couldn't complete the updates Undoing changes Don't turn off your computer But finally it finished and came up apparently none the worse for wear.
Recovering Microsoft with FreeBSD USB stick
Once I had distress down, booted from the memory stick that # ifconfig em0 192.109.197.172 # cat > /etc/resolv.conf search lemis.com nameserver 192.109.197.137 ^D # mkdir /Photos Photos: read-only file system Huh? I've just created a file on this file system. Why can't I create a directory? OK, is there a mount point /mnt? Yes: # mount eureka:/Photos /mnt # dd if=/dev/ada0 of=/mnt/distress.image bs=128k And how about that, that worked.
distress: distress
Yvonne wanted to process photos today, which means access to distress, our Microsoft ?Windows? 10 box. No reply. Checked it: yes, it was not responding. Down since some time yesterday. Find cables and connect a monitor. It had crashed. Let the recovery thing do what it wanted, then reboot. ?Windows had to back out an update. Click for more details?. But then it changed its mind and no longer offered the details. What update? The one that you, idiot, insisted on applying? What does "Settings/Windows Update" say? OK, that looks like it survived?this time. It also offered me an upgrade: I suppose that makes sense.
How to answer a phone
I still can't get my head around the user-unfriendliness of modern mobile phones. I've been using phones for as long as I can recall, nearly 70 years, and in the past I have (almost) never had difficulty answering an incoming call. With the old-style phones it was simple: lift the handset (when it was really a handset and not a complete phone) from the cradle. Later wireless phones came onto the scene, and initially you had to not just pick them up, but also press a button. They learnt, though, and now most phones have the option to answer as soon at you take it off the cradle.
Olympus USB cables
Yesterday I took 37 photos with the Olympus E-PM2. And once again I had difficulty getting the computer to recognize the camera: Feb 8 10:13:47 dereel kernel: usbd_req_re_enumerate: addr=25, set address failed! (USB_ERR_IOERROR, ignored) Feb 8 10:13:57 dereel kernel: usbd_setup_device_desc: getting device descriptor at addr 25 failed, USB_ERR_TIMEOUT Feb 8 10:13:58 dereel kernel: usbd_req_re_enumerate: addr=25, set address failed! (USB_ERR_IOERROR, ignored) Feb 8 10:14:07 dereel kernel: usbd_setup_device_desc: getting device descriptor at addr 25 failed, USB_ERR_TIMEOUT Feb 8 10:14:08 dereel kernel: usb_alloc_device: Failure selecting configuration index 0:USB_ERR_TIMEOUT, port 8, addr 25 (ignored) Feb 8 10:14:08 dereel kernel: ugen0.4: <OLYMPUS E-PM2> at usbus0 Feb 8 10:14:08 dereel kernel: ugen0.4: <OLYMPUS E-PM2> at usbus0 (disconnected) What's wrong with that view?
Yet another mobile phone?
It looks as if Yvonne's Xiaomi Redmi 9A mobile phone was not the best choice. Yes, it works, but it's glacially slow on some things. Starting the camera took for ever, round 20 seconds. It was faster after booting, only 5 seconds, but starting Google Lens took at least that long again. It's almost enough to go to sleep. Why? Is it because it has ?only? 2 GB of memory? I'm reminded of the first edition of ?Installing and Running FreeBSD? (coincidentally almost exactly 26 years ago): To install FreeBSD, you will need a computer with an Intel 386 or better CPU, which should have at least 5 MB of memory.
Time lapse photos
Taking the time lapse photos of my Mirabilis jalapa is simple: my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II has a time lapse feature. But it doesn't have a power input! Why did they do that? The old Olympus E-30 has one, conveniently with a special connector which means that no normal power supply will fit. As it is, once the battery is exhausted, no photos. This sequence took over 12 hours, longer than I can expect a battery to last. So instead I did it the old-fashioned way: turn on the camera, take a photo, turn off again, wait 20 minutes, repeat.
Gmail again
Yesterday I came to the conclusion that Gmail wouldn't accept mail from dunham.org based on the SPF RR for lemis.com. OK, add it to the dunham.org zone and try again. Partial success! Some messages were accepted, others weren't. Well, that's what Jerry Dunham said. I saw: Feb 7 00:39:09 lax postfix/cleanup[10407]: 8D15A28116: message-id=<[email protected]> Feb 7 00:39:09 lax postfix/qmgr[68371]: 8D15A28116: from=<[email protected]>, size=707, nrcpt=3 (queue active) Feb 7 00:39:10 lax postfix/smtp[10408]: 8D15A28116: to=<[email protected]>, relay=mx0.lemis.com[121.200.11.253]:25, delay=1.2, delays=0.31/0/0.55/0.38, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 Ok: +queued as 75A36263596) Feb 7 00:39:11 lax postfix/smtp[10411]: 8D15A28116: to=<[email protected]>, relay=gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[142.250.141.27]:25, delay=1.9, delays=0.31/0.01/0.13/1.5, dsn=2.0.0, +status=sent (250 2.0.0 OK 1644194351 l14si9486344plh.157 - gsmtp) Feb 7 00:39:11 lax postfix/smtp[10411]: 8D15A28116: to=<[email protected]>, relay=gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[142.250.141.27]:25, delay=1.9, delays=0.31/0.01/0.13/1.5, dsn=2.0.0, +status=sent (250 2.0.0 OK 1644194351 l14si9486344plh.157 - gsmtp) Feb 7 00:39:11 lax postfix/qmgr[68371]: 8D15A28116: removed A bit of searching on Jerry's part.
Chasing the Gmail problem
So where do I go now to get Gmail to accept my messages? Clearly others have been there before. How about Ozlabs? Looking there I see: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/33) ~ 28 -> nslookup -q=txt ozlabs.org Non-authoritative answer: ozlabs.org text = "google-site-verification=8kB0wYsJZGUvxVgogn3N2YWeclxb2AfNy0Pveng0sFE" ozlabs.org text = "v=spf1 include:_spf.ozlabs.org ?all" OK, sfr has also been forced to register with Google, and he has an SPF RR, but no DMARC. I can do that, too. In fact, I used to. From the zone file: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/14) /etc/namedb 325 -> blame ../namedb/db.lemis.com | less ...
Google giveth, Google takes away
I've been quite happy with my Chinese translations on my mobile phone. Good Google! But today I got a message from Jerry Dunham: Gmail has decided that e-mail from dunham.org is "unsolicited" (spam) and rejecting anything I send to anyone who has a Gmail address, including Linda. And how about that, my attempt sending mail was rejected with <[email protected]>: host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[142.250.141.27] said: 550-5.7.1 [45.32.70.18 12] Our system has detected that this message is 550-5.7.1 likely unsolicited mail. To reduce the amount of spam sent to Gmail, 550-5.7.1 this message has been blocked.
Chinese translation: fixed!
My surprisingly poor results with translating Chinese yesterday puzzled me. How could the translation be that bad? But of course while writing up my diary I had another chance: instead of looking directly at the book, read from the screen: And that was a completely different matter. Here step 2 in English, yesterday's translation and today's translation: 2. On a flat slice of fish sprinkle a little bit of cornstarch. Lay a few pieces of shredded green onion, ginger, ham, mushroom on the fish and roll up.
The power of diaries
Keeping this diary has one advantage that I had never envisaged: people who read it frequently come up with solutions for problems that I mention. Today there were two such cases. First, Michel Lustig has followed up one of my complaints about CNAV, that they didn't give a valid phone number for calls from outside France. But it's available on this page: +33 9 71 10 39 60 for all regions. And then Callum Gibson came up with at least a partial solution for yesterday's issue with reading Chinese. I don't need no steenking app! It's already a function of Google Lens.
Reading Chinese
It's becoming more and more important to be able to read Chinese. What does this mean? The bottom symbol is transliterated as miàn, often written mein (for some reason) and means noodles. But the rest? Surely there must be some program out there that can read Chinese and translate it for me. Yes, it seems. Of course, they're mainly apps for mobile phones. OK, that might even make sense: point your phone at something, take a photo and translate it. Read this comparison of 5 apps and decided that Pleco looked best. Installed it and got caught up in a maze of twisty little apps, all different, none of which appeared to be prepared to do what I expected.
Printing photos
We've decided to print this photo for Helena Mir?i?: I haven't printed photos for years, but Helena is not a techie, and we think that she will appreciate it. But where do we print them? A Google search had such a low signal to noise ratio that I almost despaired. But then Big W offered an 8"×10" print for $2.75. We can do that. No we can't. I couldn't find my way round the web site. I had to create albums, add a user name, select their choice of password (Upper case, lower case, punctuation, d1g1t, at least 14 characters long), and then find that the page hung.
More examination of the DxO bug
Finally found some time to examine what the new 5.1.3 version of DxO PhotoLab does. It's really confusing. There are four selections: If I select none of them, it seems that I get everything. If I select ?images not generated by PhotoLab? it eliminates the images generated by PhotoLab, which at least makes sense. If I also select ?images not generated by PhotoLab? it displays them again. If I deselect ?images not generated by PhotoLab?, it displays only the output images. All this would make sense if they were alone, and if nothing were displayed if nothing is selected.
DxO does it again
It has been six weeks since DxO released a new version of PhotoLab with a bug that displays the output files even when told not to. Here the black images in the strip at the bottom are the output files, although ?Images generated by DxO PhotoLab? has not been selected: And it has taken this long for me to convince the support team that it is wrong, and they promised to fix it. That sounds straightforward enough: just go back to the way it was.
Aussie Broadband support channels, again
Sent off a problem report to Aussie Broadband today, describing the issues with resolving the freebsd.org zone. The answer I got still puzzles me: Thanks for shooting us an email about your issue. If it's urgent, we suggest either: * giving our friendly Australian team a call on 1300 880 905 (8am to midnight Australian Eastern Time), OR * logging a fault via the MyAussie app or portal OK, it's not urgent. But how can it be easier for them to take any real problem report by phone?
Phone holder
The call with Dan gave me the opportunity to try out my new phone stand. It worked well, up to a point. I had hoped to position it so that my screens were in the background, something like my home page photo: But no, says Dan, that doesn't expose well. All you see is the screens with my silhouette in the foreground. On the other hand, where do I mount it? The best place is probably at half height in front of one of the screens, not the most convenient position. We're off to Briagolong tomorrow, and I'll use the phone to navigate there.
BSDCan 2022
Video call from Dan Langille today, the father of BSDCan. I'm one of the committee, and he wanted to discuss the option of whether there should be a face-to-face BSDCan this year, or whether it should be completely online. The real issue with planning face-to-face is that you don't know whether it won't have to be canceled at the last minute, putting a lot of people out of pocket. On the other hand, we haven't found a way to incorporate the hallway track into an online conference. An interesting detail that I didn't know: Allan Jude runs a company called ScaleEngine.
Another bloody NBN outage!
Just to complicate my work on tiwi, we had another National Broadband Network outage today, over 35 minutes. I wish they'd get their act together.
More work on tiwi
Somehow I haven't found time lately to work on my tiwi upgrade. I know why: this time I really want to do a really clean installation. And I have already betrayed my intentions. While trying to understand why key combinations like m-f no longer work correctly with bash, dumped the environment variables from tiwi and teevee and compared them. The results were suprising: PYTHONSTARTUP=/home/grog/.pythonrc.py +REAL_EMAIL='Greg Lehey <[email protected]>' RSYNC_RSH=ssh === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/6) ~ 20 -> grep REAL_ .* .bitkeeper:export REAL_EMAIL='Greg Lehey <[email protected]>' Where did that come from?
Goodbye PuTTY
Configuring and debugging PuTTY is a real pain! Configuration appears to require discovering and entering a maze of twisty little passages, all different, and when it fails, there appears to be no way to debug it. It even terminates the session, so that you have to go back to the start. So where can I debug? On the server side I can set up a debug server along the normal one: === root@lax (/dev/pts/3) /home/jdunham/.ssh 98 -> /usr/sbin/sshd -p 2222 -d -d 2>&1 | tee -a sshauth And yes, it generates a lot of output, over 100 lines.
The pain of PuTTY
More fun with PuTTY today, without coming to much in the way of success. What I have established: PuTTY starts up with a window titled ?PuTTY configuration?. The first window (?Session?) allows you to set host name, port and some obsolete parameters like serial lines. It's important to Save the configuration with a name. But that's only part of the configuration, of course. Then you need to climb down the tree, expand SSH (press + to the left) and select Auth: The important thing is the name of the private key.
Understanding encryption
I still haven't got my mail configuration for Jerry Dunham sorted out. Why? There seem to be a number of issues: I can't work out how to configure postfix correctly, and that is at least partially due to my inadequate knowledge of current cryptography software. I can apply configurations from a number of places, including Stephen Rothwell's configuration files for Ozlabs, but they're all different, and I want to understand what I'm doing. Then there's the question of web site cryptography. Cam I use the same certificates? Should I use the same certificates? I can't get the answer to that question from postfix setup tutorials or configurations.
Unexpected spam
Unusual spam message in my mail this morning: 841 N 22-12-2021 To linklist@lem ( 86) carsonjaxxonc503@gma N Seek supplier cooperation Sent via Gmail. Nothing unusual in that. But look at the To: address: [email protected]. What's that? One of my hundreds of mail aliases, allocated so that on occasions such as this I can just delete them. OK, into virtual to look for it. Not there! Checking the headers shows that it was delivered locally (the address wasn't rewritten at the external MX): X-Original-To: [email protected] Delivered-To: [email protected] Received: from lax.lemis.com (www.lemis.com [45.32.70.18]) by eureka.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 044A62635BE for <[email protected]>; Wed, 22 Dec 2021 17:57:25 +1100 (AEDT) Some searching took me ...
Installing Postfix from scratch
So how do I configure postfix to do what I want? What do I even want? The immediate issue is to accept SMTPS so that Jerry Dunham can relay mail through one of my external servers. But it seems that SMTPS is a crock, and STARTTLS is the correct way to go. Jerry uses Pegasus Mail. Why not install it and see whether it can be configured to use STARTTLS? Did that?does it ever look dated, with window decorations from the last millennium. But I couldn't find the configuration windows that Jerry had shown me in screen shots. Put that on the Tuit queue and see what I can do with configuring postfix.
Downgrading DxO
DxO don't seem to intend to fix PhotoLab in the near future. At my request, they sent me a link to download the previous version?from an external server! Did that, and the installer failed, because it doesn't cater for reversion to older versions. Yes, I could remove the new version and reinstall. And what happens to my settings? Sent them a message asking for a safe procedure. Why don't they just go and fix their bugs?
Dereel upgrade
Yesterday's build on dereel ran with no obvious problems. How about the ports? Tried that and got the obligatory repeat and (second time round) packages to be removed: Installed packages to be REMOVED: ilmbase: 2.5.5 openldap-client: 2.4.58 py37-cairo: 1.18.1_1,1 py37-gobject3: 3.38.0 None of those appear to be important, and the system ran fine after the update. The sting could be in the tail, of course.
Ghosts of the past
Email from Red Energy today, confirming yesterday's changes. All as you'd expect? No, they included a ?billing address? as Kleins Road, which we left nearly 7 years ago. And it's not the address in the bills that we still receive on paper. Where does it come from? Are they trying to emulate Telstra, who reinstated the last-but-one owner of the Kleins Road house in November 2008, and who at that time hadn't lived there for at least 12 years?
Red Energy fixes web site
Electricity bill today, including an indication that I could save up to $59.02 per year by changing to a new ?plan? (they mean tariff). Yes, I've seen this before, and grumbled about the fact that I had to call up people to do what should be on the web site. Paying by direct debit was another similar issue. Surprise! They've fixed it. I was able to do both the change in tariff and setting direct debit online. They even thought about the current bill: yes, they can do that by direct debit too.
US whiplash
A few days ago I grumbled about US American usage of the word ?whiplash? in a non-sense that I didn't understand: Explanation from Jerry Dunham: "Whiplash" refers to getting jerked one way, then the other, and is applied to non-physical cases as well as physical. Here at the IRS, the Powers That Be sometimes change the rules by which we operate, then two weeks later reverse direction, giving us all "whiplash". It's a rather lame use of the word. As he says, ?rather lame?.
System upgrade, next tiny step
Why should I configure postfix on ffm? I can do it much more comfortably locally, and in the process maybe get some progress with my local system upgrade. The system on eureka is now over 6 years old, and again the FreeBSD Ports Collection doesn't want to know. That's why I brought up a second system, dereel, so long ago that I can't find definitive records. The real stumbling block, apart from unexplained problems setting up X, was that I still don't know how to split the load between eureka and dereel. But gradually I'm coming to the conclusion that dereel should be the server and Internet gateway, and eureka should be my own workstation.
Email: Coming into the 21st century
Jerry Dunham is still agonizing with his change from a proprietary, now-dead email supplier, which I first reported three months ago. As I commented at the time, I had anticipated exactly this event 24 years ago in ?The Complete FreeBSD?: It's certainly a very good idea to have your own domain name. As time goes on, your email address will become more and more important. If you get a mail address like [email protected], and Flybynight goes broke, or you decide to change to a different ISP, your mail address is gone, and you have to explain that to everybody who might want to contact you.
Eliminating duplicate files
I've been trying to organize my video files better for some time now. It's not easy, Currently I have about 12 TB of files, about 70,000 of them. Many of these files are duplicates. I can use mklinks to recognize them if they're in the same place in a different hierarchy, and if they have the same name. Under those circumstances, it's trivial to remove the duplicates, at a rate of about a terabyte per minute But what happens if the names are different, either of the directories or of the files themselves?
DxO debugging
Reply from DxO PhotoLab support today: Seth, Dec 16, 2021, 5:54 PM GMT+1 Thank you for writing. We just released an update to DxO PhotoLab 5 today, version 5.1.1. Please download and install it to see if the issue you reported is corrected. OK, I was expecting a quick reaction. Installed the thing, and... no change whatsoever: Well, maybe.
More mobile phone insights
My new-found use of WhatsApp has brought a lot of issues with it. Firstly, why did Yvonne run out of credit yesterday? ALDIMobile's web site is pretty terrible, and it took me a while to find what I wanted. But they have an app, so I installed that. Surprise, surprise: it works much better than the web site. I can see my credit instantly, and there's also a provision to recharge via the app, though it's presumably not much help if there's no credit. But for once it's less pain than a web site. And then there's the reliability. While in town I tried to call Yvonne, but failed.
More network relay issues
Call from a Greg in the Los Angeles area just before breakfast today. He has no fewer than three different Ethernet accessible relay boards, and like me he has had trouble with the documentation. I wasn't able to help him much, but he promised to send me email both to confirm the discussion (he got my mobile phone number from my home page, but apparently didn't read the ?Use only if I tell you that it will be answered?. He hasn't sent a confirmatory email yet, so I'm not sure what his surname is, just something ending in -owski.
WhatsApp in the early morning
Just after getting up this morning, Yvonne's phone rang. Gabi Reichert with a WhatsApp video call. Yvonne was in the shower, so I went to take a look. Somehow it appeared without any action on my part, and of course I was visible; no chance of just ignoring it. Had a bit of a chat with Gabi, during which Piccola showed her face. And of course I could show her to Gabi. And the dogs? OK, into the bedroom to show the dogs, but not stark-naked Yvonne. That's interesting, though. A video call on a mobile phone is not just good to see whom you're talking to; Gabi now has a somewhat better idea of what our house and (especially) animals look like.
WhatsApp in practice
Shopping day today, so prepared Yvonne to use WhatsApp video calls to discuss what to buy. With a bit of trouble we managed to get it to work before she left, and she called me from town to ask about whether we needed a cucumber. No, but this time I was able to show her how much we had left. Potentially she could have called and showed me what she wanted to buy. But then the location services failed. We have location tracking enabled, so we can see where the other is on Google Maps. And long after she called me, she was still shown to be at the Fruit Shack.
What? Sap?
Gabi Reichert has fallen in love with WhatsApp, and she uses it instead of email. Why? Now we have at least four incompatible ways to communicate text: email, as God intended, but also SMS, Facebook and now WhatsApp. The last three are particularly incompatible, and I don't see that they offer any particular advantage. Yes, Facebook displays (one) image more easily than email, but that's a question of the email interface. It's particularly useless for multiple images, which get stored separately from the text that refers to them. So why WhatsApp? I have no idea. Yvonne really doesn't want to use it, but she doesn't want to upset Gabi either, so in the end she tried using it.
Understanding DxO bugs
Writing up yesterday's problems with DxO PhotoLab was harder than I thought. Yes, the latest version now displays the images that it generates, even if told not to, but it's not that simple. I still haven't worked out what is wrong, but changing the selection has little to do with what it displays. I shouldn't try; this is just stuff that should work, but I feel obliged to give as accurate an error report as possible.
Documenting the E-300
For some reason I spent a large part of today writing the article on the Olympus E-300. Why? I didn't do anything like as much when I got the E-330. But now I really have bought all the cameras I intended to buy, and I have a good selection of Olympus DSLRs to compare: the E-1, the E-300, the E-330 and the E-30. So it's probably time to spend a bit of time comparing them. That won't be immediately.
More DxO pain
The first Olympus E-300 images were in JPEG format, which brought out an interesting bug in the latest update of DxO PhotoLab (coincidentally installed yesterday). They have obfuscated the menu which selects which images to display, by removing part of the description. And somehow they have broken it in the process: This is my normal selection: ?RAW? (they mean raw) and ?RGB? (which they think includes JPEG), but not the images generated by PhotoLab. But now it displays the generated images, even if they're not selected!
Planning permit amendment request
Mail from Robyn Wemyss today with the correct form to fill out for the amendment to the planning permit for the shed. It's in PDF format, and intended to be filled out and returned. I recall having edited PDF documents with some difficulty in the past, but all I could find in my diary was 7 years ago, maybe not coincidentally filling out a planning permit amendment form for this house. And on that occasion I capitulated. OK, how hard can it be? Free PDF editors for Microsoft ?Windows?? Plenty of them, but this one stood out: Download, install.
Australia Post tracking, again
I'm expecting two parcels in the post, and I've been tracking them with Australia Post. I've grumbled about their tracking system in the past, I've answered their frequent surveys, but if anything they're getting worse. One parcel has been waiting at Adelaide airport since 2 December, but Australia Post is optimistic: Still in Adelaide, but it will be here some time between three days ago and now! They're not so optimistic about the other one, though: Another 3 days at best.
Gone today, here tomorrow
Somehow I'm accumulating more and more videos. Originally I had wanted to limit it to 4 TB, then 6 TB, and now teevee has an almost full 8 TB disk, and free space is dwindling. I had already moved a lot of stuff out onto a spare 2 TB external disk. But then I found the old 6 TB backup disk with stuff from 2½ years ago on it. Is there anything worth keeping there? Before I delete it, I should check whether I have it on the current 8 TB backup disk. I have a program for that, mklinks, which despite the (historical) name will also remove duplicate files when asked nicely.
More Android fun
Why did Termux fail yesterday? Clearly it worked for Juha Kupiainen. Tried the old Microsoft ?solution? and deinstalled and reinstalled it. Yes, now it works, and I was able to install openssh. What port is it listening on? From /etc/services 22, of course: ssh 22/sctp #Secure Shell Login ssh 22/tcp #Secure Shell Login ssh 22/udp #Secure Shell Login But this is Android, and it doesn't do things like that. Juha told me: 8022. OK, ssh thither and be asked for Yet Another Password for grog.
Communicating with Android, yet again
Reading back through my diary over the years, I discover that I have been suffering from Android for round 10 years. It hasn't got much easier, but I'm not ranting as much as I used to: clearly it won't go away soon. But I continue to be amazed at just how bad it is. Why can't I set custom ringtones on enzian, Yvonne's phone? I can set any of the standard ones. An obvious workaround attempt would be to find where they're stored and add my own ringtone, in the hope that the format is the same. Simple, right? Search the storage for the directory with the ringtones and copy mine there.
Laziness with loading
Yesterday I noted Daniel Nebdal's suggestion to use the loading=lazy attribute for the images in my web pages. Why didn't I implement it immediately? My web scripts are a jumble of stuff that have Just Growed over the last 15 years, and there are so many corner cases that I'm afraid to change anything. But today I took a look and discovered that it wasn't that hard after all. In fact, it made things a whole lot simpler: --- php/includes/onephoto.php 2021/07/11 03:21:50 1.307 +++ php/includes/onephoto.php 2021/12/08 00:30:49 @@ -1509,25 +1509,12 @@ - if ($islazy && !
Fixing web pages?
It's been some time since I changed the basic layout of these web pages, round 10 years: I limited the paragraph width to what is normal in print, and added lazy loading for the images. What is definitely missing is the upgrade to HTML5: I'm still delivering pages in XHTML. From time to time I think of that and look at the effort involved?473 diary pages alone to fix. Today I received mail from Daniel Nebdal, who finds my lazy loading sub-optimal. It seems that there's an alternative: Assuming a browser that supports it, you can add load="lazy" to an img tag, and it will only request the image when the browser thinks it's about to scroll into view.
Understanding Academia
On the face of it, Academia is a serious academic web site. But I have already noted that they seem to be less than thorough in their checking of the documents that they offer, and their continual discovery of references to me (please sign up to see them) makes me doubt their real intentions. A few months ago they came up with something sensible: ?Are you the Greg Lehey who wrote The Complete FreeBSD??. Yes, sure, so I updated my ?profile? accordingly. It took them a while to ask me to upload the document. Again, it's available on the web, so why not?
Perfectly Clear eyes
Finally got round to downloading the free SharkPixel's Eyes ?LOOK? for ?Perfectly Clear?. It has to be done with the ?Apps Manager?, making things difficult by having to scroll through a long list. And when it was installed, I couldn't find it! Ha ha, not a LOOK at all: it's a preset. And in fact it doesn't work badly.
Time zone strangenesses
The FreeBSD-questions mailing list seems dead, but occasionally end users send email somewhere. Today it was on FreeBSD-hackers. Somebody in Turkey had chosen a time zone file /usr/share/zoneinfo/Etc/GMT+3, but it didn't quite do what he expected: # ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Etc/GMT+3 /etc/localtime # date Sat Dec 4 03:48:50 -03 2021 Why that? And why did he use GMT+3 instead of /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Istanbul? My answer proved to be off the mark, but Derek Schrock came up with the explanation, from /usr/src/contrib/tzdata/etcetera:: # Be consistent with POSIX TZ settings in the Zone names, # even though this is the opposite of what many people expect.
Top posting: barking up the wrong tree?
I got a reply to the message that I mentioned yesterday, once again quoting the entire history. And once again there was no evidence that she had read anything: Date: Fri, 3 Dec 2021 13:28:43 +0100 From: Penny Kling <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Guest Post Request Hello. Thanks for your reply. I would like to publish an article on your site. I have several projects on different topics. I would like to know the terms of publication on your site to begin with. Could you help me with this? My answer was as one might expect: Penny, I don't know how to get through to you.
Net outage of a different kind
The Bureau of Meteorology had warned of heavy rain and thunderstorms today, and they hit us like I have seldom seen before. In a little over 45 minutes, the temperature dropped from 33.2° to 17.0°, a drop of 16.2°. And in the 62 seconds between 15:29:48 and 15:30:50, the temperature dropped by 3.4°, probably the biggest I have ever seen: +----------+--------------+ | time | outside_temp | +----------+--------------+ | 14:55:54 | 33.2 | | 14:56:55 | 33.1 | ... | 15:26:40 | 28 | | 15:27:45 | 27.7 | | 15:28:47 | 27 | | 15:29:48 | 25.7 | | 15:30:50 | 22.3 | | 15:31:51 | ...
1970s supercomputers
From time to time I compare modern computing devices to the CDC 7600. That article contains: From about 1969 to 1975, the CDC 7600 was generally regarded as the fastest computer in the world, except for specialized units. And a few months ago I had compared it to my new Xiaomi Redmi 9T. 580 megaflops compared to 8.7 gigaflops for the phone. But the Wikipedia page said only 10 megaflops. Why? Today I finally found the reference manual. First, how many functional units?
Perfectly Clear replies
Into the office this morning to find the status my query to ?Perfectly Clear?: 15 hours and not seen. OK, not much hope there?I thought. But later when I looked at it again I got: OK, that looks like a useful answer. But why did it take so long? And what's the time (?12:02 am?) ? As I understand it, they're in Alberta, which observes US Mountain Time.
The dangers of ?top posting?
From time to time I receive messages from people wanting to write a guest post in this diary. Clearly that's not appropriate, because this is my diary describing what I have been doing. That's why I have this at the end of every page: 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 still get these requests, and I answer with a reference to what the person should already have read.
Perfectly Clear limitations
My photo pages include popups to show the most important exposure details. For example, this photo of the heron recently was cropped. What was the effective focal length? It's in the Exif data that I print out: Date taken: Saturday, 27 November 2021, 8:59:41 Exposure: 1/320 sec, f/4.8 (EV 12.8), 200/24 ISO Camera: Olympus OM-D E-M1 Lens: Leica DG Vario-Elmar 100-400 mm f/4.0-6.3 Focal length: 173.0 mm (full frame equivalent: 346 mm) Focus: S-AF+MF 13.275 m (12.87 - 13.71 m) Crop factor: 0.168 (0.46 horizontal, 0.36 vertical) Effective FL: 404 mm (FF: 808 mm) Field of view: 2.6° horizontal, 1.6° vertical, 3.1° diagonal Meter mode: ESP Program AE Stabilization: Lens Size: 2119 x ...
Perfectly Clear: Ashampoo substitute
The photos of the insect nest were surprisingly successful, given the viewpoint and the distance. Put them through ?Perfectly Clear? with great advantage. I still need to find out some details of how to use it, but the results from the ?iAuto? preset suggest that that alone is an adequate replacement for Ashampoo photo optimizer. Eyeq, the maker of Perfectly Clear, continues to bombard me with special offers. Today it was $69 worth of ?LOOKs? for only $29. Which? They're too polite to say. Are they worth it? More video watching and discovered that I have a number of ?LOOKs? included.
Perfectly Clear, in depth
Today was the day to buy ?Perfectly Clear? for the special price of US $64.50. Off to the web site, where they wanted a shipping address, though they also say that they never ship anything. Never mind, my address is known. BANG! $6.45 GST on top of the price. Oh, yes, the Australian Government has decided to make GST mandatory for imports. Damn, I can run this software in other countries as well. How about Germany? BANG! 19% USt, $12.26 on top of the price. I have a computer in the USA. How does that look? Give them one of the addresses I used in the USA, and how about that, no extras.
Still more Perfectly Clear
Many photos today: the heron and the weekly house photos. And I played around with ?Perfectly Clear?. And how about that, some of the results were better than the original and what I could get from Ashampoo photo optimizer. So I suppose I'll buy it before the special offer runs out. It'll still need some getting to know, though.
Perfectly clear
So what is ?Perfectly Clear?? Two days ago I got some results, but only as ?Looks? (their term, including capitalization). What else can it do? Went off and found a surprisingly fuzzy video that explained what it can do. It applies ?Looks? to your image, and also offers adjustments based on these base ?Looks?. It seems that a ?Look? is what DxO PhotoLab calls a ?Preset?, a collection of settings. With a bit of practice I could presumably do the same thing with DxO. What did come out of the video was that Perfectly Clear can apply lens corrections for some lenses when converting raw images, at any rate.
Anonymous FTP to mobile phones
Why can't I access hirse, my phone, or enzian, Yvonne's phone, using anonymous FTP and WiFi FTP Server? Much messing around: === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/13) ~ 43 -> ftp -P 2121 hirse Connected to hirse.lemis.com. 220 Service ready for new user. Name (hirse:grog): anonymous 331 Guest login okay, send your complete e-mail address as password. Password: no echo 230 User logged in, proceed. Remote system type is UNIX. ftp> === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/13) ~ 44 -> ftp -P 2121 hirse Connected to hirse.lemis.com.
Bloody Android ring tones!
Yesterday's search for a ring tone for Yvonne's phone drew a blank, and I couldn't even get audacity to let me save an image. Spent quite a bit of time today trying to find out how to save export the clip. I still don't know why, but since the ?File? menu gave me almost no options (import, Exit or ?Recent Files? (an obscenity in itself), I chose ?Recent files?. There was only the file I was looking at. But in this second window, for no obvious reason, I was allowed to ?export?: Finally!
Weather station resurrected
When my weather station died, one of the first things I did was to connect it to dereel to see if it would work there. But I ran into MySQL configuration problems, and put it in the ?too hard? ?later? basket. After all, teevee and its USB bus were still working, but it didn't recognize the device. Still, why not eureka? Tried it out and... it worked immediately. What is wrong with USB?
A ring tone for Yvonne
Yvonne is still having difficulties with enzian, her new Xiaomi Redmi 9A mobile phone. Once again she wasn't able to answer it when I called. I wonder how prevalent this issue is. One thing that she wanted was a better ring tone for the thing: the introduction to the second movement of KV 622. That's not exactly unknown. Is there one available on the web? Out to search, and Google found many hits, all apparently with a signal to noise ratio of 0: if there was any download possibility in that jungle of advertising, I didn't find it. OK, I know how to do it myself, or at least I once did.
Perfectly clear?
More playing around with Perfectly Clear photo software today. Yet another irritating interface. They all are, so I can't blame the maker. But what does it do? So far it looks more like a set of default processing parameters than any ?Real Intelligence?. Tried it out on the fried egg photo, comparing with DxO PhotoLab of course. That's first PhotoLab with no corrections, then PhotoLab with my default settings, then Perfectly Clear with what looked like a good setting.
So nice, so nice, we do it twice!
One of the sillier mottos at Tandem Computers was ?So nice, so nice, we do it twice?. And somehow the idea of duplication pervaded the company. So I suppose it was to be expected that, after I have spent some time discussing the Good Old Days, our breakfast eggs looked like this:
5 years of fake Facebook account
Reading my diary back through the ages, I came across this article for 5 years ago. To sign up for a demonstration copy of software, I had to use a Facebook address. I refuse to divulge my real Facebook credentials, so I created a new account?they're free, after all. And apart from this one use, I have never used it. But from time to time Facebook sends me ?new friend? suggestions. That's really surprising given the attention that people have been paying to fake accounts.
More failures
The 404 document on my external mail server sends me email when a local page refers a non-existent local page: this is link breakage that I can fix. Well, maybe. I have to believe that the referrer is correct. Occasionally I get messages like: Referrer: http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-aug2015.php?subtitle=Let%27s%20go!&article=D-20150827-223324 Referenced URL: http://www.lemis.com/sitemap.xml Request URI: /sitemap.xml Problem: http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-aug2015.php has no reference to a site map. I don't understand why people do this. Recently, though, things are even more bizarre: Referrer: https://www.vv0.com Referenced URL: http://www.vv0.comhttps://www.vv0.com/main.dart.js Request URI: https://www.vv0.com/main.dart.js What does this have to do with my server in the first place?
More email delivery issues
Two days ago I sent an email to Carl Niehaus, but didn't hear back from him. But then I got a DSN message. Message delivered. That seemed a little late, so I checked the server log: Nov 21 03:58:35 lax postfix/smtp[28411]: C4C9828034: to=<[email protected]>, relay=none, delay=1.2, delays=0.21/0.01/0.97/0, dsn=4.4.1, status=deferred (connect to mx1h1.comcast.net[96.102.157.178]:25: Connection refused) <i>... retry at regular intervals</i> Nov 22 19:46:20 lax postfix/smtp[46284]: C4C9828034: to=<[email protected]>, relay=mx2.comcast.net[68.87.20.5]:25, delay=143266, delays=143257/0.03/7.4/0.93, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 pFGWm9KAui5C7pFGdmKjcc mail accepted for delivery) 143257 seconds! That's nearly 40 hours! Why that?
Tandem Computers, 30 years later
Frank Sheeman, formerly of Tandem Computers, held a get-together at the Duke of Edinburgh in Cupertino last Friday. I would almost have gone, but it's a rather long distance for a drink or two. But Gary Tom took a couple of photos, showing the passage of time more than anything else. The last time I was at the Duke would have been in August 1992, but I didn't really spend much time in Cupertino after about 1989. Then most of the people I knew were in their 30s or early 40s, so now they'd be round 70 or older, and it shows.
More mouse pain
Into the office this morning to find that my MediathekView window had focus and wouldn't let go of it. Why? Spent some time confirming that the computer was running as usual, and I was able to switch to a different X server, which worked normally. But when I switched back to :0, I still couldn't get focus. OK, back to :1 and shoot down the MediathekView. All OK again. Write up yesterday's diary entries, in particular the nervous mouse. Tried out the mouse again, confirming yesterday's issues. And I ended up with another window holding on to focus. What was it?
Nervous mouse
While at Officeworks two weeks ago, I bought a new mouse, a Philips M405. The Logitech M705 that I have seems to misbehave from time to time, and possibly the regurgitation effect that I have had in the past could be related to Logitech quirks. Today I finally tried it out. How about that, it works out of the box. But it feels strange: it's too light. It's also very sensitive. Something to get used to. Or that's what I thought. Then I saw the mouse cursor crawling across the screen, and noted that the screen saver didn't cut in: the crawling was enough to wake it again.
86-DOS: Censored!
Mail from Ryan Ottignon today, asking about 86-DOS. I had bought a copy of it in October 1981 and send to Louis-Luc Le Guerrier in December 1997, and Ryan wanted some details. OK, point to my diary entries of July 2011 and August 2015, along with the advertisement in Byte magazine for November 1980: But the image wouldn't display. Well, not on one firefox. Others on IRC tried it, with similar results. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. OK, it's a PNG image.
Plain text characters set on a web page
I wrote the reply described in yesterday's article in German, but the file I saved is text without any markup. Problem: it includes the German quotation marks ??, and they don't appear to be in any ISO 8859 character set. OK, save in UTF-8, like this diary. But what I got was mangled: Die im Schreiben erwähnten Begriffe â??Postabrechnungsnummerâ?? und â??Postrentennummerâ?? sagen mir nichts. Sie werden auch nicht im Schreiben erwähnt, das nur eine einzige Kennungsnummer enthält. I don't need to ask why: the web server is interpreting them as 8 bit plain text.
Another bloody NBN outage!
Another National Broadband Network outage today, this time even longer at 9600 seconds (2 hours, 40 minutes). I hope they finally get their act together.
We will stop your pension payments in October
Yvonne and I receive multiple pensions. And at some point we're going to die. That poses a problem for the pension funds: how do they know if we are still alive? The French and German funds have a simple if ineffective solution: send a form to be filled out, claiming that you're still alive. Get somebody in authority to witness it. In Australia, that's a Justice of the Peace who has never seen you, but considers your driver license to be adequate proof of your identity. It doesn't work well. We've been fighting the French CNAV since the beginning of the year, and they have actually stopped payments for her relatively tiny pension.
Finally answer mobile phone calls?
Called Yvonne on her mobile phone today. No answer. Try again. No answer. But then I got a call back, and once again my phone didn't offer me a ?answer call? popup. More ?swiping?, and finally got to the notifications. There it was! That seems to always be available. I've been using ?smart? phones for nearly 5 years now, and it has taken that long to find out how to answer an incoming call! And why hadn't Yvonne answered the call? Exactly the same problem!
Another bloody NBN outage
Another long NBN outage overnight: Start time End time Duration Badness from to (seconds) 1637069123 1637078171 9048 0.003 # 17 November 2021 00:25:23 17 November 2021 02:56:11 That's marginally over 2½ hours, and probably a scheduled outage. There are so many of them, mainly false positives, that I can't be bothered to check. But why do we still get them?
Ten years of identity theft
Ten years ago today I had a surprising problem: somebody had changed my electricity supplier. And neither the old nor the new supplier would tell me who it was, and it was up to me to recover from the problem. The people in question proved to be our neighbours from across the road, the Everetts. They had just moved in to their new house, and somehow they had got their address wrong: 47 Kleins Road (our address) instead of 46 Kleins Road. And with only this misinformation, they were able to apply to have our electricity supply changed. That sounds surprisingly like my stolen identity last month.
Health checks in times of COVID
Into town today to hear the results of the blood test earlier this month. I was in for a surprise: They wouldn't let me in! They had a woman (nurse?) standing guard by the door. I had to call the reception (10 m away) on a mobile phone to tell them that I was there! And that where I have such difficulty getting an answer. This time it took over 3 minutes. Why couldn't the guard tell them?
House networking issues
It's been a very cool and wet spring, and though the sprinklers are running, I don't think it was necessary. But are they running? I don't see any areas of particular moisture. And come to think of it, I don't recall seeing the daily cron output of the netsprinkle program for some time. Have I messed up my crontab? No, it still contains: 0 4 * * * /home/grog/src/netsprinkle -f /home/grog/public_html/weather/sprinklefactor -l 30 30 30 30 So why isn't it running? Tried running it, and it hung at the start.
File system structural abuse
Mail from Stephen Rothwell today. He's upgrading the Ozlabs systems, in the process thinking of yet another security measure, involving sending a UDP packet before trying the ssh connection. He suggests: The "port knock" works like this: you need to send a UDP packet (at last one) to port 22 on the machine you want to log into (with the correct IP family, of course :-)). You then have 20 seconds to ssh in. From bash, you can just do "echo >/dev/udp/host/port" Strange Linuxisms! But he also gave an alternative, based on BSD software, that can be executed automatically, making life easier.
The power of error reporting
After Wednesday's combined effort to fix Jerry Dunham's problems with Pegasus Mail, I was expecting the problem to be solved. Not so. But he did get better logging out of the program: 23:19:48.811: --- 11 Nov 2021, 23:19:48.811 --- 23:19:48.811: Connect to 'lax.lemis.com', timeout 10 seconds. 23:19:49.950: [*] SSL/TLS session established 23:19:49.950: [*] ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384, TLSv1.2, Kx=ECDH, Au=RSA, Enc=AESGCM(256), Mac=AEAD 23:19:49.950: [*] Peer's certificate name is '/C=AU/ST=VIC/L=Dereel/O=LEMIS (SA) Pty Ltd/OU=Messaging/CN=www.lemis.com/[email protected]'. 23:19:50.048: >> +OK Qpopper (version 4.1.0) at lax.lemis.com starting. <[email protected]> 23:19:50.048: << USER jdunham 23:19:50.098: >> +OK Password required for jdunham. << 0016 PASS XXXXXXXXX 23:20:00.190: 8: Socket read timeout 23:20:00.190: >> At the very least, it shows that Pegasus accepted the certificate without complaint.
Goodbye, paypal127@
A couple of days ago I ordered some wine online from Mclaren Vale Cellars. In the middle of payment, my browser died. OK, restart. Yup, still logged in, PayPal showed that I hadn't paid anything yet, so complete the transaction. The confirmation came relatively quickly?sent to [email protected]! That's my Paypal mail address, not the one that I use for Mclaren Vale Cellars. How can that happen? Clearly the interface between Mclaren Vale and Paypal leaked an email address. Sent several messages to them, and finally got a call from Mark Curtis, the manager. It was clear that he thought that it was user problems, but that's impossible: the new account had all the information that was in the old account, and I certainly didn't input it.
?Smart? TVs: back into the dark ages
Like most broadcasters, ABC Television offers online content under the name ABC iview. But unlike most broadcasters, you can't download the content; you need to watch it online. And what I have seen has always been in low resolution (typically 576p), though it seems that some is in ?high? resolution (720p). But what about our new Hisense A7G ?smart? TV? It offers iview, and since it claims to be 2160p, the 576p low resolution won't cut it. Try it out. You need to log in! Yes, I have an account, with a password that reflects my opinion of their web site.
Getting certificates for www, try 2
As a result of Monday's mail issues, I tried to install trusted certificates on mail.lemis.com, also known as www.lemis.com, using certbot. I failed because the Ports Collection didn't like my down-rev environment. But there are alternatives, and I started investigating them today. certbot uses Python, and that was the main part of the problem, but there are alternatives, including getssl, which is a series of shell scripts. More reading to do, but of course it worked out of the box and gave me a main configuration file ~root/.getssl/getssl.cfg, also a shell script, to edit. All seemed relatively clear, though they didn't make it clear whether the commented-out entries were defaults or just suggestions, and ultimately I tripped over this one: # Define the server type.
Fixing Pegasus Mail
My article about Jerry Dunham's email problems caught the eye of a couple of people on IRC. For me it was an issue with trusting the certificates (there's no way to trust them), and I'm still looking at how to fix it, but Peter Jeremy thought that it's a Pegasus Mail configuration problem, specifically that each side was waiting for the other to throw the first stone. That would certainly explain the timeout. Daniel O'Connor went to the trouble to install Pegasus, so I created a dummy email ID on mail.lemis.com for him to play with.
Phone accessories and keyboards
Then off to Officeworks to look for a carrying case for enzian, Yvonne's mobile phone. Total loss on two counts: firstly, they really only had any cases for smaller phones (5.8", whatever that might be; they're too polite to use centimetres), and secondly they were really only cases, nothing for attaching to clothing. While there, it occurred to me that the keyboard for teevee is failing (sticky Shift key, which is amazingly irritating). OK, what does a new keyboard cost? You get the choice, anywhere between $7.79 and $229: What's the difference, apart from the 30-fold price?
Commit pain
I'm still drumming up courage to perform my first git commit. Not the first time I've been in this position; as it happens, exactly 10 years ago I had the same issue with subversion).
More mail problems
Jerry Dunham is still having problems with his email. Some of it, I'm sure, is of his own doing, but it's not clear how. One thing's clear: he can't access his mail on mail.lemis.com using Pegasus Mail and POP3S. Finally I got a ?log file?: 19:26:37.693: --- 7 Nov 2021, 19:26:37.693 --- 19:26:37.711: Connect to 'lax.lemis.com', timeout 10 seconds. 19:26:48.835: 8: Socket read timeout 19:26:48.843: >> 19:26:48.853: --- Connection closed at 7 Nov 2021, 19:26:48.853. --- 19:26:48.862: That really doesn't say much. When did it happen?
Australia Post does it again
Last week we bought a new watch for Yvonne on eBay. And once again the shipping took forever. Finally, on Tuesday, it was flagged as ?In transit to Ballarat?. Ballarat? So far it has always been to Wendouree, the suburb where the sorting facility is located. And then nothing yesterday. Today the tracking told me that it was under way to Lucas, and was carded to await collection. Why there? That's nowhere near Napoleons. And, of course, estimated delivery date was between Tuesday, 9 November and Friday, 12 November. Why do they do these things? The item was in Napoleons, of course.
Redmi 9A battery life
One of the things that surprised me about my Xiaomi Redmi 9T was the long battery life, several days. How would Yvonne's cheaper Redmi 9A fare? I was sure that it would exceed the life of the Sams?ng Galaxy S7 that she had borrowed from Chris Bahlo. And it does. The Sams?ng might survive overnight, but it would be pretty well discharged. This morning the Redmi 9A had a remaining charge of 40%?after 5 days! Then we turned on the GPS receiver she used it for navigation, which used up 20% of the remaining battery. But that's still surprising.
Misunderstandings
Subject of a mail message I received today: Subject: pic doesn't center when i use a macro My first thought: why should that happen with a modern camera? It would be an obvious problem with a rangefinder camera, but a single-lens reflex or mirrorless camera should have no issues. But then I read: From: Douglas McIlroy <[email protected]> To: [email protected] False positive! Douglas McIlroy is the spiritual father of Unix, the boss of Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie round 1970, when Unix was born.
buildworld: success!
So now I have an up-to-date git tree of the FreeBSD sources. What next? My immediate need is to commit something to the tree to avoid my commit bit timing out. I know what to commit: ls -l, (the comma is an operator) inserts commas or other thousands separators into large numbers, for example: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/5) ~ 20 -> ls -l, /boot/kernel/kernel -r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 21,414,318 25 Nov 2015 /boot/kernel/kernel But on mu -CURRENT box I see: # ls -l, /boot/kernel/kernel -r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 31443184 Nov 1 08:39 /boot/kernel/kernel # Apart from the fact that the kernel seems to have bloated by nearly 50% in the last 6 years, the explicitly requested commas are missing.
More spam!
In my mail this morning: 28 N + 01-11-2021 To [email protected] ( 624) Australian Taxation N + We need to talk to you about your activity statements [SEC=OFFICIAL] That claimed to come from the Australian Taxation Office. But that's nonsense. What activity statements? I haven't had any activity in nearly 15 years. And if the ATO wants information, it knows where to get it: from Peter O'Connell of PPT. OK, who is this joker? Received: from mx2b.ato.gov.au (mx2b.ato.gov.au [180.149.192.216]) by lax.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8A0CF27313 for <[email protected]>; Mon, 1 Nov 2021 01:20:45 +0000 (UTC) Hmm.
Panorama build success
Got round to looking at Saturday's panorama problem again today. The problem was that I had taken a couple of images with a polarizing filter, which reduced the exposure by 1.7 EV. The result was: But that's after various recovery efforts by the stitcher. The preview image was much worse: And the photometric parameters showed that the normally exposed images had an exposure of 11.9 EV, compared to 10.3 for the dark ones.
More Android app issues
It would be really nice to find an Android app that tracked my location and provided the information on a map. I have that, sort of, with the mendhak GPS logger, GPS Visualizer and Wikiloc, but it's clumsy, and the maps aren't easily integrated. Something that output to Google Maps would be more useful. Even better would be an interactive display that showed time, speed and direction at the point under the cursor. But how often do you find something useful in Android? I'll put the search on the back burner. In the meantime, mendhak would do the job?if I could install it.
Next Android smart
Setting up Yvonne's phone has gone relatively smoothly, and it seems to have even longer battery life than mine; after 2 days without charge, the battery was round 80%. On thing that could reduce battery life is a GPS tracker. I've been using the mendhak GPS logger, but that's it seems that it's no longer acceptable to the toyshop. What can I use instead? Somehow the app list is really not very helpful. Tried GPS Phone Tracker & Mileage Tracker despite negative feedback: This app would have been rated 4, EXCEPT they are now killing computer browser access And it wanted me to create a user ID!
Still more bloody NBN outages!
Two mail messages from my ISP today: still more National Broadband Network outages: The details are: - Start date and time: Wed 17th November 2021 00:00 AEDT - End date and time: Wed 17th November 2021 06:00 AEDT - Window: 6.0 hours During the outage window, NBN have outlined the period of time your service may be affected by an interruption: - 360 min - Start date and time: Thu 18th November 2021 00:00 AEDT - End date and time: Fri 19th November 2021 09:00 AEDT - Window: 33.0 hours During the outage window, NBN have outlined the period of time your service may be affected by an interruption: - 540 min - 540 min We've just had 14 hours of outages, and now they're threatening another 24 hours!
COVID-19 ?digital certificates?
The events of the day put setting up Yvonne's new Xiaomi Redmi 9A on the back burner. But one of the main reasons for the phone in the first place is for the Service Victoria app, including the vaccination certificate. No WHO approved yellow vaccination certificates for modern medicine?the one person who knew beyond any doubt that Yvonne had been vaccinated wasn't allowed to sign or stamp what she wrote in the certificate?but something digital issue by somebody (or thing) that had never seen Yvonne. OK, first step: sign up with myGov. That's particularly interesting, because it's the way my Centrelink account was breached earlier this month.
Power fail!
Listening to the news on the radio at 7:00 this morning: ?Wild weather has devastated most of the state, and thousands of households are without power?. That was some forethought of mine yesterday to charge the battery to 90% and turn the air conditioner off! The news continued: ?Hardest hit were Western Victoria, including Bendigo and Ballarat.? Then the air conditioner decided to reverse cycle, something I haven't heard in a while. And from somewhere a beep. And nothing more on the radio. Dammit, power fail, and I had turned the air conditioner on 45 minutes earlier without checking if we were on the grid or not!
New phone for Yvonne
Back home and unpacked Yvonne's new Xiaomi Redmi 9A. It's pretty much as I expected, and I got it set up relatively quickly. Now to set up the all-important Service Victoria app. It was already installed, having been ?copied? from the old phone. And, like an elephant, it doesn't forget. Yvonne's name is still spelt ?Christiane Bahlo?, along with her phone number. I really should have done a factory reset on the old phone.
Unwise money transfer
Ruth Viebrock has sent me another parcel from Germany; time to pay for it. TransferWise are cheap, but not free. But they have advice. I can do it for only 0.41 ?: Only on the same page, I see: 0.28 ?, the one I had already chosen. That's not the only thing wrong with their web site.
Weather!
Off in pleasant, sunny weather to Ballarat today for a haircut and to pick up Yvonne's phone, which, as expected, came today, and not the end of next week, as Australia Post claimed yesterday. By the time my hair was cut, the weather had changed considerably. On the way back to Napoleons I got caught in the heaviest rain I can recall in recent times, and had to slow down almost to a walking pace. In Napoleons they had had flooding in the shop. When I came out, I called up Yvonne and asked her to turn the air conditioner off: this is power failure weather.
git: some advantages?
Into the office this morning to find scratches on my :0.1 monitor: It's not immediately obvious, but there's something very wrong there: Of course, it's not scratches at all. git is half clever: it knows how to set the foreground colour, but not the background colour. Of course it knows that I should be using a black background. Another indication of the short-sightedness of the developers.
Net outage!
It's been a while since I have had issues with the reliability of the National Broadband Network. Too long, it seems. Came into the office this morning to find the system off the net. Further investigation showed: Start time End time Duration Badness from to (seconds) 1635254381 1635274981 20600 0.001 # 27 October 2021 00:19:41 27 October 2021 06:03:01 1635340681 1635370763 30082 0.055 # 28 October 2021 00:18:01 28 October 2021 08:39:23 People, that's 14 hours!
git: igitt!
It's really time to update my system. I've been saying that for the last 5 years or so, but the latest impediment has been git. My last attempt was three months ago, and I seem not to have had the courage to continue. OK, today was the day. I had a clone according to the instructions at https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/committers-guide/#git-primer, and tried to update it: ===== Wed 27 Oct 2021 15:36:47 AEDT on dereel: git pull --ff-only error: cannot lock ref 'refs/remotes/freebsd/vendor/openzfs/legacy': 'refs/remotes/freebsd/vendor/openzfs' exists; cannot create 'refs/remotes/freebsd/vendor/openzfs/legacy' From ssh://gitrepo.FreeBSD.org/src ! [new branch] vendor/openzfs/legacy -> freebsd/vendor/openzfs/legacy (unable to update local ref) error: cannot lock ref 'refs/remotes/freebsd/vendor/openzfs/master': 'refs/remotes/freebsd/vendor/openzfs' exists; cannot create 'refs/remotes/freebsd/vendor/openzfs/master' !
What use tracking?
Over the years I've grumbled repeatedly about the inaccuracies of (physical) mail tracking. But today I had a particularly extreme case. Nine days ago I bought a phone for Yvonne on eBay. The seller (one of the ?FAST SHIPPING? kind) finally shipped it yesterday. Any hope of getting it here soon? Check the tracking. eBay says: Still just ?received?? Hasn't it gone any further? What does Austraia Post say? That's a big difference. eBay claims that it will be here by the end of this week, and Australia Post says it will take at least another week, possibly nearly 2.
Tracking people
Where's Yvonne? Most of the time she's in her office, about 20 m away. But she visits Chris Bahlo, and on Wednesdays she goes shopping in Ballarat. With a mobile phone and her permission I can track her location, and she can also keep track of her horse rides. Set it up today for location sharing while she went on a horse ride, and was rewarded by some interesting map displays: These screen shots were taken less than a minute apart, and they show her in two completely different locations about 2 km apart.
Strange DxO display
I have now upgraded to DxO PhotoLab release 5. So far there's not much difference to be seen, except that it rearranged my display and made me search for things. But today I got this display: What is it? There seemed to be no image selected. Will it happen again?
PV inverter strangenesses
The weather today was mainly overcast, so our photovoltaic system didn't generate much power. But at one point I looked at the ?dashboard? and saw it claim to generate over 11 kW! That's almost impossible. The panels are rated at a total of 10.8 kW, but they're oriented at 90° to each other, so it's barely possible that they can all output full power at the same time?unless ?full power? is considerably more than the rated power. The power displayed was only brief, before it dropped back to more like 6 kW?without an obvious difference in sunshine level. But looking at the logs, it seems that it could have been genuine.
Fixing web site vulnerability
Mail from [email protected] today with details of the vulnerability reported yesterday. How about that, it's due to my handling parameters to my web pages, like the URL above: /grog/diary-oct2021.php?topics=c&subtitle=lemis.com%20Security%20Vulnerability%20Notification&article=D-20211023-022907#D-20211023-022907. Since they come from me, there's no danger that they're malicious. But of course other people can create similar URLs, and that's what they did: Vulnerability Summary: 1. Vulnerable Domain: http://www.lemis.com/ 2. Vulnerable URL: http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-jan2020.php?subtitle=</title><ScRiPt>alert('/bughunter/')</sCrIpT>&&article=D-20200104-021000 3. Vulnerability Type: Reflected XSS And yes, that worked. The </title> was part of the exploit; it put the following script where it could be executed.
Who is using my mobile data?
It's only been 6 days since I installed a new SIM card in Yvonne's phone. And I ended up with over $10 of credit. But today, while playing with it (trying, with success, to send an MMS to my phone), I got a message: only $4.94 of credit left. Huh? Yes, ALDImobile charges 35¢ per MMS, far too much, but that wouldn't explain the usage. Off to check and found things like 50.51 MB of mobile data ($2.5344) at 1:10 on Wednesday. What's that about? My own usage was nothing like that, though I have things like location tracking turned on. There was another $2.2877 on Friday.
More thoughts on messaging systems
A little feedback on yesterday's thoughts on messaging systems. Peter Jeremy notes that it was possible to send images via Usenet news. Yes, it was painful, but that's a matter of evolution: MIME, also not a very clean idea, is an example of that. But also a word in favour of WhatsApp: it can deliver messages via the Internet. What an idea! But yes, the standard messaging app can't.
Upgrading DxO: the pain
There's a new version of DxO PhotoLab out there. The press have been informed, but once again I, as a customer, was not. Should I buy it? What does it really offer? Bug fixes? That would be nice. And new interface options that might make life easier. OK, buy it. Once they took payment in Euros, US dollars and Australian dollars. But that was once. Now it's only in US dollars. OK, I have a Transferwise creditdebit card that I can use to pay in US dollars. Problem: I don't have any cash balance in US dollars. What happens then? To be on the safe side, decided to transfer some money to the account.
lemis.com Security Vulnerability Notification
Unexpected mail from Open Bug Bounty today: lemis.com Cross Site Scripting Vulnerability Report ID: OBB-2188982. Huh? Who are these people? Did a bit of checking and found that yes, they're kosher. But how can I be involved in any cross-site vulnerability? I don't do anything significant with user input, just dates. OK, I can contact the reporter, and did that, but in all probability his time zone is completely different. In the meantime, followed up https://pentest-tools.com/website-vulnerability-scanning/xss-scanner-online, which found nothing.
Mobile phone messaging: WhatsApp?
Mail from Michael James today, suggesting that I could minimize my phone pain with WhatsApp, which?he says?makes messaging easier. OK, WhatsApp is an interesting app because it comes from the FreeBSD space (Jan Koum, who still has a FreeBSD commit bit). Try it out. Install works well, and it imports my Google contacts. Well, it checks them, and finds that about half of them have a recognizable WhatsApp connection. But that's bad. More fragmentation. And that brings me to a digression: Once upon a time we had email and USENET News. In many ways they were very similar: the header structure was compatible, and the main difference was the way you handled the message.
Guest contributions to this diary?
As I say in many places, this diary is my record of what I have done and (increasingly) my opinions. But I get many requests like this one from From: Penny Kling <@gmail.com> Subject: Guest Post Request Greetings! I would like to contribute to your website by adding a guest post. Do you have any specific requirements I should follow? Sorry, that's not how this works, and that's what I told her. Sorry, I have no provision for guest posts. If you write something that interests me, I may mention it in my diary, but don't count on it being automatically complimentary.
Slideshow arrived!
Checking Yvonne's phone this morning, found a notification: a ?slideshow? from me had arrived, a Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) message with two photos. That's the message I sent yesterday, and for which I looked in vain. Why did it take so long? My guess is that it didn't, but it was playing hide-and-seek with me. It seems that it won.
Sending photos by mobile phone
One of the advantages I thought of for Yvonne's new phone is that she can use it to take photos while shopping and send them to me for examination. That's certainly an advantage over anything we have had before. But how do you do it? First take a photo, of course. Then look at all the silly icons and try to decide which will send it somewhere. There were none. Gradually I'm beginning to understand these silly buttons on software like DxO PhotoLab for sending photos directly to Facebook. More discussion on IRC. As Daniel O'Connor says, ?I dunno, Android visual language looks like a mess to me?.
Another bloody mobile phone!
I've given up trying to find a small phone for Yvonne. A Xiaomi Redmi 9A it is, a slightly slower version of my Redmi 9T. It's not that I particularly like Xiaomi, but one mobile phone interface is bad enough. This way I don't have to get used to the problems that a second one causes, like today's issue where Yvonne couldn't find the dialing pad for the phone. About the biggest difference is the colour: blue instead of green. So I've decided to give it the name enzian.
More mobile phone choice pain
Spent much more time looking for a new mobile phone for Yvonne today, in the process coming to two conclusions: phones are getting much bigger, and nobody seems to care. I have been unable to find a modern Xiaomi phone (one released in this decade) that is less than 15 cm high. And none of the ?smartphone choice? web sites allowed me to search or sort based on external dimensions. That's not just irritating: it's a real problem if you don't have a pocket where you can put the thing. And Yvonne doesn't.
More phone battery fun
I've had my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark I for nearly 8 years now. In principle it was obsoleted by my OM-D E-M1 Mark II for nearly 5 years. But I'm still using the Mark I: there's not much difference between the two, and it's convenient to keep the Mark II for complicated stuff. As a result it's the Mark I that I use when I go anywhere, like to the dog training today. And the battery ran out! That's not surprising. They're all nearly 8 years old. At the very least I should carry a spare. But today I had trouble recharging two of the batteries that were waiting for use.
ALDImobile SIM: simplicity itself
Back home, time to install the new SIM card in the Samsung phone. Simple, right? The packaging included instructions, including going to aldimobile.com.au/activate and following the instructions. OK, I can do that. Of course, I don't have the same thought patterns as the people who wrote the web pages: This one means that I should write only the number, not the street itself, though the message suggests that it's the spaces that are to blame. ?Did you buy a Mobile, Date or Family Plan Starter Pack??.
Google retorts
We were in Sebastopol when it occurred to us to look for mobile phones in the Delacombe Town Centre. OK, Google, take me to Delacombe Town Centre. And off we were across country on arguably the best route. Until we got to the south-east corner of the complex: I should have turned left, and I did, but Google Maps wanted me to go round to the other side along a main road. ?OK, Google, du hast einen Knall?: ?OK, Google, you're crazy?. And the prompt answer: ?You and me both?.
A new phone for Yvonne
After some discussion, we have decided to buy a new phone for Yvonne. The Samsung Galaxy S7 has seen better days, the USB socket no longer works reliably, making charging touch-and-go, and the interface is completely different. By chance, I saw a cheap Xiaomi phone on the Officeworks web site yesterday, so off there to take a look at it. Not a single Xiaomi phone on offer! The reluctant staff member whom Yvonne brought by asked me if I had a screen shot. Right, just what you need when you come to a shop to buy something that has been advertised. Later, however, I was unable to find any Xiaomi phones on the web site.
New smart for Yvonne
As discussed yesterday, Yvonne brought home a Samsung Galaxy S7 from Chris Bahlo. And now I have to set it up for her. One ?smart? phone causes enough smart. Two different ones are double the smart, if not more. Spent some time playing around with it and wondering whether it wouldn't be a better idea to get another Xiaomi phone instead. The most obvious thing is, despite what people tell me, to use it to make phone calls. OK, put in the SIM card from the old phone. Oh. It's a mini-SIM card. Not a micro-SIM or nano-SIM. And the Samsung needs a nano-SIM.
The pain of COVID apps
Something must have happened in New South Wales. Everybody is scrambling to get their mobile phones set up with the NSW equivalent of ?Service Victoria?, which is subtly different, along with the same kind of stupid ?digital certificate? of vaccination. And people had lots of difficulty with them. These are experienced computer people, not coincidentally people who made fun of me when I grumbled about my problems. I'm glad to feel vindicated, and was able to make some suggestions to help. The most interesting one was when one person had to create a second Mygov account because the name wasn't spelt in the same way on all his documents.
MPEG corruption
Seen on the screen after watching TV tonight: [ffmpeg/video] h264: Error splitting the input into NAL units. Error while decoding frame! [ffmpeg/video] h264: Invalid NAL unit size (0 > 8734). [ffmpeg/video] h264: Error splitting the input into NAL units. Error while decoding frame! What's that? There was no obvious corruption on the screen.
A mobile phone for COVID-19?
In the USA people have thought out various financial initiatives to encourage people to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Round here there's an obvious one: a free (low-end) mobile phone. You have needed a phone to sign in to just about anywhere in Victoria for some time now, and soon you will need one to display these silly ?digital certificates?. Yvonne has a mobile phone, of course, but it's an old, small, folding one 10 cm high. She's reluctantly accepting the need for a ?smart? phone, but it shouldn't be any higher. Checked the old S?msung Samsung GT-I9100T. 12 cm. What can we find that's modern (and thus supported by the apps that the government has thought out) and no higher?
Calling German mobile phones
Since moving to MyNetFone, now Vonex, international phone calls have been ridiculously cheap. While a national ?landline? call costs $0.20 untimed, a call to a German landline costs $0.019 per minute, so a 10 minute call to Germany is still cheaper than a call to Australia. But mobile rates are different, sometimes markedly so. In Australia they're $0.10 per minute. And in Germany? I recall them being significantly more expensive than for landlines. And today Yvonne wanted to make a call to a German mobile telephone. OK, look it up. Where? The new Vonex web site is completely broken and takes me round in circles.
Bankwest replies
Call from Steven Garnett of Bankwest today to discuss the email I sent him on Monday, in which I had set a deadline of yesterday to get the bank's fraud team involved. He repeated the content of the letter and gave the impression?once again?that he hadn't read the email. You'd think he hadn't received it, but he confirmed that he did. It seems that he had informed his process expert, whatever that is, his manager and his team leader (there that term again), but if he didn't forward the message to them, there's not much they could have done. He finally undertook to inform the fraud people, and I asked him to get them to contact me.
Cherry brand delivery
Yvonne came back from shopping today with an unexpected package: It was the Kirschwasser that Ruth Viebrock sent me two weeks ago. It wasn't due for at least another 4 weeks! As if that wasn't surprising enough, there was no customs duty. What did the customs declaration say? I can't make up my mind whether that's a mistyped English ?brandy? or German ?Brand?, which is a perfectly correct description. But potentially it was confusing for the Customs Australian Border Force or one of their parsing programs.
Reporting Centrelink security breach
Despite multiple requests, Bankwest has not responded to my request to get their fraud team involved in the Centrelink fraud case. The place to go is https://reportapp.cyber.gov.au/, which presented me with multiple warnings that it's not suitable for an emergency. They can certainly say that again, and they did: Due to the complex nature of enquiries undertaken as part of the assessment process, it is not uncommon not to hear from Victoria Police for at least 12 weeks. If there is an immediate threat to life or risk of harm, please call 000.
Understanding ?modern? apps
Why couldn't I download my ?digital certificate? on my mobile phone? Medicare seems to think I have loaded it: But Service Victoria just offers me an(other) opportunity to download it: So what's the issue? I have now updated the app, but Service Victoria still asks me to download it. But this time it offers to do it directly, presumably one of the results of updating the app.
COVID certificate
Gradually we're coming out of SARS-CoV-2 imposed ?lockdown?. Well, we're already out of it, but today it was eliminated in all of New South Wales, and the government of Victoria has stated that things will get considerably more relaxed in the next few weeks. A good thing, too: in the past the ?lockdowns? have worked well, but they don't seem to have much effect against the ?delta variant?: despite the measures, which have been in place for months now, the numbers have continued to climb and have now reached nearly 2,000 infections per day. The only thing that should help is vaccination.
Tracking the POP3S certification issues
In principle my POP3S configuration for qpopper now works, but clearly there's a question of trust with the certificates. Peter Jeremy suggests using Let's encrypt. That sounds like a very good idea, and not for the first time I've made a note to follow up.
ABC news subscription
Why have I not received any news mail from the ABC subscriptions that I set up on Thursday? Off to take another look. It's almost impossible to find anything on the site. When I did, it was a completely different page, offering many more newsletters, and claiming that I was subscribed to some of them. OK, select the ones that look interesting, press ?Submit?. Nothing. Oh yes, just as I was about to give up: TypeError: NetworkError when attempting to fetch resource. That was repeatable.
Another abandoned USB hub
The seller of the USB hub that I have been trying to return has accepted the inevitable and refunded the price. So far he hasn't asked for the thing back. That's the second time this has happened with this kind of hub. I wonder what rate of return they get.
POP3S revisited
The problem with my Greg's setting up qpopper on FreeBSD page was at least that I had forgotten to write down the pass phrases for the certificates; I still had the certificates that I made at the time. But where do I need the certificates? There's nothing in that document to suggest that I will ever need them again. OK, the configuration files are straightforward enough, so why not give it a try? Updated the files and got as far as testing. According to the page, I should get: === grog@dereel (/dev/ttypj) ~ 90 -> openssl s_client -connect dereel.lemis.com:995 CONNECTED(00000003) depth=0 /C=AU/ST=VIC/L=Dereel/O=LEMIS (SA) Pty Ltd/OU=Messaging/CN=www.lemis.com...
Visiting Centrelink
Finally took up the courage (and two big books) to go to Centrelink in Ballarat to sort out my pension fund breakin. Was it worth trying to get an appointment? No, no indication that that would help, and the fact that Wednesday's letter didn't include a phone number speaks for itself. On the way out of the property, picked up the mail. Another letter from Centrelink, confirming that I had cancelled my nominee agreement with PPT (which they spelt Ppt). What other nonsense has been done with my account? At Centrelink I had the usual questions about COVID-19, and then was directed to a counter where a badly masked receptionist called me George Lehey and asked if I had an appointment.
Daily news from ABC
I receive daily news email from Channel 9, a commercial TV broadcaster and, I think, allied with Microsoft. Not my natural choice of news information, but they have the advantage of good presentation, sort of. Others thought that I should take the national broadcaster, ABC. But somehow their web presence irritates me. They have chosen the domain name abc.net.au, which would suggest that they're an ISP or some such. It wasn't for lack of access to abc.com.au: they have that too, but it redirects to abc.net.au. Then, like almost all broadcasters, they have video content online (German ?Mediathek?) . But unlike almost all broadcasters, it's only in low definition, and access is painful.
POP3S again
I really need to sort out email for Jerry Dunham. Last week I ran into inexplicable problems with ?mail loops back to myself?. OK, I can compare that with narrawin.com, which I also handle. And that delivers fine to any address no in virtual. OK, try again with dunham.org. It works! What went wrong? I'm not sure. About the only thing I noticed was that the main.cf buffer hadn't been saved when I started today. But it can't have been that: I did a number of changes last week. But that was simply POP3, with no encryption. The next problem: set up POP3S.
Bankwest: what now?
No response from Bankwest to my letter asking for investigation of their part in my Centrelink breach yesterday. I know that the mail gets through, so my best guess is ?not my problem?. And why can't I send mail to [email protected]? It appears to be handled by outlook.com, clearly a Microsoft space company. Can it be that they're too polite to handle mail from systems like mine? It would be worth checking with a mainstream MUA/MTA. How about Gmail? So I sent off a message to them, fully expecting it to be delivered. No: Date: 07 Oct 2021 10:13:03 +0800 From: Mail Delivery System <MAILER-[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: Delivery Status Notification (Failure) Message-Id: <[email protected]> [-- Attachment #1 --] [-- Type: text/plain, Encoding: quoted-printable, Size: 0.3K --] The following message to <[email protected]> was undeliverable.
Returning the USB hub
I started a return for the malfunctioning USB hub yesterday, and got an interesting message from the seller: Dear friend. We are so sorry. We specially consulted the manufacturer and their feedback is as follows. The product has four ports and seven ports. There is only one 3.0 interface for the four ports, and 2.0 for the others. The seven ports have four 3.0 interfaces, and the other is 2.0. There is no problem with your product. How we refund you half,and you close the dispute?Thank you very much for your understanding.
Centrelink security: where?
Voicemail and mail from Steven Garnett of Bankwest today, asking, as I feared, for more information from Centrelink. OK, nothing for it: sign in to this horrible mygov and select ?Centrelink?. We could not connect to the service. Please contact us for help. (RFM51) That sounds right. They can never get anything right. OK, try with different browser. Same thing. Where's the help link? There isn't one. What does Google say? It found a tweet: RFM51 code refers to server issues, unlink your Centrelink account and relink it again.
More Google Maps fun
To Geelong today for my 6-monthly periodontics checkup. Nothing much of interest there, but of course it was another chance to play around with using hirse, my mobile phone, along with Google Maps, as a navigator First issue: find the periodontist. They have a free parking space round the back, and the location is very different from their address: I can enter that on a computer, but how do I do it on a phone? Off to ask Google, and came up with give a place a private label.
Bankwest: look out!
Finally got all my documents together to send to Bankwest for my new credit card application. Sent it off and got a ?successfully delivered? DSN message, marginally interesting because it took nearly a minute to arrive. But there are more minutes. After fully 2 minutes, 10 seconds, I received: From MAILER-DAEMON Mon Oct 4 16:25:35 2021 To: [email protected] From: Mail Delivery System <MAILER-[email protected]> Date: 04 Oct 2021 13:24:31 +0800 Subject: Delivery Status Notification (Failure) The following message to <[email protected]> was undeliverable. The reason for the problem: 5.1.0 - Unknown address error 550-'5.4.1 Recipient address rejected: Access denied.
Still more backup pain
Somehow I've run out of explanations for why I'm having so much trouble with my backup disks. Into the office this morning to find that the backup on the new disk had (just) finished, successfully. So had the photo backup, which I had forgotten to disable. But that was still at SCSI-2 speeds (40 MB/s). What do I do? First, play it safe: connect all the standard backup disks to the motherboard. Well, almost all: one of the issues is that the motherboard only has 4 USB-3 ports (I think), while I have at least 6 disks, and my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II also connects via USB-3.
More backup disk problems
Into the office this morning to find last night's backup of eureka still running. That's not really surprising; it was only a level 2 dump, but since there was nothing else on the disk, it might as well have been a level 0 dump. But something still didn't ring true. Looking at the log file, I found: Sep 30 15:30:16 eureka kernel: ugen0.11: <Western Digital> at usbus0 Sep 30 15:30:16 eureka kernel: umass0: <Western Digital My Passport 2627, class 0/0, rev 2.10/40.08, addr 23> on usbus0 Sep 30 15:30:16 eureka kernel: umass0: SCSI over Bulk-Only; quirks = 0xc001 Sep 30 15:30:16 eureka kernel: umass0:3:0:-1: Attached to scbus3 Sep 30 15:30:16 eureka kernel: da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 scbus3 target 0 lun 0 Sep 30 15:30:16 eureka kernel: da0: <WD My Passport 2627 4008> Fixed Direct Access SPC-4 SCSI device Sep 30 ...
Another fishy hardware failure
I'm still not convinced that my TV really failed exactly when I installed more memory in teevee last month. But it seems that I have another case: yesterday I got a new USB hub for my external backup disks, and this morning I came into the office to find lots of: Wed 29 Sep 2021 21:04:12 AEST: Partial backup of /home/grog since 26-Sep-2021 zstd: error 25 : Write error : No space left on device (cannot write compressed block) There should be plenty of space on the disk.
Mail configuration pain
Mail from Jerry Dunham today, telling me that his ISP was shutting down, and he was looking for a new mail provider. OK, for him I can do that. But what is he going to do about his current email address? It relates to his current provider. He can't take that with him. This is the ultimate ?I told you so?. I even published it. From the last edition of ?The Complete FreeBSD?, page 317: It's certainly a very good idea to have your own domain name.
More spam?
Found in my mail today: 53 N + 29-09-2021 To groggyhimself@Fre ( 105) FreeBSD.org Login No N + New Login To [email protected] From Safari on Mac OS The subject is the bold text at the end. Who did that? It took a few seconds to realize that this could only be some kind of phishing. How can you log in to FreeBSD.org via a web browser? The only authentication is via ssh. But it did take a few seconds.
Imports: the pain
So why has UPS charged me all the extra money when they had promised on acceptance that there would be no further charges? Reading the fine print on their invoice, I see: Effective from 1st January 2020, the formal Declaration Fee (formerly known as the formal entry fee) imposed by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection will be AUD $88.00 for shipments over AUD $1,000. What's the Department of Immigration and Border Protection? Off to the other end to ask Customs about the matter.
Web: all our operators are busy
While checking yesterday's puppy training article, came across this: I've never seen that on a web site before. I was going to say ?that shouts Microsoft?, but in fact Netcraft tells me that it's Linux with a Cloudflare server. It's been a while since I looked at Netcraft. They seem to have given up on site uptimes, but there's still the ?Date first seen?
More Google Maps strangeness
For once I didn't get my phone to guide me to the physiotherapist, but when I got there, I did think to turn on maps. How about ?where am I??? Not quite what I expected: Still in Dereel? How can that be? When I asked it to take me to the physiotherapist, it obliged and told me that I was there. Clearly something hasn't been updated.
More ?Coronavirus? web problems
One of our neighbours appears to be flagrantly violating the ?lockdown? rules, walking unmasked and uninvited into other neighbours' houses. Not our business directly, but I looked up how to report the matter. The URL is to be savoured: https://onlinereporting.police.vic.gov.au/s/covid19?language=en_US. Why lang=en_US? Where are we? But probably the best would be to call the police on 131 444. Filling out the form will probably require irrelevant information like the date of birth of my paternal grandfather.
Paying for the dogs
Buying Larissa and Lena proved to involve more than just paying for them. There were three different registrations: transfer pedigree, register microchip numbers, and pay the annual registration. I grumbled about the pain on Tuesday, but it's not over. Elyse sent email telling me that my credit card number was wrong, one digit too little. I explained that I had included the 3 digit code on the back of the card. No, still didn't work. Sorry, I can't help, that's the correct number. Send me a bank account number. After a while, another email: I???ve re set my computer and tried again and it seems to have gone through now.
Changed COVID-19 lockdown
From 23:59 this evening, according to the news outlets, we will have our COVID-19 ?lockdown? restrictions eased again. Can the cleaner come? Take a look at the official site: ?COVIDSafe settings? and, not to be outdone, the stupidly named ?How we live?. NOTHING! The pages still relate to upcoming changes on 2 September. I couldn't find anything about the upcoming changes this evening. Yvonne tried calling an information line, but it timed out after 30 minutes and hung up on her, claiming overload. The cleaner did the same, with the same result. People, we can't follow the regulations if we don't know what they are!
Animal registration payments
A couple of weeks ago Yvonne processed the paperwork for our new dogs and paid by cheque for some reason. Not a good idea. We write about 2 cheques a year, and the cheque book that she chose was for an account that we closed decades ago. We have already handled one bounce, but there was a second that hasn't bounced yet. OK, call up, apologize and try to pay. Account number, please? No, it will have to be a credit card. I'll get Emma to call you back. Emma duly called and wanted a credit card number. NO! I don't know you from Eve.
To Napoleons with Google Maps
So off to Napoleons to pick up my eBay items. The route looks like this: I know the way, of course, but I use Google Maps for the fun of it. This time I forgot to turn it on until I was half way down Grassy Gully Road, about 200 m from the main road.
Tracking with Australia Post
I'm waiting for no fewer than four eBay items ordered over the last two weeks. According to Australia Post, two of them arrived in Wendouree (Ballarat) over the weekend, so they should have been in Napoleons this morning. But what did I see at 12:45? Two items with this tracking information: Of course, they politely hide the tracking details until you insist on seeing them.
Where was I when?
For some reason my monitor number 0 (far left) started misbehaving today. Colours dropped out, and it got dimmer. All the signs of a flaky cable connection. I wobbled the connections, and things got better, for a while, but it didn't stay that way. Maybe something wrong with the monitor? I had another on the floor doing nothing. Put that in, and hey, it was so much better. Nothing to do with the cable, just the monitor itself. First, it's larger, and secondly brighter. As a result, it made sense to put it in a better position, number 1 (second from left), and move the very old BenQ in number 0 position.
X pain without end
I've been using X for over 30 years, and on the whole I'm comfortable with it. But a couple of bugs make my life painful, and in all that time I haven't seriously tried to hunt them down, since they happen so seldom and finding the bug looks like so much work. Today the ?modifier key? bug bit again: one of the modifier keys got stuck in the ?on? state. Which one? The code is 0x10. With xev I was able to establish that it wasn't any of the usual suspects. Shift toggles modifier bit 1, Ctrl toggles 4, Alt toggles 8?and that's all.
The pain of dog registration
It's bad enough that both Leonid and Nikolai died this year, but now we have issues with dog registration. Leo died before the registration was due, but we paid for Niko for what proved to be only 3 months. And Lena, his replacement, arrived after his death. In the past we have been able to transfer the registration, but now they have a new person, Alana, in charge of registration, and she's very precise. She confirmed that we could have had a refund for Niko's registration if we had applied before the end of June. OK, where does it say that on the registration forms?
International money transfers
Yvonne has bought Yet Another saddle in Germany, and we're trying to find a cheap way to pay for it. Bank exchange rates can be extremely expensive, so years ago I signed up with a company called ?Transferwise?. Clever name, right, prone to false positives? But they've changed the name. Now it's just ?Wise?, an immediately obvious (dare I say ?intuitive??) name. We had to get 1,672 ? to Germany. What would it cost? ?Wise? had a comparison that's probably not that far from the truth, though not in a useful format. For me, they charged 2,694.90 AUD, which would have ended up with the following sums at the other end if I send 2,694.90 AUD: Company Recipient gets ...
Google Maps settings
More discussion of my issues with Google Maps' refusal to turn around last week. Callum Gibson got a different route home, but of course he hadn't driven in there and have his phone know his travel direction. Another suggestion: did I have it set to something else than car? How can I tell? One of the issues I have with Google Maps on phones is that I can't find the ?Settings?. Usually that's hidden behind 3 vertical dots somewhere on the edge of the display. But no, not Google Maps. I need to push myself in the face (?Avatar?, a term that I thought meant ?manifestation in human form; incarnation?, but now seems to mean ?photo?)
Why Afterpay?
The weather is gradually getting warmer, and today we took the dogs for a longer walk, to the ?Große Linde?. Lena is gradually getting more active, and I'm concerned that she might hurt herself when she runs to the end of her leash and gets stopped by her collar. Time for a harness, like Larissa has. Yvonne found a supplier online, but they were out of stock in Lena's size (7, which proved to be L upside down). Further searches found others, some in the wrong colour, and one just what I wanted, but somewhat more expensive. OK, just a matter of a dollar or 3.
4G vaccinations for the bush
One of the more bizarre conspiracy theories going around is that SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations inject 5G devices into your blood. But there's no 5G round where we live; 4G is the best we can get. I have it. Time to start a new conspiracy theory that there are different vaccines for the bush that inject 4G devices instead of 5G devices. But do I have 4G? Look at my phone. No indication. More discussion on IRC. It should be on the status line at the top of the display, like this: But what I have is: Clearly it's too polite to worry me with such details.
Google Assist: Think inside the box
Why did my phone get involved when I was talking to my TV yesterday? Could it be that the phone was listening, even though it was ?turned off?? OK, keep them apart and see what was happening. In the office, with my phone ?turned off? on the desk (in other words, no display), I asked ?Hey, Google, are you spying on me??. Indignant reply ?No, I would never do that?. So, first recognition: Google ?spies? on you. It's certainly paying attention to what you're doing, even when you think it's sleeping. Next, what does the TV say? Leaving the phone in the office, out to ask it.
?Smart? TV and Google Assistant
I'm not really overly concerned whether I get Google Assistant to work on hisen.lemis.com, my TV, but I was curious about what went wrong with my attempts on Friday. My best guess was that Bluetooth had been disabled in the configuration. OK, check that. No, all OK, Bluetooth enabled. Try with the microphone symbol again. It worked! OK, ask Google something. I got an answer, but not from the TV: my phone answered instead. Why? Why should I need a phone for communication between TV and remote control? And was it Bluetooth or via my Google account? Still more confusion. While in the configuration section, saw an item ?TV Bluetooth Speaker?, promising me audio playback from my phone to the TV speaker.
Google TV assistant
While setting up the TV, I was offered the option to set up Google Assistant (or a couple of alternatives). OK, that could be useful. My ?remote? (presumably remote control) needs to be within 3 metres of the TV? And that with a 75" TV? That makes it completely useless. Try it anyway. Nothing useful happens. So what is it this time? User ?error?? Broken ?remote?? Needed to hold the MENU button down for more than 20 seconds? Misidentified the MENU button (all I have is the box with three horizontal lines)? Some unspecified configuration error (Bluetooth not enabled, for example)?
TV firmware upgrade
Yesterday my new TV started asking for a firmware upgrade. Every time I powered it on. And it warned that it would take up to 30 minutes. OK, do it in the morning. Upgrade went almost immediately to 10%, then 20%, then 21%, then... nothing. Checking with tcpdump showed almost no traffic, but when I went back later, the upgrade was done. Well, all bar the shouting: Why does it want me to accept licenses now? I can't recall any issues when I installed it, though at that point it would have been understandable.
Google Maps: to boldly go where no man has gone before
I went down Misery Creek Road without telling Google Maps, which had instructions to take me home. Once in Misery Creek Road, there's only one practical way home: turn around and go back to the main road, in this case about 400 m back. But Google Maps doesn't believe in retreating. Instead I got this suggestion: Problem: apart from going through private land, it's completely impassable. I have had great difficulty getting through that area on foot.
Misery Creek Road again
On the way home from Napoleons, headed down Misery Creek Road to see what I could find. To my surprise, the Grevillea bedggoodiana are already in flower: Also a number of other flowers that I should really know, but the only one I know for sure is the first, Hardenbergia violacea:
Music from Android
The trip to Napoleons gave me the opportunity to try out my new cable connecting hirse, my Android phone, with the car radio. The good news: it works. The not-so-good news: it doesn't work well. The sound is far too faint, and I had to turn up the volume on the phone to maximum, and it still didn't sound good. But I also had Google Maps running, and it didn't suffer from any such problem, so the break-throughs were almost deafening. Is this because I was using the file manager? Started ?Music?, the one that I couldn't delete, accepted their stupid license conditions, whatever they may be, and was presented with a list of ?songs?, all the same: I couldn't find any ...
The last supper
Maddog Hall dug up this image: It's on Facebook, of course, so who knows who was responsible? More to the point, though: whom does it represent? Maddog recognized himself, so that's final. And Jesus? St. Ignutious? Apart from that, I only recognize Tux and Linus Torvalds. Presumably you need to be a Linux-head to recognize the others.
New keyboard
It has been nearly 10 years since I started using a Sun Type 7 keyboard, and for some time I've been looking for a replacement: the A key had started malfunctioning. That problem has gone away, but for how long? So when I found a brand new one for $65, cheap by US standards, but with free shipping?the US suppliers want up to $150 just for shipping?I bought it. It arrived today?thus the trip to Napoleons?and to my surprise it came with not only a mouse (not included in the item description) but also two mains power cables that didn't belong there.
Google Maps navigation, continued
We drove a total of 259 km today?or that's what Google Maps says. It has a useful feature that it maintains track logs of where I have been?exactly what I have been doing with GPSLogger, though it calls them ?Your Timeline?. Being Google, of course, it also guesses (frequently correctly) what businesses I have visited. On the whole, a good thing. But as usual, the details are lacking. How do I publish the log? By default only I can see it. How do I find the time where I was at a specific location? And it's not always very accurate. Today I discovered a ?snap to road?
Well don't do that, then
Part of taking my house photos involves creating two files, Makejpeg, a list of instructions for converting images that I use for all photos, and Makehouse, a list of instructions for the house photos, which I generate with an awk script. It gets copied to Makejpeg: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/14) ~/Photos/20210821 789 -> cat Makejpeg >> Makejpeg Normally it is done instantaneously. But today it went on for a considerable period of time. More memory pressure and page faults? Kill it and see: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/14) ~/Photos/20210821 789 -> cat Makejpeg >> Makejpeg ^C === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/14) ~/Photos/20210821 790 -> l total 874 -rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 3,440 21 Aug 13:12 Makehouse -rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 914,604,840 21 Aug 13:12 Makejpeg ...
Android interfaces
I've been ranting and whingeing about Android for nearly 10 years now, and I continually wonder what fueled the design decisions. My general feeling is that commercial interests predominate, but there are, after all, clever people behind them. What explains the network exchange between mobile phone and TV that I saw on Monday? Arguably I don't care, but people discussed it at length on IRC. In particular, why both ?Screen Sha..? and ?Content Sh...?? I've established that the former establishes a direct connection between the phone and TV, while the second causes the TV to contact YouTube directly, while the phone acts as a particularly hard-to-use remote control: It seems that under these circumstance some gesture brings up a marginally better ?remote ...
Unexpected directory change
Seen on teevee: === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/6) /spool/Series/Landaerztin 55 -> cd .. === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/6) /spool/Videos 56 -> Those names in red are path names. The parent .. of /spool/Series/Landaerztin is /spool/Series/. So how did it end up in /spool/Videos? I still only have a partial answer: from another shell, I had previously done: === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/7) /spool/Series 32 -> mv Landaerztin ../Videos This adds the entry Landaerztin in /spool/Videos and removes it from /spool/Series.
Android communication: modern
People on IRC seized on yesterday's article on my pains connecting my (Android) phone to my (Android) TV. I had personally decided that the TV was to blame for displaying a help text instead of a connection menu: But lots of questions, most of which suggested that the article was too long to read. Had I connected it to the LAN? Had I selected the right input? Does the phone even support ?screen casting?? Does the TV even support ?screen casting?? Have you installed ?Google Home??
Displaying Android on TV, again
After yesterday's complete lack of success trying to display my Android phone on the new TV, I did a bit of research. Is there something special about my Xiaomi Redmi 9T phone or my Hisense A7G TV? Off looking for specifically that combination. How about a YouTube video? Sure enough, plenty of them, many pointing out that I didn't need this strange Google Home app. This one showed something quite close to my situation. Just click on the chipped window icon, the one they have chosen for ?cast?. Problem: my phone doesn't display that icon. OK, look for something that refers to MIUI, and found this one, conveniently in Hindi.
More ?smart? TV fun
Getting our new TV up and running was very simple, mainly because I had been there before. On the first occasion I had tried to install it according to the instructions, and it had taken forever. This time I ignored what instructions there were, along with the installation procedure, and just connected it up as a monitor. But there are still those functions, and today I spent more time investigating them. One of them is the ?input? choice. TV, of course, and 3 HDMI inputs. Also AV and one labeled ?Screen Shar...?. I suppose it's typical of modern devices that the menus are designed to be too small for the text.
Chloe: Found!
A while back I looked at my diary for 1 September 2002, where I had written: In the evening off to Young and Jackson's on the corner of Flinders St and Swanston St to visit Chloe, ... The link was to my photos for 2 September; in those days I wasn't completely accurate with the dating. And I recalled the photo: a very poor photo of me next to the painting of ?Chloe?, a nude on the first floor.
Internet finally works
I've been using the Internet from home for over 30 years now, since I created a Heath Robinson connection from my home office in Schellnhausen, using an X.25 link to Tandem's ?Expand? network and on to devnull.tandem.com in Austin, Texas. It was clumsy and slow, but it worked. Since then I've had to contend with three issues: price, speed and reliability. Price has dropped continually from the 0.45 DM/kB in March 1992 to my current unlimited ?plan? for $69 a month. Based on my actual usage (434 GB last month), that corresponds to 15.9¢ per GB. Based on the 1992 pricing, it would have been 195.3 million DM, or about 323 million AUD today.
Peak smartphone?
Marginally interesting statistic on Statista today: we have reached ?peak smartphone?. Considering that in the last 6 years more than one ?smart? phone has been produced for every person on earth, that's not surprising. But of course it's a challenge to the makers: how to persuade people to buy new phones although they have perfectly functional ones already. My suggestion: make them easier to use. Easier to interface with other computing devices, in particular. That means going back to established principles rather than inventing trendy new interfaces that nobody understands. Interoperability, that old, worn-out magic word. Why do I need a different interface not just for every phone, but for every app?
Removing Android apps
After the pain installing Android apps over the last couple of days, it seemed imperative to remove the useless ones before I got even more confused. For the most part, that was straightforward. Long press on the icon and a menu pops up: Press ?Uninstall? and it goes away. But ?Music player?, the one that wanted to enter into a legal agreement to play my local files, refused: I can't find a way to get rid of the bloody thing!
More Android audio investigations
More investigation of audio reproduction on Android today, including discussions on IRC. Not very much came of the discussion on IRC: it seems that I'm a fool for not doing it the way the system wants. In particular, I shouldn't know anything about file names or hierarchies. Problem: how do I understand it any other way? How do I interpret this, for example? It doesn't tell me anything that distinguishes the ?songs?. But the real problem seems to be product management somewhere: they decide that file system names and hierarchies are too complicated for normal users, so they work around them.
40 years of PC!
Somehow almost nobody noticed an anniversary today: 40 years ago IBM announced their model 5150, better known as ?Personal Computer? or PC. That's more than half the history of digital computers ago.
Android: Was fragen Sie nach meinen Schmerzen?
What good are mobile phones? I have already established that they're not for phone calls. On that occasion I came up with 7 other uses, almost none of which suited me. The closest were podcast and ?Movies, Netflix?. No, I don't want to watch video on the phone. The display makes up only about 7.5% of the area of my new TV. But there's another issue. When driving, I listen to music on the radio. That's straightforward enough: I have copied a number of my CDs onto disk (eureka), and I can play them there. For example, === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/34) /src/Music/MP3/Schubert/Winterreise 6 -> ls 01-Schubert_-Winterreise,-Op.-89,-D-911---Gute-Nacht.mp3 02-Schubert_-Winterreise,-Op.-89,-D-911---Die-Wetterfahne.mp3 ...
Completing the teevee install
For a couple of days I have had teevee connected to the new TV, and it works. But there are things to do: Check whether I can start X with it. So far it was running with an X server started with the EDID of the monitor I had been using for testing. Potentially the EDID in the TV is broken. Add the other 8 GB of memory and check that it still works.
distress with big memory
Found some time to do some image processing with distress after quadrupling its memory. Is it faster? In the past I have expected to process up to 5 images per minute with DxO PhotoLab, or 12 seconds per image, though recently it seems to have been slower. And a freshly booted machine would show memory usage of about 5.5 out of 8 GB. Today I did two batches, keeping an eye on the memory usage. The first processed 13 images in 100 seconds, using up to 7.7 GB. That's clearly faster, only 8 seconds per image, but the image selection wasn't typical.
TV HDMI connect: final check
Overnight it occurred to me that I do have another portable HDMI source: my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II, and I have the cable to go with it. To the lounge room, plugged it in. No reaction. Works fine with the monitor. So another nail in the coffin of the TV.
Updating E-1 firmware
Installed my copy of Olympus Studio 2 on distress. How I hate these interfaces! But I found my way through the maze of twisty little passages to the right window for updating firmware. Connected the camera. ?Can't find camera?. Why? Somehow I had too much else to do today, so I didn't check.
Memory and Beethoven's 5th
While messing around with teevee, considered that I might as well put the additional 8 GB of memory back into teevee. But I didn't put it in the same slots. Beep-beep-beep-BURP, something like the theme of Beethoven 5. What does that mean? And why? I've mixed all kinds of memory in these ThinkCentres, but this was the same!
More memory for teevee
After upgrading distress' memory, I had 8 GB (2x4 GB) left over. Just what teevee wants: it already has 8 GB memory, but it's clear that modern web browsers eat it up quickly. OK, put it in and reboot. Beep, something that I don't recall. And then no display! Why? How can adding memory cause that kind of problem? OK, reboot and see what happens. Display. But when it started X, the display claimed that the signal (1920x1080) was out of range. Checking the X configuration shows that I have a second option, 1280x720, and that worked ?fine?. But why? Disconnect the TV and put on a normal monitor.
Microsoft reinstall
I have more Microsoft ?Windows? 10 system disks than I have systems running Microsoft: they come for free with every ThinkCentre I buy. OK, how about calling one of them progenitor and just bring it up to date with a base system that I can then tailor to a successor of dischord, distress, disgust and other Microsoft boxen. Started upgrading one, not helped by the lack of a mouse, but other things took over, so I didn't finish.
More memory!
In the mail today was no fewer than 64 GB of RAM for my ThinkCentres: 32 GB of SO-DIMM after all, despite (it would seem) the recognition of the seller that that's the wrong format for the computer, and 32 GB of DIMMs. The SO-DIMMs can go straight back, of course. And the DIMMs? They're enough to max out one ThinkCentre. So I put them in distress, my overworked Microsoft ?Windows? 10 box. Does it reduce the disk activity? Not yet. Maybe I should really try the Microsoft ?Reinstall? solution.
Another quiet day
Somehow I didn't get much done today. Spent a bit of time trying to find a way to update the firmware on my Olympus E-1, with some promise of success: this discussion gave a download link for Olympus Studio 2, which should be able to update the firmware: Well, it looks like Studio 2 can still be had!
Web site pain, the third
Had to make a funds (?payee?) transfer today with the Bank of Melbourne. It didn't show itself from its best side. The web site was down, not for the first time. Came back later and got a little further, then An error occurred while processing your request. Reference #30.1cf3ce17.1628221490.33b8a46b Refresh? Yes, that worked, but after I had started the transfer and entered all the details I got it again. Finally got to the point where it needed to send me a PIN, and then it decided that I had exceeded my daily transfer limit, something that it clearly hadn't thought of before.
Memory for ThinkCentre M93p
Mail from Jim Dillon today pointing me to the Crucial memory choice page. Enter your exact maker, model and model number, and it will tell you what memory you need. I don't need that, of course: I have the hardware maintenance manual. But it was worth checking, if only to add to today's web site pain. It gave me the choice of M93p tower, M93p tiny, and mine. And how about that: the tower takes up to 4 DIMMs, the ?tiny? takes 2 SO-DIMMs. Tried to find the one for mine, but I had forgotten what they call it (?small? is the right answer), and the only way to find it again was to enter all the search terms from the start.
myGov, 6 years later
Six years ago I tried to sign up with MyGov, an Australian Government ?service? that shows bureaucracy from its worst side. I was so annoyed that I haven't looked at it since. But completing after our COVID-19 vaccinations last week, I received an email: Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2021 11:19:22 +1000 (AEST) From: myGov <[email protected]> Subject: Your COVID-19 vaccination status is available to view Sign in to myGov to get your message in your myGov Inbox. Regards, myGov team Do not reply to this email. And that, apart from some uninteresting headers, was everything.
Backup problems?
From time to time I get this kind of message out of my overnight backup: DUMP: DUMP: 1849075 tape blocks DUMP: finished in 271 seconds, throughput 6823 KBytes/sec DUMP: level 2 dump on Thu Aug 5 04:00:00 2021 DUMP: error reading command pipe: Socket is not connected DUMP: The ENTIRE dump is aborted. The error is presumably related to dumping compressed data across an NFS connection. But why then? The second line clearly states ?DUMP: finished". And checking the dump, that's correct. It is complete.
What memory modules?
People read yesterday's article on new memory modules and were confused. Yes, they were SO-DIMMs, and what I had in my photos were normal DIMMs. And as I had noted, they're not the same shape. But the seller specifically stated that they would fit my exact ThinkCentre model, the M93p; that's why I bought them. But I had thought that they were just higher. Juha Kupiainen tells me that they're the same height, just half the width. And how about that, the item listing had a photo that showed the dimensions, though rather fuzzily: 67.6 mm. And that's what the Wikipedia page DIMM states: Regular DIMMs are generally 133.35 mm in length, SO-DIMMs 67.6 mm.
More memory
It's clear that a number of my machines need more memory. There's not much that I can do about eureka, which already has its maximum complement of memory (32 GB), though it can do with much more. I'm going to have to face the prospect of replacing it with something with much more memory, at least 64 GB. And to think that I once wrote (?Installing and running FreeBSD?, just over 25 years ago): you will need a computer with an Intel 386 or better CPU, which should have at least 5 MB of memory.
Olympus serial numbers
One of the things that interest me about my collectible cameras is when they were made. In the case of the Olympus DSLRs, that's relatively simple: with the secret handshake you can access 4 pages with information about the camera. The interesting one in this case is page 3, here from my E-1: The values are: CS: Camera Serial Number. This one is also written on the bottom of the camera.
Working around Microsoft breakage, part 815
Part of my pain with processing yesterday's photos from the Olympus E-1 and E-330 was that DxO PhotoLab didn't understand the raw format, and the Olympus Workspace program didn't understand network mounts: it insisted on me climbing its directory tree, which only showed local file systems. But there's a solution to that: symbolic links, a term that Microsoft has apparently not renamed. Pages like this tell you how to create them. You need to be root Administrator to use such powerful tools, and it seems that ?Windows? 10 no longer has the same interface to start an Administrator shell COMMAND.EXE: you need to search for it and then right-click ?run as administrator?.
syncthing?
On IRC today, Juha Kupiainen asked me how I transferred photos from my phone to a Real Computer. That's straightforward enough, as I reported earlier this month: I use WiFi FTP server and wrap it up in a couple of scripts. Not what Juha can use: he wants to push from his phone over potentially long distances. But it got us in a discussion, and both Peter Jeremy and Daniel O'Connor said that they use syncthing. What's that? A replacement for the standard utilities, it seems. Installed it on hirse and (since it's not a standard) on dereel. And I couldn't work out how to use it.
Photo processing software hell
Spent a little time today examining my new Olympus E-330. How does the sensor compare to modern cameras? How does the E-1 compare? Time for some comparison photos, also including the E-30 and the E-M1 Mark II. First surprise: the ISO range of the E-1 and the E-30 max out at 3200/36° ISO, but the E-330 only goes to 1600/33°. The E-1 considers both of these settings ?ISO BOOST? (with the shouting). OK, take photos at 100/21° and the highest values. For the E-M1 Mark II I did 25000/45° as well. Reading in the photos from the E-330 took forever. It averaged about 800 kB/s.
Strange rsync issue
Ozlabs are going the way of progress and shutting down bilbo, our venerable machine in Canberra. Instead we're going to a VPS. That will doubtless save a lot of money and probably improve availability, but of course disk space is relatively expensive. Stephen Rothwell contacted me and asked me if I really needed those 90 GB of files I had on the system. Almost certainly not. They date from when I hosted www.lemis.com on bilbo, but that's years ago now. I would have removed them long ago, except: am I really sure that there's nothing there and nowhere else? OK, tar and feather them and move them here.
Reading Olympus E-1 photos
The Olympus E-1 has a standard mini-USB connector, and finally I have new cables. Tried reading the data on dereel today: (ada0:ahcich0:0:0:0): WRITE_FPDMA_QUEUED. ACB: 61 40 a8 46 5b 40 13 00 00 00 00 00 (ada0:ahcich0:0:0:0): CAM status: Uncorrectable parity/CRC error (ada0:ahcich0:0:0:0): Retrying command, 3 more tries remain (ada0:ahcich0:0:0:0): WRITE_FPDMA_QUEUED. ACB: 61 00 e8 c9 df 40 13 00 00 03 00 00 (ada0:ahcich0:0:0:0): CAM status: Uncorrectable parity/CRC error (ada0:ahcich0:0:0:0): Retrying command, 3 more tries remain (ada0:ahcich0:0:0:0): WRITE_FPDMA_QUEUED. ACB: 61 00 e8 92 cf 40 13 00 00 03 00 00 (ada0:ahcich0:0:0:0): CAM status: Uncorrectable parity/CRC error (ada0:ahcich0:0:0:0): Retrying command, 3 more tries remain (ada0:ahcich0:0:0:0): READ_FPDMA_QUEUED.
Addressing git, try 2
There's something about git that terrifies me, but it's getting to be time to finally come to terms with it. There's a primer in the FreeBSD Committer's Guide, but it's a little uneven. I'm keeping my experience in a living with git page, which is currently far less complete than the primer. I originally cloned a source tree on dereel last month, and the instructions tell me to run this involves the invocation === grog@dereel (/dev/pts/3) /usr/src 5 -> git pull --ff-only remote: Enumerating objects: 96495, done. remote: Counting objects: 100% (96493/96493), done.
VPS server prices dropping
It seems that just about everybody has a Virtual private server nowadays. I have two, one in Los Angeles and the other in Frankfurt am Main. They're not expensive, though storage is. But discussing on IRC today, I discover that prices are dropping radically, and you can now get servers for as little as $2 per month. For future reference: https://letbox.com/page/box, https://lowendbox.com/ and https://vpsfree.org/. My guess is that the prices will continue changing in both directions; letbox is currently ?out of stock? of its $2 servers.
Xiaomi phone camera scanner
Yesterday I established, inter alia, that my almost brand new Xiaomi Redmi 9T phone didn't scan the QR codes at St John of God hospital, while most modern phones do. Why not? Took a look in the ?Settings? for the camera and found: But it was already turned on! Why didn't it work? Messed around a bit with the display. In particular, what do these symbols at the top mean? Pressed the second one from the right and got this display: ...
More reboot issues
Tried to start an xterm from teevee on eureka this morning. No reaction. Huh? Problems with the system? Not directly. It was maxing out the disks doing an rsync. Why? The only one is the one at 4:00 every morning, and it typically runs for about 10 to 15 minutes. But further examination showed: Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on ... /dev/da2p1 3,815,019 1,991,615 1,785,253 53% /dump /dev/da0p1 7,630,093 7,629,994 -76,201 101% /backups /dev/da1p1 1,907,067 1,906,906 -152,404 109% /videobackup /dev/da3p1 7,629,565 5,794,996 1,758,273 77% /photobackup That's very wrong.
St John of God: Book with seven seals
Yvonne's appointment was at St John of God hospital again today. In the past they have made it difficult for me to get in, but ?you ain't seen nothing yet?. I can no longer check in with the Service Victoria app, not because it's broken, but because they don't want you to use it: Huh? How is that supposed to work? A camera is a camera, not a QR scanner. And of course it didn't work. Somebody else came by, and it worked for her, but she was from the hospital staff, and it's not clear how long it took her to get it to work.
Recovering from the outages
I've had no fewer than 3 outages in the last week: two of the remote server lax.lemis.com, and then the results of the power failure today. Gradually things are coming up more easily, but I keep making notes in my after boot page and then forgetting to do anything about them. The really big one was setting the keyboard for teevee, now that X won't do it automatically, and today I once again found myself in a maze of little twisty passages, all different, finding the right .xmodmap file, not helped by the fact that when I chose the wrong one, I effectively had to reboot to reset to the correct starting point.
Recycling ancient hardware
Decades ago?at least 30 years?I built a state-of-the-art TV/HiFi setup. Two video recorders, two satellite receivers, and of course a TV. What wasn't available on the open market was a method to interconnect them, so I built my own based on switches and amplifiers available from Tandy. As the years went on, the satellite receivers went, TiVo and DVDs came, and I modified the box accordingly: Then came computer-based multimedia, and some time round 2004 the box became superfluous and ended up in the shed.
Census is coming
Still more irritating advertisements on the web today. Oh. One was not an advertisement, just an inappropriate way to draw my attention to the fact that there will be a census next month. Followed the link and found this information, including: If you don't have a Census number, you will be able to ask for one online. You will need to use a mobile phone for this. Now what earthly reason do they have to restrict the access to mobile phones?
Vultr failure
Message from Vultr today: Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2021 14:52:08 -0400 From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Subject: Host Node Reboot Regarding the following subscriptions: 4096 MB Cloud Compute - 45.32.70.18 (lax.lemis.com) in Los Angeles Our monitoring system indicated an issue with the hardware node hosting the instances listed in this email. Our engineering team has investigated the issue and initiated a restart of the host node in question. That took them a long time! The failure was at 16:26 on 21 July, nearly 2 days earlier: Jul 21 16:26:53 lax kernel: ---<<BOOT>>--- Normally I wouldn't have paid any attention to that, but then I discovered that my IRC proxy wasn't working again.
Crash!
Into the office this morning to find both my IRC windows unable to connect to the remote proxy. What, off the network again? No, all seemed OK. OK, bip is old, worn-out software (even Wikipedia doesn't seem to know about it), and I'm continually restarting it. That was the case today, too, and putting it into a restart loop seemed to fix things. Problem solved? Not quite. Checked and found: === grog@lax (/dev/pts/0) ~ 1 -> uptime 12:24AM up 7:58, 1 user, load averages: 0.28, 0.38, 0.34 8 hours uptime?
Getting to Buninyong
Peggy Naumov lives in Buninyong, slightly off to the east of the Ballarat-Colac road that we normally take. Getting there usually goes via Napoleons, but there's also another way via Mount Mercer: OK, I drive down the Ballarat-Colac Road all the time, and currently there are road works to slow things down. Selected the Mount Mercer variant and set off with Google Maps guiding me. But it wanted me to stick to the main road. OK, turn towards Mount Mercer, and sure enough, it recalculated the route. But half way to Mount Mercer, it wanted me to turn right (south)!
Breaking into mobile phones
Latest news today: thousands of mobile phones have been compromised by some method that I haven't read about yet. It even works without a click. Wow! Is that really surprising? Only last week I was ranting about my concerns with mobile phone security. But then, I'm just an old, progress-resistant fogey. Never mind that I got my first mobile phone more than 30 years ago, and people laughed at me for it. But this is ?military grade? spyware! Yes, pull the other one, it's got bells on.
Services Victoria: not for fools like me
While writing up yesterday's rant, I noted something new. I didn't include the entire link at the top of the page: Of course it should be: And those dots tell any normal human with intuition that there are multiple images there, and that you can select them. With the orange arrow at bottom right? Of course not! Select the button with a small part of a digit.
New cordless phones
We have two sets of cordless phones on two different lines: a Uniden 1635 with 4 handsets, bought in October 2014, and a Telstra 12850 with only two handsets in May 2015, mainly for the promise of Bluetooth headset compatibility. The Telstra phone lived up to my prejudices: it felt uncomfortable, had a particularly rasping synthetic voice with US American accent (for Telsta!) , and I couldn't adjust the volume with the Bluetooth connection. So I don't use it. But the battery in one of the Uniden headsets is dead. OK, it can be replaced: $18. That seems a lot, considering that I bought one a couple of years back for $5.25.
?Error messages?
camera-wiki.org has some interesting pages, some of which I would like to update. But how? I don't have a login, and the login page doesn't offer a way to sign up. Tried a guess, but it seems that it was wrong: No Groogle. OK, select ?create a new account?: Savour that message! You don't have permission because you don't have permission. OK, elsewhere they offer help.
Secure transactions
Mail from Macquarie today: From 16 August 2021, we?re reducing the daily transfer limit for online transfers across your accounts to $5,000, unless you?re using the Macquarie Authenticator app. We?re making this change to further enhance your security, as we?ve seen a rise in online fraud and scam activity across Australia. Macquarie Authenticator provides a more secure method for verifying payment instructions than SMS. To transfer more than $5,000 per day, you?ll need to download and set up the Macquarie Authenticator app. We?ve included more information on Macquarie Authenticator below. So to be secure I need to store access credentials on my phone, which can be stolen, rather than keeping them somewhere where nobody will suspect.
More camera history
I'm trying to categorize the history of camera technology, at least as seen from my current perspective. It's no secret that camera development has stagnated, and many people blame mobile phones for the situation. But what development is needed? Over the next few days I intend to think aloud about various aspects. Today it's viewfinders and focus. First, though, an overview. Starting a long way back, with old plate cameras, we have: Size: something that you can carry.
Air conditioner failure?
Up this morning to discover that the room temperature was round 16.5° instead of the set 21°. What went wrong there? Took a look at the control panel, and it showed a blinking RUN. That's normally the case when the outside unit turns on and is not yet up to speed. But clearly this had been going on for a while. Turned the internal panel on and off. Bingo! No RUN any more: E17. OK, do a real power cycle on the outside unit (which, of course, wasn't running). Came back in to find the controller displays going through a series of apparently random displays.
Xioami fail
Yesterday's experience with hirse, my Redmi 9T, confused me. Why was the machine so slow? Tried again this morning, of course, and also to see how many of the services were still running. The phone reacted normally, but the connection results weren't encouraging: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/6) ~ 521 -> nmap hirse Starting Nmap 7.30 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2021-07-13 13:10 AEST Nmap scan report for hirse (192.109.197.228) Host is up (0.0024s latency). rDNS record for 192.109.197.228: hirse.lemis.com Not shown: 997 closed ports PORT STATE SERVICE 1234/tcp open hotline That's not very much.
More Xiaomi insights
Ultimately I decided not to return hirse, my Redmi 9T. Yes, I wasn't able to get it to stop stopping apps at random, but that was the only real problem (apart from the fact that it was Android, of course). In particular, I liked the touch sensor integrated into the on-off button, And apart from the pain of finding a suitable replacement, who knows what problems a different model might have other irritations. Better the devil you know. Another good thing about the phone is the very long battery life. In the past I have been charging it every night, but the battery charge level seldom went below 70%.
QR code confusion
Walking round town nowadays requires a lot of QR code reading for contact tracing. Today when entering the hospital to pick Yvonne up, I took my standard image in the hallway. But in the unit where I was to pick her up, there was another one, conveniently located at knee height: OK, scan: OK, how do you open the camera? Showed that to the receptionist, who said ?never mind, use the one in the entrance?.
Retuning Yvonne's heart
Up in the middle of the night (OK, 6:30) to take Yvonne to St John of God hospital. The weather was amazing: temperatures round freezing, and plenty of fog. Yvonne went for a ?DCR TOE?, which I had already discovered means direct cardioversion and transoesophageal echocardiogram. I like to think it in terms of car ignition: her heart has been misfiring, and she needed the electrics looked at (TOE) and tuned up (DCR). She stayed there for half a day, and I picked her up round 14:00, apparently firing on all four cylinders. Dr Reddy prescribed her some Flecainide acetate and said that the procedure had been a success, something confirmed by her later blood pressure readings, for the first time without arrhythmia warnings.
More Google Maps navigation
Once again I used Google Maps to navigate to the dentist (?Hey Google, take me to Virginia Williams?), which worked well. Less so on the way back. It took me down Dawson Street and wanted me to turn right onto the Midland Highway: Sorry, no can do: That's not the first time a navigator has tried to take me that way.
Jamie Fraser collects leftovers
Jamie Fraser along again today, this time to pick up equipment instead of to deliver it. I had decided that I don't want to sell the old UPS that we bought when we moved in here. Instead I would give it away on Freecycle. But clearly Jamie is a more worthy choice, and he has just moved house, so it sounds like a good idea to give it to him. While we were at it, I tried in vain to give him some furniture for his lounge room, the cupboard at the back of this photo from 2004: But he was having none of it.
Google: Error, guess why
Tried sending an SMS today, using the messages.google.com service. Sorry, not today: OK, Google, what phone are you trying to talk to? It won't say, and I couldn't find a way to establish it. The Learn more link was typically useless: it didn't contain any information about the specific issue. Tried all the solutions, and finally scanning the QR code worked around the problem. But why does modern software refuse to supply more information?
New, faster backups
Yesterday evening, the first of the month, was the day for the level 0 backups. Previously they ran for up to 15 hours, but then I got suggestions from Daniel Nebdal to use alternative compression programs. On eureka that's zstd, because it's older than the alternative compression programs. Today was the first time to compare it in action. The backup started at 21:00, and it was finished at 7:06, after 10 hours, 6 minutes. Last month it finished at 12:50, 15 hours, 50 minutes. Somehow I had expected more of a difference, but it's still a great improvement. lagoon was a different story.
Google Maps: The cost
One of the things that I had to do to use Google Maps yesterday was to enable mobile data, something I almost never do. Why? I'm stingy, and in principle I always have Wi-Fi access. So today I took a careful look at data usage: Number Destination Duration/Data Charge Date 0490494038 mdata.net.au 28.09MB ...
Google Maps with voice recognition
Michael James had recently mentioned that he found Google Maps' voice recognition convenient. OK, we can do that too. ?Hey Google Take me to St John of God?. ?Choose your destination?. OK, there were 5 of them, including mine, and it took me there. One point for Google Maps. Next to the Fruit Shack. It knew that too. But the instructions were all wrong: That's 150 km away. I suppose that's acceptable, but why didn't it repeat the address that it found?
CIFS for Android
I'm gradually coming to the conclusion that I have put enough effort into understanding the MIUI version of Android that I might as well stay with it. The only really irritating issue (beyond that fact that it's Android) is that it keeps stopping processes apps that should continue running. But while looking through the enormous mess of apps that I already have on the phone, I came across one that I have most certainly never used: LAN Drive, which offers an SMB server. Now wouldn't that be a good idea? In fact, I think I expressed a similar view some time ago.
Getting to know git
My accident with youtube-dl last week made it clear: it's time to upgrade teevee. But now there's this horrible git thing, and I'm going to have to come to terms with it. The documentation we have is rather sketchy, and it appears to contradict itself. I suspect that it will change in the not too distant future. It's been over 5 months since my last attempt, and looking at the tree I checked out, I no longer know what branch it is. How can I tell? It seems that the first line of /usr/src/UPDATING is a good start, though not as reliable as I would like.
More distress distress
More photos to process today. Is distress still running? rwho doesn't seem to think so. But it was. Did rwhod get removed with yesterday's recovery? OK, just start it: C:\>rwhod 'rwhod' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operatube program or batch file. Damn! Where did I get it from? Off and found this page, which seems to be the one I had before. Downloaded it and tried to install: Damn. Do I have to run as ?Administrator??
Trying Waze
Driving into Ballarat gave me the chance to try out yet another navigation app, Waze, which had been suggested (if not recommended) by Michael James. It works, sort of. I've seen routes like this before: That's pointing in exactly the opposite direction from the one I needed to take. The apps take the current direction of travel (or, presumably, the way the device is pointing) to decide on the route, and this one would have taken me round in a 3.3 km circular diversion to get back to Grassy Gully Road.
Modernity!
While bringing distress back to life, was presented with this notification: Aargh! All the things that I hate, put together: ?Streamlined? toolbar and menus: in other words, different, taking getting used to. ?Modern? tabs. ?Modern? is so irritating that I'm taking it to mean ?all that is bad?. Fresh icons: one barely recognizable icon changed to something else just when I was getting to be able to identify it.
distress in distress
House photo today, nothing special until it came to the processing. distress, my Microsoft 10 box, didn't respond. A quick look showed that it had been powered off. How did that happen? Connected up a monitor and powered on. Came back a little later and found that it was powered down again. OK, add a keyboard, sit and watch. But this time it ran through and recovered. The message was interesting: And the ?More info? wasn't very helpful, giving me the impression that it was all my fault.
Python horror
Yesterday I installed an update to youtube-dl to try to download videos from a reticent TV broadcast web site. It didn't work. Goodbye, TV site. You don't get to tell me how to watch TV. But then I wanted to watch the AlJazeera news. No file. I've seen that before: they keep changing their YouTube ID. But not this time. Running it manually, I got: [download] Destination: /spool/Docco/AlJaz-15 ld-elf.so.1: /usr/local/lib/libpython3.8.so.1.0: Undefined symbol "close_range@FBSD_1.6" ERROR: ffmpeg exited with code 1 Grr! The youtube-dl upgrade had installed a new version of python, and it broke some dependency.
Which mobile phone, once again
Rather to my surprise, the seller of my Xiaomi Redmi 9T has agreed to take the phone back. So off to look for alternatives. To my further surprise, I have found very few. I need to consider whether I can't live with this misfeature. After all, it's not as if Android is anywhere close to my idea of a good operating environment. And one feature of the phone is really convenient: the fingerprint reader that overlays the on-off button. It's hard to find details about how other phones handle that.
Organic Maps
Finally Organic Maps downloaded the maps for Victoria. Since they're OpenStreetMap maps, I probably already have them on the phone, but that would require sharing, something that seems to be foreign to the concept of Android. Yes, it works. Tried the 708 Eyre Street that confused HERE WeGo. Well, I tried to try it. It seems that Organic Maps doesn't believe in looking for street numbers. It beat HERE WeGo by finding Eyre Street in Ballarat, but positioned at the western end, and I couldn't find a way to change it.
OI.Share revisited
Another Android app that I have used in the past is OI.Share. I have found it almost completely useless, but was that possibly because of the phone I was using? Tried setting it up again today. ?Easy Setup? worked first time. But: My only options are to try it again! And of course There Can Only Be One: Surely that can't be right. OK, remove, try again: What does that mean?
More Xiaomi pain
So what do I do about the Xiaomi Redmi 9T? The seller has effectively given up trying to pretend that they can offer a warranty: The extended warranty is under our own company for our customer hence we do not have the certificate :( That's nonsense, of course. They don't have a company. Even the invoice appears to be taken from some other company, though possibly they don't know of it. So I can send it back. But what do I replace it with? Apart from the misfeature, it's quite a nice phone.
Another GPS navigation app?
On IRC, Andy Snow suggested Organic Maps, which he found quite fast, though it's also based on OpenStreetMap. Installed it, but it didn't show itself from its fastest side: it hung at 14% while downloading maps. Still, that's probably the toyshop.
Latest MIUI pain
The seller of the Xiaomi Redmi 9T sent me an invoice in PDF form, without ABN, stating ?2 years warranty?. Without the ABN it's not worth the paper it isn't printed on. Replied asking for a written document. In the meantime, finally got a response for the support ticket that I entered on Friday. They wanted the IMEI number. Why didn't they specify that on their last message, which only asked for the serial number? OK, sent that, and got quite a quick reply: Both IMEI 865817055036801 and 865817055036819 are not found in our database.
More Xiaomi fixes?
On IRC today, Callum Gibson pointed me to a promised fix for my Xiaomi Redmi 9T problems. It's from Quora, so there are several answers. I didn't have time to follow, but there's some hope.
Navigating to Ballarat
On my way to Ballarat I tried a couple of navigation apps. Which ones? iGO and Sygic are no longer available. And somehow I got fed up with the others. Tried with HERE WeGo, which wanted to take me to Eyre Street in Buninyong. I thought that it might have been because I typed in the wrong street number (704 instead of 708), but no, 704 Eyre Street Ballarat also exists. So another app bites the dust. On the way back I used Google Maps, which still doesn't excite me.
GPS navigators: going round in circles
Seen in my diary for 10 years ago today: I bought a new GPS navigator and discovered that the map data was completely out of date. That's exactly the same problem I had with the most recent one in April. In that connection, it's interesting to note the increase in size of the map files: -rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 80226209 Mar 19 2010 Australia.fbl 120695296 07-27-2019 18:15 AZ 2020/CONTENT/Map/Australia_R3_HERE_2019.Q2_190612.fbl 121902592 03-02-2021 10:41 AZ 2021/CONTENT/map/Australia_HERE_2020.Q2_200720.fbl 122764288 06-10-2021 10:06 com.nng.igo.primong.igoworld/files/privdocs/InappShop/Mount/map/Australia.fbl The last three are reported by zip, which is too polite to use international date formats, so the dates are in out-of-order MDY format.
Xiaomi still kills apps
As I feared, despite the configuration hoops I jumped through, hirse continues to kill apps that are marked in multiple ways as ?don't stop?. Here an example of the servers: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/14) ~/Photos/20210619 215 -> date; nmap hirse Sun 20 Jun 2021 17:58:27 AEST PORT STATE SERVICE 1234/tcp open hotline 2121/tcp open ccproxy-ftp 4242/tcp open vrml-multi-use === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/14) ~/Photos/20210619 217 -> date; nmap hirse Mon 21 Jun 2021 09:48:33 AEST PORT STATE SERVICE 1234/tcp open hotline 4242/tcp open vrml-multi-use Got a response from the seller about my return request: Hi dear, The extended 1 year warranty is under us :) Hence for 2nd year, you can claim with us if there's any issue with the phone :) Thanks, Kelly ...
More QR code scans
On the way to pick up Lara we stopped at a petrol station. Walked in without a mask, because I forgot. Nobody complained, and on request pointed me at the toilet. QR code! Makes sense. Scan. On the way out, checked the door. Yes, QR code. Scan. Nobody else did, and nobody even pointed it out to me. What's the point?
GPS navigators yet again
Driving to Melbourne was a good chance to try out the few GPS navigators that I hadn't already tried. That turned out to be only HERE WeGo. For the fun of it, also tried MapFactor Navigator again. I also had my standalone navigator running. Navigator proved once again to be worse than useless. At least HERE WeGo chose the correct route. Navigator was absolutely consistent in choosing routes ranging from suboptimal to completely wrong. In Ferntree Gully Road it repeatedly wanted me to do a U turn when I was on the correct route. I thought I had had set the wrong destination, but after returning I confirmed that I had the correct street.
More Xiaomi pain
I went to a lot of trouble yesterday to configure hirse, my Xiaomi Redmi 9T mobile phone, from stopping apps all the time, and I thought that I had succeeded. But no, they're still going away. That's enough. I don't need this kind of annoyance, and there are plenty of other phones out there that don't have this defect. It goes back.
Still more navigation apps
Carried on half-heartedly today trying to find a usable GPS navigation app for my phone. It's depressing. I've established that iGO doesn't have adequate POI data, not even the amount delivered with el-cheapo standalone navigators, and like Sygic, it's just too expensive. MapFactor Navigator worked, but had significant issues with OpenStreetMap, and also the search interface was suboptimal. As I later discovered, I couldn't find a way to enter street numbers. Tomorrow we're going to Ferntree Gully, but I couldn't enter the complete address. What else is there? MAPS.ME, apart from being too loud, also uses OpenStreetMap, so it's not worth trying.
Finding the ATA
Yesterday's attempts to recover my Apple ID were thwarted because I couldn't locate my VoIP ATA on the network. I had disconnected it from the network, so when I reconnected it it would get a new IP address, and comparing the output of arp -a before and after would show it to me. Did that and found: hirse.lemis.com (192.109.197.226) at 00:25:9b:6e:34:36 on em0 expires in 1033 seconds [ethernet] So that's why hirse moved. officephone (as I think it was called) had had the same IP address.
Bloody dhcpd!
Trying to download my screen shots from hirse was more difficult than I expected. Timeouts although the apps were running. What's going on? While looking for something else, found an indication of the IP address, which the Settings menu must have inadvertently displayed. 192.109.197.228. That's dhcp-228, and hirse is 192.109.197.226. Why did that happen? In general, dhcpd hangs on to IP addresses at all costs. I had to modify my scripts to accept alternate IP addresses.
MapFactor navigator
Going into Ballarat gave me a chance to try out a new GPS navigator, MapFactor Navigator. It wasn't very successful. The maps were correct, but the route that it chose wasn't. And every time I deviated from its recommendations, it recalculated a new incorrect route. In addition, it showed speed limits that are just plain wrong. Other navigators often show old speed limits, but this one shows limits that have never existed, like 60 km/h down Grassy Gully Road. My guess is that this is due to their use of OpenStreetMap. I checked Grassy Gully Road, and sure enough, it shows a speed limit of 60 km/h.
MIUI app murders: fixed?
Surely I can't be the only person suffering from this stupid app stoppage that MIUI seems to think desirable. More searching on the web brought me this. Unlike previous pages, it refers to version 10 of MIUI, the one I'm running. Followed it: Go to Settings/Battery & Performance: Select the ?Settings?
MIUI assassinations: enough!
I've spent the best part of a week trying to stop the MIUI version of Android from stopping processes apps when it feels like it. Why? This is a clear violation of the Trade Practices Act. A computing device is there to run programs. If it can't do it reliably, for whatever reason, and I haven't been warned in advance, that's a violation. Of course, first check that it can't be fixed. Clearly they think of it as a feature, not a bug. A case for support. Where are they? This page gives me Technical Support - [email protected] Doesn't that inspire confidence?
Banks in the time of Internet
In the article about the sale of Pedro I praised the bank system for getting their act together and allowing instant transfers. That might have been premature. Yvonne wanted to pay Sally for the advertisement she put in the Trading Post. ?It says that the server is down?. Oh. Were we off the net again? No, all fine, but indeed I got a timeout on https://login.anz.com. OK, wait a bit?a good half hour?and it worked. Then I wanted to pay for Lara, using the Bank of Melbourne account. Timeout on https://ibanking.bankofmelbourne.com.au/ibank/loginPage.action. Others confirmed that the servers were inaccessible, and later came up with this news report.
Recovering Apple ID
Finally found the (unflattering) password for my Apple ID today, and Apple accepted it. But it wasn't done yet: This stupid reliance on phone numbers to authenticate things is Just Plain Stupid. As far as the number shows, it's a plain ?landline? (in fact, it's VoIP, but Apple can't know that). And there are ways to tap into phone lines along the side of the road: Those numbers on the tags are the last 4 digits of the phone number.
Understanding iPads
My ?new? iPad 2 came with no documentation at all. While that's modern, in this case it was a free gift, so I could hardly complain. But I had difficulties navigating: how do you get away from a full screen? It wasn't until some time later that I noticed the sole button on the side (or is that bottom?) . Still, Apple is a reputable manufacturer. They must have manuals for the device. Off to look for ?Ipad 2 manual?, and sure enough, came up with the iPad manual page, which pointed me at this PDF document. Only 12 pages, and 11 of them were warranty and safety information.
An iPad
Yvonne came home from shopping today with an iPad 2. Why? The price was right: nothing. Plugged it in and tried to set it up. ?Please enter your Apple ID?. Aaargh! Just what I was ranting about yesterday! But maybe I should do it, at least to set it up. Anyway, don't I have one after all? Yes, on my password list, unfortunately without a password. Why did I forget that? OK, click on ?forgotten password?. It wants to send a code to my old phone number, and wouldn't take no for an answer. When I continued anyway, got: There is not enough information to reset your password at this time.
Navigation apps again
Going to Ballarat was a good opportunity to further test the navigation apps that I had installed on hirse: iGO and Sygic. In principle I had decided against iGO, at least because of the lack of POIs, but it seems that I was at least partially wrong there: it was able to find M.C.Physio. But it couldn't find ALDI, so it's probably not the choice. Sygic calculated an arrival time that looked wrong. But I kept my eye on it, and how about that, it was right after all. Wonderful. But that was on the way to the dentist. While I was there, it seems, the free trial of ?Sygic Premium?
More MIUI assassinations
hirse still continues to wake in the morning with fewer apps running than on the night before. What's going on? On checking, discovered that most of the apps that were ticked in this list, and which I had painstakingly unticked, were ticked again: But there's more. You can do an app-by-app configuration. In fact, it seems that to get it to behave, you must do an app-by-app configuration, and of course all my favourite apps were on the ?chop? list.
Navigation confusion
Yvonne will pick up a device (as it happens, an iPad) for me tomorrow, so set up the real GPS navigator for her to find the place. And from there she wanted to go to M.C.Physio, so I searched for that in the POIs. Yes, it has it, twice in fact: Now isn't that helpful. Same address, two different distances. How did they manage that?
Sending SMS
One of the people interested in buying Pedro, all communicating by SMS on phones. Yvonne spoke to one of them today, and she wanted details by ?text?. How do you do that? Slide (or ?swipe??) over the surface of a phone? That way madness lies. I recall some interface I have used in the past, but I couldn't find it now. OK, what's IRC for? Asked and got a reply from Daniel O'Connor: Messages.app. On an Apple. I can do that, though I had to reboot fwaggle: it didn't do so automatically after last week's power failure. -bash: Messages.app: command not found.
Still more Android fun
Gradually I'm coming to terms with hirse, my new Xiaomi Redmi 9T. There are still a few rough edges to work out, of course. The most obvious one was the continual app disappearance: I continually needed to restart things, for no obvious reason. But Andy Snow explained: it's a feature, not a bug. The apps that get stopped are ones that use the most power, and this page explains how to fix it?if you happen to be using a 3 year old version of MIUI. Still, it hasn't changed completely beyond recognition. The instructions about ?becoming a developer? no longer seem to apply, I think, but this sequence seems to be the way I went: ...
Begone foul cracker!
Into the office this morning to find 2000 mail messages, most of which looked like: 937 N + 12-06-2021 To [email protected] ( 6) World Wide Web Owner N + FAILURE: /%29%20AND%204985%3D%28SELECT%20%28CASE%20WHEN%20%284985%3D4985%29%20THEN%204985%20ELSE%20%28SELECT%205052%20UNI 938 N + 12-06-2021 To [email protected] ( 6) World Wide Web Owner N + FAILURE: /%29%20AND%207697%3D%28SELECT%20%28CASE%20WHEN%20%287697%3D6953%29%20THEN%207697%20ELSE%20%28SELECT%206953%20UNI 940 N + 12-06-2021 To [email protected] ( 6) World Wide Web Owner N + FAILURE: /%27%20OR%20NOT%201661%3D2897%20OR%20%27rxVi%27%3D%27YQTNgrog/Rant/reverse-horror.php/ <- http://www.lemis.com:8 All from the same address, of course: Remote IP: 45.146.166.55 Client: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071103 Firefox/2.0.0.9 OK, time to finally set up a firewall to block idiots like that.
Phone image quality
Yesterday I took a couple of images with hirse, my new phone, in the darker corners of my office. How good are they? Good enough if you're not fussy. How about a crop (the box next to the microscope at top left): That's not spectacular. Surely a Real Camera can do better: Oh. Yes, marginally better, but still not acceptable. That was taken with the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II and the Leica DG Summilux 15 mm f/1.7 ASPH., which is closest to the phone in angle of view and aperture.
More Android fun
After yesterday's journey to Cape Clear, today was the time to evaluate the track logs. Where are they? I know the ones for Mendhak GPS logger: /storage/emulated/0/Android/data/com.mendhak.gpslogger/files/. OK, take a look with ftp. Connection refused! The ftp server had stopped. Restart the server and try again. But there was no track log there! GPS logger had also stopped. So had one of the navigation apps. In fact, hardly anything was running any more. What's going on here? OK, where are the track logs from iGO and Sygic? How do you find them? Presumably the app authors expect you to ?swipe? all over the place with magic incantations instead of just specifying a path name.
More navigation apps
Going to Pene Kirk's in Cape Clear gave me an opportunity to try out more navigation apps. This time I decided to compare iGO and Sygic. I didn't have an address for Pene. I know where it is, and I easily established the coordinates, but how do I enter them? iGo knows that I'm in the USA or somewhere like that, so it offers a west (negative) longitude by default: But it accepted my guess of an E to represent east. And it took me down my short cut via Harrisons Road, which, like just about every map I've seen lately, it calls Stones Road.
More Android surprises
I'm gradually coming to terms with hirse, my new Xiaomi Redmi 9T mobile phone. But there are typical modern things like this: Clearly a feedback page. But for what? Ah, it's too polite to say. I may never know, so certainly I can't feed anything back.
USB file system confusion
Into the office this morning to find that my nightly backups didn't work as intended: the backup file system for eureka had overflowed. Further investigation showed that the four external USB disks had been probed in the wrong sequence, and I had backed up to the /dump file system instead of the /backups file system. Another item for my ?after boot? page. But shouldn't there be an option to mount based on the disk label? I had some recollection, but I couldn't find it. Maybe it's was something that I did with Vinum decades ago.
firefox display refusal
Today's photos started off with a photo of the garden and two screen shots, the first a detail of the second. But one of my firefoxes didn't want to know: That text on the right is displayed when the image can't be displayed. Why? Other browsers can show it, so it's clearly not an issue with the image. But look at that name! What an obscenity! http://www.lemis.com/grog/Photos/20210609/small/Toyshop-advertisement.jpeg. My ad blocker (and others) wanted nothing to do with it, though they were happy enough with the name of the detail image, http://www.lemis.com/grog/Photos/20210609/small/Toyshop-advertisement-detail.jpeg.
What size mobile phone?
One of the really frustrating things about using a mobile phone as a computer is that they're so tiny. My old S?msung I9100 has a display with 11 cm diagonal, about 4?" or 0.33% of the area of our TV display. That's barely usable. And when I first got involved with Android, I chose a device with a marginally larger display: a 10" tablet, a whopping 1.7% of the TV display. But tablets are obviously too big. Phones are the way of the future: they need to fit into your shirt pocket, it would seem: Still, my Nokia 3 had a somewhat larger display than the S?msung, 5" or 0.44% of the TV.
iGO to Napoleons
A rather soggy ?you have mail? slip from Australia Post in the letter box today: my newest Nikon F was waiting for me at the post office. Time to try out the Android version of iGO on hirse. That's effectively the same software that I use on my standalone navigators. I had tried installing it 9 months ago, but failed to install any maps. Try again. Yes, it installed, even very quickly: this phone seems to have much faster networking than the Nokia 3: it displayed rates of over 2 MB/s, coming close to the speed of my network link. The iGO interface is different, but vaguely familiar.
Recovering computers
How did the computers weather the power failure? Frustratingly, eureka's hardware doesn't recover from a power failure: I have to manually power it on, and no UEFI setup option can change that. distress, the Microsoft ?Windows? 10 box, came up in its usual disk-eating state. teevee came up with no problems at all, but I still needed to start X and set the key map. lagoon came up, but couldn't mount NFS file systems from eureka, so I thought it easier to reboot it after eureka was up. And eureka? It doesn't want to boot, presumably a variant on the issues I have with dereel: In this case, my guess is that I installed a newer variant of the boot code, but that the support in the file system was missing (no directory ...
Mobile phones and supercomputers
When I started in the business, the supercomputer was the Control Data 7600, and for a long time I measured all computers by its performance. Basic parameters: 2 CPUs, each with 8 functional units (I think; it's surprisingly difficult to find details). Cycle time 27.5 ns, so if all 16 functional units were running (which never happens), it would run at about 580 MIPS. And my new Xiaomi Redmi 9T mobile phone? According to it has ?Octa-core (4x2.0 GHz Kryo 260 Gold & 4x1.8 GHz Kryo 260 Silver)?.
Still more Android fun
Presumably as a result of practice, setting up hirse, my new Android phone, wasn't as difficult as I had feared. Of course, there were still things to be done. One was just plain finding installed apps. Much discussion on IRC, and lots of experimentation, and finally I got roughly what I was looking for. It seems that MIUI has two different ways of displaying apps. By default it's the old way, in pages ?swiped? sideways, the way it was on my S?msung I9100. The problem is that I didn't find a way to sort the icons alphabetically, so I had to search the entire collection.
Android compatibility: the truth?
Last week I grumbled about the fact that Service Victoria's app doesn't support my old S?msung I9100: Android 4.1 is too old for it. And Callum Gibson defended the choice because of the effort involved in supporting such old (over 8 years!) systems. And then I discovered that some apps are too old for modern Android! I had difficulty with the WiFi File Transfer, because it was too old. And today I spent some time looking for the Mendhak GPS logger. When I found it, the author explained the reason why it's no longer in the toy shop: The core of the issue (why it gets removed) has been that GPSLogger supports a lot of older devices and frameworks, whereas the Play Store is always trying to get ...
More Android fun
Yesterday I managed to set up hirse, my new Xiaomi Redmi 9T mobile phone, without too many difficulties. But of course there were many loose ends. First, what about a GPS logger? In the past I had used the Mendhak GPS logger, but that was no longer an option: the toy shop didn't know about it. I had had this problem before with taskumatti, and I had installed two others, both titled ?GPS Logger?: BasicAirData and Peter Ho. They weren't a raging success: in fact, I couldn't get either to work. BasicAirData only ever showed this screen: That wasn't a hardware issue: the GPS status app showed a surprising number of satellites.
Microsoft disk thrashing
What's wrong with Microsoft ?Windows? 10? Since last month's forced update, it seems to be trying its best to kill the disk: for no apparent reason, the system processes use 100% disk for minutes on end. I suppose I should replace it with an SSD, but what does it happen in the first place? How I hate Microsoft!
Telling time with Android
Another issue with all Android phones that I have seen is that they don't want to display seconds in their times. hirse came with a clock app that nicely did so, even by default. But what about on the screensaver? No, then the seconds go away, and there's no way to get them back. Why? I can only assume that this is an energy saving thing. But I wish they'd offer it, at least as an option.
Setting up Xiaomi Redmi 9T
Unpacked the new Xiaomi Redmi 9T phone with some difficulty: it had been wrapped tightly in bubble foil, and I had difficulty unwrapping it. The first thing I saw was a USB charger, outside the box. Why? There was another charger with European plug inside the box. Clearly not an Australian model. But what I wasn't expecting was how much bigger it was than previous phones: From left to right: S?msung G9100, Nokia 3, Xiaomi. Documentation looked better than I expected. Warranty documentation written in flyspeck, and 100 pages of instructions, admittedly also in flyspeck!
Where's my phone?, conclusion
Where's the phone that I bought nearly 2 weeks ago? On Friday they sent it to Wendouree, apparently too late to get it to the post office on the same day. OK, what does AusPost tracking say today? And yes, the times are consistent wrong way round chronological. So it was transferred to the (unspecified) post office at 6:42 and then put in transit 7 minutes later. What does that mean? Called up the post office on 5342 0455 and was told that the packages were just being unloaded from the car, and that it would take about an hour, after they had scanned them.
dereel X upgrade, next pain
Yesterday I managed to avoid doing any work getting X configured on dereel. In principle all I needed was to get the configuration to arrange the three displays in the correct order, which in this case means :0.0 on D-Sub, :0.1 on DVI and :0.2 on HDMI. That's necessary at least because only the third display has an HDMI input, and on the second the D-Sub input is already in use. Irritatingly, that meant that the non-X display was on the middle monitor, and it's stupid enough to change displays if one goes away. So when eureka:0.0 (on the same monitor) does a screen blank, it changes to dereel and doesn't come back when I restore the eureka displays.
More dereel fun
A little more playing around with dereel today. First, take the memory out of eureso and put it in dereel, increasing dereel from 8 GB to 16 GB. Booting wasn't quite what I expected. Firstly, it failed: Haven't I seen that before? I'll have to check. And don't I just need to enter boot to boot? Yes. But then I saw: real memory = 12884901888 (12288 MB) avail memory = 12384124928 (11810 MB) Why not 16 GB?
Backup problems solved
My replacement of backup programs brought an unexpected problem, as I noted a couple of days ago. The backups failed with dump -0uf - / | nice zstd -T4 > /dump/lagoon-FreeBSD/0/root.bz2 mksnap_ffs: Cannot create snapshot //.snap/dump_snapshot: /: Snapshots are not yet supported when running with journaled soft updates: Operation not supported dump: Cannot create //.snap/dump_snapshot: No such file or directory Today I tried the obvious: copy and paste the first line. It worked! Huh? Time for more examination of that script: echo dump -${level}uf - $fs \| nice $PRI $BZIP \> $dumpfile.bz2 if [ "$dummy" != "Y" ]; then ...
X on dereel, next attempt
In August last year I spent two weeks trying to configure X on dereel, and ultimately gave up postponed the effort. The issue was almost certainly a bug in the nvidia driver: no matter what I wrote in the X configuration file, it put the displays in the same sequence, and not the one I wanted. Since then I have upgraded the system, and it makes sense to use dereel as my workstation and eureka as the house hub. So let's take a look at that X configuration again... It has changed completely! I didn't get very far, but what I saw today was (from /var/log/Xorg.0.log): [196913.340] (==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.0.log", Time: Fri Jun 4 17:17:50 2021 [196913.340] (==) Using system config directory "/usr/local/share/X11/xorg.conf.d" [196913.340] (==) No Layout section.
Access only with QR code
The latest lockdown in Victoria is now loosened. For us out in the sticks, there are only a few restrictions. What are they? I wish I understood. Despite over a year of this kind of issue, the government still doesn't have a single place to go to to tell you what you may and may not do. But in the news I heard that access to shops is now only with QR code. What does that mean? Presumably some mobile phone app. Why did I only hear it on the news, to which I only listen sometimes. Yvonne hadn't heard of it (and didn't know what a QR code is anyway).
New password restrictions
It seems that I'm not the only person who finds password strength checkers stupid. Here's a reductio ad absurdum: Your new password must include the full text of one of Shakespeare?s sonnets, plus at least 48 characters from three different alphabets. Bear in mind that you cannot use a Shakespearean sonnet that you have used in a previous password and you must include at least three numbers and no more than eight, but at least six upper case letters. There are further restrictions.
Download failure
Seen while trying to download a video with MediathekView today: I wonder what that means. It only applied to one file, and it was consistent, so I suspect a configuration error at the other end.
Finally better backup compression?
It's been nearly a month since Daniel Nebdal sent me suggestions for better compression for backups. Yesterday was the first day of the month, time for a level 0 dump (whole system), and thus also high time to choose a better compression program. For eureka things were clear: pbzip2 is the best that I have installed, and I didn't want the pain of building a port on a 6 year old system. teevee was also uninteresting, since I use rsync to back it up. Left lagoon, which has zstd. OK, make zstd -T4 the compressor. Today I had two unexpected results: The network-wide script /home/local/bin/dodump wasn't linked on lagoon.
Upgrading dereel again
The build of FreeBSD 13 on dereel completed without incident yesterday. Time to reboot and install the world. Failure! Something about creating a symlink C, which already existed. What directory? It's too polite to say that, but it was related to nls. OK, go looking: === root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /usr/src 2 -> find / -xdev -name C | xargs ls -ld ... drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 19 Jan 09:18 /usr/share/nls/C lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 7 19 Jan 09:18 /usr/share/vi/catalog/C -> english The only symlink was the second one, but clearly that has nothing to do with nls.
More GPS navigator fun
Planning to go into town today, despite the lockdown, to mcPhysio. I don't really need a GPS navigator to get me there, but it's an interesting position because the parking area is on Anticline Lane, behind the clinic, and my previous navigators couldn't find it. OK, add the coordinates to the user.upoi file, and once again it worked. And for some reason it wanted to take me only to the junction of Anticline Lane and Eyre Street, and that via a different route from normal, via Ascot Street. That's not optimal, but I did have the route set to ?short?, and maybe it was.
Battery recalibration, part 2
Yesterday's PV recalibration was short and sweet. But it's also Tandem-like: ?So nice, so nice, we do it twice?. Today we had another one, in principle almost identical to the first one: start charging at 12:40 and 51%, charge until Can't open /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/Photos/20210601/photolist.php: fopen(/home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/Photos/20210601/photolist.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory I hope there will only be two.
Upgrading my systems, yet again
The computers I was expecting last weekend didn't quite make it to the state border before the lockdown was declared. Now it looks as if they won't make it here until September. What should I do? My current thinking is to make dereel (or whatever I'll end up calling it) my personal workstation, and leave eureka as the house server. The server software is not as time-critical as the workstation software (such as firefox, Google Chrome and other obscenities). OK, first bring dereel up to FreeBSD 13. For that, I need to use git, a program that I find profoundly irritating. But it gave me a chance to follow the instructions in the committer's guide.
Another PV system battery calibration
Another PV battery calibration today, once again with minor impact. It started at 10:13 with 35% battery charge, and was done by 11:17. And this time it did use the PV power, even to the point of feeding in to the grid during that time. Looking at the graphs, I'd guess that it only cost me 1 or 2 kWh from the grid: While I was at it, discovered that the graph generator does show output power usage, obfuscated at ?Inverter Active Power?
GPS POIs: success
Why did my GPS navigator not want to know my manipulated user.poi yesterday? Is it something basic, or some trick it has up its sleeve to refuse files it didn't create? Try one step at a time. The file it created, and which it recognizes, has only the one line: 1|@Favourites|Casa iberica||-37.798047|144.975922|_a**||_avi||3065|Fitzroy, VIC|Johnston Street|25||+61-3-| 2|@Favourites|Home||-37.800201|143.751655|_a**||_avi||3352|Dereel|Stones Rd|29||+61-3-| @My POI It's worth parsing this line. Clearly the delimiter is a |, and some of the fields are always empty (and have been on all the other versions of these files that I have seen over the years).
Where's my phone?
The phone that I bought on Tuesday stood a fighting chance of arriving today. But it didn't, so it'll be at least another 3 days. And then in the evening I got a message: the phone has been sent, tracking number attached. Tracking number shows that Australia Post issued the tracking number at 16:06 today. And that's all. No evidence that it has been sent, though Australia Post is very lax with that kind of detail. Still, no thanks to oz_trade for their handling speed, despite their promise of fast delivery.
Creating POIs for GPS navigator
So it seems that I have lost the POI (Point of Interest) file that I had in my old GPS navigator. That's not so bad: it was quite a mess, and it would be interesting to find out how to create one with sane tools. What does it look like? === root@dereel (/dev/pts/4) /mnt/AZ 2020/save 14 -> less profiles/01/user.upoi-orig "profiles/01/user.upoi-orig" may be a binary file. See it anyway? ÿ?2^@|^@@^@F^@a^@v^@o^@u^@r^@i^@t^@e^@s^@|^@H^@o^@m^@e^@|^@|^@-^@3^@7^@.^@8^@0^@0^@2^@0^@1^@|^@1^@4 === root@dereel (/dev/pts/4) /mnt/AZ 2020/save 15 -> hd profiles/01/user.upoi-orig 00000000 ff fe 32 00 7c 00 40 00 46 00 61 00 76 00 6f 00 |ÿ?2.|[email protected].| 00000010 75 00 72 00 69 00 74 00 65 00 73 00 7c 00 48 00 |u.r.i.t.e.s.|.H.| 00000020 6f 00 6d 00 65 00 7c 00 7c 00 2d 00 33 00 37 00 |o.m.e.|.|.-.3.7.| 00000030 2e 00 38 00 30 00 30 00 32 00 30 00 31 00 7c 00 |..8.0.0.2.0.1.|.| 00 ...
Updating GPS navigator
Since wanting to return the new GPS navigator six weeks ago I haven't really done anything with it, though I got both a refund and the device. As a result, I gave the old one to Petra Gietz' granddaughter Kaylin (or similar). And I have newer maps than the ones in the device, so how about installing them? I've been through these directory trees before, and there wasn't anything particularly difficult this time. But what happens if the software doesn't like the maps? The map directory is (relative to the device storage) AZ\ 2020/CONTENT/Map/. But the new image has AZ\ 2021/CONTENT/map/. Does the device care about capitalization?
Lockdown!
Victoria has been without any new locally transmitted COVID-19 cases for 45 days now. Or at least, that was the case a couple of days ago. Now we have 35 of them! Time for a fourth lockdown. It'll last a week or so. What superb timing! Over the next 3 days we had planned: A riding clinic with Anke Hawke, starting on Saturday. Jane and Scott Ashhurst had already left by car, and had to turn back.
Whence these security warnings?
On Monday I was puzzled by the false positive security messages I had been receiving. And I found out what the problem was: sharing /var/log between eureka and eureso. Problem: I'm not. eureso stores its log files locally. So where is it coming from. Looking at just one file, /bin/rcp, I had on Monday: --- /var/log/setuid.today 2021-05-23 04:09:21.202725000 +1000 +++ /tmp/security.mc8GJjo2 2021-05-24 02:18:33.930816000 +1000 - 1524878 -r-sr-xr-x 1 root wheel 19952 Nov 25 11:45:59 2015 /bin/rcp + 3370766 -r-sr-xr-x 1 root wheel 19952 Nov 25 11:45:59 2015 /bin/rcp The only difference is the inode number.
Whose fault is SARS-CoV-2?
During the bad Donald Trump era, He Himself proclaimed that SARS-CoV-2 ?Coronavirus? was ?The Chinese Virus?. Thus it was that I was happy to find this article, referring to this one, which shows in some technical detail that the discovery of the virus in Wuhan was by no means the beginning of the story. I discussed it two weeks ago. But now people in the USA are getting up on their hind legs again and suggesting that it did escape from a laboratory in Wuhan, like this article in the Washington Post. The Washington Post isn't exactly trash press, but it is US American.
New phone, dammit!
I've been thinking, researching and discussing a new mobile phone for several days now. That's wasting more time than I can afford. Made a decision: a Xiaomi Redmi 9T with 6 GB of main memory and 128 GB of flash storage. Why that? I had always thought that it would be a good idea to buy a Chinese mobile phone. In principle I would have bought a Huawei phone, mainly out of protest, but the punitive measures taken by Western governments, including our Australian government (death and destruction be on them!)
Still more system strangenesses
Seen in my daily security check emails today: eureka.lemis.com setuid diffs: --- /var/log/setuid.today 2021-05-23 04:09:21.202725000 +1000 +++ /tmp/security.mc8GJjo2 2021-05-24 02:18:33.930816000 +1000 @@ -1,74 +1,74 @@ - 1524878 -r-sr-xr-x 1 root wheel 19952 Nov 25 11:45:59 2015 /bin/rcp - 86133 -r-sr-xr-x 1 root wheel 21016 Nov 15 12:19:38 2017 /destdir/bin/rcp - 86504 -r-sr-xr-- 1 root operator 10592 Nov 15 12:20:19 2017 /destdir/sbin/mksnap_ffs - 86524 -r-sr-xr-x 1 root wheel 32480 Nov 15 12:20:20 2017 /destdir/sbin/ping ...
Welcome to TandemAlumni
Mail message today: my application for membership of the groups.io TandemAlumni group was accepted. But why? It seems that my name wasn't stored as part of my membership application. OK, now I can look at the photo that Fritz posted: That's a classical example of requiring ?click to enlarge? to see anything. But it doesn't work! Only my copy shows it. after 3 clicks. Here in original size: The photo is clearly a photo of a photo, and I have my doubts as to its accuracy.
History and yet more technology pain
Jerry Dunham sent me an interesting historical photo today: That was a photo of the Tandem Computers employees in the Ben-Gurion-Ring facility done by Fritz Joern round 1987, and he had posted it on a Tandem alumni group on groups.io. Why am I not a member? Jerry told me how to sign up, and of course I had to give an email address and wait for a message. After some time, none had come. OK, what do we have email logs for? I don't know: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/4) /var/log 194 -> ls -l maillog -rw-r----- 1 root wheel 60 23 May 00:00 maillog That's not much.
Still more technology pain
Somehow everything seems to be running at a snail's pace lately. I might suspect that it has something to do with the disk issues on eureka, but that doesn't explain why distress, my Microsoft box, seems to be running at 100% disk so often, apparently in system processes such as ?Malware removal?. I'm reminded of an ancient German story about maintaining system reliability with a program called ?Oremus? (?let us pray?) . It doesn't even seem worth looking for it online: it would drown in false positives. If I recall correctly, it kept the computer from crashing by using up all CPU time.
Disk recovery, continued
Finally my disk copy is done! Of course, it was already out of date, since the original disk had been updated. Time to run another rsync.. To my surprise, it ran for over 2½ hours and transferred 22 GB! It seems that I update quite a bit of stuff on a regular basis. But there are still no obvious signs that the old disk is dying. In fact, there's not even a reason to believe that the problem is with that disk; it could also be the photo disk, or something else altogether, though that sounds less likely.
High-resolution panoramas
House photo day today, and bright sunshine. Time to try out a couple of things I've been thinking about for a while. First, how about a high-resolution panorama? Currently I take 4 photos at 90° angles and get a panorama with up to 90 MP, depending on cropping. I had tried before with longer focal length lenses, but getting them to align correctly proved to be more pain than I wanted to go to. So how about using the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II's high resolution shot feature, 80 MP per image instead of 20? First problem: I take my images using the in-camera HDR bracketing feature, 3 images offset by 3 EV.
Computer failures gang up
Checking my weather information today showed a surprise: nothing! Did I do something wrong with my recovery efforts yesterday? They shouldn't have affected the weather station, which is connected to teevee. Much searching. No, MySQL still running on eureka, weather software still running on teevee. But the weather station didn't want to talk to it. Disconnect and reconnect the USB connection, and it started again. A random issue, unrelated to the other problems.
Disk recovery, continued
Yesterday's disk recovery went smoothly enough, but by evening I had only transferred 1.3 TB or so. Came in this morning, and... the file system still had only 1.3 TB in it. Looking around, discovered: May 21 18:03:58 eureka kernel: em0: TX Queue 0 ------ May 21 18:03:58 eureka kernel: em0: hw tdh = 543, hw tdt = 769 May 21 18:03:58 eureka kernel: em0: Tx Queue Status = -2147483648 May 21 18:03:58 eureka kernel: em0: TX descriptors avail = 790 May 21 18:03:58 eureka kernel: em0: Tx Descriptors avail failure = 0 May 21 18:03:58 eureka kernel: em0: RX Queue 0 ------ May 21 18:03:58 eureka kernel: em0: hw rdh = 110, hw rdt = 109 May 21 18:03:58 eureka kernel: em0: RX discarded packets = 0 May 21 18:03:58 eureka kernel: em0: RX Next to Check = 110 May ...
What's that clunk?
While downloading videos this morning, heard a repetitive ?clunk-a-clunk-it? coming from eureka about once every 2 seconds. Must be the disk. Why are these things so noisy? But it wasn't always so, and it continued unabated after a couple of syncs.. It also continued after the downloads were finished. What's accessing the disk? Off to look with top, which showed random access to the root file system, and iostat, which showed relatively continuous access to the disk on which it was located. But what's causing it? Stopped likely processes like the four firefox instances, MySQL and MediathekView. No change. Network? Disconnected the local network cable.
What's a mobile phone good for?
Once again I'm spending far too much time on a topic that doesn't really make me happy: mobile (?smart?) phones. I've decided to cut my losses in one direction: I won't repair it. I clearly also won't pay $89 to replace a battery on the phone when I can buy a brand new one for $69. But do I want to buy a new Nokia 3? I think it has been particularly painful (thus the ?smart?) , and if I'm going to buy a new phone I should probably get something with an interface that is closer to the norm. S?msung maybe?
Smart phones: the pain
It proves useful to have both this diary and IRC contact. After posting yesterday's article about my phone, a lot of people were up in arms: don't use it, it could catch fire. Oh. Yes, I knew about mobile phone batteries catching fire, but they were S?msung, not Nokia. On reflection, yes, potentially it could. But if that were the case, there would be many more warnings about it. OK, nothing for it, take the thing apart and look inside: In these photos, the ?top?
Disintegrating mobile phone
I've recently discovered some strange behaviour with my Nokia 3 mobile phone. The rear cover started peeling off, and now it's extreme: I can push it back in again?there are clips holding it in place?but it doesn't stay. What's causing that? Took a look inside, which showed little of interest: It seems that something inside is swelling, presumably the battery. Is this a result of it being on almost permanent charge?
What's that popup?
While working with distress, my Microsoft 10 box, I somehow conjured up this popup: How did I get it? What produced it? What is it? What good is it? It clearly seems to be produced by Microsoft, not a third party application. I'll probably never understand this system, but then, even if I did, by that time it would have been replaced by something even more bizarre.
Why 25 Mb/s is enough
For once in my life I'm on the trailing edge of Internet link speed. Since signing up with the National Broadband Network over 7 years ago, my link speed has been 25 Mb/s down, 5 Mb/s up. But as I discovered last year, that tariff is no longer available. Now the only speed they offer is 75 Mb/s down and (I think; they don't like to divulge such important information) 10 Mb/s up. When I wanted up upgrade my traffic quota in October, the only option with more traffic was unlimited 75/10 for $14 more. I managed to negotiate (and forget to note in my diary) the old 25/5 for $10 less because I was a ?legacy?
What's this breakin attempt?
Overnight my external web server received round 2000 breakin attempts. The server tells me: Date: Sat, 8 May 2021 18:14:24 GMT From: World Wide Web Owner <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: FAILURE: /grog/diary-nov2017.php/%29%3BCREATE%20OR%20REPLACE%20FUNCTION%20SLEEP%28int%29%20RETURNS%20int%20AS%20%27%2Flib%2Flibc.so.6%27%2C%27sleep%27%20language%20%27C%27%20STRICT%3B%20SELECT%20sleep%2832%29-- <- http://www.lemis.com:80/grog/diary-nov2017.php/ Referrer: http://www.lemis.com:80/grog/diary-nov2017.php/ Referenced URL: http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-nov2017.php/%29%3BCREATE%20OR%20REPLACE%20FUNCTION%20SLEEP%28int%29%20RETURNS%20int%20AS%20%27%2Flib%2Flibc.so.6%27%2C%27sleep%27%20language%20%27C%27%20STRICT%3B%20SELECT%20sleep%2832%29-- Request URI: /grog/diary-nov2017.php/%29%3BCREATE%20OR%20REPLACE%20FUNCTION%20SLEEP%28int%29%20RETURNS%20int%20AS%20%27%2Flib%2Flibc.so.6%27%2C%27sleep%27%20language%20%27C%27%20STRICT%3B%20SELECT%20sleep%2832%29-- Remote IP: 45.146.166.229 Client: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2) AppleWebKit/536.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/19.0.1061.1 Safari/536.3 Clearly this is a URL crafted to attempt some kind of request, but what? Resolving the %s, I get: );CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION SLEEP(int) RETURNS int AS '/lib/libc.so.6','sleep' language 'C' STRICT; SELECT sleep(32) So what is it trying to do?
Compression, for real
Daniel Nebdal read my articles about compressing dumps. It seems that I'm a rank amateur: he has tried many others with better results than the ones I had: xz has been in base for mumble years, and often gives a better compression/time tradeoff than the bzip family. The default settings are single threaded and slow, but try xz -T4 -1 (four threads, +level 1) - at least for me, it's both faster and smaller than bzip. The speed depends on how many cores you can give it, of course.
Navigating without GPS
Into town this morning for a blood test. For once I didn't take my GPS navigator: after all, I know my way round Ballarat. Turn right on Leith St?don't I? Yes, of course I do. Down Barkly St and turn left towards Bakery Hill, and then I'm there. But where do I turn left? Main Road? Or at the roundabout before. Chose before. Then another 3-way roundabout. Where now? Chose left again and didn't recognize anything until I was at the police station: Eastwood Street, going in exactly the wrong direction. I was able to find my way back, of course, but the real issue is that I relied too much on the navigator.
The daily dump compression
So today my pbzip2 finished: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/4) /dump/lagoon-FreeBSD/0 30 -> time pbzip2 home3 real 309m3.275s user 1771m35.488s sys 28m39.588s As expected, at only 5 hours it was the fastest. But look at that user time: not quite 30 hours! That's far longer than bzip (1576 minutes/26.3 hours) or bzip2 (804 minutes/13.4 hours). I hadn't expected that.
Compressing dumps, try 2
Yesterday's attempts at compressing backups were suboptimal because I used the old, worn-out bzip instead of the new, better bzip2. So I tried again: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/4) /dump/lagoon-FreeBSD/0 17 -> time bzip2 home real 815m16.263s user 804m19.745s sys 3m54.405s === root@eureka (/dev/pts/4) /dump/lagoon-FreeBSD/0 18 -> l ... -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 273,486,479,360 2 May 13:06 home -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 222,389,811,395 2 May 13:06 home.bz2 -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 223,600,494,258 2 May 13:06 home.bz How about that. Still no ball of fire, but it's much faster, 13.6 hours instead 26.5 hours, almost exactly half the time.
Backup pain
The beginning of the month is the day when I do my level 0 dumps. There's a lot of data to transfer, and they run for up to 15 hours. But yesterday things didn't end quite the way I had hoped: dump -0uf - /home | bzip2 > /dump/lagoon-FreeBSD/0/home.bz2 DUMP: WARNING: should use -L when dumping live read-write filesystems! DUMP: Date of this level 0 dump: Sat May 1 22:05:27 2021 DUMP: Date of last level 0 dump: the epoch DUMP: Dumping /dev/ada0p5 (/home) to standard output ... DUMP: dumping (Pass IV) [regular files] DUMP: 0.59% done, finished in 14:04 at Sun May 2 12:15:09 2021 DUMP: 1.25% done, finished in 13:10 at Sun May 2 11:26:44 2021 ...
Firefox: Yet Another Restriction
The Wikipedia page for Pentacon Six contains a number of errors. OK, I can fix that... Oh. How do I invoke Emacs? I use It's All Text!. Or at any rate, that's what I used to do. Since a recent firefox update, it has disabled it. The link is dead-on as well: ?More Information? tells me that it's not signed and thus may steal my personal information. OK, fine, so why not supply such basic functionality in the browser? You could hide the whole Emacs distribution in firefox without anybody noticing.
Panic!
Yesterday's crash and reboot seemed to have been particularly painless, but of course I forgot a couple of things: restart the linkcheck script that checks NBN availability, and the script that logs the PV inverter activity, and whose name I can never remember (it's ~/solar/insertdb). That should be part of the system startup, but somehow there are problems with the startup framework, which doesn't really cater for user-level services. While doing some normal photo processing, eureka paniced on me! It's only been a day since the last time. But that was due to my messing around with the /photobackup file system, which wasn't even mounted.
Recovering deleted UFS files
Question on Quora today: How can I find deleted file data block, this data block will help me to recover the file. - When a file is deleted in the ufs file system, only the path to that file is deleted and the data block of the file remains on disk. in FreeBSD? I'm guessing that the asker wants to know how to recover a deleted file. There's a simple answer to that one: you can't.
What did I focus on?
Another issue with Olympus is the particularly poor focus results with the M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-200 mm f/3.5-6.3 lens. It's not the lens itself: backgrounds are sharp, but somehow I don't manage to get the subject in focus. What did I focus on? The camera image preview displays a green square, so small that it's not clear exactly what it had focused on. But DxO PhotoLab doesn't display it. How about Olympus' own software, whatever they're calling it this year... ah, there it is, ?Workspace?. No, nothing there. Does the image really contain this information?
E-M5 Mark III firmware bugs?
After playing around with Yvonne's Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark III recently, I left it in manual focus mode. Yvonne didn't know how to reset it. On investigation, neither did I. I know how to do it on my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II, but things are different on the E-M5 Mark III. Presumably for commercial reasons, they have castrated the interface, as I noted on 1 February 2020: The rounded buttons on the left top of the E-M1 Mark I bring up menus that control four different parameters: And the E-M5 Mark III?
Android notifications: breakthrough
Why do some notifications sent to my phone only appear on the Microsoft Glacialware interface? While "swiping" my way across the phone surface, I found several that I hadn't expected: What kind of sort order is that? It's not even wrong way round. It reminds me of ?we hide the stuff you're looking for? Facebook, but with Facebook I at least understand what they're doing. Off to look for ways to change the sort order. If they're there, then they, too, are well hidden.
Understanding Android, try 4711
This morning my phone beeped while I was sitting at the computer. Another of these transient notifications that never show up again, something from Powercor. OK, now I have the Microsoft phone connection, so I could look at it. It's glacially slow! It may be a functional replacement for sane windowing networking such as X, but the performance reminds me of the bad old days of the Internet with data rates under 1 kB/s. It took about a minute to present a display: But those notifications don't show on the phone, and the notifications on the phone don't show here.
Setting up Zoi[Pp]er
My attempt on Friday to set up Zoiper failed: I didn't understand the setup. What's this user name stuff? That never used to be there. Today I tried again, armed with a bright idea: maybe MyNetFone has a setup guide for it. Yes, indeed, a 5 page PDF document, showing just what you expect. But it seems that Zoiper is cleverer. They've changed their setup screen to something that I still don't understand, and they've camel-cased themselves in the process, to ZoiPer. Clearly they want to be modern. The real issue is: what is this ?account name? stuff? Put in a random name and password, and continued: OK, that looks vaguely normal.
Microsoft phone access
While doing some random operation on distress, my Microsoft 10 box, I got a notification: Huh? I didn't try to set up a phone. Oh, yes, I did, months ago. At the time it proved cleverer than me, and I gave up. But this time it seemed to work, though at a snail's pace. Still, it looks as if I will now be able to do some things with a real keyboard for which I previously had to use this horrible glass substitute.
grog needs fixing
Email today: Subject: Bug in grog should be fixed before new release Is this some premonition of reincarnation?
A new keyboard option?
Mail from Ian Donaldson today, pointing me at the Unicomp PC122 range: The layout looks good. The amazing number of function keys at the top is not much use: I only use 3 or 4 of the 12 I have on my current Type 7 keyboard. And there are only 10 keys on the left, compared to the 12 on the Northgate and 11 on the Type 7 (I fake a 12th with the ESC key, which the Unicomp doesn't have in that position).
eBay refund
I've been negotiating with the seller of my new GPS navigator for 2 weeks, during which time he kept coming up with new links of dubious legality. In the end I offered to pay 50% of the total price if he would be able to supply me new maps next year. More discussion, suggestion that they would take it back if I paid the postage and took responsibility for the resale. No way, of course. And then, out of the blue, a refund. I can keep the device. I almost feel that I have cheated them, though of course they could have taken my last offer.
A new keyboard
I'm very fussy when it comes to computer keyboards. For decades I used Northgate OmniKey keyboards, manufactured in about 1990. The important thing about them was the pad of function keys to the main keyboard, something that the page I reference doesn't display at all: By 2012 they had all become worn enough that I needed a replacement, and in May 2012 I bought a Sun Type 7 instead. It took a bit of getting used to, but proved to have the advantage of even more function keys: there is also a row at the top, which I have mapped to F21 to F32.
Net outage!
While writing up my diary today, we had a net outage. I suppose it's indicative of how much I use the Internet that I noticed within a minute of the occurrence, before my monitor scripts did. So, what is it? The NTD showed normal status. ifconfig said that the link was up. tcpdump showed data going out, nothing coming in. In the past I've had trouble with DHCP. Restart dhcpd? No change. OK, first wait. Do some household work. Come back. Still down. Does Aussie Broadband know about this? I could call them, of course, but the only functional phone I have is a real ?smart?
GPS navigator, continued
The seller of my GPS navigator still hasn't accepted that he can't supply what he promised, lifetime map updates. But he's coming closer. At the beginning of the month he sent me a well-obfuscated link to a Zip archive on Dropbox, which contained the same maps I already had. After a couple more exchanges he sent me another message, half in Chinese, which with some coaxing downloaded a newer RAR archive with maps dated 13 October 2020. Is that the latest? Maybe. But once again there's this Q2 in the file name, which suggests that they could be issued quarterly, in which case it's at least 2, when not 3, quarters out of date.
The pain of printers
Yvonne cooked ?Rinderrlouladen? (beef olives) for dinner this evening. For some reason she didn't use our existing recipe, but found this recipe. Would I print it out, please? Why can't she do it herself? Well, her firefox didn't offer her the option, just print to file. OK, take a look. 31 pages! No, let's trim that. But while looking at the print preview, I discovered that the images were missing. Why? Try with Chromium. Same thing. Try with Microsoft. Same thing. At least Microsoft knew exactly what printer it was printing to, which puts it ahead of any of the FreeBSD systems: Brother HL-3170CDW.
rms: PC victim?
rms is a unique person. He shows little interest in conforming to social norms, but he has produced some remarkable changes in the way the computer industry works. He's an excellent example of Shaw's claim ?all progress depends on the unreasonable man?. A couple of years ago he offended the sensitivities of the current politically correct US society by defending Marvin Minsky against accusations of sexual assault. This article shows the US-centric nature of the criticism: ?I think it is morally absurd to define ?rape? in a way that depends on minor details such as which country it was in or whether the victim was 18 years old or 17.?
Spam: can't be delivered?
Received this morning: That's clearly fake. I don't create messages like that. But looking at the text version, I saw something very different: This is the mail system at host lax.lemis.com. I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below. For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster. If you do so, please include this problem report. You can delete your own text from the attached returned message.
ATA installation
Yesterday's less-than-successful attempts at configuring my new Grandstream HT802 Analogue telephone adapter had a clear message: RTFM. So started with that today. Not much success. There was nothing in the manual that suggested that I should do anything different. I was left with two clues: firstly, the default port number in the configuration was 5062, not 5060. Why? That's the port number of the server, and it's almost invariably 5060. And then there was this firmware download thing that I had noticed in the log messages. That was clear. The ADVANCED SETTINGS menu (why do these people always shout?) included: Reset that, remember to both save and to reboot (another 2 minutes), and it no longer tries.
New ATA, first impressions
On the way home, picked up the Grandstream HT802 Analogue telephone adapter that I bought last week. No instructions at all! It appears to be from a bulk pack, and it came really with only a power supply and an Ethernet cable. Never mind, I had already downloaded the PDF of the administration guide, which had been suitably confusing. It's amazing how many apparently obscure settings that these ATAs have. Still, I've been there before. Let's try without the instructions. Connect up. IP address? Guess DHCP: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/36) ~ 1672 -> arp -a ...
Health First: Signs of the times
Why did the pharmacies downstairs from Health First close down? One potential reason was that Health First made a better offer for the space. But that would only explain one of the pharmacies. The second, UFS, was only there for a year or so. Another explanation might be that the location is inconvenient. It's not that difficult to get a parking space: there's free parking across the road in Central Square. But I find it takes me about 10 minutes longer to get there than to most places in Ballarat. And like Central Square itself, it seems that the middle of town is atrophying.
Rebooting lagoon
Rebooted lagoon today as planned, and sure enough, the USB problem went away. And Microsoft raised its ugly head. Can't mount \\lagoon\Photos: ?drive in use? or some such nonsense. It proved that this time the cause was that Samba hadn't been started after reboot. That's a configuration error that I don't quite understand: I had an old version of the config file /etc/rc.conf. But wouldn't it have been so much easier if that message had said ?NO RESPONSE FROM \\LAGOON??
USB hang
Yvonne off to take some photos at Chris Bahlo's place, leaving Pedro behind to do so. Back home, she had trouble: she couldn't connect her camera to her computer, lagoon. The ?One Moment...? display appeared, but it didn't go away. I've seen that before. Poor connection of the USB cable. Tried again. Nothing. Finally tried it on eureka. No problems. That's at least a partial relief. If the connector on the camera were damaged, the repair would probably cost most than a replacement computer. But what is it? Defective port? Looked for another one, but they were all in use. I must consider getting a hub.
GPS map updates, dammit!
Yesterday the seller of my new GPS navigator told me that the file he sent me did indeed describe how to update the maps. The only problem was that the document was in a Microsoft proprietary format, and I didn't have the software to access it. OpenOffice couldn't make anything of it. OK, what about Microsoft? Tried to access it there. It seems that Microsoft has a solution, ?Excel? (another of those silly names). They have it, but I don't. But some time ago I downloaded a ?free file viewer?, which showed me pretty much what OpenOffice did. Dammit, as much as I hate doing so, I had no choice: I had to read the https://www.dropbox.com/s/z0wtzwhtjq8qyxw/AZ%202020.zip?dl=0 and type it in!
GPS navigator update, revisited
More discussion with the seller of my GPS navigator. I rejected his offer of 30% off: I don't want a discount, I want the maps that you promised me. If you can't deliver them, I don't need the unit at all. To my surprise, I got a response: We have already sent you the instruction and you need to click on the website to see this.
Network speeds
Downloading the Sygic map update took nearly 2 hours. OK, it's big, a little over 900 MB. But my Internet link has a 25 Mb/s download speed, so it would be reasonable to expect a 2 MB/s download speed. That's about 7½ minutes. 2 hours corresponds to about 128 kB/s. Try Ookla Speedtest. With its choice of speed test server, 1.33 Mb/s download (and 2.3 Mb/s up). Some discussion on IRC. My cameras are also so glacially slow. And my 802.11 access point is cheap and nasty. Could it be that it's the bottleneck? Found the configuration screens relatively easily. No, it offers ?Mixed 802.11b/g/n?.
More GPS investigations
One thing that became clear during my trip to Geelong on Tuesday was that the maps on my new GPS navigator were significantly out of date. No worry, it was sold with lifetime map updates. So I contacted the seller, who sent me a strangely packed RAR archive containing images of how to set up the device. Sorry, no go. Maps, please. Silence for a while, then Thanks for your mail. You do not need to return this, or how about we refund you 30%? The 30% off is not much use without up-to-date maps.
PIXIO alternative?
Anke showed Yvonne some videos of her riding. They looked as if they had been taken with a PIXIO ?Robot Cameraman?. But no, it seems that there's a (much) cheaper alternative out there: Pivo, which I always thought was beer. It seems that it requires a mobile phone, and that it works on face recognition?most of the time. It's certainly worth investigating.
Testing the ATA problems
My VoIP quality is clearly inadequate, but where does the problem come from? Based on my testing, it comes from the ATA. But a replacement is expensive, and obvious answers have the habit of being wrong. What I need is a bog standard old-fashioned phone to confirm that it's not one of the modern cordless things causing the problem. The test is a matter of seconds. But where do I get one? Facebook to the rescue. Asked on the local Dereel group, and sure enough, a Richard Emery responded and even brought the phone over here, in the process admiring all our animals.
Which ATA?
Spent some time this morning looking for recommendations for Analogue Telephone Adapters. They're few and far between. About the only thing of interest was the mention of a ?jitter buffer? in some models, but so unevenly that I couldn't rely on the statement. And it seems that the Grandstream HT812 is specifically marketed as a router (but, it appears, not a firewall), and that there's a somewhat cheaper Grandstream HT802 available without the routing function. And how do you compare prices? Some specify postage, others don't. Postage typically runs to up to 20% of the price, and so many sites are too polite to mention postage until you buy one and are about to check out.
Another ATA?
As planned, prepared to connect CJ's old Mitron MNFMV1 ATA to my system today. How? What's its IP address? Fortunately found this article, which told me that it was the same as a NetComm V210P, and was able to find the manual in PDF. And as I recalled, there's a phone interface which reads out its IP addresses. It seems that I need to connect the cable to the WAN port, but to configure it I need the LAN port. OK, can do. But then, looking at the menus, there's no way to set the service provider: it's locked to MyNetFone.
Piccola makes trouble
Picked up some wine on the way home. Piccola approved: That was taken in a hurry, of course. Somehow I need to find a way to highlight her eyes. I can see more fun playing around with DxO PhotoLab ahead.
Camera firmware update
Watching a couple of technical videos yesterday, I discovered that new firmware was available for nearly all my Olympus cameras and a number of lenses. OK, bite the bullet and update them all at once. It took me nearly 90 minutes, and I didn't get finished. First, check which lenses needed firmware upgrades so that I could pair them with cameras and kill two birds with one stone. Fire up the updating application (you wouldn't entrust something as important as that to cp, now, would you?) . Let it first update itself. Accept the license agreement, written in grey on grey in 2 pt text, twice.
Aussie VoIP
Also got round to set up my ATA to connect to Aussie Broadband's VoIP service. Setup was straightforward enough, and it seemed to register immediately. But I could neither make nor receive a call with it! All seemed well, but the phone didn't ring. A bit of searching showed why: I don't use the second phone, and I had disconnected it from the ATA for some testing. Another case of ?It works better if you plug it in?. But there was a lot of background noise. Phone? I don't really need more than one, so let's swap the two. But the noise stayed with the line!
How to destroy a web site
Silke, Yvonne's farrier, along to trim Carinita's hooves for the first time ever, so she asked me to take some photos, which she later processed. But they didn't show up on the web. What went wrong? A bit of examination showed: the entire collection of photos, since January 2001, was gone without a trace! Oh. One of the issues we have with the current file layout is that Yvonne has her photos on lagoon, her machine, but the web server doesn't have access to those files. So the web files are on eureka, specifically /Photos/yvonne/www. And yesterday I removed the entire /Photos/yvonne hierarchy in the assumption that it was all on lagoon.
Booking an X-ray
I've been planning to have a jaw X-ray done some time, and I've always found ways to postpone it. But it's been over 3 months now, and I'm going into town in the afternoon, so let's see if I can have it done then. Call up Lake Imaging in Howitt Street on 5304 9000. Work my way through the three-level menu, then wait for 4 minutes in an announcement loop. Sorry, people, I have better ways to spend my life. How about an online application? Yes, of course. Please select year from the available years (2021-2039), take a photo of your referral (forget that!)
Yvonne migration: done!
So now I have resolved all remaining issues with Yvonne's photos. Time to remove all traces from eureka. Before: Filesystem 1M-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/ada1p1 7,629,565 7,514,336 38,933 99% /Photos After: Filesystem 1M-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/ada1p1 7,629,565 5,313,824 2,239,444 70% /Photos Aaah!
New VoIP provider?
My call on the phone to the Golden Plains Shire Council today was complicated by the quality of the connection. What's causing that? I had it yesterday as well. It was the same number, so it could be my phone, my network (VoIP), MyNetFone (the VoIP provider), the PSTN or the council's phone. Which do I investigate first? MyNetFone looks like a good choice to start with. I could try a different VoIP provider, but where? Aussie Broadband offer VoIP, but they want $10 a month for it. The price is marginally higher than MyNetFone, but before committing, I'd like confirmation that it works.
Signs of the (Internet) times
Last week I commented about problems with radio reception. It seems that we weren't alone. In large parts of New South Wales they've been working on transmitters for days, to the point that they announced them on radio. And as I observed, it only applied to FM transmitters, not TV or the ABC listen app. In that connection, a statistic from Statista: All of this fits well into my Future of the Internet paper, now 7 years old, about what the world will be like in 2034: The public switched telephone network will cease to exist.
Photo corruption identified
How do I know which of yesterday's photos was correct and which was corrupted? I had thought that I had tried both with DxO PhotoLab, and it had been happy with both. But that wasn't the case: it didn't like the version that had been on lagoon, and in fact hung up as a result. So it was a good thing that I copied the version on eureka. But that's only part of the story. What's wrong with the image? Can good old Emacs help? Yes! That needs a couple of clicks to enlarge it, but it shows clearly that there's a stretch of binary 0s (^@) starting at offset 127489.
Resolving photo mismatches
After last week's comparison of photo backups, I was left with 6 directories with discrepancies. How do I resolve them? Procrastination sounds like a good idea. But tonight there's the weekly exchange of backup disks, and currently mine is over 100% full. Time to compare them. In fact, most of them weren't an issue. New, processed files on lagoon that weren't there on eureka. Nothing to worry about. One directory on eureka full of broken symlinks that weren't there on lagoon. Also not an issue. In the end, it boiled down to a single image: /Photos/yvonne/20171214/orig/2C149985.ORF. Is it really different? === root@lagoon (/dev/pts/3) /Photos/yvonne/20171214/orig 163 -> l /eureka/Photos/yvonne/20171214/orig/2C149985.ORF 2C149985.ORF -rw-rw-r-- 1 yvonne home 15,832,056 14 Dec 2017 /eureka/Photos/yvonne/20171214/orig/2C149985.ORF -rw-rw-r-- 1 yvonne home 15,832,056 14 Dec 2017 2C149985.ORF === root@lagoon (/dev/pts/3) /Photos/yvonne/20171214/orig 164 -> exifx /eureka/Photos/yvonne/20171214/orig/2C149985.ORF 2C149985.ORF File /eureka/Photos/yvonne/20171214/orig/2C149985.ORF Date taken: Thursday, 14 December 2017, 11:52:20 Exposure: ...
Signs of the times: Digital banking?
Received a strange letter from my bank today: That's a number of surprises: It refers to the Mount Barker, SA branch of the bank. We haven't lived in the area for nearly 14 years. It refers to a ?digital branch? without saying what it means. An end part of a tree? Or just a glorified Automatic Teller Machine?
Eye test confusion
Recently I've received both email and paper reminders from Specsavers telling me that my eye test is overdue, and that it should have taken place on 11 February. Problems: I had an eye test exactly a month before. And by chance (or more to the point, as the result of their mismanagement) I was there on 11 February as well. Why didn't they tell me then? In any case, it's clear that the glasses they sold me on 11 February were not what I had asked for, and I'm going to have to go there Yet Again to have the correct ones made.
ECONNRESET: Still there
After yesterday's solution to the high CPU usage on dereel, I hoped against hope that the ECONNRESETs would go away. They didn't. There was no real reason to expect that they would, but whatever it is, it's still there. How do I track the problem?
Splitting photo backups, part 2
It's been six months since I split photo backups between myself and Yvonne: a single 8 TB disk wasn't sufficient. So now we have two. But I didn't remove Yvonne's old backups from my backup disk, and now things are getting tight: Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/da3p1 7,629,565 7,555,050 -1,780 100% /photobackup That's straightforward enough to fix, of course: just remove all Yvonne's files from my disk. They're on her disk already.
Tracing the dereel CPU use
Spent some time scratching my head about the discrepancy in CPU usage on dereel today. And then it occurred to me. I've seen this before. Checking the top output over a few seconds showed: last pid: 4165; load averages: 3.83, 3.88, 3.89 up 53+01:53:17 11:57:26 last pid: 5043; load averages: 3.83, 3.88, 3.89 up 53+01:53:18 11:57:27 last pid: 5970; load averages: 3.83, 3.88, 3.89 up 53+01:53:19 11:57:28 1805 processes in 2 seconds! Clearly there's some process death spiral involved. And looking at the ps output more carefully showed: USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND grog 75374 3.1 0.0 11776 728 v0 S 15Feb21 ...
The water tower photo again
It's been nearly 20 years since I first heard about the stencil painting of Peter Weinberger on a water tower at AT&T's Murray Hill facility, where the Unix greats were active: Over the course of the next year various details became clear, but it wasn't so clear who actually performed the action. Dennis Ritchie wrote: So: who did it? If Greg Rose suspects certain aviation-inclined buddies, I in turn think his suspicions are likely to be well-founded.
dereel CPU usage
There's something really strange about dereel, which runs a two month old version of FreeBSD 12.2. I've noted that the firefox that I run from there keeps crashing with and ECONNRESET. But it's not a firefox issue: shells do too. Somewhere down my priority queue I've wondered how to analyse the issue. But today I found something even stranger: lots of lost CPU time. What I see from top is: last pid: 74531; load averages: 3.96, 3.98, 3.97 up 51+04:54:31 14:58:40 129 processes: 5 running, 123 sleeping, 1 waiting CPU: 45.9% user, 0.0% nice, 43.0% system, 0.0% interrupt, 11.1% idle Mem: 1514M Active, 3889M Inact, 251M Laundry, 1382M Wired, 773M Buf, 831M Free Swap: 20G Total, 103M Used, 20G Free PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME ...
Radio reception issues
Three months ago we had trouble with terrestrial radio reception: Paul Gallagher fixed that for me: But since then we've had a couple of cases where the receiver showed no signal. It happened again this morning during breakfast. Check the antenna. From the ground it seemed OK. Does it work? Turn on the TV and tune to the same station (ABC Classic). Works fine, so the antenna's OK.
Where is 45.146.167.42?
So who is this cracker so insistent in vain attempts to break the web site? === grog@lax (/dev/pts/2) ~ 21 -> host 45.146.167.42 Host 42.167.146.45.in-addr.arpa. not found: 3(NXDOMAIN) === grog@lax (/dev/pts/2) ~ 22 -> ping 45.146.167.42 PING 45.146.167.42 (45.146.167.42): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 45.146.167.42: icmp_seq=0 ttl=49 time=162.769 ms ^C --- 45.146.167.42 ping statistics --- round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 162.746/162.757/162.769/0.012 ms OK, clearly it's not local to lax (in Los Angeles). How about a traceroute? That's an old, worn-out tool, and fewer and fewer routers are prepared to return bad news, so what I saw was: === grog@lax (/dev/pts/2) ~ 24 -> traceroute 45.146.167.42 traceroute to 45.146.167.42 (45.146.167.42), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets 1 * * * 2 144.202.118.65 (144.202.118.65) 18.777 ms 15.184 ms 22.055 ms 3 * * * 4 * * ...
Begone foul cracker
Part of my web server infrastructure includes reporting broken internal links: if the referrer is local (my web server) and the broken link is also in the same space, I send myself a mail message. Today I got quite a few: Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2021 05:38:59 GMT From: World Wide Web Owner <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: FAILURE: /%27pSyDVv%3C%27%22%3ENbESLHgrog/diary-apr2017.php/ <- http://www.lemis.com:80/grog/diary-apr2017.php/ Message-Id: <[email protected]> Referrer: http://www.lemis.com:80/grog/diary-apr2017.php/ Referenced URL: http://www.lemis.com/%27pSyDVv%3C%27%22%3ENbESLHgrog/diary-apr2017.php/ Request URI: /%27pSyDVv%3C%27%22%3ENbESLHgrog/diary-apr2017.php/ Remote host: Remote IP: 45.146.167.42 Client: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; pt-BR; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20051010 Firefox/1.0.7 (Ubuntu package 1.0.7) Clearly that's not in the referring document.
Anatomy of a grid power failure
While doing nothing in particular in my office, the UPS beeped. I've heard that before. It seems that when there's a grid power outage, the PV inverter takes long enough to switch over that the UPS notices (though nothing else seems to). So out to the garage to check. Yes, power out. Waited a few minutes, than checked the Powercor outage map. No problems in the area, only a total of 8 premises without power state-wide. Dammit, is it maybe a local failure? Out to check the meter box. Where is the meter box? It's somewhere here: Ah, there!
Phone crash?
Came into the office and picked up my phone this morning. Pressed the power button briefly. Nothing. The thing had shut down. Why? It was on the charger. Not plugged in properly? No, after rebooting, it showed 100% charge. I haven't seen that on a phone before. Was it a crash? A deliberate shutdown? People suggest that I go looking for log files, but can I bear the thought?
Stitching large images
Hugin is not a ball of fire, though other programs, like DxO PhotoLab, might give that impression that it is. Stitching a normal-sized panorama (up to about 90 MP) takes a couple of minutes. But today I had much larger images to stitch. enblend took 2 hours, 9 minutes and used 26 minutes of CPU time: grog 95220 96.6 3.2 2201676 1075072 56 R 11:49am 26:00.13 enblend -f240 grog 31417 0.0 0.0 18848 2324 29 S+ 1:58pm 0:00.00 grep enblend So why so long?
Faking fisheye projection
As planned yesterday, took a sequence of shots to create a ?fisheye? view, using the Leica Summilux 25 mm f/1.4, simply because that's a ?standard? lens. It took 5 rows of 7 shots to cover what I expected to be the complete area, a total of 105 shots (3 each at different exposure for each position). I was trying to emulate this view, a single shot with the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 8mm f/1.8 Fisheye PRO: The first problem was the top row: it was all sky, there was almost nothing to identify the location of the images, and only two were placed.
ct@: Found
I've been puzzling about the mail alias [email protected] for a couple of days now. It's not in my /usr/local/etc/postfix/virtual file, and it's not in /etc/mail/aliases. But the mail gets through! The waters are clearly muddied by postfix's insistence on pretending that it's sendmail. But everything I see suggests that things are installed correctly. It seems clear that somewhere there's mention of ct. But where? What happens if I run newaliases? Firstly, is it even the correct newaliases? === root@eureka (/dev/pts/3) /etc/mail 496 -> wh newaliases 3468544 lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 32 4 Oct 2016 /usr/local/bin/newaliases -> ../../../usr/local/sbin/sendmail 3054005 lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 21 25 Nov 2015 /usr/bin/newaliases -> /usr/sbin/mailwrapper Yes, despite the names, that's clearly postfix.
More spam relaying investigations
So how did I get spam sent to a non-existent address? Time to check the logs on lax, the only visible external MX: Mar 1 12:42:14 lax postfix/smtpd[68786]: connect from 79-100-162-206.ip.btc-net.bg[79.100.162.206] Mar 1 12:42:15 lax postfix/smtpd[68786]: 3C85828034: client=79-100-162-206.ip.btc-net.bg[79.100.162.206] Mar 1 12:42:15 lax postfix/cleanup[68789]: 3C85828034: message-id=<[email protected]> Mar 1 12:42:16 lax postfix/qmgr[9196]: 3C85828034: from=<fishingov3@mail-relay.msc.com>, size=50473, nrcpt=2 (queue active) Mar 1 12:42:17 lax postfix/smtpd[68786]: disconnect from 79-100-162-206.ip.btc-net.bg[79.100.162.206] ehlo=1 mail=1 rcpt=2 data=1 quit=1 commands=6 Mar 1 12:42:17 lax postfix/smtp[68790]: 3C85828034: to=<[email protected]>, relay=mx0.lemis.com[121.200.11.253]:25, delay=2.5, delays=1.6/0.01/0.65/0.24, dsn=5.1.1, status=bounced (host mx0.lemis.com[121.200.11.253] said: 550 5.1.1 <[email protected]>: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in local recipient table (in reply to RCPT TO command)) Mar 1 12:42:18 lax postfix/smtp[68790]: 3C85828034: to=<[email protected]>, relay=mx0.lemis.com[121.200.11.253]:25, delay=3.4, delays=1.6/0.01/0.65/1.1, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as 9C6D12635BE) Mar 1 12:42:18 lax postfix/cleanup[68789]: 9E67A28135: message-id=<[email protected]> Mar 1 12:42:18 lax postfix/bounce[68791]: 3C85828034: sender non-delivery notification: 9E67A28135 Mar 1 12:42:18 ...
USA: Technological shot in foot
Interesting statistics from Statista today: The 5G market is dominated by Asian companies, first and foremost Huawei. And the USA has banned them. Not surprisingly, US takeup of 5G technology is correspondingly slow. Bravo, Donald Trump!
Still more mail puzzles
More spam: From fishingov3@mail-relay.msc.com Mon Mar 1 23:42:18 2021 Return-Path: <fishingov3@mail-relay.msc.com> X-Original-To: [email protected] Delivered-To: [email protected] Received: from lax.lemis.com (www.lemis.com [45.32.70.18]) by eureka.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9C6D12635BE for <[email protected]>; Mon, 1 Mar 2021 23:42:17 +1100 (AEDT) Received: from 79-100-162-206.ip.btc-net.bg (79-100-162-206.ip.btc-net.bg [79.100.162.206]) by lax.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3C85828034; Mon, 1 Mar 2021 12:42:15 +0000 (UTC) Received: from [213.80.138.183] (helo=rxeb.ruuc.club) by 79-100-162-206.ip.btc-net.bg with esmtpa (Exim 4.85) (envelope-from carpetbaggedld506@mail-relay.msc.com) id 5iae8zjv2yf6bjf.9.20210301144213 for [email protected]; Mon, 1 Mar 2021 14:42:13 +0200 Received: from ( [124.175.187.15]) by 79-100-162-206.ip.btc-net.bg with SMTP id C897B19FBB; Mon, 1 Mar 2021 14:42:13 +0200 Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2021 14:42:13 +0200 Message-ID: <[email protected]> From: "MSC Inc."
Mail configuration issues
Every day I get messages from my external server lax.lemis.com, like this one: Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2021 05:30:00 GMT From: Charlie Root <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: lax.lemis.com monthly run output Message-Id: <[email protected]> Nothing very interesting, but one point sticks out: Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2021 05:30:00 GMT Huh? I don't use no steenking GMT. The system is set to UTC, isn't it? === grog@lax (/dev/pts/2) ~ 11 -> date Tue 2 Mar 2021 01:25:46 UTC Right.
Goodbye mecablitz?
Once upon a time, the brightest star in camera illumination was Metz, since renamed to Metz Mecatech, the makers of the mecablitz (watch that lower case m) flash units. Over the years I've had no fewer than 6 of them. But somehow, like so many German photography companies, they have not kept up with the times, and now they appear to be on their last legs. I have a whole slew of URL redirections for this diary. But today none of them worked. No matter which URL on www.metz-mecatech.de I chose, I got an HTTP 403 (?forbidden?) error, even for the home page.
Wikipedia puzzle
Yesterday I included a link to the Wikipedia page for Nickel-zinc batteries. But what did I get? Nickel?zinc battery From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Redirected from Nickel-zinc battery) Huh? What's that? Redirected from the same spelling? It took a while to realize that the ? in the page name is an em-dash, not a hyphen. Is that correct? I haven't seen it before.
More multimedia pain
Yvonne came up with multiple issues with her photo processing today. Firstly, she couldn't connect to distress, my Microsoft ?Windows? 10 machine. The rdesktop session started and then went away again. I've seen that before and worked around it. But how? It was repeatable on lagoon, so off to eureka to try from there with her credentials and a sane keyboard (Yvonne uses a German layout). System in use, do you want to take over? OK, close my connection and things worked normally. Back to lagoon. Now things also worked normally. Somehow I have something in the back of my head that says that this happened when I have rebooted distress and the system is in use.
The limits of rechargeable batteries
I had considerable trouble with the batteries in my flash units today, not for the first time. I no longer keep records of the charge history of each individual rechargeable battery, because it doesn't seem to help much, but I do measure the voltages when I remove them from the device. And what I see is that in almost every case, only one of the rechargeable batteries in a set is severely discharged, while the others seem to be OK. That's different from non-rechargeable batteries. Under such circumstances they are all equally discharged. Why? I assume that it's because of the more consistent quality, though clearly it could also be historical.
Goodbye Quora?
I've been answering questions on Quora for some years now. I often wonder why. They have some strange policies, and they seem to be doing everything they can to lower the value of their product. Today I spent considerable time downvoting questions like ?How many inches is 5 foot 3 inches?" , ?How far is 5 kilometers in miles?? and ?How long is 30 cm in inches??, for answers to which the (same) questioner actually gets paid. As if that isn't enough, they're inventing answers. Have a question with no answer? Never mind, our bots will bring up some irrelevant answer matching some of the keywords.
Dying firefox
For over a month I've had this issue that my firefox instance on dereel (displaying on eureka:0.2) dies overnight, apparently after receiving an ECONNRESET from eureka. That still doesn't make any sense to me, but I'm going to have to do something about it: it's now happening several times a day. What's causing it? I have many X clients running over the local net. But there seems to be something special about dereel: the xterms also die, though the ssh connections don't.
Spelling errors
Quora is not a site for staying still. They're always trying out something new, frequently to their detriment, like paying people for asking questions without setting any standards. The result: a flood of inane questions. And now they've decided that there are still not enough answers to questions. So they send off a bot to look for answers that might be related, and display them by default! OK, time for a question: how do I change the default? But that's not so straightforward: OK, I'll bite.
Bouncing mail
Received today: Date: Thu, 18 Feb 2021 12:10:25 +1100 (AEDT) From: Mail Delivery System <MAILER-[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender This is the mail system at host eureka.lemis.com. I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below. <[email protected]>: host lax.lemis.com[45.32.70.18] said: 450 4.7.25 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [121.200.11.253] (in reply to RCPT TO command) I've seen that before. That happened last week before I fixed my DNS.
More DRM insights
More discussion on IRC about my video download issues. I didn't get any success, but one insight: youtube_dl uses rtmpdump (apparently part of mplayer) to perform the download. Where is the check for DRM made? Spent a little time looking at rtmpdump (which, of course, was installed) but didn't get my head round the syntax.
More Android bugs
It was a good thing that my phone was on my desk next to my keyboard when Chris rang: it displayed the call, but it didn't ring. Dammit, I've had this before: the phone just stops ringing, and I have to turn ringing on again. But this time the display showed that the phone should have been ringing. OK, Microsoft solution: reboot. And then, without any further configuration change, it rang as the settings indicated. I hadn't expected that kind of bug.
Klearview again
When looking for gardeners, I had to call lots of mobile phone numbers. That's cheaper with my mobile phone, so I had it on the desk when it rang. Chris, wanting to know about clearview. Huh? Clearview? No, Klearview. It's on my web site. With a whole lot of questioning, finally found out that he was talking about a case of eBay fraud that I experienced 3½ years ago. The seller was a certain Craig Weber, eBay ID klearview_au, who accepted my money, didn't deliver, and then opened a non-payment case against me! And now Chris was thinking of buying a NAS system from him and apparently wanted my opinion.
FreeBSD packages breakage
So what causes this? === root@teevee (/dev/pts/11) /Lphotos/yvonne/20210213 10 -> pkg install vlc Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue... pkg: Repository FreeBSD load error: cannot open sqlite3 db: Not a directory And how do I fix it? It stops me from using the packages collection altogether. I've already grumbled about the inaccurate message (what file is it looking for?) , but last time it went into hiding. Today I needed to do something about it. A web search brought up this forum discussion. As usual for forum postings, it seems, the suggestions didn't work. === root@teevee (/dev/pts/11) /Lphotos/yvonne/20210213 12 -> pkg update -f Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue...
Video display problems
I still have issues with some online videos. Since the most recent season of ?A country practice?, the broadcaster has protected the episodes with DRM, starting with this one. That shouldn't be an issue: I can still watch the episodes with a web browser of my choice. But programs like mpv can't. That's not the only issue with mpv. What about vlc? Some people swear by it. I've installed it in the past, but it would be good to have the latest version. === root@teevee (/dev/pts/11) /Lphotos/yvonne/20210213 10 -> pkg install vlc Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue... pkg: Repository FreeBSD load error: cannot open sqlite3 db: Not a directory Dammit, I've seen that before.
More photo processing pain
Yvonne in today to say that she couldn't view her video clips: === yvonne@lagoon (/dev/pts/1) ~/Photos/20210213 423 -> mpv youtube-Yvonne-and-Carlotta-mini-comp.mkv (+) Video --vid=1 (*) (h264 1920x1080 59.941fps) (+) Audio --aid=1 (*) (pcm_s16le 2ch 48000Hz) error: XDG_RUNTIME_DIR not set in the environment. [vo/gpu/opengl] Could not make context current! Segmentation fault (core dumped) What's that? A bit of playing around showed that it only happened on lagoon and only with mpv, and that the message about XDG_RUNTIME_DIR was bogus: it wasn't set on any other system either.
Connecting mobile phone to Microsoft
distress, my Microsoft ?Windows? 10 box, seems to be very slow. But then, it had been running for 30 days. Time for the Microsoft solution: reboot. It seemed to take for ever. What seemed like 10 minutes later there was still significant disk activity, so I turned on a monitor. No obvious display, just a blank screen. But it was booting. Why does it take so long? Did something go wrong with the shutdown? It could be, since it came up with this silly ?configure your system? screen that I have grumbled about in the past. But in this case I had considered trying one of the options, connecting my phone to Microsoft.
Fixing iPhones
Petra Gietz has been complaining for a few weeks now that her ALDImobile phone account isn't working. Finally she came with the requested password, and we checked the status. Credit of a little over $22. Clearly ALDImobile isn't the issue, except that she had used something like $3 credit for incoming data?it seems. Her phone is an iPhone 5. Took a look at the display. ?SOS only?, presumably meaning that something is wrong with the account. Does it display signal strength? Maybe, but how and where? Still, it looks like something with the SIM card. Put it in my old Samsung GT-I9100T.
Apple audio: next step
I still haven't set up fwaggle.lemis.com, my Apple iMac, the way I want, and I'm in no particular hurry, but today the audio cables arrived that I needed to connect the machine to an amplifier and hopefully get better audio quality. It's hard to say whether the quality was better: the quantity was so lacking that I could hardly hear anything. Yes, it's an earphone output, but I hadn't expected the difference to be so great. So it seems that once again I'm hindered by an inflexible machine.
New GPS navigator
Another reason to go into town was to try out my new GPS navigator, this time a 9" one. The last one was relatively large, but this one is considerably bigger, here under the old one and my normal-sized Nokia 3 phone: Fitting it to the car was more than the usual irritation. It has a standard clip that attaches directly to the back of the navigator, sideways, which makes it impossible to see what you're doing: And it's so big that it barely fits anyway.
Network problems!
One of the first things that I do when I come into the office in the morning is to load the latest TV programme data. I have a cron job which downloads the information from http://verteiler1.mediathekview.de/Filmliste-akt.xz at 8:28, but I still need to tell MediathekView about it. No new data! What happened? Can't find host address for verteiler1.mediathekview.de. It took a while to realize why: we were off the net, and had been since 3:15. OK, what does the NTD say? All displays look normal enough. dhclient? No, it's running. Interface? === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/7) ~ 71 -> ifconfig xl0 xl0: flags=8843 metric 0 mtu 1500 options=82009 ether 00:50:da:cf:07:35 inet 121.200.11.253 netmask 0xfffffc00 broadcast 121.200.11.255 nd6 options=29 media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX ) status: active What's that ...
More Apple stuff
Discussing access to Apple machines with VNC on IRC today. I've had strange results, hangs, and today glacially slow screen refresh. Yes, VNC is no ball of fire, but today I saw a case where it was refreshing the screen at the rate of one character-size block every 10 seconds. I iconified the window, and when I restored it, only a few seconds later, everything was there. Somehow there are issues that I don't understand. Callum Gibson, an Apple fan, tried out VNC and ran into the same issues, so for once it's not just me. Potentially it's because I tried opening more than one session at a time, or it could be related to Apple's strange approach to DNS.
A use for fwaggle
So what do I do with fwaggle, my ?new? iMac? There's not really any space in my office for it, and since I propose to use it via VNC, there's no need for it to be there. On the other hand, it appears to have good audio connections, so how about putting it in the dining room? That worked, modulo a couple of unexpected problems: firstly, the VNC settings had somehow become reset, requiring reconfiguration, and secondly I didn't have the right 3.5 mm cable to the amplifier to the right. But the loudspeakers in the machine are alright, so for the first time we can listen to Radio Swiss Classic directly in the lounge room.
More air conditioner observations
Despite the E25 status display, the air conditioner seems to be working normally. What should I do? I checked further sources and found that the ambient temperature sensor is somewhere in the external unit, and it's connected to the ?CPU board?, at bottom left: The cable goes somewhere inside the housing. Presumably it's for detecting the outside temperature when heating, so that it can initiate the de-icing cycle, though possibly it's to detect malfunctions within the external unit.
Power failure with a difference
My mobile phone buzzed again at 9:40 this morning and produced one of these ephemeral displays that usually go away before I can start reading them. But this one didn't. It even had a DISMISS button or similar. It did finally go away, and I couldn't find it in ?Notifications?, but later I found a corresponding message: Power outage! Now isn't that nice of them to inform me? For the first time ever, my mobile phone worked the way it always should have.
More Apple stuff
I hadn't really intended to do anything with fwaggle, my new iMac, but we ended up with a discussion on IRC about memory compatibility. It seems that I was a little hasty in blaming Apple for the issue. The new memory was faster, but it had a different timing: While I was at it, noted again that the position of the monitor (and thus the computer) was still inappropriate: I could barely read the screen against the light background.
Undertanding git
People, in particular Peter Jeremy, are grumbling about the transition from subversion to Git. I can't blame them, and it has taken what wind there has been out of my sails in my upgrade of the system. Callum Gibson has come up with two links that I should follow: https://www.sbf5.com/~cduan/technical/git/ and http://sethrobertson.github.io/GitBestPractices/
Apple memory?
The iMac (fwaggle) came with 4 GB of memory. But Juha Kupiainen had contributed 16 GB of memory to replace it with, and Jamie Fraser had installed it. But it didn't work reliably. Why not? Looking through the Technical Specifiactions, I discovered: 4GB (two 2GB) of 1333MHz DDR3 memory Configurable to 16GB, only at the Apple Online Store. Why that?
More Apple fun
Played around a little with the new Apple (which I have called fwaggle.lemis.com) today. First I moved it to the other side of my row of monitors. Now it doesn't reflect any more, but it's difficult to read when the sun shines outside. OK, more searching: what kind of machine is this? ?About this mac? tells me that it's a macOS High Sierra Version 10.13.6. Ah, no, that's not what it means. That's clearly the operating system. The system itself is an iMac (21.5-inch, mid-2011). Yes, that's what it says, along with the information that it's a 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5, but it's too polite to say which Core i5.
New Apple
Jamie had originally got the iMac because it had had a disk failure, and the previous owner had not been able to integrate the new disk into the software?an amusing incident, given that Larry McVoy had been sounding off this morning about the FreeBSD installation program on the Unix Heritage Society mailing list, claiming that Linux and Microsoft were miles ahead. Yes, he didn't mention Apple, but there was an implication. So what do I do with it now? Integrate it into the network, of course. The first issue was the monitor, which doubles as a mirror (extreme left): It's not clear from those photos that the bright aluminium strip at the bottom of the device is quite irritating.
Latest GPS pain
Last time I used my GPS navigators I had pain because I couldn't read the display. Today the weather was more like winter, and there was no issue with seeing the display. But of course the directions were approximate, up to 200 m away from the real location. That's more of a pain than it seems: I had about 10 destinations. Normally the navigator removes the destination from the route one I go there?if I go there. Without going to exactly where the navigator wanted me to go, I had to edit the route every time to remove the destination. And the old navigator took forever to find its GPS location again, even after only sleeping.
Caught:dereel problem
Into the office this morning to find windows from dereel on eureka gone again. What did the console say? Most of that is firefox grumbling to itself, but what's this ECONNRESET? That doesn't make much sense, but at least I know what it was. In passing, this is yet another situation showing how silly it is to have text on a black background, especially dark blue. Things were slightly different this time, though, possibly because the starting terminal didn't go away: It lied, of course.
teevee hang
While cooking dinner, I had the recipe displayed on the TV. But when I looked back a little later, the display was plain white, and I couldn't get any response from teevee, the computer driving it. A quick check showed: yes, it had hung. No response over the net. The Big Red Button worked, and after rebooting there was no evidence of any issues, including not in the log files. Computers crash, of course, but this one seems surprising.
dereel issues
I'm still running firefox on dereel until I can finally update eureka. But in the past couple of days I've come into the office to find all windows from dereel on eureka:0 closed, including firefox. Why? dereel was still running, and I was able to restart the xterms and firefox without difficulty. And there were no messages in the system logs. Nothing for it: start firefox from a vty. That way, when it dies, I'll see something. In fact, I'll see plenty without it crashing.
GPS pain, yet again
Finding my way to Melbourne is pretty straightforward, though I always run into issues from leaving the freeway (where?) to getting the the Victoria Market. But now I have my route in my phone, and I have a backup in my old, worn-out GPS navigator. Both failed completely. Today was bright sunshine, and the position of the navigator (difficult to change) reflected the sunshine on my left wrist. I couldn't see anything. And the phone had forgotten all about my route! OK, back to Notifications. But those were yesterday's Notifications. Who cares about them? So the phone had deleted them. OK, enter manually.
Microsoft? Linux? FreeBSD?
Discussing with Jamie Fraser on IRC today: <groggyhimself> Did anybody hear the rumour that there won't be a Microsoft 11? <groggyhimself> That they'll migrate to Linux instead? <jf> that sounds like horseshit to me <groggyhimself> Very possible. <jf> i've heard that they're going to keep doing rolling updates for windows 10 <groggyhimself> I saw it in passing and wondered if there could be an element of truth in it. <jf> but i honestly am not even sure where they go from here, with the exception of office there's not much besides inertia tethering a lot of folks to microsoft products <jf> (for the home anyway, for business it's a different kettle of fish) <groggyhimself> And marketing?
Understanding Android, once more
So what went wrong with sending my route to my mobile phone? It's looking more and more like there's something wrong with the phone, or that there's some strange configuration issue. Discussed it on IRC, which was illuminating. I was expecting either a message or a direct invocation of Google Maps. But no, fool, it's a Notification. And while there are icons for phone, messages and contacts, you need a Completely Different Interface for Notifications: steal (or as the US Americans say, swipe) the phone from the top and you'll see your Notifications. And sure enough, there it was, waiting to be collected.
Network failure!
Came into the office this morning to find that we had been off the net for nearly and hour between 6:48 and 7:45. That used to be nothing worth mentioning here: it happened all the time. It wasn't a scheduled National Broadband Network outage, and it was the longest in nearly a year. OK, outages can happen, and this one didn't worry me overly. But that in itself is an indication of how things are improving. Hopefully it will stay that way. In this case, Andy Snow tells me that the outage affected the whole state (of Victoria). What, NBN? No, Aussie Broadband.
Next Android challenge
We're off to Melbourne for the first time in well over 2 years on Thursday, so time to program a map into my GPS navigator. First, though, an overview with Google Maps. That was straightforward enough, and it offered to send it to my Nokia 3 phone (or, as it chooses to call it, my HMD Global TA-1020). OK, that makes sense. Do it! And how about that, the phone buzzed, and that was that. No popup. Do I have to ?open? ?Maps?? Tried that. No route. Looking around at various options, I discovered that it had noted all my waypoints, and would happily take me to any of them.
Making friends^W acquaintance with git
So I have to finally use Git to update my software. I really wish they hadn't done it, but I'm going to have to come to terms with it. OK, where's the docco? I had saved some mail messages on the subject for later perusal. Now's the time. 529 messages! There must be a simpler way. Peter Jeremy has been there before me (and grumbled mightily). Ask on IRC. No Peter, but Andy Snow came up with this summary, which refers to Warner Losh's git primer, the one that he had sent to me some months ago. OK, follow that: cd /usr/src REPO=https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd.git git clone $REPO -b stable/12 Nothing happened.
Next system upgrade attempt
As part of my migration attempts for eureso, brought dereel up to date: new kernel, new userland, update ports. It almost worked: [43/194] Installing librsvg2-rust-2.50.2... pkg: librsvg2-rust-2.50.2 conflicts with librsvg2-2.40.21 (installs files into the same place). Problematic file: /usr/local/bin/rsvg-convert There's too much of that kind of thing. OK, it looks like librsvg2-rust-2.50.2 should win, so let's remove the other: === root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /home/grog 2 -> Log pkg delete librsvg2-2.40.21 ===== Tue 19 Jan 2021 12:37:08 AEDT on dereel: pkg delete librsvg2-2.40.21 Installed packages to be REMOVED: ImageMagick7: 7.0.10.24 audacity: 2.4.2_2 chromium: 84.0.4147.135 darktable: 3.2.1_3 emacs: 27.1_1,3 firefox: 84.0.1,2 gimp: 2.10.20_1,2 gtk3: ...
The revenge of Microsoft
Yvonne in to my office with a problem: distress, the Microsoft ?Windows? 10 box, wouldn't talk to her, something to do with all slots being full. Sure enough, it was repeatable. Bloody Microsoft! Does this have something to do with the unsolicited upgrade last week? Probably. In to my office to check. Worked fine for me. Simulate Yvonne's environment and try again. Long delay while it logged her in and did whatever else Microsoft does when it starts up. But it worked. Back to her office. Worked. So what went wrong? She had to log in, but the first couple of times around we didn't get that far.
More eureso pain
Some time in the early hours of this morning my port upgrade completed. Well, it stopped running: [8/1417] Upgrading gstreamer1-plugins from 1.8.0 to 1.16.2_2... pkg: gstreamer1-plugins-1.16.2_2 conflicts with gstreamer1-plugins-bad-1.8.0_1 (installs files into the same place). Problematic file: /usr/local/include/gstreamer-1.0/gst/audio/gstaudioaggregator.h I had expected that. Somehow I had 26 gstreamer-related ports installed, including gstreamer-0.10.36_4 Development framework for creating media applications gstreamer-ffmpeg-0.10.13_4 GStreamer plug-in for manipulating MPEG video streams gstreamer1-1.8.0 Media applications framework OK, take note of the fact and remove them all.
firefox will help!
I'm still suffering from slow performance from web browsers. firefox thinks so too, and offered to help. OK, I know what the real problem is, but it would be interesting to see what it wants to do. But I never expected this: Throw out all customizations! All my settings! All the things I've worked to carefully get the thing to be halfway usable and less painful! These people need their heads read.
eureso upgrade, day 3
Into the office this morning. The build, now with /usr/obj NFS mounted, almost worked. But then, towards the end of the kernel build, I saw something I've never seen before: ===> Ports module x11/nvidia-driver (all) cd ${PORTSDIR:-/usr/ports}/x11/nvidia-driver; env -u CC -u CXX -u CPP -u MAKESYSPATH -u MK_AUTO_OBJ -u MAKEOBJDIR MAKEFLAGS="-I /Photos/Tools -D NOCLEAN -I /Photos/Tools -D NOCLEAN -D NO_MODULES_OBJ .MAKE.LEVEL.ENV=MAKELEVEL KERNEL=kernel TARGET=amd64 TARGET_ARCH=amd64" SYSDIR=/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/sys PATH=/home/src/eureso/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/amd64.amd64/tmp/legacy/usr/sbin:/home/src/eureso/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/amd64.amd64/tmp/legacy/usr/bin:/home/src/eureso/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/amd64.amd64/tmp/legacy/bin:/home/src/eureso/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/amd64.amd64/tmp/usr/sbin:/home/src/eureso/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/amd64.amd64/tmp/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin SRC_BASE=/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12 OSVERSION=1202504 WRKDIRPREFIX=/home/src/eureso/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/amd64.amd64/sys/GENERIC make -B clean build pkg-static: Warning: Major OS version upgrade detected. Running "pkg-static install -f pkg" recommended ===> Cleaning for nvidia-driver-440.100_1 ===> nvidia-driver-440.100_1 pkg(8) must be version 1.15.9 or greater, but you have 1.10.5.
eureso upgrade
Continued with eureso today. The disk image that I copied from the stable12 VM booted happily, though I ran into a couple of minor issues. First, my intention is to have as good as the same configuration files for both eureso and eureka. /etc/rc.conf contains: FORREAL=0 if [ $FORREAL -eq 0 ]; then hostname="eureso.lemis.com" hostip=192.109.197.143 defaultrouter="192.109.197.137" else hostname="eureka.lemis.com" hostip=192.109.197.137 fi All I need to do, I thought, was change FORREAL from 0 to 1 or back. But life isn't that simple. At the very least I need a different /etc/fstab.
Anatomy of a power failure
In the early afternoon my office UPS beeped once. I've heard that before: it often happens when there's a grid power failure. Why? I wish I knew; maybe a slow cutover to battery power? Out to confirm: yes, the power was out. It started at 13:46:29, and continued long enough for me to investigate. Check the Powercor outage map, the one that displays a map of all of Victoria, 95% of populated South Australia and half of New South Wales, and always insists on going back to that view. Zoom in. Yes, a large pink-shaded area round Ballarat, going about as far as Buninyong.
Android messages: caught in the act
Over the past few weeks, these irritating ?here now and gone forever? messages on my phone have become fewer. But today one appeared just as I happened to be looking at the phone. It was from VicEmergency, about which I have complained in the past. Something about Covid, but I didn't have time to read the rest. Somehow that's typical of the app. It's supposed to inform me about emergencies, notably bushfires, not ongoing incidents. But could it be that it was too polite to send to my Messages tab, and wanted to display it itself? Fired up the app, which is as useless as it has ever been, and indeed I saw a warning about COVID-19?from two days ago!
eureso again
My system upgrade ground to a halt, not for the first time, a month ago. I ran into an unexpected feature (yes, really) of VirtualBox that gave me what looked like inconsistent disk images. I'm sure that I can work around it, and the feature itself (different views of the same disk on different VMs) can be very useful, but here it's just another way to shoot myself in the foot. So, how about a real computer? Looking around, I was surprised to discover that I have no fewer than 8 ThinkCentre boxes. Five are in use, one appears to be dead, but that still leaves two.
distress crash
Into the office this morning to process some photos, and found that distress, my Microsoft ?Windows? 10 box, had apparently crashed and rebooted during the night: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/37) ~/Photos/20210113 449 -> date; ruptime Thu 14 Jan 2021 09:45:23 AEDT dischord down 3+21:13 distress up 13:59, 0 users, load 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 How did that happen? How do I find out? First, of course, I establish contact with the machine: Setting up your device?
Phantom files
While backing up my photos today, came across this strange information: ... 2-grog/.nfs.d7ef1349.29924.4 2-grog/.nfs.d7ef3635.29924.4 2-grog/.nfs.d7ef5a7a.29924.4 ... What are they? /Photos/2-grog/ is a staging directory that I use to make life with Microsoft bearable: put the files I need to process there and run a Microsoft-space program always against the same directory so that I don't have to climb trees directory for directory. The software (in this case DxO PhotoLab) is set to write its results back to the same directory. But what does that have to do with NFS? I'm using SMB with Samba.
Rotated photos
While looking at old photos today, came across this thoroughly forgettable image: It would be bad enough the right way round: It was taken with the old Samsung GT-I9100T mobile phone, and intended to show that even that camera could take better photos than this, which we had received a day earlier: But why was it rotated?
Putting Microsoft to sleep
Interesting question on Quora today: Did Windows remove the sleep mode. That's quite relevant to me, since I haven't been able to get distress, my Microsoft ?Windows? 10 box, to sleep. But the answer (now thoughtfully downvoted) referred to hibernating, not sleeping. A bit of searching found the answer anyway. The problem was that I was looking in the wrong place. SHUTDOWN/H will hibernate, but there's no corresponding option for ?sleep?. Instead you need to open the menu at the bottom of the screen, select ? (IO), find ?Sleep? in the new menu, and click on it. Clearly much friendlier than using old-fashioned commands.
More old diary insights
Only yesterday I noted the advantages of old diary entries. And then today I found one addressing the issue of inputting special characters into X clients. How do you enter a ? or a °? Ten years ago I found one way: put them into a custom ~/.XCompose file. But recently it stopped working. Why? My way of entering ° is Multi_key d e. But that stopped working on firefox, and I discovered that I could create it with Multi_key o o. Why? I was running firefox on dereel, because eureka is still so down-rev that many sites won't talk to its old, worn-out firefox.
More old diary insights
Only yesterday I noted the advantages of old diary entries. And then today I found one addressing the issue of inputting special characters into X clients. How do you enter a ? or a °? Ten years ago I found one way: put them into a custom ~/.XCompose file. But recently it stopped working. Why? My way of entering ° is Multi_key d e. But that stopped working on firefox, and I discovered that I could create it with Multi_key o o. Why? I was running firefox on dereel, because eureka is still so down-rev that many sites won't talk to its old, worn-out firefox.
Processing photos with distress again
So now I can use distress again for my photo processing. All OK? Hardly. First, while processing the weekly house photos, 66 out of 72 DxO PhotoLab conversions failed: I've had problems in the past where a couple failed, but over 90%? Looking at the destination directory showed: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/37) ~/Photos/20210102 190 -> l orig/*f ... -rwxr--r-- 2 grog wheel 121,228,768 2 Jan 12:41 orig/41026156_DxO.tiff -rwxr--r-- 2 grog wheel 121,228,680 2 Jan 12:41 orig/41026157_DxO.tiff -rwxr--r-- 2 grog wheel 29,483,408 2 Jan 13:05 orig/41026158_DxO.tiff ...
Samba documentation again
While writing up yesterday's pain with Samba, noted this emblem at the top of the page That's the title page of the O'Reilly book, Using Samba, 2nd Edition, February 2003?18 years ago! No wonder it's out of date. Is that an excuse? It's an explanation, of course. But anything that old should come with obvious disclaimers. And it was the only thing I found on the Samba site that dealt with that configuration detail.
Microsoft problems: bloody Samba!
So what's going on with my SMB connection between distress (Microsoft 10) and my FreeBSD computers? Yesterday I established that it was related to the system not listening on port microsoft-ds (445). And that was almost certainly because I didn't tell inetd to listen on that port. OK, clearly a configuration issue, probably because I've been dragging the same configuration with me for over 20 years, and in those days microsoft-ds probably wasn't used. In principle it seems that this would do the trick (last line, bold face): # Enable the following two entries to enable samba startup from inetd # (from the Samba documentation).
More Microsoft pain
While editing our annual newsletter, I looked back to previous years. Our photography has really improved, and I felt inspired to go back and reprocess some of the worse ones. Prepared for processing on distress, the Microsoft ?Windows? 10 box. Boy, was it slow! It had been up for nearly a month, and was clearly running out of steam. OK, Microsoft solution: reboot. When it came back, it couldn't access the file systems on lagoon, including the photo disk! I had exactly this problem with eureka a month ago, but not with lagoon. Dammit, what is wrong with this horrible ?operating system??
Installing Zoom
Mark Murray wants people who can recognize him to do a virtual PGP key signature via Zoom. OK, there are a couple of things to challenge me. My last key signing was 14 May 2005, and I've been meaning to set up Zoom for some time. OK, off looking. https://zoom.us/. Why .us? Anyway, it wasn't nearly as straightforward as I thought. But finally it seemed that what I needed was the free zoom client. How do I get it? First sign up (free!) . And above-average stupidity in the process. First, another bloody CAPTCHA (what's a crosswalk? As I have commented before, nothing to do with the Stations of the Cross).
Understanding cheap amplifiers
Writing up yesterday's article on lasagne au saumon, I came across a couple of video clips, including this one: Problem: there was music, but the voices were inaudible. I put it in the article anyway, and Yvonne read it before publication. She had no problem with the sound, though she wasn't very impressed by the recipe. So why didn't I get any sound? Still problems with one channel? A bit of messing round with the el-cheapo amplifier that I got in early September. It looks essentially like this: Swapping the inputs confirmed that one channel was not making it out to the loudspeakers.
Even stranger Google messages
Received this afternoon: Yes, I don't recognize that either. In fact, the message is almost completely useless. Google has been unhelpful in the past, but now it proves no information whatsover. Does the blue tick and ?This device? mean that the unrecognized device was the one displaying the page? Hard to say, since they don't. And if so, is it the ?device? on which the web browser is running (dereel.lemis.com), or the device on which the browser is displaying ( (eureka.lemis.com)? To add to the confusion, it showed the same information on other browsers and on other systems.
More sprinkler issues
Getting dressed this morning, I saw this: Huh? There are at least two things wrong with this picture. First, there's a leak in irrigation circuit 1, and secondly, its time slot is 4:00 to 5:00, long before I saw it. Out to take a look. The relay board (sprinkler.lemis.com) showed: That's circuits 1 and 4 on. But the sprinkler program had finished, and in any case, only one is ever turned on at any one time.
Latest ports pain
In my mail saw an update to youtube-dl. OK, upgrade. pkg: Repository FreeBSD load error: cannot open sqlite3 db: Not a directory Now isn't that helpful? Which sqlite3 db? Where is this stuff? Was this related to a recent NFS hang? What are sqlite3 dbs called, anyway? locate didn't help much, but then I gradually recalled /var/pkg/db. OK, what's in there? === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/7) /spool/Already/Series 215 -> l /var/db/pkg/ total 145 -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 158 22 Dec 09:28 FreeBSD.meta -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 89,997,312 22 Dec 09:34 local.sqlite -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 54,493,184 15 Nov 16:10 repo-FreeBSD.sqlite -r--r--r-- 1 root wheel 6,471,021 21 Dec 03:05 vuln.xml Off to compare this system (teevee) with eureka.
Debugging weather station software
My weather station is horribly unreliable, and my software is full of heuristics to capture valid data anyway. In general, the station returns I/O errors several times a day, and I have to recover. But today it didn't work. The debug printfs that I have put in the software return things like: ./wh1080 starting Raw rain: 0.000000, max: 3.000000 Previous rain 0.0, rain now 940628436634351921645591195969126400.0, difference 940628436634351921645591195969126400.0 Raw rain: 940628436634351921645591195969126400.000000, max: 3.000000 That's not the station. It's my heuristics, and clearly using floating point doesn't help.
Lagoon update issues
Into the office this morning and checked the nightly backups, as usual. Where's the backup for lagoon? Nothing there. A quick check showed a cron job started at 21:00, but waiting on something. And then nothing. OK, first start a dump and put the question on hold. It ran normally, but I got two mail messages. Two dumps! day 17 month 12 weekday 4 dump -2uf - / | bzip2 > /dump/lagoon-FreeBSD/2/root.bz2 DUMP: WARNING: should use -L when dumping live read-write filesystems! DUMP: Date of this level 2 dump: Thu Dec 17 21:00:00 2020 DUMP: Date of last level 1 dump: Fri Dec 11 21:00:00 2020 ...
A new lagoon
Yvonne off shopping today, time for me to change the hardware of lagoon, her computer, hopefully without her noticing. Since last week's crash it seemed certain that the USB subsystem of her current machine was defective, so I bought a new one. They're both ThinkCentres, the old one an M91p, the new an M93p. All I really needed was to change the disk and the display card. How long could it take? 10 minutes? It took half an hour. ThinkCentres are interesting because they need almost no tools, but I still have difficulty opening them (each model differently) and getting the disks out of the carriers.
New ThinkCentre
The new ThinkCentre 93p for Yvonne has arrived. It came with a virgin install of Microsoft ?Windows? Pro, so before giving it to Yvonne I tried setting up file sharing to see whether it would far any better than distress. First problem: what should I call the system? Checked /usr/share/dict/web2 and came up with the possibilities disagree, dislike, disarray, disaster, discard, discord, disdain and disturb. And in the DNS configuration I already had disgust, which I had used last time. In the end I selected disgust, though it's probably not the most appropriate. It's only been 5 months since I set up distress, but already I had forgotten the details: everything Microsoft is so counter-intuitive.
Your Windows has crashed!
Yvonne into the office this afternoon to report a serious ?Windows? error: That's nonsense, of course. This was on lagoon, a FreeBSD box. And the phone number wasn't even valid: it's clearly a US telephone number. But I couldn't get rid of the page!
System upgrade, continued
Why did I not find my new kernel and userland on eureso yesterday? Put the ?disk? back into the instable-12 VM and checked. Yes, the kernel is there! [root@instable-12 /destdir]# ls -l /destdir/boot/kernel/kernel -r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 37262464 Nov 29 22:12 /destdir/boot/kernel/kernel What's going on? Checked the pathnames to the ?disks?, not helped by the too-small window (which, however, I was able to enlarge. Yes, same pathname. But then a transient display popped up: Yes, the same file.
Finishing the 1977 photo scans
I've been scanning slides of our Australia trip in 1977 and 1978 for 5 days, and finally I'm done?I think. Multiple things complicated the matter, including deciding how to organize the files. I started with a single directory per film, but then it turned out that the slide trays didn't correspond one to one with films. But now I have directories ~/Photos/Film/19780101 to ~/Photos/Film/19780108, along with one that didn't belong there at all: processed in March 1977, and from my preliminary examination seems to have been taken in Mexico. That's confusing, because I thought we traveled to Mexico in January 1979.
The eternal eureka upgrade
Clearly I went off on a tangent to try to fix SMB communication between distress and eureka yesterday. I should have been continuing with my upgrade of eureka to a modern version of FreeBSD. So that's what I started on today. I had a root file system with up-to-date kernel and relatively new userland. Boot up in eureso and upgrade the ports. That wasn't the problem I expected, sort of. It didn't even want to delete Emacs, only, to my surprise: Installed packages to be REMOVED: chromium: 79.0.3945.130 firefox: 72.0.2_2,1 OK, I can reinstall them later.
Investigating Microsoft networking issues
So why can't distress (Microsoft 10) access file systems on eureka with SMB? There was an issue with the protocol version, but I fixed that months ago. Has distress forgotten the settings? Off to check, with the help of this page. Well, sort of help. It's dated 23 May 2018, over 1½ years old, so Microsoft has changed their maze of twisty little menus, all different. But when I checked, yes, SMB 1.0 client was enabled. The message I had was: OK, more searching, and came up with this page, which said ?Pinpointing the direct cause of the problem you are dealing with is one of the most important steps while troubleshooting?.
Sunset mouse
I've been having various issues with the wireless keyboards that I use instead of a remote control for teevee, my TV computer. Spent some time messing around with batteries, without any final results. But Yvonne wanted to join in the fun. She came to me and said ?I think my mouse needs a new battery?. I don't think so: But yes, the mouse was dead. It has a red LED, but it was off. How old is it? It seems to be a relic of a bygone millennium.
Doctor's visit with a difference
Appointment with Paul Smith today to discuss last month's blood test. Dammit, do I really have to go to Ballarat just for that? No. One of the positive things about COVID-19 is that we can now perform many doctor's appointments by phone, and today was a good example. Somehow it's not the same, though; maybe we should have a video link. Results were unspectacular. Vitamin D is now in the normal range, though the test was taken only a couple of days since the end of the 3000 IU treatment. So for a while I'll take a more normal 1000 IU.
The eternal eureka upgrade
Yesterday the latest issue with my eureka upgrade was eureso crashing while copying files. OK, tar the file system to a file on (the real) eureka and untar it into the second file system on eureso. It still crashed! It wasn't file system corruption on the destination file system: I had run newfs on it first. What's the issue here? Old, worn-out VBox? Old, worn-out kernel on eureso? No, that kernel is the same as the one running on eureka. But clearly I need an alternative. One of the pile of 5 old real machines on the office floor? I don't even know which ones are still functional.
Reboot your mobile phone?
More trouble with my mobile phone today. Various buzzes. Is that its way of saying ?you're receiving a call, but I'm too polite to make the noises you asked for?? Tried calling myself. No ?ring? tone. Was the original buzz Yvonne trying to call me? Tried pressing the phone symbol on the log to call her back. Nothing happened. While messing around, about a minute later, my VoIP phone rang. I had pressed the phone symbol on the wrong log entry and called myself?but it had taken the phone a whole minute to get the request through its thick head! OK, reboot.
More fun with the eureso upgrade
On Sunday I got my eureso upgrade to the point where I had a file system with an up-to-date kernel and userland?on dereel. Next step is to upgrade the ports, and for that I needed to boot it. New machine? Virtual machines should work for that. OK, fire up my eureso virtual machine. Oh. Can't do. Some network problem, error VERR_SUPDRV_COMPONENT_NOT_FOUND. What's that? I've seen problems with VBox networking before. From prior recollection (and documentation), it was something to do with the kernel modules that were needed: /boot/modules/vboxdrv.ko and /boot/modules/vboxnetflt.ko. But they were loaded. Found a /boot/modules/vboxnetadp.ko, so loaded that too, with no change.
NFS/SMB: No go after all
Yesterday I discovered that I could access an NFS-mounted FreeBSD file system with SMB. But that was only up to a point, and when I tried more complicated processing today I got various hangs. Why? I don't know. I can still do all the processing I want via dischord, the Microsoft 7 box, so it's not urgent. More urgent is continuing the system upgrade for eureka.
Microsoft network pain
The other networking issue I have is with distress, my Microsoft 10 box. Compared to firewall debugging, this seems to be swamp debugging. I still suspect that it has suddenly decided not to be compatible with older versions of SMB, but there was one workaround to try: mount the NFS-mounted copy of eureka:/Photos from lagoon. Does that work? Yes! So I'll leave it like that until I have finished upgrading eureka, hopefully some time in this decade.
More network problems
Yvonne into my office today to tell me that she had been unable to upload her photo metadata to the external web server. Why? Was it down? She had been able to upload the photos themselves to Digital Ocean, so it wasn't the net connection to the outside world. But I couldn't even ping www.lemis.com. Was it down? No, no issues from eureka, only from lagoon. Routes? Probably not if I could access Digital Ocean, but checked for explicit routes. No, nothing. Ran tcpdump on eureka's external interface. Ping out, ping reply. And lagoon saw nothing. A bit of searching: the firewall!
Microsoft sting in tail
I thought I got my machines up and running properly after yesterday's power outage. But today I tried to process some photos with distress, my Microsoft 10 box Can't reconnect network share (or whatever terminology Microsoft uses. Grrr! I've had issues like this before. A bit of quick checking showed that it could access the file system on lagoon, but not the two on eureka. dischord, the Microsoft 7 box, could access both, and not surprisingly, so could smb_client. So the problem seemed to be with distress. OK, distress came up before eureka. Typical Microsoft solution: reboot. No help. Dammit, where do they hide this network configuration stuff?
History: plus ça change
Reading back in my diaries for bygone years, came across these entries: 29 November 2000 Installing FreeBSD is getting easier all the time. I suppose practice doesn't make it any more difficult, but the installation itself is also getting better. 29 November 2010 Another power failure round 8:00 this morning, just as I was getting up. Somehow I've been doing the same things for decades.
The daily eureso build
Before my other pain I had started to build an image for eureso on dereel. But the build failed! --- error.pico --- cc -DCOMPAT_32BIT -march=i686 -mmmx -msse -msse2 -target x86_64-unknown-freebsd12.2 -m32 -L/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/obj-lib32/tmp/usr/lib32 --sysroot=/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/obj-lib32/tmp -B/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/tmp/usr/bin -B/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/obj-lib32/tmp/usr/lib32 -fpic -DPIC -O2 -pipe -fno-common -I/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/contrib/com_err -g -MD -MF.depend.error.pico -MTerror.pico -std=gnu99 -fstack-protector-strong -Wsystem-headers -Werror -Wall -Wno-format-y2k -W -Wno-unused-parameter -Wstrict-prototypes -Wmissing-prototypes -Wpointer-arith -Wreturn-type -Wcast-qual -Wwrite-strings -Wswitch -Wshadow -Wunused-parameter -Wcast-align -Wchar-subscripts -Winline -Wnested-externs -Wredundant-decls -Wold-style-definition -Wno-pointer-sign -Wmissing-variable-declarations -Wthread-safety -Wno-empty-body -Wno-string-plus-int -Wno-unused-const-variable -Qunused-arguments -c /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/contrib/com_err/error.c -o error.pico --- lib/libelf__L --- make[4]: make[4]: don't know how to make /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/sys//eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/lib/libelf/sys/elf32.h. Stop What went wrong there?
Restarting MediathekView
One of the things that I couldn't recover from so easily on teevee was MediathekView. It had been running for months without the binaries needed, which some overenthusiastic pkg invocation had removed. Never mind, we have one on eureka. All I need is to copy the current state files from teevee. And it didn't work! ?Error downloading file?, after a delay of something like 2 minutes. That suggests network issues, possibly geographic restrictions. But I had no difficulty downloading them with youtube-dl. After some time, tried a different interface, one that asked me to check the download parameters. Storage path: /spool/MediathekView.
Debugging the weather station
My weather station is not reliable. In fact, it's one of the most unreliable pieces of hardware I know. My software is full of heuristics to catch it trying to lie, or to recover from unexplained crashes (which could also be due to bugs in the FreeBSD USB stack, or even?oh horror!?in my code). It also has communication issues with the external unit, so at some point I moved it to teevee, which is in line of sight with the external unit. But lately it has been particularly unreliable, to the point where many of my graphs were failing. Today I needed to restart the software after the reboot.
Power fail recovery: one up, two to go
So I got eureka up almost faster than I had expected. teevee was already up, but the X keyboard mapping wasn't. Damn, how did I do that? It had to be done manually, because something in X causes it not to look at remap requests done from a script. I thought it was ~/xm, but that put my keyboard in a state that I couldn't recover from. After a good deal of investigation and cursing, it seems that I had somehow left xm in an inappropriate state, referring to a keymap that didn't work. Replace that with an older map and?so far?all appears to be well.
Recovering eureka
Rebooting eureka is always an issue. I do it so seldom that I forget special issues, like starting some processes that require controlling terminals. Until this morning's power failure it had been up for about 440 days, so I had also forgotten what I did last time. When I came into the office, eureka was powered down. Why? The other machines all came up. And when I powered it on, instead of booting, it came up with a ?can't load kernel? message from the loader. I'm sure I saw this last time I rebooted eureka, but I could no longer recall what I did to solve it.
Upgrading eureso, try 3
So for reasons that I don't understand, I can no longer build a FreeBSD 12 or 11 kernel on eureso, a FreeBSD-10 copy of eureka. So I took the different approach of building the system on dereel, with intent to install on eureso today. But that didn't work either! The first issue, of course, was that the objects were on dereel, and I needed them on eureka. OK, move them across and symlink /eureka/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12 to /usr/obj. === root@eureso (/dev/pts/1) /usr/src 31 -> make installworld make[1]: "/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/Makefile.inc1" line 97: A build is required first. You may have the wrong MAKEOBJDIRPREFIX set.
Cross-building FreeBSD-12 on dereel
As planned yesterday, started building a current FreeBSD-12 system on dereel, which is already running an older version. What I forgot was that dereel has 4 CPUs, but I did a single-threaded build because that's what I would have done for eureso, a virtual machine, so as not to overload the host eureka. It took all day for buildworld and buildkernel: -------------------------------------------------------------- >>> Kernel build for GENERIC completed on Fri Nov 27 18:11:03 AEDT 2020 -------------------------------------------------------------- 20015.05 real 16524.06 user 1195.53 sys ... Fri 27 Nov 2020 18:11:03 AEDT OK, dereel's not the fastest machine I have, but that's over 5½ hours.
Greg's monitors
Once again somebody wanted to see how my now monitors are arranged on my desk top. The obvious projection is cylindrical, since that's the way I view the monitors, but previous attempts have been less than successful: Apart from the ever-present Moiré, which no software seems to be able to remove, there's a question of distance from the monitors and their relative height. OK, dammit, take a single photo with an extreme wide-angle lens. Rectilinear or fisheye? Conventional wisdom is that fisheyes distort and rectilinears don't: That is in fact the same photo, taken with the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED ...
Upgrading eureso, 2nd try
Why couldn't I build bmake on eureso yesterday? Could it be that FreeBSD 12 has changed too far from release 10? OK, how about an intermediate step of release 11? cc -O2 -pipe -I/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/11/lib/libnv -MD -MF.depend.dnvlist.o -MTdnvlist.o -std=gnu99 -Qunused-arguments -I/usr/obj/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/11/tmp/legacy/usr/include -c /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/11/sys/contrib/libnv/dnvlist.c -o dnvlist.o /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/11/sys/contrib/libnv/dnvlist.c:50:10: fatal error: 'sys/dnv.h' file not found #include <sys/dnv.h> ^ 1 error generated. *** Error code 1 Stop. bmake[3]: stopped in /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/11/lib/libnv What's that? I don't want to know. Quarter of a century later, and I'm still running into this kind of problem. This should Just Work.
eureso and other frustrations
Finally got round to building a new world on eureso, the virtual copy of eureka. It didn't get far: sh /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/tools/install.sh -s -o root -g wheel -m 555 make make.amd64/bmake install: make.amd64/bmake: No such file or directory *** Error code 71 Stop. make[2]: stopped in /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/usr.bin/bmake What's that? Do I have Yet Another Corrupt Source Tree? Established that there was no /usr/obj hierarchy. What is this crap? Is the system too old to build the current FreeBSD-12 system? How do I work around it?
Upgrading eureka: yet another tack
Upgrading eureka seems to be a never-ending task. It's been well over 7 months since I came up with the bright idea of running two computers again, and gradually updating the second (dereel) as I go along. Clearly this isn't working either. Why not? One obvious reason is that the configuration has proved much more complicated than I expected. Where do I put my files? I ended up with a maze of little twisty symlinks, all different. And of course modern programs like firefox and (especially) Google Chrome have issues with networks. Chrome won't work at all on a remote display.
New kitchen scales
Yvonne has been looking for new kitchen scales for some time. There are plenty on eBay, and they all seem to work well, but they're so tiny. This was significantly larger, and much more expensive?$80 compared to the $12 or so that I paid for the eBay offerings. But it had been halved in price, and in addition they were offering 20% shop-wide, so she ?only? paid $32 for it. From Soehnle, a well-known German company, with the rather silly name ?Page Comfort 400?, and no indication of the resolution (which proved to be the expected 1 g). Came with a single sheet of ?instructions?
NiZn battery behaviour
Taking my ring flash photos yesterday ended up with what I expected: the batteries went flat. Well, as usual, one battery went flat. These were Nickel-Zinc batteries, and I've already noted that in almost every case, only one went flat. While the other three had dropped to about 1.55 V, this one was round 0.6 V. Throw it away? That's what I've done in the past. But this time I measured the voltage some hours later, and it was back to about 1.2 V. So I charged it, and it reached the same level of charge as the others. Has it survived the ill-treatment?
Bloody Android phone!
Yvonne went shopping today, and called me several times. I've more or less learnt to live with pain smart phones: pull gingerly out of my shirt pocket, being very careful not to touch the screen, then smash swipe upwards. Works if you're careful. One time, though, I did it wrong and touched the screen. A completely different display appeared. OK, I've analyzed this one in the past: wait a few seconds for this glacially slow phone to produce a DISMISSACCEPT display, then accept. And yes, it did that. Press ACCEPT. Display goes away, phone continues ringing. And that was all until Yvonne got bored and hung up.
Who coded the Internet?
Somehow I have had this knowledge in the back of my head for decades: when IPv4 was finalized, DARPA gave contracts to BBN and University of California, Berkeley to implement it?on Unix. The university created a Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) to do the work. And the first functional version of the IP stack was in 4.1cBSD, though it was really released in 4.2BSD. Kirk McKusick put me right on one detail: it was 4.1aBSD, not 4.1cBSD. But in the course of my reviews I read the Internet protocol suite page on Wikipedia, and it barely mentions Berkeley. The only reference is: The spread of TCP/IP was fueled further in June 1989, when the University of California, Berkeley agreed to place the TCP/IP code developed for BSD UNIX ...
Time for a new firefox
Still more problems with my ancient firefox today. OK, bite the bullet, run it from dereel. Apart from mail interface problems (also on dereel), things now seem to work. I had to change my dobrowser script to put the web pages somewhere neutral (/eureka/var/tmp), and I needed to copy the ~/.mailcap to dereel. Somehow the biggest issue of running like this is the maze of twisty little symlinks, all different.
Fraudulent web sites?
It looks like we're going to have to feed Leonid 4Cyte for the rest of his life to treat his arthritis. It's expensive stuff?our vet charges $74 for 100 g. Melissa Wisbey gave Yvonne a cheaper source, PetCircle, offering it for only $62.95, post free. OK, we can do that. Signed up, added to my ?cart? and went to checkout: Oh, signup didn't include an address, so I had to give at least the post code: Grr.
SBS programme access: solved
A couple of days ago I grumbled that I could no longer download videos from SBS. That's a challenge for some; Callum Gibson tells me that he can download them with , exactly the same tool that I use. Do I have an old version installed? No, for once it was newer than his, probably because it's necessary. OK, I can try upgrading, and of course there's a new version, but it didn't make any difference OK, an example.
technology, opinion
Andy Oram, my old editor at O'Reilly, has published the first of a series of articles From Unix to Linux: Key Trends in the Evolution of Operating Systems. This is the series that I was reviewing last week, and which gave me cause to think. I told Andy about this in my review, of course, but it's clear that he sees things differently. He took some of the suggestions on board, but I'm left wondering whether the difference is simply our viewpoint. For my viewpoint, it looks a little uneven. Why highlight BIND? The issue of upper and lower case? The one-letter options that we know and love?
Printer pain
Yvonne wanted to print the recipe for the Rouladen so that she could mark it up in the kitchen. It wasn't easy; in fact, I nearly gave up: First, her firefox didn't want to know about the printer. Why not? No idea. So I had to print to a file and then copy the file to the printer. But that didn't work as expected. I got three pages, the first only with headings, the second showing only the photo, and the third also almost empty.
Evolution of TV viewing
Andy Farkas has a new DVD collection: ?Get Smart?. He paid money for it; I downloaded my copies legally for free. That led to a discussion on IRC, which was interesting. But first, a digression. It's been over 50 years since we first had a TV in the house. Times have clearly changed. Thinking back, 30 July 1964 Home TV (parents) 1 June 1972 TV in my home 10 December 1975 Colour TV ...
?Coronavirus? ?spikes?
I've heard from several sources recently that ?Coronavirus? numbers are ?spiking?. What does that mean? First, Coronavirus, one of the main causes of the common cold. Do people really keep statistics on the kind of virus that people have? It seems highly unlikely. Clearly they're talking about one specific coronavirus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. Given that name, or even the abbreviation SARS-CoV-2, you could almost forgive the inaccuracy. But in fact they're not talking about the virus at all, but COVID-19. Why do they have to be so inaccurate? In Germany they tend to refer to it simply as ?Corona?, which I thought was a crown or a beer or something.
More insights into BSD vs. Linux?
While looking for reasons for Linux overtaking BSD, came across this page. There's a lot in there, and I haven't read it yet, but it quotes a number of people who were active early on. I should read it.
Why did BSD fail?
I'm currently reviewing a yet-unpublished paper about (effectively) how Linux ?took over? from Unix (and thus also BSD). And clearly Linux is now an order of magnitude more important than BSD. Why did BSD fail? Why, did BSD fail? No, it's still going strong, just not as strong as Linux. But why did that happen? I still don't really understand. A couple of suggestions that have done the round: The AT&T lawsuit scared people off The AT&T lawsuit was over by 1994, long before Linux became usable.
Web site maintenance
I've always shied away from content management systems, but it's clear that they address a real issue: how to ensure that everything is consistent. With 2400 odd text pages, I'm not always winning. Spent some time today writing up my Weißkrautsalat; the recipe in my recipe index was just a copy of a broken German recipe. After some time I had the recipe pretty much ready, and just needed to link to the old version. Damn! I've been there before! I just forgot to change the link in my recipe index. It was a certain satisfaction to discover that the recipes (in each case modified from the original) were as good as identical.
Woolworths checkout
Part of my shopping was at Woolworths, where I've had fun with their checkout machines in the past. To their credit, they've fixed one of the issues I had: how do you pay? Now they say it clearly: But to get there I first had to scan in the items. Six bottles of cherry juice. Please bag this item? Or Skip Bagging? Until I told it, it wouldn't proceed. Dammit, I have my own bags. Skip. But I had to scan Every Individual Bottle.
Computers in the days of Facebook
It's relatively clear that Yvonne won't be riding for a while, so now seems like a good time to send off her riding vest for service. More contact via Facebook, this time with Michelle in Gisborne. A PDF document arrived by Facebook. How do you print it? Why would you want to print it when you can send it to a device (clearly not a printer)? I couldn't find any way to send it to a printer. Yvonne asked Michelle. ?Just download it?. I couldn't see a way to download it either. In the end I went searching for it with Google, found the PDF, displayed it with xpdf and printed it.
Yvonne's accident, two days later
Yvonne is still not feeling any better after her fall on Sunday. OK, time to get a doctor to take a look at it. Oh. 20th-century US American tones when trying to call Health First. I'm not sure what the difference is between them and a normal ?engaged? tone, but I think it means something like ?this line inaccessible? or ?this line not in service?. Was it Health First or the phone system? Tried calling my other phone line. Same thing. So: MyNetFone? Tried calling Health First from my mobile phone. Same ancient tones. Tried calling my mobile phone from my VoIP phone.
What makes Unix unique?
I'm currently reviewing a paper for publication. Amongst other things it talks about what made Unix different from other systems. I'm not happy with the paper as it stands, but it's a cause for me to step back and think, especially as the author doesn't seem open to my argumentation. Unix was a multi-user system Yes, but it wasn't alone in that. By 1970 most systems were multi-user. Arguably Unix was one of the smaller multi-user systems, but my first experience with computers at all was multi-user FOCAL on a PDP-8, an even smaller system.
Cropping multiple images uniformly
Cropping yesterday's images was not easy. The photos were only approximately in the same place, something like this: What I wanted was 600x450 pixel crops of the bottom right-hand corner of the gate: There were 26 images. How should I do it? GIMP can do that. But it's such a pain to use. If you invoke it with 26 file names, you get 26 windows (and then some).
Making friends with DxO PhotoLab 4
I seem to have resolved the issues that I have with DxO PhotoLab 4, so I bought the upgrade. Processing today's photos was strange: one of the Watsonias seemed to have developed a yellow throat: Did it do that before? Compared with version 3 on the same image and with the same settings: No! That's strange, particularly since the results of processing don't seem to be any different: The screen shots above were ...
DxO PhotoLab 4: understood
I still haven't got round to reading the DxO PhotoLab 4 manual, but I've been using it from time to time despite my issues. What were they? The big one was highlighting underexposed and overexposed parts of the image. It used to be at top right, but it was gone. And then I found it, purely by chance, at top left. It's part of the histogram ?palette?, and for some reason they moved that to the other side of the screen. And the ?only see some tools?? A feature, not a bug. The default display shows them all, but you can reduce them to specific categories, maybe not a bad idea.
NBN reduces data rates
A while back the National Broadband Network introduced a new rate for fixed wireless network links, ?best effort? up to 75 Mb/s down, 10 Mb/s up, and apparently (as I only now discover) called ?Fixed Wireless Plus? to placate people who can't count. And that's all you can get from Aussie Broadband now. But it's too much! This article describes the NBN's reaction to unfair users who actually use this bandwidth. the usage profile of the network has changed, to the point where a small subset of ?heavy? users are routinely in breach of the fixed wireless fair use policy...
calendar(1) hurry
I was quite upset about the accusations I received from a core team member last Friday, especially as he didn't respond to my questions (?too hard?) . And he went and authorized commits that I thought were overly hasty. I didn't react. The result? Half the project up in arms, some because it didn't go far enough, others because it went too far, still others because it meant that the core system (here the remaining part of calendar(1) had to know about /usr/local, while there were people trying to move /usr/local elsewhere. Up to the core team intervention we had exchanged 15 mail messages, involving 4 people.
Statements returning to bite me
I'm not the only person looking back over the years. Peter Jeremy came up with this quote from IRC: <PJ-}> 2010-10-25 19:35:20 <groggyhimself> What good is dump(8)? <PJ-}> 2010-10-25 19:36:41 <groggyhimself> If I find a dump in 10 years' time, I can put it on the compost. <PJ-}> 2010-10-25 19:36:47 <groggyhimself> tar will prevail. And the funny thing is, 10 years later, I am still using dump(8). I wonder why. I think I was right 10 years ago.
DxO PhotoLab surprise
Yesterday I grumbled that the new DxO PhotoLab 4 highlighted overexposed parts of images, and I couldn't turn it off. Now it doesn't highlight them, and I can't turn it on. I really need to read that manual.
Scanning old photos, continued
It's been well over a week since I scanned in some photos I took 55 years ago. The real issue is to put them on a directory corresponding to the day on which they were taken, and fake Exif data for them. That's not as difficult as it seems: I kept an exposure notebook at the time, and a couple of years later I transcribed it to an A5 ring notebook: And I already have a PHP script to add the Exif data. How hard can it be? Bearable, I suppose. But there were a number of surprises: I marked this particular film as Ilford HP4, but in fact it was Ilford Mark V, ciné film similar to HP4.
New DxO PhotoLab
DxO have released a new version of PhotoLab, version 4. As a long-standing customer and user of PhotoLab, I found out, of course?from DPReview. As I've seen before, it seems that DxO didn't see any reason to inform its customers. OK, find the thing, not made easier by their web site breakage. Finally downloaded and installed it, which involved restarting my Microsoft box, distress. And how about that, it looks pretty much like the old one. No obvious bugs fixed: navigating the preview strip still is touch-and-go (it worked in previous releases), and the cursor breakage I have seen is still there.
Goodbye Internode
I've had relations with Internode for well over 20 years, mainly because it was in Adelaide and people I knew worked there, but it wasn't until 7 June 2005 that I finally opened an account. But somehow the friendly connection with Internode wasn't reflected when I was a customer. And it didn't last long, of course: two years later I moved to Dereel and had to find alternative Internet connections. I returned to Internode 10 years ago and stayed with them for another 3 years until I got an NBN link. Why didn't I stay with Internode? I wasn't happy with the treatment I had had.
Still more calendar(1) issues
I've had a complaint, copied to the FreeBSD core team and from a member of the team, about demands I made and that I was disrespectful and unproductive. I was? I tried hard to avoid any such suggestion. So I answered and asked what I had done wrong and what demands I had made, and got a response saying ?This is too hard. You're nit-picking and demanding?. Once upon a time the core team took things seriously.
More calendar(1) wrangling
More discussion on the FreeBSD-arch mailing list today. Somehow we're running around in circles. It seems that unknown people want this ?fixed? immediately, after 24 years. And though in principle people agreed with my argument about unifying with the other projects, there's no time to wait. Why? Who are the unknown people? Why now? And why should I have to do the work? Why not take a little time to do it right?
Flushing inactive memory
I've been grumbling relatively silently for some time that my system has so much memory in ?inactive? state. Here a typical view: last pid: 42544; load averages: 1.53, 1.28, 1.20 up 407+02:00:35 12:00:29 1677 processes:1 running, 1663 sleeping, 4 stopped, 9 zombie CPU: 21.8% user, 0.6% nice, 3.0% system, 0.3% interrupt, 74.4% idle Mem: 3477M Active, 23G Inact, 3197M Wired, 176M Cache, 1656M Buf, 1750M Free Swap: 20G Total, 9799M Used, 10G Free, 47% Inuse On the one hand I have 23 GB of inactive memory, over 70% of total memory, but I'm also using nearly 10 GB of swap.
More calendar(1) investigations
What do we do with calendar(1)? What do other systems do? Took a look at Linux, Mac OS, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and to my surprise all of them had calendar(1) and a similar set of calendar files, in each case in the hierarchy /usr/share/calendar/. The data files themselves are clearly closely related?every single one had the incorrect entry for the Boston Shoemakers?but the Linux one also had additional files, like calendar.kazakhstan. To my surprise, the Linux file for Australia included the line: * $FreeBSD: head/usr.bin/calendar/calendars/calendar.australia 345251 2019-03-17 22:26:50Z grog $ And that's the current version on FreeBSD.
Keeping FreeBSD up to date
FreeBSD has been around for nearly 30 years now, and most of its files base on 4.4BSD. The important ones have been updated, of course, but there were also a lot of historical files, like the calendar information for the calendar program. I have it set up so that it sends me email with all calendar entries for the day. A couple of days ago I got such an entry: Oct 18 Boston Shoemakers form first US labor org., 1648 Huh? The USA wasn't founded until 1776.
Still more X issues
Yesterday I established that the error message I was receiving when trying to display email attachments on firefox was genuine: the X server had too many clients. How many? === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/27) ~ 144 -> xlsclients |wc 45 661 5495 === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/27) ~ 146 -> xwininfo -root -children | wc -l 424 45 clients? That doesn't seem very likely. Clearly there are many more windows. Looking at the window list on my displays I found: Display Number of clients ...
Analysing X problems
After yesterday's catastrophe with X communication, my first thought was how to recover the situation to a point where I could continue working. What happens on server 1? Things work! In principle, I could stay there, but the rest of my environment is on server 0, and switching servers takes time. When I returned to server 0, without thinking I tried to view an email attachment. It worked! But not for long. After a while I ran into the old problem again. So I did some more investigation. The more I look, the clearer is that it doesn't directly relate to firefox.
More firefox pain
It's been over 6 months since I started a project to replace eureka with two machines, the other called dereel. It was slow going, and without real reasons I postponed things. One of the biggest reasons is the horror that is firefox. More and more web sites are refusing to talk to my old version, or placing severe restrictions on its usage. Today I discovered that I can no longer log in to eBay, or at least not under certain circumstances. OK, I have a more modern (and thus harder to use) firefox on dereel. Just get it to run on a eureka server.
Where's my failure report?
I have a daily cron job that reports grid power outages. But today there was none. Why? Off to look at my Heath Robinson power monitoring scripts. There are two main parts, apart from the MySQL database. ~/solar/suckdb fakes a web page to the inverter and creates a MySQL command with the help of a sed script: curl -N 'http://inverter.lemis.com/system/events/sse/stream' -H 'Accept: text/event-stream' -H 'Referer: http://inverter.lemis.com/dashboard/main.html' -H 'Cookie: __utma=51177012.766199467.1486957619.1542435223.1545448630.4; __utmc=51177012; __utmz=51177012.1542145939.2.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=(none); adblk=adblk_no' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' -H 'Cache-Control: no-cache' 2>/dev/null | sed -l -f frobdb.sed And ~/solar/insertdb runs suckdb and inserts the records into the database, politely ignoring errors: while :; do suckdb | grep --line-buffered ^Insert | mysql household; done So what went wrong?
NBN maintenance: Becoming less obtrusive?
Another National Broadband Network scheduled outage notice today. There's nothing unusual about that, but this time there was a difference: during a 12 hour window from 23:00 on 5 November to 11:00 on 6 November, I may experience up to 5 one minute outages! I may, since I monitor the connectivity, but I doubt anybody else will. Hopefully this is an indication that they're becoming less obtrusive.
xpdf issues: blame svn!
I still couldn't understand why my xpdf build failed. Off to look at the source tree in more detail. Ran === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/42) /usr/ports/graphics/xpdf4/files 110 -> svn log patch-xpdf-qt_CMakeLists.txt svn: E155010: The node '/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/xpdf4/files/patch-xpdf-qt_CMakeLists.txt' was not found. Oh. svn update failed? === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/42) /usr/ports/graphics/xpdf4/files 111 -> svn up Updating '.' : At revision 552295. No. So why wasn't it deleted? svn is too modern to have a real man page, of course, and the suggestion in the excuse man page sounds like an insult: Documentation for Subversion and its tools, including detailed usage explanations of the svn, svnadmin, svnserve and svnlook programs, his- torical background, philosophical approaches and reasonings, etc., can be found at .
Investigating xpdf port
So why did my xpdf build fail yesterday? One of the patch files didn't apply cleanly. OK, take a look. The patch file's not big: --- xpdf-qt/CMakeLists.txt.orig 2017-08-08 23:22:50 UTC *** +++ xpdf-qt/CMakeLists.txt @@ -86,6 +86,6 @@ if ((QT4_FOUND OR Qt5Widgets_FOUND) ${CMAKE_THREAD_LIBS_INIT}) set_property(TARGET xpdf PROPERTY WIN32_EXECUTABLE 1) - install(TARGETS xpdf RUNTIME DESTINATION bin) - install(FILES ${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/doc/xpdf.1 DESTINATION man/man1) + install(TARGETS xpdf RUNTIME DESTINATION libexec/xpdf) + install(FILES ${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/doc/xpdf.1 DESTINATION share/xpdf/man/man1) endif () And the file to be patched? The patch shows that the section in question starts at line 86: target_link_libraries(xpdf ${QT_LIBRARIES} ${EXTRA_QT_LIBRARIES} ${PAPER_LIBRARY} ${FREETYPE_LIBRARY} ${FREETYPE_OTHER_LIBS} ...
More ports pain
One of the things I've been meaning to do for some time is to learn about the Proto-Indo-European language. OK, after looking at the TV news, tried a document I have: === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/10) ~/Documentation/Language 172 -> xpdf An_outline_of_Proto_Indo_European.pdf Bus error Dammit, what's wrong now? It happened with every document. Update? OK, that worked, requiring a surprising number of Qt dependencies (aren't there a surprising number?) . Try again. === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/10) ~/Documentation/Language 172 -> xpdf An_outline_of_Proto_Indo_European.pdf Config Error: No paper information available - using defaults Cannot mix incompatible Qt library (5.13.2) with this library (5.15.0) Abort trap Dammit!
Race condition, caught
I have a script for watching TV. It runs mpv to display the file and does some bookkeeping, including updating a list of files that we have seen. That's not completely transparent: it writes a temporary file foo in the current directory, arguably something that I should change. Today we watched the final episode in a directory. Can I delete the directory? Not yet: foo is still there. Let's check: === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/3) /spool/Series/90-min/Nord-bei-Nordwest 9 -> ls -l total 0 ls: ./foo: No such file or directory -rw-r--r-- 1 grog home 0 7 Oct 21:18 foo Somewhere between the second and first line (in that sequence), foo was removed.
US military attack decoded
Juha Kupiainen came up with an insight on the presumed attack from the US military last week. The URL was: http://www.lemis.com/accepted-SubZero?aHR0cDovL3d3dy5sZW1pcy5jb20vZ3JvZy9Eb2N1bWVudGF0aW9uL0xpb25zLw==;cGPM5qAnLsbMaV7KZOmgdpyLReLuEGTO7yFyD9dPYd0= He put that through https://www.base64decode.org/ and came up with: http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/Lions/^G^F<j^Brl?N^Gi?^.^FL^W t^] Now why was that used? And what's the trailing junk? It does, however, suggest that it wasn't as malicious as I might have expected.
Strange spam
From time to time I see spam subject lines that make me sit back and think. Here are two: 29 N + 03-10-2020 Home Solar Installat ( 87) N + Home Solar Panel Incentives For Local Residents 30 N + 03-10-2020 AmericanPatriotCo Co ( 58) N + Honor Your Favorite President With A Trump Coin Turn the first one around. Home Solar Panel Incentives For Non-Local Residents? What did they think when they used the word ?local?? Geographically close to the spammer? People who live near their houses?
US Military: unreachable
Not completely unexpected mail today: Date: Fri, 2 Oct 2020 02:10:55 +0000 (UTC) From: Mail Delivery System <MAILER-[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender This is the mail system at host lax.lemis.com. I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below. <[email protected]>: connect to POSTAL.nic.mil[207.132.116.7]:25: Operation timed out Somehow this all demonstrates a level of incompetence that I hadn't expected from the most powerful military in the world.
Bloody ?smart? phones, ipHone edition
Tried to call Petra Gietz on her mobile phone this morning. It diverted immediately to voice mail. OK, not a problem, she came by a few minutes later, so I told her about the diversion. Oh yes, she knew about that, but she didn't know what was wrong. It's an iPhone 5, something I have had (and rejected) before. How hard can it be? Took a look, in the process also, at Petra's request, to disable the requirement for a pass code when powering on. I couldn't manage it and had to enlist Daniel O'Connor's help. The real issue is the menu system (why does the icon for ?Settings?
More transcoding insights
Now that I have managed to get a good copy of the Oddball DVD, it seemed a good idea to look at some DVDs that we bought at Julie Donaghy's in March. I had tried at the time to rip them, with little success. So I tried with tccat, and how about that, it ripped them. Well, two out of three episodes. For some reason the middle episode came out completely scrambled. And somehow 2.5 GB for a 45 minute video in (relatively poor) 576p seemed excessive. How about trying something that goes beyond simply copying the data. HandBrake? Played around a bit and finally found some ways to tell it where to store things.
X problems
One of the first things I do every morning is to change my nicks synchronously on two different IRC channels. OK, set the first one, copy and paste to the other, press Return, done! <grO0gle> BREAKING: Promising new coronavirus numbers in Victoria [08:48] <grO0gle> Huh? What happened there? It proved that copy and paste was broken. I could paste?that's what the result showed?but copying didn't, at least not from an Emacs instance. Lots of playing around, and finally traced it to x2x. Possibly the problem was that I had started two instances, one each going north and south from eureka:0.0 to dereel:0.0.
Trust the US Military!
What do I do about yesterday's breakin attempt from the US Air Force (124fw-902.afnoc.af.mil)? The right thing is to report it. FOOL! You sent it to the wrong address. af.mil. has no A record. OK, how do I find the correct address? With a little searching, found this page, which tells me that the correct abuse address is [email protected]. Send it there. No DSN receipt confirmation. After a while, checked the mail queue: 379E327313 4004 Sun Sep 27 01:51:49 [email protected] (connect to POSTAL.nic.mil[207.132.116.7]:25: Operation timed out) [email protected] This is the world's most powerful military organization, the one that was exploited by the likes of Julian Assange.
US military breakin attempt
I regularly get a number of link failure reports from http://www.lemis.com/. Some are genuine problems on my part: I refer to a non-existent page from a valid page, something that's worth reporting. Then there are failures that seem to be self-perpetuating, like: Referrer: http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-feb2016.php Referenced URL: http://www.lemis.com/Histoire_Foie_Gras.php There are two issues here: firstly, the referring page doesn't refer to that URL. I do have a page with that name, but it's http://www.lemis.com/grog/recipes/Histoire_Foie_Gras.html. Somewhere a request has been built that has attributed it to an unrelated referring page.
Ripping DVDs, revisited
So how do I rip my Oddball? Asked on IRC, where Callum Gibson had the answer: tccat. What's that? Apparently a little-known component of transcode, a namespace-violating but descriptive name. OK, try the obvious invocation: === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/8) ~/ 52 -> tccat /cdrom > Oddball.mp4 Nothing happened. Ah, RTFM. It's not clear how tccat wants to interpret the /cdrom, and I suspect it just ignores it. The input file wants to be announced with a -i. And there's a really arcane track specification. After some playing around, I tried Callum's suggestion: === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/8) ~/ 53 -> tccat -i /dev/cd0 -T 4,-1 > Oddball.mp4 Bus error The -T specification is the track number (4), followed by a chapter number ...
Oddball!
Mail from the Central Highlands Libraries today: my Oddball DVD was waiting for me. Just bring my library card. Fine, but what library card? They have issued me with a real card number now, but I haven't received a card. Called up on (03) 5338 6850 and spoke to Graham, who agreed to hand the DVD to Yvonne (who happened to be in town) without a card, and at some time I should come in and pick up my card. Also tried again to sign Yvonne up. No luck. Called up again, Graham tried, and also failed. At least we now have documentation of the bug?and Graham also issued a card on the spot, unfortunately after Yvonne had picked up the DVD.
More GPS navigation pain
Off to Geelong again this afternoon for my six-monthly periodontic checkup. More for the fun of it than anything else, I wanted to try a navigation app on my way there. After over 12 hours, iGO had still not loaded any map data. OK, off once again Googling for best gps app. The first hit gave me a choice of 10, with little overview: the first one was for hikers. The next seemed more likely: HERE WeGo. OK, we can try. At least it installed, and it allowed me to select ?Geelong? as a destination, though once again I was left wondering where all the fine detail had gone.
More navigation software
I'm off to Geelong tomorrow for my six-monthly periodontic checkup. And my GPS navigator is on its last legs. I've been looking for a replacement, but this is really a function that a mobile phone should be able to do. Only I haven't found any suitable apps. I'm currently using iGO on my navigator. And it's available for Android too?at a price. But new navigators cost money too. So off to download it. I can't understand it! But one thing was clear: I needed to download maps, at prices comparable to those of a standalone navigator. OK, I get a free week's trial of one map only.
Where am I?
One of the prerequisites of taking my analemma photos is to know the time of mean solar noon. My GPS navigator tells me that my location (well, the post outside my office) is at -37.80061,143.75168. You can calculate mean solar noon easily enough from the longitude: multiply by 4 minutes and subtract from UTC. That gives me 01:24:59.6 UTC, close enough to 01:25 to not make any difference. Sometimes web sites want to know my location. I've grumbled about that in the past: they won't take my word for it, and instead go via some IP address or another. Which address?
Voigtländer Nokton reexamined
I don't use my Voigtländer Nokton 25 mm f/0.95 lens very often, but I've come to terms with it. Since it's a completely manual lens, I have to update the Exif data manually, and I have methods in place for that. But yesterday I took another photo (full aperture, of course, the only time it has any advantage) and got this: That's clearly vignetted. OK, fix it in DxO PhotoLab and save the profile, in the process running afoul of the horrible interface presented by DxO's editor, and overwriting my default profile in the process: But it's only at full aperture.
Bloody ?smart? phones!
It's been nine years since I first started thinking about getting a ?smart? phone, though it took until less than four years ago before I finally got one, and then mainly because it was free. Looking back, my objections were the same from the very start, like here: hard to use, no keyboard, amongst other random objections. All that has changed is that my hatred has increased. On the positive side, I can now use it as a phone with relatively few problems. It almost always rings when a call comes in, and almost always I can answer it. What's wrong with this picture?
Ports pain, 10 years on
On Saturday I commented, after having to search for the canonical Samba port: How I wish the Ports Collection would recognize generic names! And then today I read my diary of ten years ago: There seems to be no canonical Samba port. The one I have in my scripts was net/samba3, which happily started building and told me it was deprecated. So I went looking for the correct one, which you'd expect to be net/samba.
Integrating disks, day 3
Yesterday's disk installation went smoothly, so today I did the third one, moving the second one to lagoon. All I need now is to bend things to talk to the disks instead of /Photos and /photobackup on eureka. Or maybe there's more to do. Where did yesterday evening's backup of lagoon go? Usually it's finished shortly after 21:00. But this morning there was no sign of it. Went looking: === root@lagoon (/dev/pts/2) /Photos 45 -> ps wwaux | grep dump root 92902 0.1 0.1 12036 2480 - S 21:24 2:51.59 dump: /dev/da0p1: pass 4: 7.21% done, finished in 166:15 at Sat Sep 12 08:35:36 2020 (dump) === root@lagoon (/dev/pts/2) /Photos 46 -> date Sat 5 Sep 2020 10:20:55 AEST Not only was it trying to back ...
Shopping in Ballarat
How do you kill 20 minutes waiting for the car work? To ALDI, next door to Autobarn, where we looked around for things that Yvonne would not normally buy, and found some pre-marinated chicken satay that didn't look too bad. Also a couple of other random things. Then to Woolworths to look for satay sauce. How about that, a parking place straight ahead: It wasn't until I was almost into it that I read: Yes, there was something on the wall, partially obliterated by a truck (who was probably not picking things up).
Integrating external disks, for real
As planned, partitioned and loaded Yvonne's first backup disk on dereel today (it has USB 3, so it's much faster). Also as planned, noted exactly what to do. Get it wrong and you can really shoot yourself in the foot. To be careful, I divide into 3 steps: Confirm the correct disk. On connection, the kernel reports the details, including in particular the device name da0.
lagoon backup disk
Into the office this morning to look at how the data copy to Yvonne's new photo disk was progressing: ... x ./20171214/orig/2C149984.ORF x ./20171214/orig/2C149985.ORFtar: (null) : Truncated tar archive tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors. I really must get in the habit of redirecting error output for these things.
Another 24 TB of storage
A courier arrived today with the 3 8 TB backup disks that I ordered last week. Small, light package. We had just been talking about early disk drives (Seagate ST-506, 5 MB) on IRC, and it occurred to me that these three would correspond to 4,800 ST-506s. Oh. Not 4,800. 4,800,000! How storage has increased over the last 35 years! Idly considered the space that that many ST-506s would take up, not helped by not knowing the exact dimensions. OK, for the sake of comparison, I could go back a year or two further and consider the IBM 2311 that I had considered interfacing in the days before I could afford a real disk drive: This page gives the dimensions: 38"×40"×24".
Ports pain
What's the purpose of porting software? I wrote the book on the subject, so I went looking for a statement. None. Clearly it was too obvious: take some sources you have received and convert them to binaries that run in your environment, typically operating system and display environment. But lately we've been in a discussion on the FreeBSD lists which makes me wonder if everybody sees that as the purpose. People wanted to remove ports because they no longer compiled under the set of options chosen for the Ports Collection, because there's no upstream maintainer, or just because they're too old.
unix: old, worn-out magic word
Today I discovered that all ten xearth processes running on eureka's root screens had crashed. Why? Tried to restart them. === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/42) ~ 2 -> xe Error: Can't open display: unix:0.1 Error: Can't open display: unix:0.0 Error: Can't open display: unix:0.3 Error: Can't open display: unix:0.2 Huh? They're all working. In fact, I ran that script on unix:0.2. What has happened? It proved to be the display name: unix:0.0, for example. Change that to :0.0 and all is well. In principle, it's the same thing: in front of the display identifier you specify either a system name (for TCP domain) or unix (for Unix domain).
NBN revisited
Discussing Internet traffic charges with Callum Gibson on IRC. I'm currently paying $65 per month with Aussie Broadband for 600 GB at 25 Mb/s down, 5 Mb/s up. That's more than I currently need, since they have generously cut charges during the daytime, so I could go down a few 100 GB if I wanted. Or get an unlimited tariff for $4 more per month. Off to confirm. Damn, this web site is confusing. To start with, it doesn't want to know about the old firefox on eureka. OK, fire up the latest and gratest firefox on dereel. ?Please answer this CAPTCHA?.
CJ hacked?
(VoIP) phone call from CJ Ellis today, with the information that his Internet is broken. That sounded unlikely, but it seems that some scammer has been annoying him, and now he has lost Internet connectivity from his computer?not the new one, because sound doesn't work on that, but the old one (which I think is running Ubuntu). Does he really have connectivity issues, or is there something else? Got him to start TeamViwer, but he couldn't get a user ID or password, which appears to be TeamViewer's polite way of saying ?sorry, can't contact our server?. So I got him to connect the other computer, which connected fine, and I was able to browse through it with TeamViewer.
Fixing rain gauges
The Bureau of Meteorology has still not recorded any rain for Ballarat since Thursday. Clearly something's wrong. Ring them up? No, nowadays you use email web forms for communication. The BoM's one is particularly emetic: fill out one of hundreds of reasons, browser type and version, enter your name once but your email twice, the second into a field that doesn't accept pasting, and at the end you had to answer a trick question. People, you should be open to communication, not trying to annoy people! Filled out the form and got the confirmation: REF2020-237-13537.
Mobile phone clocks again
Mail from Michael James today, informing me that iPhones can display seconds on the idle screen?but only on the analogue display, unless you jailbreak them. That's even more confusing. Why limit it to analogue displays? Are digital users too leet to want to display seconds? Another possibility comes to mind: the things are inaccurate! Or at least, mine is. I have an app for time display. What's it called? Anonymous, it seems. At least nothing wants to display its name. And it is something like 10 seconds slow! In the Good Old Days that would have been not only normal, but even good.
Microsoft surprises
I have migrated most of my Microsoft activity from dischord (Microsoft ?Windows? 7) to distress (?Windows? 10), but the scanner is still connected to dischord, and it will stay there until I move dischord to the other side of my monitors. Today I wanted to scan something. Turn on the scanner, wake dischord, start the scanner program. ?Can't start scanner? or some silly popup. Do you want to open? the Troubleshooting Assistant? assistant? No, not really. I don't think I could stomach what I found inside. But the message persisted. Check the ?Control Panel?. Device is working normally. Dammit, the Microsoft solution is simple: reboot.
Mobile phones: too modern?
Seen on IRC today: <mattik> older brother complaining about no seconds field on his samsung android hehe <mattik> there again have no idea how to do that with iOS on iphone either <afark> there is a new icon on my phone and I don't know what it means.. <afark> ..a quarter filled rectangles with wobbly lines on either side <afark> also running out of green... might have to plug her in again <pj> chuzz: If you swipe down, it might associate it with some text. <bb0> gc: you get seconds if you go into one of the clock apps <bb0> gc: I can't help with the wobbly lines icon <bb0> gc: take a screenshot of it?
Goodbye NiZn?
While taking the photos of Piccola and the mice, my flash gun gave up on me: low battery. That can happen, of course, but these were freshly charged. Checking, I found that three of the batteries were showing round 1.72 V, which is normal for a fully charged battery, but the fourth was showing only 0.7 V. I've seen similar things with NiMH batteries. I'm coming to the conclusion that rechargeable batteries are not as uniform in their characteristics as non-rechargeable batteries. They may work well individually, but in series with others it seems that they tend to fail like this. I've been using NiZn for power applications for nearly 9 years now.
More X pain
Why is my screen navigation on dereel so strange? I can move right through the monitors, but moving left jumps over one: from dereel:0.2 I go to dereel:0.1, and from dereel:0.2 I go to eureka:0.3. The answer, it seems, is x2x. Today, for some reason, I picked up the mouse attached to dereel, and there things work normally. What's causing that? But at the moment that's not my issue. First I need to castrate the X configuration on on eureka. Currently it has 4 screens, two hidden behind dereel:0.1 and dereel:0.2. That's more of a pain than it appears: apart from them occasionally popping up when dereel's X server screen blanks, it means that I can't move left from eureka to dereel; instead I have to go the long way round.
dereel in earnest
So I've given up on finding relevant documentation for the Nvidia X driver. Take what I have and frob it with values that seem likely, even if I can't find any documentation for them. For the three screens, add: Option "metamodes" "VGA-0: nvidia-auto-select +0+0" Option "SLI" "Off" Option "MultiGPU" "Off" Option "BaseMosaic" "off" ... Option "metamodes" "DVI-D-0: nvidia-auto-select +0+0" ... Option "metamodes" "HDMI-0: nvidia-auto-select +0+0 {AllowGSYNC=Off}" The other options (SLI, MultiGPU, BaseMosaic) are repeated in each Screen section.
Nvidia X investigations
Yesterday I had put off my investigation of the X configuration in the expectation that it could take some time. I didn't have much time today, but I made a start. First, check the entry for metamodes in Nvidia's X config options page. Sure enough, Option "MetaModes" "string" This option describes the combination of modes to use on each monitor when using TwinView. See Chapter 13, Configuring TwinView for details. Default: string is NULL. This is going round in circles!
Ports pain: so nice, so nice, we do it twice
While I was installing ports, there's handbrake, a video transcoder that Julie Lannen had recommended to Yvonne. I've heard good things about it, not for the reasons that Julie stated, but to transcode some ridiculously large video files. Typical German videos are either 720p (a 45 minute episode takes up about 1.4 GB) or 1080p (2.4 GB). But lately we've been finding episodes of Die Firma Hesselbach, also 45 minutes. The series was first aired in 1960, in black and white of course. The sizes speak for themselves: === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/11) /spool/Already/Series 590 -> mpid Hesselbach/01/01-11-Der-Betriebsausflug-20*4 Hesselbach/01/01-11-Der-Betriebsausflug-20170319-113000.mp4 VIDEO: [H264] 512x288 24bpp 25.000 fps 510.3 kbps (62.3 kbyte/s) Hesselbach/01/01-11-Der-Betriebsausflug-20200805-001000.mp4 VIDEO: [H264] 1920x1080 24bpp 50.000 fps 7487.0 kbps (913.9 kbyte/s) === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/11) /spool/Already/Series 592 -> ls -l, Hesselbach/01/01-11-Der-Betriebsausflug-20*4 -rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 260,868,776 14 Jul 2019 Hesselbach/01/01-11-Der-Betriebsausflug-20170319-113000.mp4 ...
More dereel upgrade fun
While doing my X config experiments, checked in the config file with RCS. Or at least I tried. Not there! People have taken RCS out of the base system and made a port of it. OK, that's ?progress?, I suppose. Then I tried to install a couple of graphics programs. A new version of darktable has just come out. The port has already been updated, but the package hasn't. OK, I've had enough pain building ports: this sort of thing tends to have hundreds of dependencies. Install the old package to satisfy the dependencies, then build a new one. Ha, ha, there are build depends!
X on dereel again
Took a look at the X configuration files that I generated with nvidia-settings yesterday. To my surprise, the formatting wasn't that bad, but they had still lost the comments. But there were a number of surprises: The file did have a different ServerLayout section: Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "Layout0" Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0 Screen 1 "Screen1" 3840 0 ...
Fighting dereel X configuration
I've left another couple of days before continuing with the X configuration on dereel. I had feared that it would be painful, and my fears proved to be underestimates. In principle it works, but the three monitors are configured in the wrong sequence. The one in the middle (BenQ GW2265) comes up as screen 0 and the one on the left (Acer G246HL) comes up as screen 1. By some coincidence, the one on the right (BenQ E200HD) comes up as screen 2: In passing, there's another issue that I'm going to have to deal with.
Porting revisited
It's been nearly 25 years since O'Reilly published my first book, ?Porting UNIX Software? Time have changed, reflected by the fact that O'Reilly now seem to have taken the book out of their collection without telling me. That might also be a sign of the times, though it looks more like web site breakage; I'm still there, and there are broken links to my books. But I can't even find their book catalogue from their home page. Have they gone out of that business? Today I discovered that, while my x2x worked, it was maxing out a CPU core. I know this problem: it checked all file descriptors on return from select(), and since the number of file descriptors has increased dramatically, the time taken has done so too.
Bloody Microsoft!
When I fired up distress, I was distressed to find this display on the screen: I don't want to meet no steenking Edge! Don't you tell me what to do, you foul Microsoft! And what's this insult? My security? My privacy? You have violated my machine and rebooted it! And now you have only given me one option: ?Get started?. Get stuffed! Fired up the Task Manager and shot it down in flames.
X installation continued
Into the office this morning to find that my BenQ E2200 HD monitor (variously eureka:0.1 via DVI and dereel:0.2 via HDMI) was not responding. dereel's X was on screen blank, and though eureka was delivering a signal, there was no way to get the monitor to display a menu so that I could switch to DVI. I had to wake dereel's X server to do the switch. It's time to wonder whether I should connect one or two more monitors now that I can. OK, now that I have an X server, I can run Hugin on dereel (Hugin is too polite to run across the network).
X configuration on dereel
It's been several days since I've looked at the X configuration on dereel. There are at least two reasons: firstly, I've been busy, and secondly I expect pain. Back to look at it again today. I had started editing a configuration file, but it looked strange. Here an example: Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen2" Device "Device1" Monitor "Monitor1" DefaultDepth 24 Option "TwinView" "0" Option "TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder" "DFP-0" Option "metamodes" "nvidia-auto-select +0+0" SubSection "Display" Depth 24 EndSubSection EndSection Why the TwinView entries?
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.
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?.
Sony HDR-CX405 results
Finally found time to look at the video clips that I took on Chris Bahlo's Sony HDR-CX405 yesterday. First, though, how do I get the videos off the camera? As on the Olympus cameras, all images are stored in a single directory (MP_ROOT\100ANV01). And that needs to start this silly PlayMemories program?not to use it; it's useless?but to set the camera USB connection into mass storage mode. Did that: no clips! Searched the whole file system and found nothing obvious. But they had been displayed in ?Windows Explorer?
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=<[email protected]>, 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.
More Sony HDR-CX405 fun
Somehow my previous experience with the Sony HDR-CX405 doesn't make sense to me. The camera has had good reviews, but I've had nothing but trouble with it. In particular, though, the PIXIO ?Robot Cameraman? can control it, so it must have functionality not mentioned in any documentation I have been able to find. But apart from PIXIO, the tests that we took on Saturday looked terrible. This clip shows a number of issues: bad mounting on the tripod (the ground is level), wobbly tripod, but also poor image quality, aggressive single-speed zoom and focus hunting. Round 19 seconds into this clip a sudden zoom produces this: That was one of my ...
Sony HDR-CX405
Lots of photos and videos to process today. The Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II and Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark III were straightforward enough, but I had to work out how to use Chris Bahlo's new Sony HDR-CX405. In particular, how do you get the images off the device? The storage is a micro SD card?256 GB of it!?and Chris had bought an SD card adapter to read it into the computer. But that's not the way to go. Why does the thing have a USB connection? That's a micro USB connector. Yes, it's marked MULTI, but that's presumably for additional functionality. We have the corresponding cables.
Enforced pause
For probably over 6 months I've had papers to file on my left-hand desk. But instead of filing them, I've been adding to them as things come in the post. Enough! I'll put off other work, including the new dereel, until I have at least a substantial proportion of the filing done. First step is to sort them into a semblance of destination: I can see this taking a while.
Panic on dereel
Spent most of today installing ports on dereel, in the process discovering that pkg logs an installation in the system log. That's certainly convenient, since it only logs the prime ports, not the dependencies. Then a first attempt to configure X. Not a success: just an error message that I forgot (I can find more details in /var/log/Xorg.0.log) and what proved to be an empty configuration file. The log file was empty too! But that's probably because of: Jul 16 13:58:46 dereel kernel: nvidia0: <Graphics Device> on vgapci0 Jul 16 13:58:46 dereel kernel: vgapci0: child nvidia0 requested pci_enable_io Jul 16 14:01:29 dereel kernel: panic: vm_fault: fault on nofault entry, addr: 0xfffffe004c2d2000 Yes, I have a dump, but clearly the panic was related to running X.
Shooting in the boot
Finally got round to rebooting dereel after the kernel upgrade. The results weren't quite what I expected: What went wrong there? Somehow I had managed to boot from the first partition (/dev/ada0p2, FreeBSD 10.2) and mount the root file system from the second (/dev/ada0p4), which had been built for FreeBSD 12.1. Clearly I needed to modify /boot/loader.conf on /dev/ada0p2. But how? I couldn't even run vi. Briefly considered trying ed before I came to the conclusion that cat would be easier, and fortunately that worked.
Photo image sizes
I've just installed Ashampoo Photo Optimizer version 8. I've had various issues with the older versions: Some dialogue windows accepted input glacially slowly (up to 30 seconds per keystroke). Fortunately this is only during installation. It refused to work with larger images. How large? Smaller than some of my panoramas, probably under 100 MP. It produced ridiculously large ?optimized? images, up to 5 times the size of the original.
Understanding FreeBSD memory allocation
During the kernel build on the new dereel, took a look at top output: Mem: 72M Active, 5820M Inact, 3372K Laundry, 1185M Wired, 773M Buf, 774M Free This machine (currently) has 8 GB of RAM. At this time, only 72 MB were active, and 5,820 MB were ?inactive?. Admittedly there was hardly memory pressure, with nearly 10% of memory free and no swap, but I wonder if it wouldn't be interesting to tune the ?inactive? parameters.
Good things come in threes
I have now more or less got distress (Microsoft ?Windows? 10 machine) in usable shape. A good thing too: today my third ThinkCentre M93p arrived, the one I'm planning as an interim FreeBSD desktop machine. Interestingly, it had almost exactly the same serial number as the one I'm using for teevee: PC0240MD instead of PC0240MC. I'm on familiar territory there. But like the other two, it came with ?Windows? 10, so it made sense to activate it before removing the disk. What then? Found a disk which I had been using for setting up dereel, so worked on that, in the process updating my HOWTO entry.
?Windows? 10: insights
Relatively early in the day I start writing my entries for the previous day. Today I had fun enough: the excruciating pain of trying to ?map? network drives (under ?This PC?, for some reason). OK, repeat the sequence and take screen shots. The first thing, which I had noticed but not reported yesterday, was that I could display the advertised file systems by pressing ?Browse?: So I know the file systems, I know my credentials, and I still get these moronic and apparently incorrect error messages.
More ?Windows? pain
Yvonne obligingly took 315 photos today, to be processed with DxO PhotoLab. OK, set things up for her as well. Basically the same thing as for me. But then there's this strange Microsoft layering violation: file sharing is per-user, so I had to go through the whole CIFS pain all over again. That's particularly silly since in each case I need the same credentials. And, once again, it didn't work! First time round, after entering user name and password and pressing ?Do it? or whatever, it repeated the credentials window immediately. The second time it waited its 20 seconds (to see if the password became valid?)
Hibernate or sleep?
One of the problems for which I haven't found a solution is the fact that ?Windows? 10 doesn't seem to be able to ignore the ?sleep? settings while an rdesktop session is active. So, as many have advised, I have to disable sleep. So when do I sleep? Under ?Windows? 7 it was simple: terminate the rdesktop session and it goes to sleep after its normal timeout. But of course distress doesn't. And the shutdown program doesn't even offer ?sleep?, just ?hibernate?. Tried that, and of course it works. It also presumably uses less power. But coming back up is a different matter.
The daily ?Windows? pain
Gradually distress is working more or less as I want it. Spent some time today trying to refine the thing to not require double clicking, and showing all files rather than just those parts of some file names. It wasn't helped by the fact that they've both rearranged and renamed things. I didn't find how to set the NTP server, though my HOWTO page describes it for ?Windows? 7. I did find that they have renamed the tab ?Folder Options? to ?File explorer options?, and that's where I need to turn off this silly double mouse click (obvious, isn't it?) .
More Microsoft stuff
So finally distress is working relatively well. Within the constraints of the system, I'm surprisingly satisfied. Last time I tried, it kept me busy for days, and in the end I gave up. Of course, there are still things to do. Why does distress go to sleep when rdesktop is active? Off looking in the documentation web, and found lots of suggestions about what to do, like this one. They all had one thing in common: ?if you're running rdesktop, disable sleep?. That's straightforward enough, but not what I want, and not what ?Windows? 7 does. Have they broken it? On the other hand, I did manage to process my weekly House photos on distress, requiring installation of Photomatix and Ashampoo Photo Optimizer 8, which only came out a couple of days ago.
Software bloat avoided
One of the unexpected occurrences with distress was that it went to sleep while rdesktop was running, leaving rdesktop ?corpses? (freely translated from German ?Leichen?) behind. Mentioned that on IRC. What? You're still using rdesktop? That's an old, worn-out, unmaintained magic word. OK, I'll bite. Why is this rdesktop's fault? But the consensus was that yes, it is. I should be running a more modern client, such as remmina, vinagre, freerdp or krdc. OK, what's good about them? From the pkg-descr, I get for remmina: * Maintain a list of connection profiles, organized by groups * Make quick connections by directly putting in the server address * Remote desktops with higher resolutions are scrollable/scalable in both window and fullscreen mode * Viewport fullscreen mode: remote desktop automatically scrolls when the mouse moves over the screen edge.
New DxO PhotoLab
One of the most pressing reasons I had for setting up distress was to be able to run version 3 of DxO PhotoLab, which doesn't work on ?Windows? 7. Install at, start it, no problems. Now Yvonne can process the photos from her Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark III without first concealing them as E-M1 Mark II photos. And it seems to work about 50% faster, presumably because of the faster processor. But then there's the eternal problem: configuration. For DxO there are three components: my saved ?presets?, the lens/camera correction modules, and the base configuration. How do I copy them? Will copying them work?
More ?Windows? 10 fun
As planned yesterday, today was the day to attack file sharing between distress (Microsoft ?Windows? 10) and my FreeBSD machines. I wasn't expecting it to be easy, and it wasn't. The first issue is that my down-rev version of Samba doesn't do the new version of Microsoft's CIFS. People had told me that I had to use the version 1.0, though I had some recollection that it still hadn't worked for me. OK, how do you do this? By the end of the day I had still not found my way round Microsoft's maze of twisty little menus, all illogical, but at least I had found that most problems have been addressed on some web page or another.
More Microsoft fun
After running overnight, distress managed to upgrade itself to ?Windows? 10 version 2004 (which sounds surprisingly like it's 16 years out of date). What now? Low-hanging fruit, mainly getting rid of this irritating date and time format. OK, first ?region?. Given that it tells me that the date is July 9, it's fairly clear that it's set to USA. But no, Australia, at least Microsoft's interpretation, just US English for some reason. Managed to set time formats, but the login page still showed ?July 9?. And of course it's too polite to show the seconds: it's a modern Operating System. Maybe I need to reboot.
New Microsoft box
Over the weekend I ordered another ThinkCentre M93p, and it arrived today. This one was intended to run ?Windows? 10, so there wasn't much to do except set it up. But almost out of habit, I opened it up and started putting in a graphics card (by default it only has a VGA connector). And there a surprise that will keep me thinking when I get the next one, destined to become a FreeBSD box: it's too high. Still, that's for another day. Put the thing back together, fired up, logged in with my Microsoft account, and ?activation? was so smooth that I didn't notice it.
Why such big video files?
The video clip that I uploaded for Yvonne was 5 minutes, 20 seconds long, and it took up 3.7 GB! That's 42 GB per hour! Why so big? Clearly it's higher quality than ?broadcast? videos, but how much? Investigating, (re)discovered that the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark III has the following video options: Resolution FPS Mb/s Fantasy name 4096x2160 24 237 ...
More Dropbox pain
So why did my Dropbox upload hang just before the end? There's a ?help? link that brings me to this page, where I read: You can upload files through the desktop app or mobile apps, no matter their size. Files uploaded to dropbox.com must be 50 GB or smaller. All files uploaded to your Dropbox must be smaller than your storage space. For example, if your account has a storage quota of 2 GB, you can upload one 2 GB file or many files that add up to 2 GB. If you are over your storage quota, Dropbox will stop syncing.
Shotgun attack
I send myself emails from the web server when a local link is broken. I determine a local link from the HTTP_REFERER field in the request, and that can, of course, be wrong. So it was today: Date: Sun, 5 Jul 2020 16:23:56 GMT From: World Wide Web Owner <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: FAILURE: /faq.php?action=grouppermission&gids%5B99%5D='&gids%5B100%5D%5B0%5D=)%20and%20(select%201%20from%20(select%20count(*),concat(version(),floor(rand(0)*2))x%20from%20information_schema.tables%20group%20by%20x)a)%23 <- http://www.lemis.com/faq.php?action=grouppermission&gids[99]='&gids[100][0]=) and (select 1 from (select count(*),concat(version(),floor(rand(0)*2))x from information_schema.tables group by x)a)%23 Message-Id: <[email protected]> Referrer: http://www.lemis.com/faq.php?action=grouppermission&gids[99]='&gids[100][0]=) and (select 1 from (select count(*),concat(version(),floor(rand(0)*2))x frominformation_schema.tables group by x)a)%23 Referenced URL:http://www.lemis.com/faq.php?action=grouppermission&gids%5B99%5D='&gids%5B100%5D%5B0%5D=)%20and%20(select%201%20from%20(select%20count(*),concat(version(),floor(rand(0)*2))x%20from%20information_schema.tables%20group%20by%20x)a)%23 Request URI:/faq.php?action=grouppermission&gids%5B99%5D='&gids%5B100%5D%5B0%5D=)%20and%20(select%201%20from%20(select%20count(*),concat(version(),floor(rand(0)*2))x%20from%20information_schema.tables%20group%20by%20x)a)%23 Remote host: Remote IP: 45.121.104.220 Client: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.2) What's that stuff?
Sharing files in the age of Dropbox
Yvonne shares a number of videos with Julie Lannen. Julie does a lot of video production herself, and it's not surprising that she's not satisfied with the quality that YouTube offers. Her solution: Dropbox. But today Yvonne told me that she had had difficulty uploading a video to Dropbox. Too big, 3.7 GB instead of a maximum of 2 GB. It seems that the new limit is relatively recent. Julie had a solution: a compressor called HandBrake. Huh? You can't compress videos worth a damn. For the fun of it, tried it with bzip2 -9: -rw-rw-r-- 2 yvonne home 3,720,123,421 5 Jul 23:24 67050112.MOV -rw-r--r-- 1 root home 3,719,542,477 5 Jul 16:35 foo.bz2 That's really not worth the trouble.
?Windows? 10: the pain
It's becoming increasingly clear that I will have to upgrade at least one of my Microsoft boxes to ?Windows? 10. For no particular reason, took the disk that I had received with the new ThinkCentre M93p last month and tried it in the old ThinkCentre M58p that used to be teevee. The experience was interesting. First, try to guess what this silly new GUI is hiding, with some success. Managed to configure the system as disgust.lemis.com (192.109.197.173), though the ?troubleshooter? caused trouble: it claimed that couldn't fix the problem. What problem? It was too polite to say. I decided that the ?troubleshooter?
Olympus Webcam
Received interesting mail from Olympus Australia the other day: far from closing down, they've announced new lenses and a webcam application. The lenses are a 150-400 mm f/4.5 PRO, which has been under development for over a year, and a new 8-25 mm f/4.5 PRO. The 150-400 corresponds roughly to my Leica Vario-Elmar 100-400 mm f/4-6.3 except for the constant aperture and the inbuilt 1.25x teleconverter that converts it to a 188-500 mm f/5.6. Interesting, but probably outside what I can justify. The other is more interesting: an 8-25 mm f/4 PRO zoom. That could get quite a bit of use, but the aperture isn't outstanding.
Computer upgrades: new tangents
I bought my new ThinkCentre mainly because I thought that there might be a hardware issue with the old one. When I got it, I did some investigation that showed that there are issues with newer versions of FreeBSD or X, and I still haven't cornered them. But now that I have replaced the hardware, the rest isn't so much of a hurry. But there's another upgrade on the back burner: splitting eureka (running FreeBSD 10.2-STABLE, now coming on 5 years out of date) into two machines, one as a network gateway and one as my private machine. That petered out a couple of weeks ago, mainly because the hardware failed.
tiwi continued
Didn't do much work on tiwi today. To my surprise, on booting I was greeted with: Jun 30 11:55:15 tiwi savecore[844]: reboot after panic: vm_fault: fault on nofault entry, addr: 0xfffffe004c6e5000 Jun 30 11:55:15 tiwi savecore[844]: writing core to /var/crash/vmcore.5 And how about that, I then found: Jun 29 14:48:48 tiwi kernel: panic: vm_fault: fault on nofault entry, addr: 0xfffffe004c6e5000 Jun 29 14:48:48 tiwi kernel: cpuid = 2 Jun 29 14:48:48 tiwi kernel: time = 1593405878 Jun 29 14:48:48 tiwi kernel: KDB: stack backtrace: Jun 29 14:48:48 tiwi kernel: #0 0xffffffff80c0b3f5 at kdb_backtrace+0x65 Jun 29 14:48:48 tiwi kernel: #1 0xffffffff80bbf4ae at vpanic+0x17e Jun 29 14:48:48 tiwi kernel: #2 0xffffffff80bbf323 at panic+0x43 Jun 29 14:48:48 tiwi kernel: #3 0xffffffff80ef68bc at vm_fault+0x248c Jun 29 14:48:48 tiwi kernel: ...
The daily tiwi pain
I've been trying all sorts of different approaches to getting tiwi working correctly, to the point where I'm no longer completely sure what I did where. Time for a log. Today's entries in that log, slightly condensed: Clearly the Radeon card was a dead end, so I installed Nvidia graphics card: === root@tiwi (/dev/pts/7) ~ 5 -> pciconf -l -v vgapci0 vgapci0@pci0:4:0:0: class=0x030000 card=0x83541043 chip=0x0a6510de rev=0xa2 hdr=0x00 vendor = 'NVIDIA Corporation' device = 'GT218 [GeForce 210]' class = display subclass = VGA Boot the teevee kernel of 2 April and install the correct driver for GeForce 210: === root@tiwi (/dev/pts/0) ~ 4 -> pkg delete nvidia-driver-390 ...
Still more tiwi surprises
So, where am I with tiwi? The mouse doesn't work as I want it to, and mpv vomits over the screen when started. But apart from that, mpv works, and I can work around the mouse issue. On the other hand, the reason I bought the new machine was to help corner the continual panics that I was getting from teevee. So why not just connect it up to the TV and see how it works? How I hate messing around with furniture! I need to drill a hole in the back of the TV cabinet and feed a number of cables through it.
eureka hang
Into the office as usual this morning and pressed the Shift key on my keyboard. I like observing which monitor lights up first. The only thing I can be sure of is that monitor 3 (of 4) will be last, but for reasons I'm still trying to understand, the others don't always come up in the same sequence. Today, though, they were all the same: nothing happened. Damn. Has the system crashed? Looked at the LEDs on the front panel. Both on, power and disk. That's a clue, I suppose. Off to teevee to see if I could contact eureka. Yes, it wasn't down, but very slow.
tiwi: progress
As planned, back to look at my issues with tiwi today. I had three main issues: Keyboard remapping didn't work. Mouse middle button emulation didn't work. Configuration issues with X. I had some ideas about how to fix each of them. And I made some progress. Key remapping With the key remapping, it occurred to me that I had had similar problems with teevee, probably due to my lack of understanding of how xmodmap works.
Finish that tiwi!
I've been dragging my heels with tiwi due to the numerous issues I've had. But teevee made it clear once again that I need to finish it: Jun 25 21:24:40 teevee kernel: Timeout initializing vt_vga Jun 25 21:24:40 teevee kernel: panic: page fault This time the backtrace was slightly different: (kgdb) bt #0 0xffffffff80bf068f in sched_switch () #1 0xffffffff80bcaba7 in mi_switch () #2 0xffffffff80c19b53 in sleepq_catch_signals () #3 0xffffffff80c19e44 in sleepq_timedwait_sig () #4 0xffffffff80bca5b2 in _sleep () #5 0xffffffff80bd5f22 in kern_clock_nanosleep () #6 0xffffffff80bd60cf in sys_nanosleep () #7 0xffffffff81091e87 in amd64_syscall () #8 <signal handler called> And what was that first message?
Understanding modern TV
Spent some time today exploring the 7plus online video site, including signing up with them. All went relatively smoothly, but then I was offered a choice: display on your TV. OK, I'll bite. This was displayed on my TV. Select the button and get: What code? Nothing else of relevance was displayed on my TV. And I didn't get any email, of course. Clearly this is Yet Another case where some group with collective tunnel vision have designed Yet Another ?standard? that applies only to what they were thinking of, and TV broadcasters that jump on the bandwagon.
youtube-dl timing
It seems that a large number of online content is stored in two different files, one considerably larger than the other. It conveniently shows the download speed and the remaining time. Here an example: [hlsnative] Downloading m3u8 manifest [hlsnative] Total fragments: 318 [download] Destination: Friends Like These-6067128257001.fhls-2407-3.mp4 [download] 2.6% of ~963.33MiB at 1.15MiB/s ETA 14:10 This is the first of two images. OK, the information seems to make sense. Calculating the download time, the time for total size at that speed is 13.96 min.
Youtube-dl: legal?
I've been using youtube-dl for downloading all sorts of videos for some time now. Basically, it's just a tool, one that the GUI-obsessed mainstream seems to consider unnecessary. I don't. GUIs have their strengths, but they require far too much human intervention, particularly for repetitive tasks. In many cases it's simpler to download videos, not just from YouTube, but also from online services of TV broadcasters. Clearly there's no legal issue: I could just as well look at them with a web browser, if I could stand it. Or is there? Do some misguided companies distinguish between legalities depending on how you look at them?
Repairing CJ's computer
CJ Ellis called me on the dot of 9:30 this morning, as agreed. Still no joy. OK, fire up TeamViewer and connect. No, sorry, no can do. No password generated. Some message about a proxy not functioning. OK, he's talking to me on his Internet connection, so that's working. His NTD is connected only to the ATA, which also has an output for the computer. Both computers show the same symptoms. Must be the cable, right? No, says CJ, it's connected. OK, is it connected to a wrong port? Tell me what connections there are on the back of the ATA.
Political correctness
A couple of days ago a mail went round the FreeBSD developer lists: we should consider adapting our terminology to the IETF draft terminology (backup here in case of bit rot). I thought about following up, but decided that the topic could quickly produce more correspondence than I wanted to follow. I was certainly right about that. To date there have been 343 messages on the topic and the problems that grew out of it. The issue does not seem to be to encourage uniform, descriptive terminology, but to avoid terms that some people (presumably in the USA) might find offensive.
A new computer for CJ
CJ Ellis along this morning with his ?new? computer, a Dell Inspiron desktop (huh? I thought Inspirons were laptops), with an Intel i3-3240 @ 3.4 GHz processor and 8 GB of RAM. 2289 The old one has a Core 2 Duo E7400, and certainly no more than 4 GB, though when he bought it it only had 2 GB. Certainly the CPU power difference is noticeable: CPU Mark 966 for the old machine, 2289 for the new one. And the additional memory can only be good, especially as the machine runs (of course) ?Windows? 10. OK, what was the problem? The passwords didn't work.
Still more tiwi fun
Where do I go from here with tiwi? Clearly I have the wrong version of GLX, and based on experience on teevee it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that I can get other mice to work with middle button emulation. OK, more searching in the X directory hierarchy. The nvidia driver claims to install in /usr/local/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/.nvidia. Is that the only dot directory? No! === root@tiwi (/dev/pts/0) /usr/local/lib/xorg/modules/extensions 56 -> l -aR total 29 drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 512 19 Jun 22:25 . drwxr-xr-x 5 root wheel 1,024 19 Jun 22:25 .. drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 4 Mar 13:42 .nvidia drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 19 Jun 22:25 .xorg -r--r--r-- 3 root wheel 14,964,128 4 Mar 13:41 libglx.so -r--r--r-- 3 root wheel 14,964,128 4 Mar 13:41 libglx.so.1 ./.nvidia: total 29 drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel ...
More tiwi installation
In principle tiwi is now up and running with the Radeon display board. Today, as planned, I looked for GLX and mouse button emulation. First run X -configure and move the /root/Xorg.conf.new to /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Start that. Yes, now we have a mouse cursor. But still no GLX, still no middle button emulation. Out looking for solutions to the GLX issue first. Most of the problems people were having were with Nvidia GPUs, and most were old. But this page included an xorg.conf file with this interesting section: Section "Module" Load "glx" EndSection Why is that needed?
Greg's diary: verbal diarrhoea?
I've written a lot about my system upgrade pain over the last 6 months. So far this month it's 35 pages of printed output. Too much? Who reads this stuff, anyway? There's a simple and good answer to that question: I do. I've spent a lot of time looking back in this diary to see what surprises the systems have had for me in the past. And if anything, I didn't go into enough detail. It really is useful having this information available.
Groggy shoots himself in foot
Booting tiwi was another matter: Jun 19 15:22:20 tiwi kernel: KLD linprocfs.ko: depends on kernel - not available or version mismatch Jun 19 15:22:20 tiwi kernel: linker_load_file: /boot/kernel/linprocfs.ko - unsupported file type Jun 19 15:22:20 tiwi kernel: KLD linprocfs.ko: depends on kernel - not available or version mismatch Jun 19 15:22:20 tiwi kernel: linker_load_file: /boot/kernel/linprocfs.ko - unsupported file type Jun 19 15:22:20 tiwi kernel: KLD if_ed.ko: depends on kernel - not available or version mismatch Jun 19 15:22:20 tiwi kernel: linker_load_file: /boot/kernel/if_ed.ko - unsupported file type Jun 19 15:22:20 tiwi kernel: lo0: link state changed to UP Jun 19 15:22:20 tiwi kernel: KLD if_ed.ko: depends on kernel - not available or version mismatch Jun 19 15:22:20 tiwi kernel: linker_load_file: /boot/kernel/if_ed.ko - unsupported file type Jun 19 15:22:20 tiwi kernel: KLD ums.ko: depends on kernel - not available or version mismatch Jun ...
tiwi upgrade
Finally found a disk for tiwi. Despite the surprising number of spare disks that I have, there was really only one choice: the other 1 TB disk, an ancient copy of my /src file system (now relocated to /home/src). OK, copy a disk image of the current root file system on teevee to eureka, mainly because I had space there. Then boot a spare machine with space for two disks, using my chosen disk as the second disk. Partition the disk. That's pretty straightforward. Well, almost. I got this output from the partition commands: === root@eureso (/dev/pts/0) /home/grog 14 -> partition-disk ada1 destroyed ada1 created ada1p1 added gpart: /dev/ada1p1: not enough space ada1p2 added ada1p3 added ada1p4 added ada1p5 added => 40 1953525088 ada1 GPT (932G) 40 128 ...
New ThinkCentre
The ThinkCentre that I ordered on Saturday arrived today, rather more quickly than I had expected. And that from Toll, who haven't impressed me positively in the past OK, was I right about the expansion slots? Yes, indeed. But a little surprise: What's that cable fouling the slots? I discovered that I could get a card in anyway, but it seems a strange thing to do. Fired up the machine, which came up and then presented a blank screen, something that has happened too often in the recent past.
Crash! Crash! Crash!
Now I have tidied up my desktop (upper surface of a desk) sufficiently to be able to run a second system conveniently. A couple of days ago I had set up what proved to be an AMD Phenom? 9550 with 6 GB of memory and noted that it didn't fail. But it wasn't on for long, so today I took a look and considered how to proceed. The disk in the machine identified as dereel.lemis.com, but seemed unconfigured. Here the relevant boot information: Jun 17 14:22:48 dereel kernel: FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE r354233 GENERIC amd64 Jun 17 14:22:48 dereel kernel: FreeBSD clang version 8.0.1 (tags/RELEASE_801/final 366581) (based on LLVM 8.0.1) Jun 17 14:22:48 dereel kernel: CPU: AMD Phenom(tm) 9550 Quad-Core Processor (2210.11-MHz K8-class CPU) Jun 17 14:22:48 dereel kernel: Origin="AuthenticAMD" Id=0x100f23 Family=0x10 Model=0x2 Stepping=3 Jun 17 14:22:48 dereel kernel: Features=0x178bfbff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,CLFLUSH,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,HTT> Jun ...
gdb pain
So I had to rebuild gdb to get rid of this horrible illegible coloured output. First problem: it didn't like my GNU make, the one I installed only a month or so ago. I had to upgrade. Why? Why are things so intimately tied to revisions of standard software? Sure, upgrading didn't take anywhere as long as discovering the problem, but is that really necessary? So, run make config and deselect anything that looks like an attempt to vomit colour over my screen. Build. Reinstall. Try out. Damn, it still displays things in colour! Dammit, this must have hurt somebody else.
Fixing gdb
Yesterday's problems with gdb irritated me. Somewhere I heard a whisper ?install gdb from ports?. OK, I can do that. Aaargh! People, what is this abomination? Yes, I don't have great objections to the sparing use of colour in output, but half colour? Only foreground, with no regard for background? I just plain can't read it. Yes, it can be disabled. But it must be disabled.
Cleaning up old and mouldy computers
So now a new ThinkCentre is on its way. Time to move on with my network restructure. The idea is to keep all the videos on a central machine, probably eureka, which we can then access from any computer, and have teevee (existing ThinkCentre M58p) and tiwi (new ThinkCentre M93p) as redundant machines to drive the TV. But I still haven't made up my mind about what to do in the office. One or two machines? Two has the great advantage that I can gradually upgrade. And what about the old M57p ThinkCentre? It failed early last year. I had some recollection of it having difficulties after a power failure (now a thing of the past), but I can't find any indication in my diary.
More debug problems
For some reason, since moving my weather station to teevee, I've been getting bogus rain readings, only on startup. It looked like an uninitialized variable, but after several attempts I still can't work out where. OK, put in some debug code: /* XXX horrible kludge, fix! */ if ((readings->rain > 1.0) && just_started) { int *doom = 0; *doom = 0; /* boom! */ } just_started = 0; That's a sure-fire way to get a core dump: deference a NULL pointer.
ThinkCentre serial numbers
Yesterday I found the details for two of my four ThinkCentres based on their serial numbers. They're written in a relatively small font, and my eyes are no longer the best. After one failure, decided to take photos of them: It turned out that I had transcribed them correctly, but the second is so old (about 12 years) that their system ran into trouble converting the serial number. That's the one that seems to be flaky, so it's good to know that it's the oldest.
Yet another ThinkCentre
In principle it should be easy enough to get replacement hardware for teevee: there are lots of ThinkCentres on sale on eBay. But as on other occasions, it's really difficult to compare what's on offer. OK, I want a fast processor, which was the criterion when I bought the last two machines. I also want a PCIe slot for the graphics card, and on comparison I discovered that dischord, the Microsoft machine, doesn't have one. Will the eBay listings tell me? Not a hope. So off, looking first at the processors. The ones that came into question were all Intel Core i5 processors: -2400, -3470, -4570 and -4570T.
Panic!
Another panic on teevee this evening, again related to web browsing. This is becoming all the more common. Is there maybe something wrong with the hardware? Time for a backup system, anyway. But that will require rearranging the storage. Currently teevee has 8 TB of video storage. Should I maybe really be thinking about a NAS? Somehow that's the diametric opposite of fast SSDs. But for this application it would be more then sufficient.
Update your diary for you
I'm not getting as many requests for links from my diary as I once did, but this one got me today: Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2020 23:13:28 +0000 From: Tara Worsham <[email protected]> To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Subject: Something is missing on lemis.com My name is Tara and I want to say that your page http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-jul2017.php?subtitle=Still more mouse problems helped me a lot! So first of all - Thank you! When I tried to work with a VPN I got TONS of errors (It was annoying!) . I asked on several Facebook groups for a solution and got this great guide: https://www.wizcase.com/blog/avoid-netflix-proxy-error-and-streaming-error/ https://www.wizcase.com/blog/avoid-netflix-proxy-error-and-streaming-error/ - This was the only solution that worked.
Revisiting ancient X clients
Now that Facebook has supplanted email, Yvonne doesn't look at her mail much any more, and missed a message I had sent her earlier today. There's a solution for that, an X client that displays a US-American style mailbox with a flag, and lifts the flag: I had installed it 30 years ago when email was something that didn't come too frequently, but I removed it again after I was getting more than 200 messages a day.
teevee: reinstate old kernel
So I've tried just about everything to get the mouse working correctly on teevee after last month's kernel build. Was it really the kernel that made the difference? Reinstate the old kernel and compare. Yes! Now the mouse works normally again. But what caused the difference? Where do I even start looking? It may be related to /dev/input, but even there I can't find any useful documentation. My experience with upgrading teevee in the last three months has been horrible. There were so many problems that I can't even start describing them. I'll have to go back and write them all up.
Panic!
I've been wondering what to do about teevee, and making do with the mess that it's in at the moment. One thing was obvious: the hangs always occurred when I was doing something with firefox. Well don't do that, then: use Chromium. So I've been doing that for about a week, without making friends with it greatly. It reluctantly accepted my settings to make it behave like a normal X client and not a window manager, but I still can't get it to fill the screen correctly. That's something that people don't do in the Microsoft space, of course, but that's no reason for it to misbehave under X.
Avant Stellar?
Eleven years ago I finally gave up trying to maintain my 20-year-old Northgate OmniKey keyboards. Some undocumented time previously I had bought a couple of Avant Stellar keyboards but found them hard to use, and 8 years ago I replaced them with the keyboard I still use, a Sun Type 7. I hadn't thought much more of the Avant Stellar keyboards until I received mail from Kari Eveli last year, offering software for the keyboard. What can I do with it? Clearly it's a good idea to put it online somewhere, but all the software I have (in my src directory, and deliberately not displayable) is my own.
Still more teevee mouse problems
OK, I misentered the Emulate3Buttons entry in my X configuration yesterday. Time to fix that, and also try running X without moused. While I was at it, also worked around the bug in the loader scripts: --- /boot/lua/drawer.lua 2020/06/05 05:11:37 1.1 +++ /boot/lua/drawer.lua 2020/06/05 05:11:43 @@ -145,9 +145,6 @@ end local function defaultframe() - if core.isSerialConsole() then - return "ascii" - end return "double" end Also some research into starting processes at boot time.
Next teevee hang
Once again teevee hung this evening, again with firefox; why can't it do it during the day when I have more time? And maybe it's time to stop using firefox until that issue is solved. So I took the opportunity to explicitly add to xorg.conf: Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Mouse0" Driver "mouse" Option "Protocol" "auto" Option "Device" "/dev/sysmouse" Option "Emulate3Buttons" Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7" EndSection According to the man page that's the default, so it shouldn't be necessary and shouldn't make any difference.
Completing the sock purchase
So what went wrong with Yvonne's attempt to order socks yesterday? Her mail to the seller bounced, but their system had obviously noted the problem and sent her email reminding her of the purchase?along with a $6 rebate voucher. OK, try again. Yesterday's URL was clearly old and worn out, and that was something they hadn't expected: But retrying brought me further, including additional inapplicable but required information: And the voucher (?only valid for today?)
PayPal pain
Yvonne doesn't buy much online, but she tried today. Special socks. Where do they come from? She didn't know. She knew the price, but not the currency. And she wanted the password for PayPal. OK, went and found that, typed it in. Failure. Go to some URL unrelated to PayPal to try again. DAMN! Have we fallen prey to a scammer? Quick, in something of a panic, off to change my PayPal password! How do you do that? I was able to log in with no trouble, but where's the ?reset password? tab? Must be behind the calendula icon. But there I find ways to update my photo, my time zone, how to close the account, how to add physical or email addresses.
More mouse insights
More discussion about mice with Callum Gibson on IRC today. It seems that he's almost more interested in the issue than I. But our approaches are different: he was looking for (and found) a solution, while I'm trying to understand the architecture so that I can make a choice. Today he came up with this page, which looks interesting, but which will need some careful reading. This page contains similar information, but also points out that xev takes parameters, and xev -event mouse should stem the voluminous output that it produces by default. And then xmodmap has an -pp option, which prints the mapping between logical and physical pointer buttons, but doesn't seem to address the issues of chords like the Emulate3Buttons option of mouse(4x).
More mouse experiments
The mouse issue with X on teevee is still not resolved. I've found that the side button remapping on the new mouse (Logitech M705) works, but it's unbearably slow, and xset m seems to have no effect. That in itself is an issue: I currently have three mice connected to the machine, but there's no way to tell xset which mouse you're talking about. The small mice have acceptable cursor speeds, but the M705 is glacial. In addition, it, and only it, seems to have issues such as marking text when deiconfying xterms. So: for the moment I'm using one of the old mice, and I have the M705 next to it for when I want a button 2 event.
More mouse insights
Finally got round to looking at Callum Gibson's X logs. They were interesting. One was close to my logs, and the other was very different. One loads a driver: [1564593.546] (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "kbdmux" (type: KEYBOARD, id 6) [1564593.566] (II) config/devd: kbdmux is enabled, ignoring device atkbd0 [1564593.566] (II) config/devd: adding input device (null) (/dev/sysmouse) [1564593.566] (II) LoadModule: "mouse" [1564593.566] (II) Loading /usr/local/lib/xorg/modules/input/mouse_drv.so And the other ignores /dev/sysmouse: [ 18.027] (**) Option "Device" "/dev/input/event5" [ 18.027] (**) Option "_source" "server/devd" [ 18.028] (II) event5 - Logitech USB Optical Mouse, class 0/0, rev 1.10/21.10, addr 4: is tagged by udev as: Mouse [ 18.028] (II) event5 - Logitech USB Optical Mouse, class 0/0, rev 1.10/21.10, addr 4: device is a pointer ...
teevee: Still more pain
Somehow I couldn't bring myself to analyse Callum Gibson's Xorg.0.logs today. There's enough pain already. But teevee had other ideas: once again firefox hung and couldn't be stopped: === root@teevee (/dev/pts/6) /usr/src 17 -> ps auxw|grep firefox grog 70936 50.4 18.5 3296136 732976 v0 DE Wed19 6:14.95 [firefox] grog 1158 23.3 19.7 3615332 782596 v0 RE Wed16 23:23.62 firefox grog 70695 17.2 7.3 3296400 288856 v0 DE Wed19 175:03.42 [firefox] grog 68187 6.4 2.8 2676596 111156 v0 DE 18:15 4:48.60 [firefox] root 27538 0.0 0.1 11396 2144 6 S+ 17:49 0:00.00 grep firefox The RE state is ...
Lies, damn lies and WiFi-X
While checking the (very poor) recording of Al Jazeera news this afternoon, I saw an advertisement that interested me. A company called WiFi-X who offered a cheap WiFi device that increased my Internet connection speed. Huh? What does WiFi have to do with my Internet link? Watched the full 5 minute commercial, which didn't explain, though it seems that my ISP is deliberately throttling my link speed, and this device will miraculously fix it. Not just lies, but conspiracy theories too. What kind of idiots would believe that? Too many, I fear: not nearly enough people understand even basic networking.
Understanding the mouse issues
So what's causing the problems with the mice on teevee? The whole thing is such a pain that I'm not sure that I want to know. Compared the Xorg.0.log with older ones and found no obvious differences. But when discussing it on IRC, Callum Gibson wondered why I was still using moused. He also didn't understand my issues. Why did I want to remap the mouse buttons? Every mouse nowadays has at least three buttons. Button 2 is incorporated with the scroll wheel. Ah, right, I had (mercifully) forgotten that. It's been over 17 years since I stopped using it because it was so ergonomically painful.
Still more teevee pain
The recent problems with firefox hanging on teevee suggest that there's a software problem somewhere. Time for an upgrade? Built a new world and kernel today, and then fired up. The mouse didn't work correctly! It took me a while to realize that the button mapping wasn't working. It took even longer to realize that I had changed neither moused nor X. Only the kernel had changed; I still needed to install the new userland. I have a two-button mouse, but X requires three buttons. So for ever there have been kludges to simulate the third button. The one I use on teevee is to press both buttons at once.
Another teevee hang
Once again I had a firefox process loop in STOP state on teevee this evening, once again after some attempt to create a new tab: last pid: 75918; load averages: 1.07, 0.62, 0.35 up 4+06:53:00 19:04:05 134 processes: 1 running, 131 sleeping, 1 stopped, 1 zombie CPU: 0.6% user, 0.0% nice, 25.2% system, 0.0% interrupt, 74.2% idle Mem: 2068M Active, 170M Inact, 426M Laundry, 1009M Wired, 377M Buf, 92M Free Swap: 20G Total, 2946M Used, 17G Free, 14% Inuse PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND 38033 grog 3 20 0 3416M 693M STOP 2 17:01 100.23% firefox And once again I couldn't kill X, and I had to ...
Yet another teevee crash
There's something about the Covidly web site that browsers don't like. I've had to shoot down browsers on multiple occasions, but today things were worse than usual. On teevee the whole display hung, including the mouse cursor. The firefox process was using 100% CPU time, and I couldn't stop it: it was in STOP state. I thought that only happened when it was in a debugger, but clearly that wasn't the case, and sending a SIGCONT didn't help. In the end I had to reboot the system Yet Again. Is this hardware? That's what I thought last time. But it's looking more like a software issue now.
More weather station anomalies
For some weeks now I've had the internal unit for the weather station in the lounge room. On the one hand, the temperature in the lounge room is more interesting than in the office, but the real reason was to have a line of sight to the outside unit, in the hope that the communication would be better. The hope seems to have gone to fruition, but a couple of days ago I had a strange graph (blue line, obscured by the text; the bigger version is clearer): What kind of malfunction could have caused that spike round 16:00?
Multimeter strangeness
Do the batteries for the gate opener have any charge? Yes, one has 13.13 V, the other 12.98 V. Why the discrepancy? I had measured the second one with the leads swapped, so it really displayed -12.98 V. For the fun of it, swapped the leads. 13.13 V. Both batteries read the same, but the multimeter showed a discrepancy of 150 mV depending on which way round I measured them. What can cause that? It's a cheap multimeter, but I hadn't expected that kind of issue.
Google Translate excels
So what does ?Las semillas son negras opacas, alargadas, de tamaño pequeño, con 18 a 25 g/100 semillas.? mean? I translate it as ?The seeds are opaque black, wide, of small tamaño, with 18 to 25 g/100 seeds?. What does tamaño mean? Put it through Google Translate, which for some reason chose the mobile phone version of the page, coming up with: The seeds are opaque black, elongated, small in size, with 18 to 25 g / 100 seeds. So does tamaño mean size? My not-very-good Spanish-German dictionary translates it as ?derartig, so groß, so klein?, suggesting ?thus?, but it seems that as a noun it does indeed mean ?size?.
NBN outage!
A message arrived from Aussie Broadband yesterday evening after I had gone to bed: you have an unscheduled NBN outage! Well, it didn't arrive immediately, because we had an outage. But yes, there was one, about 25 minutes long. Impact on me: my IRC TCP connections reset, and I had to restart. More interestingly, though, this is the second unscheduled outage this (last) month. And the last scheduled outage was nearly 2 months ago, a real record. Have they just changed their reporting method?
Another teevee hang
X hung again on teevee this evening, again with messages that suggest hardware problems, either with the system itself or with the display card: Apr 30 18:58:52 teevee kernel: NVRM: GPU at PCI:0000:01:00: GPU-85983119-e9ef-ac66-6817-fbed5657b871 Apr 30 18:58:52 teevee kernel: NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:01:00): 56, CMDre 00000000 0000045c 0001002a 00000007 00000000 Apr 30 18:58:52 teevee kernel: NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:01:00): 56, CMDre 00000000 00000088 0001000a 00000007 00000000 Apr 30 18:59:03 teevee kernel: NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:01:00): 39, CCMDs 0000000c 000090b5 It would be really nice to know what that means, but it looks almost identical to the hang I had three weeks ago.
COVIDSafe: Only for people with money
Fired up my old Samsung GT-I9100T mobile phone today, with intention for Yvonne to use it for the COVIDSafe app. No expectation that she would use it as a phone; like all Android phones, it's far too clunky, and her old steam phone works just fine. How I hate the user interface on mobile phones! Somehow I didn't manage to spell ?COVIDSafe? correctly, and all I got was this message: Well, work harder then! Tried again in a different way with the same result.
Simple, obvious, ... wrong
While installing things on dereel, decided that it would be time to upgrade the ports on teevee. That's straightforward enough: pkg upgrade. Oh: New packages to be INSTALLED: ImageMagick6: 6.9.10.90,1 ... Installed packages to be REINSTALLED: emacs-26.3_3,3 (direct dependency changed: ImageMagick6) Callum Gibson could be right: pkg knows nothing of the fact that my Emacs depends on ImageMagick 7, not 6. OK, once and for all, let's fix that. I have already modified the Makefile, so apart from checking that it does now build and run on teevee (last month, for some reason, it didn't), and then commit.
Installing the new server, continued
It's been nearly two weeks since I paused my system installation efforts. It wasn't just the pain; I had other things to do. But today I finally got round to continuing. In fact, installing ports wasn't that unsuccessful. My simplistic ports identification attempts didn't help, but the only ones that failed were: apache, ghostscript9, lame, nvidia, p5-, php, samba, vbox, xkeyboard, xtset, xmlprprxmlrpc, xproto. I forgot to catch the error output, so my logs contain the relatively uninformative: === apache Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue... FreeBSD repository is up to date. All repositories are up to date.
Tracking COVID-19
COVID-19 is dangerous for many reasons, but probably the worst is the combination of extreme contagiousness and the difficulty identifying carriers. That's the main reason for the quarantines that have crippled the world economy. Now that the number of infections here in Australia has dropped almost to zero, the question is how to keep it that way but to allow people out of their houses. Mobile phones to the rescue! The government has brought out an app called COVIDSafe, which tracks nearby users via Bluetooth and logs (on the phone, for privacy reasons) any such encounter that lasts more than 15 minutes.
Another PV recalibration
Nice sunny day today, perfect for generating lots of electricity. But when I looked at the ?dashboard? in the afternoon, the PV array was generating nothing. Take a look at the database. No update since 25 March! That was the day that Fred installed the new firmware. Did I somehow mess up my sniffing code? Took a look, and all looked well: Insert into powerstats set Id = "127.0.0.1:502:1", Pac = 640, SetPoint = 0, Alarms = "", Status = "On-grid (calibrating batteries - 2)", StatusCode = 3, SOC = 68, VBat = 264, PacBat = 750, PacPV = 0, FromPV = false, Codes = "", W1 = 7, W2 = 0, W3 = 0; It also confirmed my suspicion that the inverter was calibrating again.
Shrinking the world
Saw on the overnight transcript of IRC: Jari Kirma was complaining about the ping time from Helsinki to Sydney, about 450 ms. OK, it is two thirds of the way round the world?isn't it? Try a traceroute: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/8) ~ 111 -> traceroute www.hut.fi traceroute to www.hut.fi (130.233.220.240), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets 1 radiation-tower.aussiebb.net (167.179.136.1) 36.516 ms 29.910 ms 38.899 ms 2 cmslive.aalto.fi (130.233.220.240) 310.082 ms 312.576 ms 310.011 ms Huh? What's that? Yes, the first hop is the National Broadband Network link, but that's in Melbourne.
ISO sensitivity measurement continued
Last week I looked at the first of two articles by Richard Butler of DPReview about the meaning of the ISO 12232:2019 standard on (to quote) ?Digital still cameras ? Determination of exposure index, ISO speed ratings, standard output sensitivity, and recommended exposure index?. Now the second instalment has appeared, and it, too, is very interesting. As I noted last year, the original ISO 6:1993 standard based on the Hurter-Driffield curve describing film sensitivity: Specifically, the sensitivity related to minimum exposure: the "speed point" m is the point on the curve where density exceeds the base + fog density by 0.1 when the negative is developed so that a point n where the log ...
Goodbye Nokia
I've pondered for a while, but there's really no reason to keep the new Nokia 5.1 Plus that I bought last month. Packed it up, and Yvonne can take it back to ALDI tomorrow.
Luminar again
Note on the M43 Tech Talk Facebook group today: Luminar 3 (the previous version) is available for free. Haven't I tried that before? Yes. And I didn't seem to come to much of a conclusion. OK, download again, once again facing a lot of confusing information. But finally: Restart your computer! Yes, that's normal enough in the Microsoft space. But dischord had been up for 34 days (even surviving Daryl Buchanan's power failures). Sigh. OK, reboot, try to find my way around this horrible tree climbing that the Microsoft space expects.
Chasing the teevee X config problems
Why can't I start X from login on teevee? So far all attempts to catch any error message have failed. Today, thanks to Daryl Buchanan, I had to start it at least twice. And this time I did it from a shell on eureka. There was the message: /usr/local/bin/X: Only console users are allowed to run the X server Hmm. I think I've seen this before. Where did it go? Not even /dev/tty seems likely. What does it mean? Clearly not an interactive shell, since that was I was using.
More ports configuration issues
Mail from Yvonne today: would you please print out this PDF document? No. Not needed. The real issue is that her MUA (mutt) won't display PDF. Didn't take long to find out why: the file /usr/local/etc/mailcap was missing. I must have forgotten to check it out after a recent upgrade.
Alarm! Inverter problem
After Daryl left, received a mail message from Ingeteam: Serial number Start End Description Type 0AM172B16A22 (E10017220395) 4/17/2020 1:02:46 PM 4/17/2020 4:07:03 PM Grid voltage out of range Active for more than 1h OK, the grid was disconnected. But was it more than 3 hours? No. In fact, it couldn't have been: this message was dated 17 Apr 2020 06:12:07 +0200, corresponding to 14:12:07 here.
GPS receiver accuracy
To my immense surprise, I got a positive comment about the track log of my walk with the dogs a couple of days ago: Bonita ruta, felicitaciones. Whatever gave him that idea? Discussing on IRC, James Fraser suggested buying a Garmin smart watch: his wife has one, and it produces good results, as this map shows: Of course, that's a relatively open route, and at a small scale; but it's clearly better than what I could do.
Mobile phone GPS: useless
How far did I walk today? I guessed about 3 km. But I had my Nokia 5.1 Plus with me, logging my progress. 8.55 km! (though the brain-damaged Wikiloc decides to convert it to archaic units of feet and miles): What a useless map! At best it gives a vague idea of where I have been. That confirms my decision: the phone goes back. And Google Maps gives a distance of 1.5 km each way, just what I had expected.
Systems upgrade pause
For the past couple of days I've been too busy to continue with the pain of upgrading my computer systems. Today I had time, but most definitely not the inclination. Somehow all of this is far too hard, and I haven't even reached half-way yet: once the ports are all installed (or the ones I have identified, anyway) I still need to configure a whole number of subsystems from scratch. I don't see it happening in less than a couple of weeks.
Powercor problem resolution
Call this morning from Edward Barkla of Powercor. I had had difficulty accessing my power usage statistics on their web site: all queries produced the result ?Customer response is empty?. Clearly it was a database problem, as I told him. He didn't agree directly, but he asked if it would be OK if he removed my account and recreated it with a slightly different name (leaving out my middle name). Yes, not a problem, and it worked. But what kind of workaround is that? In passing, it seems that Edward has grown up.
SMS to ?landlines??
Call from Mick Solly this afternoon. He had been incapacitated yesterday. Did I get his SMS? No, where did he send it? To my ?landline? (really a VoIP phone in the ?landline? address space). How can that work? He doesn't know either, but his phone accepted it. That sounds strange, so I tried it. Yes, sure enough, you can send an SMS to a destination that's not equipped to receive or present it. Some discussion on IRC suggested that some Telstra and Optus phones really can display SMSs. But wouldn't you think that the phone companies would do something to present the others, like offer a diversion to a mobile phone, or convert to voice?
The daily ports grind
OK, where did I get to yesterday? I couldn't look in the diary entry, because I hadn't written it yet. What's in the log file? === root@dereel (/dev/pts/3) /var/cache 3 -> emacs Log.log ld-elf.so.1: Shared object "libMagickWand-6.so.6" not found, required by "emacs" Damn! That ImageMagick installation failed, but it left me without dependencies for Emacs. The quick answer was to reinstall Emacs, but that wasn't a real option yet. So: install all the ports that would install easily: for i in a2ps aalib apache audacity bind916 chromium cowsay cpuid curl dcraw dvd+rw espeak exif exifprobe exiv2 ffmpeg firefox fvwm ghostscript9 gimp gindent gv hugin kdenlive klondike lame lensfun lightzone linuxlibertine lsof lynx mencoder mplayer mpv mtools mutt mysql80-server nmap nvidia nvidia p5 patch pbzip2 php pidgin pigz portlint postfix procmail projectx qpopper rawtherapee rdesktop ...
Continued upgrade pain
Yesterday Arstechnica published an article on installing FreeBSD. Various FreeBSD lists started discussing it, producing more text than I could handle at the moment. I skimmed through the article and recognized both things that I recognized and things that I didn't. It seems that the article was well-written and, though the author comes from the Linux camp, relatively objective. Things like ?mouse doesn't work out of the box? are clearly wrong. Installing GNOME is, in my world, also wrong, but it should work, and the author had trouble with it. On the other hand, some of it I can definitely relate to: The apparent lack of a simple xorg package turns out to be a big, fat lie?if I had just typed pkg install xorg, it would have ...
Quora: run by idiots or androids?
A few months ago I stopped answering questions on Quora because of their heavy-handed and non-transparent approach with perceived violations of their policy. I got the impression that the identification was done by computer programs, but that doesn't exonerate them for not responding to my complaint ?appeal?. Gradually I started answering a few questions, though nothing like the number I used to answer. Clearly too many. Today I received: Quora Moderation collapsed your answer for violating a policy on Quora. Your answer may need improvement To see the answer page, visit: https://www.quora.com/qemail/track_click?aoid=z66phiErWQm&aoty=16&aty=4&click_pos=0&ct=1586417847037330&et=103&force_notif_url&id=63208efac9a845529bee8275f9921711&notif_url=%2FIf-you-attend-public-high-school-in-the-USA-for-a-term-with-a-B-1-visa-and-then-apply-to-a-private-SEVIS-high-school-while-your-visa-is-still-valid-and-you-apply-for-change-of-status-with-DHS-Will-you-be-given-approval%2Fanswer%2FGreg-Lehey&request_id=104&src=1&st=1586417847047773&stories=7571144257&uid=8HRfVayLviB&v=0 What's up now?
Google gets on the bandwagon
It was bad enough that GIMP installed multiple copies of the documentation in different languages, but that was (probably) years ago, and they may have learnt since then. What's less understanding is why I continually get a ding-ding ding-ding on my mobile phones with silly questions like: Why do they do this? I never asked for it, and how many people need all three?
dereel update
As planned, today I continued my installation on the virtual machine that I had set up to bootstrap the next dereel. Also created (yet another) page describing what needs to be done. That's a moving target. Today I started building the latest FreeBSD 12.1-STABLE, which ran for a surprising time?in fact, the rest of the day. In the meantime, how do I reinstall the ports? pkg upgrade has its limitations: first, I've experienced repeatedly that it fails. And then there's the issue of whether I even need the ports. The alternative is to make a list of all installed ports, but install only those ports that I recognize.
teevee crash!
As if that wasn't enough, when I went into the lounge room to watch the news on teevee, it hung. Why? I couldn't get the firefox instance to stop. Into the office, where I could access teevee with no problems. The firefox process was stuck in a STOP state, something that I usually associate with a process dumping core. But I had disabled core dumps on teevee, and it was maxing out a processor core. Dammit, restart the X server. But that was hanging too, waiting on some obscure kernel lock whose name I forgot to write down. A look at /var/log/messages showed: Apr 8 17:04:05 teevee kernel: NVRM: GPU at PCI:0000:01:00: GPU-85983119-e9ef-ac66-6817-fbed5657b871 Apr 8 17:04:05 teevee kernel: NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:01:00): 56, CMDre 00000001 00000094 00010049 00000007 00000000 Apr 8 17:04:05 teevee kernel: NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:01:00): 56, CMDre 00000001 000000c0 0001004b ...
teevee crash!
As if that wasn't enough, when I went into the lounge room to watch the news on teevee, it hung. Why? I couldn't get the firefox instance to stop. Into the office, where I could access teevee with no problems. The firefox process was stuck in a STOP state, something that I usually associate with a process dumping core. But I had disabled core dumps on teevee, and it was maxing out a processor core. Dammit, restart the X server. But that was hanging too, waiting on some obscure kernel lock whose name I forgot to write down. A look at /var/log/messages showed: Apr 8 17:04:05 teevee kernel: NVRM: GPU at PCI:0000:01:00: GPU-85983119-e9ef-ac66-6817-fbed5657b871 Apr 8 17:04:05 teevee kernel: NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:01:00): 56, CMDre 00000001 00000094 00010049 00000007 00000000 Apr 8 17:04:05 teevee kernel: NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:01:00): 56, CMDre 00000001 000000c0 0001004b ...
Dual server install, next step
As planned yesterday, continued with my installation of a second system. The machine was already running an old instance of lagoon, masquerading as eureso, and it had a complete copy of eureka's root file system on another partition. But that wasn't what I wanted: I wanted a clean new install. How do you do that with FreeBSD? I used to give classes in this sort of thing, but they started with a boot floppy disk, something mercifully obsolete. Nowadays we have bootable DVD images and bootable memory sticks. But that's not what I want; I just wanted a bootable root file system, and there seems to be no way to download one.
Updating eureka, attempt 15
I last updated eureka, my main machine, well over 4 years ago: FreeBSD eureka.lemis.com 10.2-STABLE FreeBSD 10.2-STABLE #2 r290972: Wed Nov 25 11:38:38 AEDT 2015 [email protected]:/usr/obj/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/10/sys/GENERIC amd64 I've had a number of attempts to update it both before and after then, but there are a number of issues. Firstly, I hate to reboot. Now that we have the photovoltaic electricity installed, we no longer have power outages, and eureka has been up for 7 months, with promise of staying up much longer. Then my X configuration is bizarre, and after 30 years of experience, X is still not as reliable as I would like.
The pain of time change
Daylight Saving Time ended today, time to put the clocks back. Now that even Microsoft understands DST, it's not as difficult as it used to be. But there were still 12 clocks to reset: the (conventional) oven, two microwave ovens, three analogue clocks and six cameras. OK, three of the cameras have an 802.11 (?Wi-Fi?) link, and the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark III even has a Bluetooth link. With these links, at least in theory, you can set the time to a 1 second granularity simply by connecting. The other three can only set time to a granularity of 1 minute. But how do you connect?
Backing up videos
It's been just over 3 years since we gave up using broadcast TV and switched to the World-wide web. We quickly acquired a large collection of various series, mainly from German TV broadcasters. And since they have a tendency to broadcast repeats out of sequence, we kept the entire series even after we watched them. That's a recipe for bloat. I started off with a 3 TB disk and then replaced it with (yet another) 8 TB disk. And it's filling up too. Looking at the older series, it's clear that the resolution leaves something to be desired. 200 GB of films with a maximum resolution of 720x480, significantly below the resolution of standard TV broadcasts.
Relativizing Android file access ease
Downloading yesterday's photos from the mobile phones was interesting. Mounting the file systems on teevee is clunky. I haven't found a way to integrate it into /etc/fstab, so I need to start things manually, not helped by at least flachmann continually disabling its FTP server. But even when things were mounted correctly, I had difficulties: === root@teevee (/dev/pts/11) /flachmann/DCIM/Camera 27 -> l -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 4,657,086 1 Apr 18:43 IMG_20200401_174318.jpg -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 5,463,532 1 Apr 18:43 IMG_20200401_174323.jpg -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 42,016,296 1 Apr 18:43 VID_20200401_174331.mp4 -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 34,467,850 1 Apr 18:44 VID_20200401_174400.mp4 === root@teevee (/dev/pts/11) /flachmann/DCIM/Camera 28 -> mv * /Photos/grog/20200401/orig/ mv: fastcopy: read() failed: VID_20200401_174331.mp4: Input/output error mv: fastcopy: read() failed: VID_20200401_174400.mp4: Input/output error === root@teevee (/dev/pts/11) /flachmann/DCIM/Camera 29 -> l -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 42,016,296 1 Apr 18:43 VID_20200401_174331.mp4 -rw-r--r-- 1 ...
More teevee pain
While playing around with the photos on teevee this afternoon, tried: === root@teevee (/dev/pts/8) /usr/src 23 -> emacs (emacs:80274): dbind-WARNING **: 15:17:03.053: Error retrieving accessibility bus address: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken. What's that? The DISPLAY was set to eureka:0.1, and it only happened with Emacs under root. And it only happened since the reboot yesterday. It was repeatable, sort of. While scratching my head, this message appeared: (emacs:80314): dbind-WARNING **: 15:21:08.304: Error retrieving accessibility bus address: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.TimedOut: Failed to activate service 'org.a11y.Bus': timed out (service_start_timeout=120000ms) After that, it worked.
Firefox' answer to PDF
To my surprise, Yvonne doesn't display PDF documents. But now she has received some?via Facebook, of course?and she asked me how to look at them. OK, click on the link: Now isn't that clever? Use Chromium to display the PDF. Why not just use Chromium? Well, I have a number of reasons, but wouldn't it be more obvious to use a dedicated PDF viewer like xpdf? OK, can do that too. Just find the pathname of the executable by climbing up from the directoryfolder from which X was started and then climb down again into /usr/local/bin (assuming you know where it is).
Recovering from panic
OK, reboot teevee. Not surprisingly, I had to run fsck on /spool. Should I set journalling? Not now, let's get the machine up and running smoothly first. And there I ran into the problems that I had had earlier this month. I couldn't start X, and when I did it manually I ran into all sorts of problems with key remapping. I thought I had fixed them. Yes, I had, but the fix only works under certain circumstances. I ran into a situation where xev told me I had the correct mappings (Ctrl to the left of the A key, for example), but on the xterm I was using, the same key functioned as CapsLock.
Panic!
While watching TV this afternoon, teevee froze. No obvious disk activity, but after a while it rebooted: Mar 30 16:04:57 teevee savecore[651]: reboot after panic: page fault Oh. It's been a while since I've seen one of those. Took a quick look at the dump: === root@teevee (/dev/pts/8) /var/crash 3 -> kgdb /boot/kernel/kernel vmcore.0 ... Unread portion of the kernel message buffer: NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:01:00): 8, Channel 00000005 Fatal trap 12: page fault while in kernel mode cpuid = 1; apic id = 01 fault virtual address = 0x0 fault code = supervisor read data, page not present instruction pointer = 0x20:0xffffffff82a3c132 stack pointer = 0x0:0xfffffe00004c28e0 frame pointer ...
Emacs yellow areas tracked down
While writing yesterday's diary entries, ran into another case of a yellow-stained Emacs buffer. This time I grabbed the lossage: SPC O K , SPC h a c k SPC a r o u n d SPC i n SPC <switch-frame> C-x C-f C-g C-x C-s <help-echo> <M-drag-mouse-2> <M-drag-mouse-3> <switch-frame> <switch-frame> M-x v i e w - l o <tab> <return> Clearly this happened as the result of one or more of <help-echo> <M-drag-mouse-2> <M-drag-mouse-3>. But what do they mean? The drag-mouse events are clear, but <help-echo>?
Communicating by email
My problems with Red Energy yesterday haven't been the only ones where I have problems communicating by email. I've had two others in the last year, first with a company that might be called Resilium, and more recently with Elysian Energy. In all cases, communicating was like pulling teeth. Why? Part of it is clearly the practice of replying to a message in a separate place from the message itself. This is the way it has always been with conventional mail. But when I wrote lots of conventional mail, over 50 years ago, I might have been replying to a multi-page letter, in which case I would have it on the desk next to me.
GPS comparisons, finally
So finally I have made maps from the track logs that I created while travelling to Napoleons on Thursday using GPS Visualizer. They're certainly interesting. First, the whole journey, as logged with taskumatti (my old Nokia 3 phone), flachmann (the new Nokia 5.1 Plus phone) and my old dedicated GPS navigator: I went to Napoleons and returned via the same path, so there should be no loops in the track logs.
GPS comparisons
I've been dragging my heels on my GPS receiver comparisons. There's a good reason: it's a pain to access these things. Now that I have file-system like semantics to access the telephones, that's not so bad, but I had forgotten how to access the dedicated unit. The first step is clear: connect the unit to the computer with a USB cable: Mar 27 12:14:13 eureka kernel: ugen0.11: <MStar Semiconductor, Inc.> at usbus0 Mar 27 12:14:13 eureka kernel: umass4: <MStar Semiconductor, Inc. Mass Storage Device, class 0/0, rev 2.00/0.00, addr 17> on usbus0 Mar 27 12:14:13 eureka kernel: umass4: SCSI over Bulk-Only; quirks = 0xc001 Mar 27 12:14:13 eureka kernel: umass4:7:4:-1: Attached to scbus7 Mar 27 12:14:13 eureka kernel: da4 at umass-sim4 bus 4 scbus7 target 0 lun 0 Mar 27 12:14:13 eureka kernel: da4: <Mstar > Removable Direct Access SCSI device ...
Weather station pain
My weather station is still having difficulties communicating with the outside unit. That's nothing new: I've had these issues for over 10 years, but for some reason they're getting worse. It's clearly related to the position of the internal unit, and I've been moving it around the office to try to get better communication. The obvious thing to do is to put it in the lounge room. Like that it almost has a line of sight to the external unit, and the internal measurements are more meaningful. That requires connecting the unit to teevee. But for that I had to work my way through these bizarre MySQL permissions, which I still don't understand.
Working from home
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, lots of people are working from home for the first time. And of course lots of other people are trying to sell the solutions to their perceived problems. How-To Geek has many suggestions for The Best Work From Home Apps for iPhone and Android. I only have one: avoid them all. The devices have been optimized for people moving around, to the detriment of use in a single place. One exception comes to mind, though: The 6 Best Free Video Conferencing Apps. I don't have a camera on eureka, and I don't know of anything that would work with FreeBSD.
Another FTP server
Daniel O'Connor pointed me at an alternative FTP server yesterday. FTP? Everything! It's a Servers Ultimate, reminding me that ?ultimate? means ?last?, and that the German translation ?das Letzte? an extremely negative evaluation is. And indeed, it had servers. 5 different FTP servers. What are they all? Of course it's too polite to assume I wouldn't know. Some worked for me, some didn't. But while looking around on their web site, found: This app will work for 7 days after which you will need to buy the paid version. BAD Servers Ultimate.
Nokia 5.1 Plus: yes or no?
So: I've had the Nokia 5.1 Plus for 12 days now. Another 48 days before I need to give it back if I don't like it. What advantages does it have? Why was I even interested in a new phone? The issues I have with the older Nokia 3 are many and varied. The ones that continually irritate me are: Messages that appear on the screen when the display is turned off, then stay for about 4 seconds before disappearing forever.
More mobile phone fun
So now I have file access to flachmann, my new Nokia 5.1 Plus, via a file system interface. But it's FTP, not exactly state of the art. How about an HTTP access method? I can access the file system on taskumatti (my old Nokia 3) via HTTP, but not via FTP, using the same app, WiFi File Transfer. OK, off looking. Yes, there's a port fusefs-httpfs, which not only installs, but also produces a message: ===> NOTICE: The fusefs-httpfs port currently does not have a maintainer. As a result, it is more likely to have unresolved issues, not be up-to-date, or even be removed in the future.
Battery calibration without end
When I got into my office this morning, yesterday's PV battery calibration was still going on: Three complete cycles, and it was continuing into the fourth. When it got to the fully charged state of the fourth, I power cycled the inverter, but it's becoming clear that that won't stop it. Time for a stiffer letter to the suppliers, asking for: As I asked last August, please get me a statement from the manufacturer (not from you) by 10 April answering the questions: How often should this recalibration take place?
File access in the age of Android
I've had my new Nokia 5.1 Plus for 10 days now, and so far the experience has been mixed. I've found a number of apps that seem better than what I have used before, but I'm still running into this frustrating now-you-see-me-now-you-don't message stuff. But that might be a Nokia taunt. One difference is that WiFi File Transfer only provides FTP access, while on the older Nokia 3 it offers HTTP. I've been thinking for some time about my most basic question, last asked when I got the phone: But surely, surely, there is software available for that most basic of network functionality, copying data from one system to another?
File access in the age of Google
Peter Jeremy has given me access to a large collection of files on Google Drive. There must be several terabytes of them. OK, follow the ?invitation? and get a list of names. besplex, epsplex and so on. What are they? My understanding is that they're disk images of some kind, but Google Drive tells me that they're ?Google Drive folders?. What can I do with them? I have no idea. I'd expect to be able to select them show the component files, but I failed in that attempt. Once again, the Google interface is so non-intuitive that I can't make head or tail of them.
More GPS navigation fun
My GPS navigator works even worse than before. It reached the end of time a year or so ago, and last month I left it out in the sun (wouldn't you think a navigator could deal with that?) : Since then it doesn't work too well, and I'v ebeen thinking of a replacement for a while. Today's trip to Ballarat was worth another attempt. Off to the toyshop to see what was on offer. I discovered an app already installed: ?Australia Topo Maps?.
OED access in times of COVID-19
I access the Oxford English Dictionary several times a week via the State Library of Victoria. It's convenient and free. Somewhere I have a DVD of the Second Edition, but it's easier via the web. But today I was unable to access the service. ?You could not be signed in. This account has no valid subscription for this site?. Damn. What has gone wrong there? The only credentials I need are the ones I need to access SLV, and they were OK. OK, report a bug? No provision for that on the SLV web site, just ?ask a question?. OK, ?ask a question?, specifying a reason.
Peace!
Somehow the last week has been particularly stressful, and it had its overhang into today: I didn't get yesterday's diary entry committed until 16:54. But that's about all I had to do today. Yes, Yvonne managed to find an interesting bug in avidemux: when saving a clip, if you forget and use the standard Emacs c-x c-s, avidemux does save a clip. But it's not the one you selected: it's the one to the left of the A mark (in other words, the part cut off at the beginning).
NBN breaks promise
Between 0:00 and 6:00 this morning the National Broadband Network had promised not one, but two outages. And there were none! That makes seven weeks with no planned outages, and also none in the immediate future. That's something of a record.
Emacs strangeness
Seen in my calendar this morning: Mar 19 Greg installs BSD/386 0.3.1, 1992 28 years! But that's nothing compared to an editor that I installed some time in 1980, MINCE, a clone of Emacs for the Z-80 microprocessor. And I've been using some form of Emacs ever since (GNU Emacs since 1989). But lately I've been having surprises. I sometimes get areas of the screen marked with a yellow background. Why? What are they? I've done some searching, and most answers on the web seem to reduce to RTFM.
Another NBN outage notification
Recently I had over two weeks with no looming National Broadband Network outages, but last week another came??only? 15 minutes, and in the middle of the night. I can live with that. And then today another one came: NBNCo has let us know that they are planning network maintenance in your area, and that your service at 29 STONES RD, DEREEL VIC will be affected. The details are: - Start date and time: Fri 20th March 2020 00:00 AEDT - End date and time: Fri 20th March 2020 06:00 AEDT - Window: 6.0 hours You may experience the following interruptions during the maintenance - 90 min Not quite as acceptable, but in the middle of the night, so again, I can live with it.
Android: file access and ringtones
For some reason, my new Nokia 5.1 Plus is only partially compatible with WiFi File Transfer: it doesn't support HTTP connections. On the old Nokia 3 I could connect with a web browser like this: But on the new one (called flachmann now that the old tablet of that name is no longer usable), I need to use FTP: Is that a problem? After using it, I don't think so.
Yet another video editor
Finally I have avidemux working, sort of. But it has some irritating habits, and it's clear that it's relatively limited. What else is there? I had already tried kdenlive, running into problems with both performance and interface. Clearly interface is something that I need to get used to, but performance is an issue that might remain. So today Callum Gibson suggested openshot, something that I had been thinking of anyway. To emphasize the suggestion, he pointed to this page, which interestingly enough listed the four best packages (in order) as openshot, kdenlive, shotcut and avidemux. So another reason to try it.
Groggy's ports mistakes
I made a mistake on IRC this morning: * groggyhimself grumbles about ports. Ah, but that's my fault. I'm not just using ports, I'm mixing them with packages. Naughty boy! Is that wrong? I claim not, but others point to configuration differences between my system and the system on which the packages were built. Yes, the dependencies could be different. But that's exactly the point of the dependency database. I'm pretty sure that I'm doing it by the book, with some explicit exceptions, like extracting the package directly without passing "go" and registering with the database.
Using avidemux
So now, after only a week, I have a slightly castrated version of avidemux running on lagoon. Tried to show Yvonne how to use it, but failed. Although I had used it before, and though it's relatively sane, I forgot what the symbols mean. On a second attempt I was more successful. But then she tried by herself, trimmed video clips, save them and... they weren't there! After some investigation, discovered that avidemux is just as bad as all this GUI software that has no concept of directory trees. Or maybe almost as bad. You can specify at least one file on the command line, which produces many and varied illegible texts: And the first time round it happily provided the correct directory for saving the output file (/Photos/yvonne/20200317, the same one ...
avidemux debugging
So why did my avidemux build fail yesterday? I really need to find out. I had established that it claimed not to be able to find /usr/local/include/X11/X.h, but locate told me that it was there. locate gives a historical view. Was the file really there? === root@lagoon (/dev/pts/0) /usr/ports/multimedia/avidemux-qt5 293 -> locate X11/X.h ... /usr/local/include/X11/X.h === root@lagoon (/dev/pts/0) /usr/ports/multimedia/avidemux-qt5 294 -> l /usr/local/include/X11/X.h ls: /usr/local/include/X11/X.h: No such file or directory Gone! Clearly after the locate database was built. But when, exactly? === root@lagoon (/dev/pts/0) /usr/ports/multimedia/avidemux-qt5 295 -> l -dT /usr/local/include/X11/ drwxr-xr-x 12 root wheel 2048 14 Mar 12:27:38 2020 /usr/local/include/X11 That looks like the time I was upgrading the ports.
The daily ports pain
By yesterday evening I had managed to install the base avidemux package. Only three more to go. Next I tried avidemux-qt5.
New mobile phone
So now I have a new mobile phone, a Nokia 5.1 Plus. Why? I hate mobile phones. But maybe the issue was that my Nokia 3 was just too gutless?only about 100 times the processing power of the Intel 486 that I mentioned in Porting UNIX Software above. That would suggest that it could build the complete X system in 15 seconds. The advantage of the 5.1 Plus is that it's sold by ALDI, so I have two months to play with it, and if I don't like it, I can just return it. Fortunately it doesn't look like this image from Wikipedia, the stuff of my nightmares (keyboards with missing keys): OK, set up.
avidemux on lagoon, next attempt
Yvonne off to Ballarat today for Pilates, so took the opportunity of updating her ports. After (re-)copying the entire root file system to the /destdir partition, ran pkg upgrade. And it just worked! It's nice to see something working as advertised. Then back to install avidemux-qt5. Not found. OK, what do we have? === root@lagoon (/dev/pts/0) ~ 188 -> pkg search avidemux avidemux-2.6.11_15 Simple GUI based video editor avidemux-cli-2.6.11_9 Simple GUI based video editor (cli) avidemux-plugins-2.6.11_18 Simple GUI based video editor (Plugins) Dammit, that's still the old version!
avidemux for lagoon
So finally I have avidemux working on teevee. Now to put it on lagoon for Yvonne. === root@lagoon (/dev/pts/0) ~ 108 -> pkg install avidemux-qt5 avidemux-cli avidemux-plugins pkg: No packages available to install matching 'avidemux-qt5' have been found in the repositories === root@lagoon (/dev/pts/0) ~ 109 -> pkg search avidemux avidemux-2.6.11_15 Simple GUI based video editor avidemux-cli-2.6.11_9 Simple GUI based video editor (cli) avidemux-plugins-2.6.11_18 Simple GUI based video editor (Plugins) Huh? That's exactly what I installed on teevee yesterday: === root@teevee (/dev/pts/7) ~ 115 -> pkg search avidemux avidemux-2.7.4_1 Simple GUI based video editor avidemux-cli-2.7.4 Simple GUI based video editor (cli) avidemux-plugins-2.7.4 Simple GUI based video ...
NBN outages again
We've had 22 days with no threat of an National Broadband Network outage! What joy! Of course, it was too good to last. The next one is on its way: - Start date and time: Fri 20th March 2020 00:00 AEDT - End date and time: Fri 20th March 2020 06:00 AEDT - Window: 6.0 hours You may experience the following interruptions during the maintenance - 15 min Of course, a 15 minute outage (maybe!) in the middle of the night is almost acceptable.
Video editing: avidemux success!
Spent most of today writing up my diary entries for yesterday. It paid off, though: while reading what I had collected, I noticed that there were five ports with names starting in avidemux: avidemux, avidemux-cli, avidemux-plugins, avidemux-qt4 and avidemux-qt5. I had already established that I needed avidemux and avidemux-qt5, and had installed avidemux-cli to admire the screen vomit. That leaves avidemux-plugins and avidemux-qt4. Clearly avidemux-qt4 is an older version. And avidemux-plugins? No description, of course, and at first I had thought of it as extras, but what if it's part of the base port? After all, what use is the avidemux port with no executables?
Learning
In general, it seems that kdenlive is the most popular editor. It refuses to work over a network, but maybe it would be OK locally. Installed on teevee and tried again. It runs! And produces about 200 lines of error and warning messages on the xterm, for once without trying to change the colour. Presumably this is typical of developers thinking that they can flush their debug messages down the xterm, and is of no further interest. But then it brings a typical confusing error message: Huh?
Rediscovering avidemux
So, FINALLY, I had avidemux-qt5 installed, at round 14:00. Let's run it: The screen seems to be 1920 x 1080 px [destroy] 03:49:21-533 Destroying preview [renderDisplayResize] 03:49:21-533 Render to 0x0 zoom=1.0000, old one =0 x 0, zoom=1.0000, renderer=0x0 [UI_resize] 03:49:21-534 Resizing the main window to 152x230 px [RDR] Resizing to 0 x 0 [initGUI] 03:49:21-535 OpenGL enabled at built time, checking if we should run it.. What are all those empty lines? Ah, they're not empty, just tastefully set to displaying white foreground on your choice of background. You can mark them, for example, which also makes them visible.
More video editor pain
So first let's try to get the video software that I have to run. It's excruciating for multiple reasons. First another look at avidemux. Why is there no executable? Ah, that's for me to know and you to guess. There are a total of five ports: avidemux, avidemux-cli, avidemux-plugins, avidemux-qt4 and avidemux-qt5. What do the pkg-descrs say? A video editor that allows editing of AVI, OGM, and MPEG videos. The MPEG support provides the ability to convert to DVD compliat PS streams. It contains various filters for deinterlacing, cropping, resizing, etc. Allows for cutting without re-encoding. Has the ability to re-encode and re-sample.
More video processing pain
More investigation of the files that I had ripped yesterday. The good news: the audio worked after all; the error messages were just confusion on the part of the player. The bad news: some of the episodes had not been decrypted. As planned, conected up my ancient Digitrex GKX-9000 DVD recorder to the TV monitor today and put in one of the Heartbeat DVDs. It worked and behaved correctly, including providing me with the titles, which none of the software had extracted. OK, how about copying the entire DVD to disk? It proves that vobcopy has a corresponding option: vobcopy -l -m The -l option shouldn't be necessary, but otherwise vobcopy thinks that files can't be larger than 2 GB.
This can take a _long_ time
Julie Donaghy had had some DVDs of Heartbeat for sale yesterday, but we didn't take them: we already have the episodes. But then it occurred to me that the quality of the copies I have is pretty terrible, so for $5 for 17 DVDs (5 seasons) it seemed to make sense. So today Yvonne went off to pick them up. 17 DVDs? She came back with 54! Julie had lent her the complete DVDs for Lost, of which we had never heard, but which Julie says is excellent?IMDB agrees. OK, the usual problem: we don't have a DVD player, so I needed to read them in to disk.
PIXIO fail
Yvonne wanted to take another sequence of video clips today using the PIXIO ?Robot Cameraman?. Set it up in place, turned on the beacons... nothing. No power. Further examination showed that it was only beacon 1, which appeared to be completely discharged. Aborted the effort, with considerable growling on Yvonne's part, and put the things on charge. Yes, everything was charged except for beacon 1, which charged normally. What's the issue? Apart from the documented bug with the controller itself (after charging you must power it on, then off again, to avoid immediate self-discharge), I've seen the beacons spontaneously turn on when removed from the charger.
Daily teevee update
The updated teevee is now working well enough for me to be able to use it, but it's still not fixed. What's the story with the keyboard mapping? And why can't I start X from the startup script? For the X problem I tried a solution suggested by this page. Create /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config with this content: allowed_users = anybody Then to investigate the keymap. Clearly I needed the old system to compare with, so rebooted there and saved the keymap with xmodmap -pk. Boot back to the new system.
More NBN outages!
It's been over two weeks since the perpetual threat of National Broadband Network outages finished. And since then we haven't had any outages! Until today: Duration from to (seconds) 494 5 March 2020 14:20:21 5 March 2020 14:28:35 ...
teevee progress
The daily teevee pain today. First, check out a pristine copy of the source tree and build a new world, again, this time with a kernel that divulges when it was built. I've run into this before, but I thought people were going to fix the bugfeature. It took me a while to find this completely non-intuitive setting, only six months ago: create a file with an equally unlike name /etc/src.conf and add: # Don't drop build date, dammit! # What a silly name for the knob. WITHOUT_REPRODUCIBLE_BUILD=dammit Was that the correct syntax?
Nokia 3 ring tones die
Six weeks ago, after upgrading the operating system on my Nokia 3 mobile phone, I discovered that it no longer produced a ring tone for an incoming call. That's basic telephone functionality! It proved only to have disabled my custom tones, so I growled and installed one of their particularly emetic standard tones. But today Yvonne called me from town. Only vibrate. Fortunately I had it in my shirt pocket, so I received it. But now no tone sounded, not even when I tried to select them, something that had previously worked. A bit of searching on the web proved this is not specific to Android 9 (or whatever the silly name is).
teevee build pause
So how do I handle my issues with upgrading teevee? On the face of it, the upgrade process is broken. But why does nobody else complain? Obvious reasons could be that they maybe think it's modern, or that they don't want to make fools of themselves complaining in public: I belong (currently, at least) to the latter group. Other reasons could be: Incompatible boot blocks causing the lua errors and possibly the keyboard bounce.
Shotcut: book with seven seals
Yvonne spent some time this afternoon trying to use shotcut to trim a video clip, with spectacular lack of success. Apart from the fact that the use of the interface is completely at variance with anything I have ever seen, she wasn't even able to save the result. When she tried, all she got was a small XML file. OK, see what I can do. FOOL! You don't save files, you export them. OK, tried that, after finding out how to trim files (simple: take the start and end markers and move them to the point you want?if the markers are displayed, which isn't all the time).
Daily teevee pain
At least one of yesterday's problems with the teevee upgrade, the lua errors, could have been that the source tree was updated between building world and installing world, so built another world today. To boot the new system cleanly, copied the old /boot/lua directory to the new system, and it booted cleanly. But I still had these repeated characters from the keyboard, to the point that I couldn't log in as rooott at all. I had to go to eureka and log in via the net. While I was there, ran make installworld. This time it ran cleanly. Reboot. Those bloody lua messages again!
Upcoming events
Received (barely) yesterday evening: From [email protected] Sun Mar 1 23:59:44 2020 Date: Sun, 1 Mar 2020 04:59:36 -0800 From: Geni <no-[email protected]> Latest Lehey Family updates February 23 - 29 Sunday, February 23 * Yvonne Lehey turns 71 on March 1. Nothing like advance warning, is there? No, this is nothing like advance warning.
eBay notifications
While in the lounge room, logged in to eBay, apparently for the first time in this instance of teevee. That required me to find the email address and the (unflattering) password. And then I got this message: What nonsense is that? Apart from the fact that it doesn't tell me which email address it's talking about (I had to check the mail headers to confirm), I have had that particular address since 6 July 2003. I've been with eBay for over 20 years; when will they finally get their act together?
More teevee upgrade pain
Finally the build for teevee is finished. Reboot. make installworld. Oh: ===> stand/i386/loader_lua (install) installing DIRS BINDIR install -d -m 0755 -o root -g wheel /boot cc -target x86_64-unknown-freebsd12.1 --sysroot=/spool/obj/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/amd64.amd64/tmp -B/spool/obj/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/amd64.amd64/tmp/usr/bin -O2 -pipe -I/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/stand/i386/btx/lib -nostdinc -I/spool/obj/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/amd64.amd64/stand/libsa32 -I/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/stand/libsa -D_STANDALONE -I/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/sys -Ddouble=jagged-little-pill -Dfloat=floaty-mcfloatface -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -DLOADER_GELI_SUPPORT -I/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/stand/libsa/geli -DLOADER_DISK_SUPPORT -m32 -ffreestanding -mno-mmx -mno-sse -mno-avx -mno-avx2 -msoft-float -march=i386 -I. -Iinclude -I/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/stand/common -I/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/contrib/lua/src -I/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/stand/common -I/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/stand/liblua -DLUA_FLOAT_TYPE=LUA_FLOAT_INT64 -DLOADER_CD9660_SUPPORT -DLOADER_EXT2FS_SUPPORT -DLOADER_MSDOS_SUPPORT -DLOADER_UFS_SUPPORT -DLOADER_GZIP_SUPPORT -DLOADER_BZIP2_SUPPORT -DLOADER_NET_SUPPORT -DLOADER_NFS_SUPPORT -DLOADER_TFTP_SUPPORT -DLOADER_GPT_SUPPORT -DLOADER_MBR_SUPPORT -DLOADER_ZFS_SUPPORT -I/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/stand/libsa/zfs -I/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/sys/cddl/boot/zfs -Wall -I/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/stand/i386 -DLOADER_PREFER_AMD64 -std=gnu99 -Wsystem-headers -Werror -Wno-pointer-sign -Wno-empty-body -Wno-string-plus-int -Wno-unused-const-variable -Wno-tautological-compare -Wno-unused-value -Wno-parentheses-equality -Wno-unused-function -Wno-enum-conversion -Wno-unused-local-typedef -Wno-address-of-packed-member -Wno-switch -Wno-switch-enum -Wno-knr-promoted-parameter -Wno-parentheses -Oz -Qunused-arguments -DLUA_PATH=\"/boot/lua\" -I/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/libexec/flua/modules ERROR-tried-to-rebuild-during-make-install -c /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/stand/common/interp_lua.c -o interp_lua.o cc: error: no such file or directory: 'ERROR-tried-to-rebuild-during-make-install' *** Error code 1 What's that?
Carry a camera!
In the 1960s some organization in the UK brought out the slogan ?Carry a camera?, and I certainly did what I could to adhere to it. Things haven't changed that much, and when we went to the vets I brought two cameras?and left them in the car! So when I took the photos of Leonid, I had to use my phone. The results are correspondingly terrible. I could at least have brought my bag with the E-PM2.
teevee upgrade
OK, time for action on teevee. I still have two root partitions, so given the issues I have, maybe the idea of alternating them isn't such a bad idea after all. Copied one to the other, remembered to update /boot/loader.conf on the first partition to point to the second: Then reboot. Oh. Forgot to update /etc/fstab on the second partition, so I ended up mounting the first partition after all. Reboot, run pkg upgrade on the second partition. Number of packages to be installed: 62 Number of packages to be upgraded: 433 Number of packages to be reinstalled: 70 How long since the last upgrade?
More ports frustration
Yvonne did another session with the PIXIO ?Robot Cameraman? today. Time to finally investigate shotcut to process the videos. How about a nice video tutorial? It would be an excellent idea?if I could find one. The tutorials that I did find all assumed that I understood in detail concepts like ?timeline? and screen layout. OK, try it anyway?this sitting in the lounge in front of teevee's display. === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/6) ~/Photos/20200228 14 -> shotcut Cannot mix incompatible Qt library (version 0x50c02) with this library (version 0x50d02) Abort trap Ah, right, there was this problem...
Death in the age of Internet
A while back I received notification of the death of Bruce D. Evans, one of the more noteworthy members of the FreeBSD project. Sad, of course, but particularly so in Bruce's case. Like most members of the project, I didn't see much of him, though he lived in Australia. Here he is with us (in the light blue shirt) at a meeting in Sydney It's difficult to understand Bruce's importance to the project. He was something like a conscience, not criticizing but reminding and discussing in excruciating detail.
Hung teevee
While watching the news on teevee, the mouse cursor froze. Bloody mice! Off to change the batteries, though they seemed OK. No change. No problems accessing teevee from the net, which showed nothing in the logs. Broken web browser? That seems the next most likely reason. And sure enough, both firefox and Chrome were immortal. ps showed: === root@teevee (/dev/pts/15) ~ 52 -> ps alx | grep chrome 1004 2370 1 0 20 0 654304 80332 ctl.api_ DE v0 7:50.87 chrome: --type=gpu-process --field-trial-handle=14865618314097472987,5793152138677131776,131072 --gpu-preferences= === root@teevee (/dev/pts/15) ~ 53 -> ps alx | grep firefox 1004 2361 1227 0 20 0 3549544 652680 - T v0 6:32.33 firefox 1004 2367 2361 0 20 0 2769620 299660 ctl.api_ DE v0 1:14.21 [firefox] 1004 ...
Many DxOs
Processing the photos was a challenge. With the house photos, the photos of the laksa preparation and my analemma project, I took a total of 957 photos. DxO PhotoLab is not the fastest image processor on the market?in fact, it's quite possibly the slowest?and in general I can reckon with 5 images per minute. That's a good 3 hours for that many photos. OK, spread them across two computers and it'll be a little better. But how? DxO is not only slow, it tends to get slower with lots of images. After startup it can take up to 5 minutes to react to user input while it goes and looks at images with which it has nothing to do.
More mouse problems
A month ago I gave up with the problems I was having with my Logitech M705 MARATHON mouse: it had a tendency to paste data in unrelated windows. Instead I went back to my old el-cheapo Jenkins mouse. But that, too, wasn't without its problems. This one did the opposite, marking portions of windows when I deiconified them. At least for the moment that proves to be more irritating (I had difficulty marking text, going to another window and pasting it), so I'm back to the Logitech for the time being. But what's causing this? My guess is button bounce: the driver accepts every change of state, even if it's really short.
Chrome: listen to me!
While watching TV this evening, the full-screen image turned to a framed image (coincidentally the same size). Before I could ponder what was causing that, a message appeared: ?Can't update Chrome?. What's that nonsense? I didn't ask Chrome to update, and it should know that it's too stupid to perform its own update under FreeBSD. But what kind of mindset causes programmers to interrupt whatever else is going on on a computer to deliver what proves to be a completely boring and unwelcome message?
Rebuilding firefox
Yvonne off shopping today, plenty of time for me to build the firefox port. First, though, a couple of symlinks. I don't want to check out the entire ports tree to lagoon when I already have one on eureka. In addition, it seems that I was duplicating packages on lagoon, so: === root@lagoon (/dev/pts/0) ~ 75 -> ln -s /src/FreeBSD/svn/ports /usr === root@lagoon (/dev/pts/0) ~ 76 -> ln -s /eureka/home/var/cache/pkg/ /var/cache The first issue was: ===> Fetching all distfiles required by firefox-73.0.1,1 for building ===> Extracting for firefox-73.0.1,1 => SHA256 Checksum OK for firefox-73.0.1.source.tar.xz.
Video editors
I've been looking for a video editor for some time now, and I'm even prepared to pay real money for a good one. Yvonne is in even greater need: since buying the PIXIO ?Robot Cameraman?, she has clips with useless start and end portions, where she approaches the camera to turn it on or off. She asked Julie Lannen, who tells her that she uses Adobe Premiere Pro, presumably paid for by somebody else: it's expensive, but not nearly as expensive as she claims.
NBN giveth, Vultr taketh away
While entering the tickets for the DNS issues, discovered this exciting news, which the Vultrs had not seen fit to get to me by email: Frankfurt Scheduled Maintenance - 2020-02-20 Event Type: Network Upgrade Start Time: 2020-02-20 03:00:00 UTC End Time: 2020-02-20 04:00:00 UTC The Frankfurt network will be upgraded to provide network enhancements as part of ongoing efforts to provide excellent service and maintain an ideal hosting environment. A device reload may be necessary and some customers may experience brief periods of latency or packetloss while routes are updated across the redundant topology.
No FreeBSD mail?
In the office this morning, found about 10 commit messages from the FreeBSD project. That's unusual: normally it's round 100 to 150. Did something go wrong? The obvious first check was whether the messages had been filtered into a spam folder, especially since I had managed to shoot myself in the foot with my procmail configuration a while back. OK, check procmaillog, which shows what procmail has done. It's not easy to read: procmail: No match on "Subject:.*skincare" procmail: Bypassed locking "/var/mail/grog.lock" procmail: Assigning "LASTFOLDER=/var/mail/grog" procmail: Opening "/var/mail/grog" procmail: Acquiring kernel-lock procmail: Notified comsat: "grog@3000110:/var/mail/grog" From owner-svn-ports-[email protected] Mon Feb 17 22:00:22 2020 Subject: svn commit: r526362 - head/www/py-flask-admin Folder: /var/mail/grog ...
End of the NBN threats
For as long as I can recall, when I signed in to my personal data on the Aussie Broadband site, I was greeted with this banner: It had become completely meaningless; there was always the threat of an NBN outage. But no more! It's gone! Does that mean that the extreme pain of last week was a final fling? No more NBN outages?
More weather station woes
I've had problems with my weather stations since I got the first one over 10 years ago. In particular, the communication between internal and external unit is flaky and inconsistent. Lately it has got to the point that communication fails for hours on end. What can cause that? Battery problems seem the most likely, so I changed the ones in the internal unit. No improvement. The batteries in the external unit are self-charging via a tiny PV panel, but they can always fail. So out to take a look, replacing them with fully charged NiMH batteries. No improvement. And the existing batteries (rechargeable Alkaline) showed a perfectly normal voltage.
Outing to Lal Lal
After Mick Solly destroyed our last electric weed sprayer last month, Yvonne offered to do the work instead, and she bought a manual sprayer unit which she hasn't got round to using yet. And then she found a second-hand 30 l unit on sale at a price only marginally higher. Off to Lal Lal to take a look at it, in the process marveling at the inaccuracies of the GPS navigators I had brought with us. My dedicated unit has suffered from the heat recently, and I think it might have damaged the touch screen: And Google Maps offered the usual pain: Where's my Nokia 3?
No NBN outage!
Today was a day when the National Broadband Network had threatened up to 8 hours of outage. But none at all! Friday, and the first time this week!
NBN: sting in the tail
After the pain that the National Broadband Network caused me over the last three days, I was expecting them to continue for the rest of the week. But no, the link stayed up all day long. Until the evening, when I was watching the TV news when the display hung. Just before close of business they managed to sneak in another 37 minute outage.
NBN: A million seconds and counting
After the NBN horrors of yesterday, today was better, right? Wrong. At the end of the day we had: Timestamp Outages Duration Availability Date (seconds) 1581253200 4 5830 93.25% # 10 February 2020 1581339600 2 21141 75.53% # 11 February 2020 1581426000 2 25075 59.90% # 12 February 2020 That's a total of 52046 seconds, or 14 hours, 27 minutes, 26 seconds, all during normal working hours!
No music for Groggy
Facebook message today from Lyndon Watts: invitation to a bassoon recital in Melbourne?today at 17:00! Thank you, National Broadband Network, for making this possible!
Another day without NBN!
After yesterday's NBN outage, I was hoping for a little time without the perpetual ?routine maintenance?. No such luck. The net went down again at 9:30. But not for ?long?: at 10:15 it was back again. But for even less time. At 10:37 it went down again, and stayed down all day. I've taken to starting an audible ping to catch when it comes back again: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/67) ~ 5 -> ping -a -i 5 www PING www.lemis.com (45.32.70.18): 56 data bytes ping: sendto: No route to host ...
Begone foul spammer!
After the failure of GMail, I have resorted to various methods to control spam, including procmail. Some of it works, but it's painful. And in principle it should work against spam like this, where there's an unambiguous keyword in the Subject: line: 875 N T 10-02-2020 =?utf-8?B?IkRyZXciID To [email protected] ( 18) N T Desperate for a Fuckbuddy But it doesn't. The clue is in the From: header: =?utf-8?B?IkphY3F1ZW.
More NBN outages
More NBN outages today, a total of four of them, totalling 97 minutes. When will they ever stop?
Bank of Melbourne money transfers
Received the invoice from Nat McKay, whose company proves to be called Elecservices Victoria, today. OK, pay it with the Bank of Melbourne account, because they send mail directly to the recipient to say that the money is on its way. All went well. And then I owe money to Kelly Yeoh. I had already had problems transferring money to her, not helped by the stupid behaviour of the bank (in this case ANZ). OK, do that while I'm there. In each case, the Bank of Melbourne irritates by making a phone call to give me a confirmation code. With Elecservices it went fine, but this time it took forever to come through.
Late CFBSD testimonial
It's been nearly 25 years since I started writing what became ?The Complete FreeBSD?, and 17 years since the last edition. But today Callum Gibson pointed me at a new testimonial. Looking at it, it seems that Jack Velte was right: the advertising on the cover sold it to this particular customer (?not revealed due to privacy concerns?) : When I first saw The Complete FreeBSD book by Greg Lehey I remember noticing the text on the front page that said, "The Free Version of Berkeley UNIX" and "Rock Solid Stability", and I was immediately intrigued!
Improving server security
Things seem to be working well with the external servers, but looking at the log files shows some interesting stuff: Feb 1 00:00:17 lax sshd[16759]: Invalid user sinusbot from 180.76.102.136 port 35108 Feb 1 00:00:17 lax sshd[16759]: Failed unknown for invalid user sinusbot from 180.76.102.136 port 35108 ssh2 Feb 1 00:00:17 lax sshd[16759]: Failed password for invalid user sinusbot from 180.76.102.136 port 35108 ssh2 Feb 1 00:00:17 lax sshd[16759]: Disconnected from invalid user sinusbot 180.76.102.136 port 35108 [preauth] Feb 1 00:01:07 lax sshd[16763]: Invalid user minecraft from 178.128.124.204 port 36180 Feb 1 00:01:07 lax sshd[16763]: Failed unknown for invalid user minecraft from 178.128.124.204 port 36180 ssh2 Feb 1 00:01:07 lax sshd[16763]: Failed password for invalid user minecraft from 178.128.124.204 port 36180 ssh2 Feb 1 00:01:07 lax sshd[16763]: Disconnected from invalid user minecraft 178.128.124.204 port 36180 [preauth] ...
More mobile phone pain
While I was at the doctors, got a call from Dave Morrison the electrician. And once again I had difficulty answering it: the ?answer? display changed to one offering me only hanging up. He passed me to Nat, who was puzzled about the problem with the outside light, but said he would come to take a look tomorrow. I shouldn't have taken the call, of course, but Paul was patient (when in fact I should have been the patient), and calling Nat back is not an easy thing to do. But when I got home I had a whole slew of SMS messages indicating missed calls: three from Nat and two from Dave, presumably not including the one that got through.
More finishing touches on external servers
So now I only have two external servers, lax.lemis.com and ffm.lemis.com. Took a look at the DNS configuration on ffm and found that it was a master (but not visible to anywhere on the Internet). OK, it seems better to have only one master, and that should be lax. Tweaked the ffm configuration, and all worked. But it's not saving the zone file. Why not? And then, on lax, saw: Jan 30 01:18:51 lax ftpd[90419]: FTP LOGIN FAILED FROM 180.114.37.233 Jan 30 01:18:54 lax ftpd[90420]: FTP LOGIN FAILED FROM 180.114.37.233 Jan 30 01:18:55 lax ftpd[90421]: FTP LOGIN FAILED FROM 180.114.37.233 ...
Restarting the systems
Part of the electrical work involved powering off everything except eureka, including teevee and lagoon, which, accidentally, didn't happen cleanly. They also didn't come up cleanly. teevee had a dirty /spool file system, with a ghost file flying around dated round 19 December 2019, six weeks ago. Why was it still there? fsck fixed it, but it shouldn't have been necessary. lagoon came up fine, but I couldn't start X: [ 22.677] (II) NVIDIA(0): Virtual screen size determined to be 640 x 480 [ 22.677] (WW) NVIDIA(0): Unable to get display device for DPI computation.
Winding down RootBSD
So finally everything seems to be working with the server migration. I still need to keep my eye on DNS, but it's working. Time for a final backup, which took barely 10 minutes: real 9m24.397s user 6m30.093s sys 0m53.825s And then move it to lax: === grog@oldwww (/dev/pts/3) ~ 1 -> time scp /oldwww.tar.gz lax: oldwww.tar.gz 100% 1991MB 24.6MB/s 01:21 real 1m23.426s user 0m16.129s sys 0m9.901s Nearly 7 times as fast!
Solving the VNC console issue
Mark Price of RootBSDNetActuate added to yesterday's ticket, again suggesting I look at proxies. Discussed the matter at length on IRC, and in the end came to the conclusion that yes, it could be part of the problem, if the client didn't uniquely identify itself. But I don't use a proxy on the browser I use for that purpose. OK, which browsers use the local proxy http://cache.lemis.com/? Not the one I normally use for this sort of thing. So I tried again. And it worked, and I was able to enter a large number of the letters in the alphabet, 20 out of 26, more than in the original Latin alphabet.
What purpose core dumps?
firefox is a remarkably unreliable program, like all other web browsers that I know. On teevee I have come to the practice of restarting it every day. But how? It seems that the best choice is simply to (X terminology) destroy it, which sends a SIGQUIT (I think). Problem: that generates a core dump. In the good old days we just let it happen. But firefox is a modern program. No simple 60 MB core files for it, not like Emacs. It regularly generates multi-gigabyte core files, in the process swapping in all the useless crud that the VM system has carefully tucked away, and leaving a file that nobody in his right mind wants to look at.
Programmer's ABCs
Decades ago I read Datamation, which I found to be quite a good magazine for its time. And over the years it contained a number of humorous articles, one of which I tried to reconstruct at Programmer's ABCs. And now somebody has scanned in what appear to be all issues, and I can complete the ABCs. I recalled most of them relatively well, but it's amazing how many details I forgot on the way.
DNS: Done?
So now the 24 hour TTL for narrawin.com has expired, and I can update the zone files to point only to the new systems. While I'm at it I should add ffm.lemis.com, on which I can also run a name server. And the others? Took a look at the configuration on ozlabs.org, which looked like nothing I have ever seen before. Stephen Rothwell explained: my configuration is in my own directory hierarchy in ~/etc/bind/, and I can maintain it myself. Took a look. Yes, indeed, the cruft of decades: === grog@bilbo (/dev/pts/1) ~/etc/bind 114 -> l -rt total 1 -rw-r--r-- 1 grog bind 522 Jun 29 2008 db.vinum.org -rw-r--r-- 1 grog bind 744 Jun 29 2008 db.begemot.org -rw-r--r-- 1 grog bind 5869 Jun 29 2008 db.groogle.net -rw-r--r-- 1 grog grog 832 Jun 30 2008 named.conf-slave-narrawin -rw-r--r-- 1 bind ...
Server migration: next step
OK, time to finalize the name server migration. I have a name server running on lax.lemis.com, but the world doesn't know about it. What do I need to do? First, of course, copy the zone files to the existing master name server, currently ns1.lemis.com. And when I activate it, the master name server ceases to be a visible name server at all, though it will still allow zone transfers. What about the other name servers, ns2.lemis.com, ns4.lemis.com and ns6.gandi.net? ns6.gandi.net is clearly a slave, but I'm not even sure about the other two.
RootBSD problem solution
Response to yesterday's ticket from RootBSDNetActuate today: I was able to login to VNC without issue and run service sshd restart. I was unable to replicate your problem unfortunately with VNC. My recommendation is to try logging into VNC in a private or incognito window as something may be cached. And indeed the sshd service was running again. But no, it couldn't be cached information. I had tried this on many different browsers on different systems, on one of which I had reset all cache content, and it's a problem that I had reported two years ago.
Slow migration from old server
I really need to get off the old server by the end of the month. I've been meaning to do it since August last year, but this time I wanted to do it right and without pain. Today I started the name server on the new server (lax.lemis.com). Worked fine. I thought. But then I saw: Jan 25 05:44:17 lax postfix/smtpd[1576]: connect from unknown[96.47.72.81] Jan 25 05:44:18 lax postfix/smtpd[1576]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[96.47.72.81]: 450 4.7.25 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [96.47.72.81]; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<mx2.freebsd.org> Huh?
More phone smart
Why did I miss the phone call from Elysian Energy? I had the phone in my pocket at the time, with the ring tone set to ?loud?. Test it. Nothing, just a vibration. Dammit, what's wrong with the thing now? Fought my way through the menus, in the process discovering a couple of short cuts that could be useful in the future: But it didn't tell me how to allow it to ring again, and I couldn't get it to do so. Lots of fighting the system with increasingly loud cursing, and ultimately came to the conclusion that the upgrade to Android 9 had disabled my custom ring tone, but only when called.
Smart Home meets Delacombe Town Centre
After that dropped into Bunnings in Delacombe Town Centre, partially looking for clips for my camera strap. I had been told that they had them, but not here. And this is, I'm told, Bunnings' biggest shop of all. What they did have was an advertisement: I suppose that's inevitable. Will we really live in a future where a smart phone is central to our lives?
The regular NBN outage
I had already had enough fun with various technical problems today, so of course the National Broadband Network had to chip in to make the day perfect, with a 111 minute outage in the middle of the day. Sadly I'm coming to accept them.
More OI.Share fun
On Monday I established that just about the only use of Olympus' OI.Share app was to set the time on the camera, and even that was painful. But wait: what about video? One issue with the PIXIO ?Robot Cameraman? is that you can't easily start and finish recording from horseback. Can OI.Share do that? Yes! Well, in its normal broken way: So you buy an expensive camera capable of 60p and even 120p, and then you use a broken toy app on a toy phone to castrate it again.
More E-M5 Mark III experience
Gradually Yvonne has been using her Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark III more, but today she asked me to take some photos for her. That was probably worthwhile. Once again I found things to change: this ?Rec View?, a silly term describing the time to display the previous image on the LCD after taking it. The idea is good for people still in the analogue mindset: show the image so that you can evaluate it. When taking multiple shots, it gets in the way of the viewfinder. We've already seen this with Chris Bahlo's camera 2 years ago. Die! But this thing also does ?Wi-Fi?, right?
Migrating DNS to new server
There's not very much left on oldwww.lemis.com. I really should migrate the remainder before the end of the month. The big one is DNS, and in principle that's relatively simple. Or is it? The configuration files have now completed their wandering through the directory hierarchy, it seems, from /etc/namedb/ via /var/named/etc/namedb to /usr/local/etc/namedb, and of course sample configuration files have been installed in /usr/local/etc/namedb. They're probably needed, as I noted when I checked named.conf: ; DNS resource files for lemis.com ; Greg Lehey, LEMIS, 21 January 1995 ; $Id: diary-jan2020.php,v 1.20 2020/01/19 02:57:24 grog Exp $ Is that date correct?
Understanding Wayland
As planned, took a look at The real story behind Wayland and X , a video presented by Daniel Stone at linux.conf.au in Canberra in 2013. It was quite a disappointment. There was no description of functionality differences at all. Does Wayland support multiple screens? My guess is yes, but it's just a guess. Does Wayland support networking? Hard to say. The talk was somewhat rambling, and it pointed at known weaknesses in the X implementation, but it somewhat overstated the case. They were trying to get Wayland to the performance level of VNC. But VNC has terrible graphics performance, way behind X.
Another grid power failure
Another grid power failure today, probably 1 second at 10:27:04.
Old fogey works around mouse problems
Yesterday I switched mice because of issues when changing screens. Things changed, but they're not fixed. The Jenkins mouse doesn't divulge passwords, but it does frequently select large parts of a window when deiconfiying it. Does this relate to multiple screens? I don't know. At some point I suspect the mouse driver; potentially the mice are noisy (part of being wireless?) , and the driver should only accept a ?key press? if it stays for more than a minimum period of time (milliseconds?) . Maybe I should have another look at that mouse driver. The feedback on IRC was interesting: I must be the last person using such old-fashioned software, X with multiple screens, let alone networking (something that I use a lot).
Mouse issues
I've had difficulties with computer mice literally for decades. As described a couple of years ago, there are issues with spurious key press events when changing X screens. In the case of the Logitech M705 MARATHON mouse, these frequently result in texts being pasted in unrelated windows. The most embarrassing cases are when I publish sensitive information, like in April 2001, when I accidentally published the password to the FreeBSD-announce mailing list. But it hasn't stopped. I suspect that it's the mouse driver, but I failed completely to make sense of the code?maybe a reason that the bug has lived so long.
Fixing email bounces
So far I've established that reichertconsult.de accepts mail from eureka.lemis.com, but not from lagoon.lemis.com. Why? Looking at the headers, messages from eureka or teevee have: From: [email protected] And messages from lagoon have: From: [email protected] Why? And should that make a difference? It's ugly, so let's get rid of it. Looking through sendmail.cf no longer looked as easy, so back to the source of all wisdom, ?The Complete FreeBSD? (in this case, third edition, since after that I switched to postfix).
The daily email problem
Mail from Yvonne in the course of the day: ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors ----- <[email protected]> (reason: 550-Sender verification is required but failed. (ID:550:0:5) Huh? What does that mean? How I wish that MUAs would report problems correctly. Further investigation showed that lagoon is still running sendmail, and that it's delivering directly. Given prior experience, I'm surprised that she hasn't run into trouble earlier. OK, what to do? I don't want to go through the whole postfix setup again. How do you set a relay host in sendmail?
DxO: Sting in the tail
So Yvonne took a couple of really forgettable photos with her new Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark III: Put them into DxO PhotoLab, and what do we see? This image cannot be processed since its EXIF data cannot be read or is corrupted. Huh? What went wrong there? Checked the Exif data: nothing wrong, as expected. More DxO Exif processing breakage? I've seen plenty in the past. Does it do that with JPEG images as well?
More Android insights
One of the possibilities of fixing my Android phone problems was: (Maybe) the display can be found in the ?notifications?, apparently that part of the display revealed by ?swiping? down from the top. Tried that today. First called myself with the phone switched off: OK, that's normal enough. But when the phone is switched on, I get: That's what I got with Helen's call yesterday.
Still more mail pain
Mail seems to be running smoothly now. But there's always an exception. Yvonne asked me today to check if something was wrong with an email she was expecting. Yes: Jan 7 00:20:55 lax postfix/smtpd[69637]: warning: hostname sau-04a27-or.servercontrol.com.au does not resolve to address 180.92.199.61: hostname nor servname provided, or not known Jan 7 00:20:55 lax postfix/smtpd[69637]: connect from unknown[180.92.199.61] Jan 7 00:20:55 lax postfix/smtpd[69637]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[180.92.199.61]: 450 4.7.25 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [180.92.199.61]; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<sau-80340-or.asimar.com.au> Jan 7 00:20:55 lax postfix/smtpd[69637]: disconnect from unknown[180.92.199.61] ehlo=1 mail=1 rcpt=0/1 data=0/1 rset=1 quit=1 commands=4/6 A clear case of incorrect MUA or DNS configuration, and something that I should reject.
Daily Android pain
Helen called back on my mobile phone, since that's the network she uses. Normally the call indication looks like this: But this one was different: This one's simulated, of course, so the caller (?Home?) is incorrect. OK, ACCEPT. Display changes, phone keeps ringing. I couldn't find any way to get back to answer the call, and in the end she hung up. Dammit, what use is a phone if you can't answer it?
Keep all photos?
I've gradually developed a basic rule with my photos: keep all photos, even those that don't appear to have any use. That fits in with my career in high availability computing, where any data loss is disaster. It also goes with a deep-set impression that I got watching Blow-up over 50 years ago. An important part of the story was an image that the photographer was going to discard, when he discovered that it contained a clue of a murder. But sometimes I have to accept that not all data is holy. To get the photo of the spark on the insulator I used the E-M1 Mark II's stupidly named ?Pro Capture?
Daily email problem
And now I thought I had really fixed the email issues on the external server. But today Yvonne came to me and told me that somebody was getting email rejected: Of course the Facebook world drops important information like date and time. But it was easy enough to find in the server logs: Jan 2 20:35:42 lax postfix/smtpd[10520]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from delivery.mailspamprotection.com[198.143.161.18]: 550 5.7.1 <delivery.mailspamprotection.com[198.143.161.18]>: Client host rejected: 310 http://www.lemis.com/dontspam.html. Please use your ISP's mail server.; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<delivery.mailspamprotection.com> Yes, that's a bug, not a feature.
Android update
By coincidence, discovered that there was an Android update available for my mobile phone, to release 9.0 (with some silly epithet). OK, download and install. Somehow it went well, but when I tried to scroll the task list (or whatever it's called), it no longer worked. Ah, this is an undocumented user interface change: in release 8 you scrolled up and down, in release 9 it's left and right. That could be an improvement, but why don't you get told about these things? The other difference I've noticed so far is definitely an improvement: the ?Beep-BEEP Beep-BEEP?
Fixing spam blockages
Yesterday's ticket response from Vultr didn't help much, but it did mention one thing: For this specific list you will be required to do so as they require rDNS entries to be setup for the IP and will require your input as the mail server administrator. https://spfbl.net/en/delist/ That's nonsensical for two reasons: firstly, the rDNS entries are there, and secondly they're Vultr's responsibility. But it was worth going to https://spfbl.net/en/delist/ to see what they say. Yes, no rDNS. Did they check? I did, and it was OK.
Email server: worth the trouble?
A while back I got all the wrinkles sorted out in the email configuration on lax.lemis.com, my external server that also answers to the name www.lemis.com. It took hardly more than 3 months. Why so long? I've been running an email server since March 1990, not quite 30 years. I've written a book including information on how to configure sendmail and (later edition) postfix. But somehow things are much more complicated now. Still, it's working. Then I came into the office this morning and read: 66BFC285F3 747 Tue Dec 31 05:46:30 [email protected] (host mx01.t-online.de[194.25.134.72] refused to talk to me: 554 IP=45.32.70.18 - A problem occurred.
Happy New Year!
For the past 7 years we've been sending out a Christmas letter instead of Christmas cards. And I started again this year, until it occurred to me: why Christmas? It's a letter telling people what we have done in the past (calendar) year, so the very end of the year seems more appropriate. So from this year on it's a New Year's letter, and today I got it out, just on time: here. 45 minutes later Warren Toomey wrote: Hmm, for me it's empty under both Firefox and Chromium.
Bushfires and Android
Somehow, try as I might, I can't make friends with Android. Things are so bad that I can't understand how anybody can live with them, so maybe part of it is my specific phone. What I see is: Every Android phone seems to be implemented differently. This is possibly the biggest issue in my case. I just can't work out what it's trying to do, and I can't find documentation.
NFS fail race condition
While opening or closing a window in the office yesterday evening, it seems that I wobbled a connection to the external /videobackup disk drive: Dec 29 21:49:19 eureka kernel: ugen0.9: <Seagate> at usbus0 (disconnected) ... Dec 29 21:49:21 eureka kernel: ugen0.9: <Seagate> at usbus0 Dec 29 21:49:21 eureka kernel: umass1: <Seagate Expansion Desk, class 0/0, rev 3.00/1.00, addr 22> on usbus0 So the disk was still there, but the mount was invalidated. It was NFS exported, and teevee uses it. This morning at 4:00 it ran into trouble: Mon 30 Dec 2019 04:00:00 AEDT [tcp] eureka:/videobackup: Permission denied ...
Boop?Boop?Boop
It's another hot weekend, not that unusual at this time of year: my weather data doesn't point at a smoking gun with ?climate change? written on it. But the flies love it, and I've taken to taking the dogs for a walk with a veil: What a joy when the air conditioner is on the blink. In the evening the temperature gradually dropped to below what the toy air conditioner could produce, so we flung open the windows and... no change. There was almost no wind.
Modern-day resource hogs
Once upon a time Emacs was considered a resource hog, in the long-gone days of the 20th century: ?Eight Megabytes And Continually Swapping? gives the lie. And then came web browsers with a memory hunger than blows my mind. Move over, firefox. The real hog is Java, or at least applications that use it. Today I started MediathekView, a java application, on teevee, and had to wait for it to start up and read in its programme list: PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND 9543 grog 22 21 0 1780M 409M CPU2 2 6:38 11.04% firefox 16996 grog 24 52 0 2505M 1173M uwait 1 13:00 1.16% java 1112 grog ...
Your tripod is on its way!
A couple of days ago I was musing about the lack of tracking number for my new tripod. But they've made up for it: ?19 Dec 2019 3:58 pm?. That's two days after I received it! Am I going to get another one? Off to follow the tracking number, helped by eBay's polite refusal to provide a link, and ultimately found this: That's the presumably roughly correct information, modulo missing timestamps.
Bushfire! Where? What?
On a day like today we keep an eye on the emergency services web site. I've been grumbling about this site and its predecessors for over 10 years, but it has only marginally improved. Today Yvonne noticed what could be smoke to the east. Check http://emergency.vic.gov.au/. Yes, many fires: What is all that stuff? Looking in more detail made it clear that you can't believe what you see. Yes, doubtless there's at least one fire, but: Which is the most dangerous?
NBN Christmas Joke
One of the eternal NBN planned outage messages today, making 4 upcoming outages in total over the next 6 weeks. But this one was clearly a joke: NBNCo has let us know that they are planning network maintenance in your area, and that your service at <strong>29 STONES RD, DEREEL VIC</strong> will be affected.<br> The details are: - Start date and time: Fri 31st January 2020 00:00 AEDT - End date and time: Fri 31st January 2020 06:00 AEDT You may experience the following interruptions during the maintenance - 1 min One minute?
Communicating with Telstra customers
Voice mail from my cousin Robert Herbert today. It seems that he doesn't have our real phone number. He had sent me an SMS a couple of days ago, but I hadn't seen it?it was probably announced by one of those strange beep sequences that Android loves to send. Called Robert up on the phone (now isn't that an old-fashioned way to communicate? I suspect that it's so complicated on ?smart? phones that people choose other methods) and discovered that he and Brendan will be down this way on Monday. Time for a dinner party? He'll discuss with Brendan. In the meantime I have to send them an email, and that doesn't work well with Telstra.
Mutt problems
I chose to send the duplicate emails from freefall.freebsd.org. Things weren't quite as I expected: === grog@freefall (/dev/pts/45) ~ 1 -> mutt ELF interpreter /usr/libexec/ld-elf.so.1 not found, error 8 Abort trap Huh? OK, contact the admins, and Li-Wen Hsu replied pretty quickly asking an obvious question: Which mutt are you running? I should have thought of that, but what could I be using? === grog@freefall (/dev/pts/45) ~ 5 -> which mutt ./mutt === grog@freefall (/dev/pts/45) ~ 6 -> l mutt -rwxr-xr-x 1 grog grog 1191851 Dec 6 2000 mutt Look at that date!
More domain registration insights
Discussing my domain name issues on IRC with Peter Jeremy today. He came up with some interesting details, including this explanation of ?internet keyword? from chinaregistry.org.cn: Internet Keyword, a newly emerged technique for visiting network names, is a convenient way to realize the visitation of the browser by establishing a corresponding relationship between Internet Keyword and URL. You only need to use the language you are familiar with to tell the browser the address of the Internet Keyword you want to go. But other links were more interesting, like this one.
You, too, can register lemis.cn
More mail from Kevin Liu of chinaregistry.org.cn today: We have already suggested that they should choose another name to avoid this conflict according as your company have no relationship with them, but they persist in this name as China domain names (lemis.cn, lemis.com.cn, lemis.net.cn, lemis.org.cn) and internet keyword. In our opinion, maybe they do the similar business as your company then register it to promote his company. As is known to all, the domain name registration based on the international principle is opened to company and individual.
I want lemis!
Mail from Gareth Jing today, presumably associated with Kanghong Ltd: To whom it concerns, We will register the China domain names "lemis.cn" "lemis.com.cn" "lemis.net.cn" "lemis.org.cn" and internet keyword "lemis" and have submitted our application. We are waiting for Mr. Kevin Liu's approval and think these CN domains and internet keyword are very important for our business. Even though Mr. Kevin Liu advised us to change another name, we will persist in this name.
Where did aspell go?
While testing Friday's aspell problems, I renamed /usr/local/bin/aspell to test the results. And I forgot to rename it back again! What did I call it? On one system I called it foo (a safe name), but not on lagoon. OK, pkg update. No, it's up to date, who cares if it's complete? OK, remove it and reinstall it. No problem. No aspell. Why didn't it install it? That doesn't make sense to me. Of course, there are easier ways to find the old aspell binary. List the directory by time and look for other programs that are installed: -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 150,712 14 Nov 12:20 apsel -r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 2,050 14 Nov 12:20 aspell-import ...
lemis.cn?
Unexpected mail today, from chinaregistry.org.cn, the Chinese domain registrar: A company called Kanghong Ltd requested ?lemis? as their internet keyword and China (CN) domain names (lemis.cn, lemis.com.cn, lemis.net.cn, lemis.org.cn) They wanted to know if it had anything to do with me. Nice of them to contact me, but what should I do? Years ago lemis.de, once my domain, was taken over by somebody else, though currently it's registered to parkingcrew.net, clearly a cowboy.
Daily mail fun
After the annoyance with the net failure yesterday, I gave up on what I was doing with mail. But looking at that transport table again made things clear: .lemis.com :smtp:mx0.lemis.com:25 * smtp: Syntax error! It should have been this, without the colon in the predicate: .lemis.com smtp:mx0.lemis.com:25 OK, try that. Success! Next, what do we do with narrawin.com? Chris forwards her email to Gmail, so all we need to do is send it on.
More bloody network problems!
While trying to fix my mail config, my network link failed in mid-command. I got as far as typing le of less, and that was all. What caused that? The usual tools showed that nothing was going across the link: Looked at the NTD, but it looked normal, and usually the NBN people are too polite to work at weekends. Was Aussie Broadband doing some reconfiguration work that went wrong? It wouldn't be the first time. Finally decided to brave the mobile phone app. No go: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/6) /usr/local/bin 196 -> tcpdump -n -i xl0 12:58:11.932614 ARP, Request who-has 167.179.136.1 tell 167.179.139.35, length 28 12:58:12.928504 ARP, Request who-has 167.179.136.1 tell 167.179.139.35, length 28 12:58:14.302346 ARP, Request who-has 167.179.136.1 tell 167.179.139.35, length 28 ...
Mail config, the daily pain
So my mail configuration is finally working. Or is it? lagoon is still sending all mail to www. Is that a good idea? No, for at least two reasons. The mail about the nightly backup, which should end up in my inbox on eureka, gets sent to www too, not exactly efficient. But from there it can't get back! Dec 13 22:18:10 w4 postfix/qmgr[29383]: 787C727FF9: from=<[email protected]>, size=59648, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Dec 13 22:18:40 w4 postfix/smtp[36173]: 787C727FF9: to=<[email protected]>, relay=none, delay=43572, delays=43542/0/30/0, dsn=4.4.1, status=deferred (connect to eureka.lemis.com[192.109.197.137]:25: Operation timed out) It should, of course, send to mx0.lemis.com, the external address for eureka.
Talking to Apples
DxO PhotoLab version 3 is out, and normally I'd try it out. But DxO doesn't like dischord, my Microsoft box: it runs ?Windows? 7, too old for something modern like PhotoLab. So that's yet another upgrade on my path. But recently Chris Bahlo gave me an old MacBook Pro, and DxO runs on Apple as well. Now to find out how to access it from a sane system. VNC, wasn't it? Checked. Yes, I have a program called vncviewer on eureka. What do I need on silberapfel (the Apple)? Nothing, it turns out. Newer versions of Mac OS include a VNC server.
The eternal mail configuration
OK, why is Gmail silently swallowing my emails? Did some testing, in which it appears that it's too polite to make any complaint, even when sending mail to nonexistent destinations (or is there really a [email protected]?) . OK, let's guess that it's my MTA behind NAT, and let's finally configure the server on www as it should be. First, modify main.cf on lagoon to relay to www. Try it out. No change: it continued to send messages directly: Dec 13 12:19:10 lagoon sm-mta[90492]: xBD1J9PU090492: from=<[email protected]>, size=386, class=0, nrcpts=1, msgid=<[email protected]>, proto=ESMTPS, daemon=Daemon0, relay=localhost [127.0.0.1] Dec 13 12:19:10 lagoon sendmail[90491]: xBD1J9Mk090491: [email protected], ctladdr=groggyhimself (1004/1000), delay=00:00:01, xdelay=00:00:01, mailer=relay, pri=30052, relay=[127.0.0.1] [127.0.0.1], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (xBD1J9PU090492 Message accepted for delivery) Dec 13 12:19:21 lagoon sm-mta[90494]: STARTTLS=client, relay=mx1.freebsd.org., version=TLSv1.3, verify=FAIL, cipher=TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384, bits=256/256 Dec 13 12:19:25 lagoon sm-mta[90494]: xBD1J9PU090492: to=<[email protected]>, ctladdr=<[email protected]> (1004/1000), delay=00:00:16, xdelay=00:00:15, mailer=esmtp, pri=30386, relay=mx1.freebsd.org.
Next step with lagoon
In principle lagoon is now up and running, and even serving mail for our domain, something that I had never planned. But Yvonne still had issues: F11 didn't work. OK, that's clearly in the context of editing emails with Emacs, where I had bound it to a function called tidy-up-reply. And of course it said what was worrying it: Undefined dictionary: british In other words, I hadn't installed aspell. OK, switch to VTY 2 to install it.
More mail fun
So now mail is working, if not quite the way I expected. Still, until I read up on the subject it'll do the job. But then Yvonne came and told me that Danielle Teo wasn't getting the email that she sent. Danielle's on Gmail, and it's easy enough to check: Dec 11 16:46:15 lagoon sm-mta[83327]: xBB5kFGK083327: from=<[email protected]>, size=1312, class=0, nrcpts=1, msgid=<[email protected]>, proto=ESMTPS, daemon=Daemon0, relay=localhost [127.0.0.1] Dec 11 16:46:15 lagoon sendmail[83324]: xBB5kFXI083324: [email protected], ctladdr=yxlehey (1005/1001), delay=00:00:00, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=relay, pri=31129, relay=[127.0.0.1] [127.0.0.1], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (xBB5kFGK083327 Message accepted for delivery) Dec 11 16:46:20 lagoon sm-mta[83329]: xBB5kFGK083327: to=<[email protected]>, ctladdr=<[email protected]> (1005/1001), delay=00:00:05, xdelay=00:00:05, mailer=esmtp, pri=31312, relay=gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.
NBN outages: Telstra to the rescue?
The situation with NBN reliability remains unacceptable. But today on IRC, Peter Jeremy pointed me to a search path to find that Telstra apparently offers a ?modem? for NBN that features 4G wireless backup?for no extra cost, if I read the documentation correctly. Yes, only 6 MB/s downlink, but not so long ago that was a luxury: Is it worth going through the pain with Telstra to get that feature? The pain started with ?check your address?, with this tastefully formatted message: Why no FW signup online?
More email fun
Another mail bounce message today, reminding me that the status quo is insufficient: the current external mail server (oldwww.lemis.com) claims to be www.lemis.com, but that's a different address, causing a number of sites, notably FreeBSD, to reject mail. I need to change something for my outgoing mail. But since they removed the block on my outgoing SMTP, there's no reason to use any external server as a relay any more. So how about just updating the transport database to deliver directly? No go: Dec 11 11:34:02 eureka postfix/cleanup[8344]: BDB72263592: message-id=<[email protected]> Dec 11 11:34:02 eureka postfix/qmgr[8264]: BDB72263592: from=<[email protected]>, size=308, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Dec 11 11:34:02 eureka postfix/smtp[8346]: BDB72263592: to=<[email protected]>, relay=none, delay=0.22, delays=0.02/0.01/0.2/0, dsn=4.4.4, status=SOFTBOUNCE (Host or domain name not found.
TIO: NBN can do what it wants
Call from Yash from the TIO today referring to yesterday's complaint, and wanting to know what it was all about and what to do going forward. Yesterday? I didn't put in a complaint yesterday. It was on Friday. And I had given more detail than they expected, so much that I couldn't paste it in their form. Oh, they're not allowed to follow URLs. So could I please explain going forward? What? They make judgements on disputes without being able to use the tools of their trade? OK, I explained it to him briefly. Sorry, they can't complain about the NBN choosing their maintenance schedule, only missed appointments and property damage.
Rejecting mail
It's been over a month since I did my last mail server changes, something that should long have been finished. Things seem to be working, but I have something like 200 messages in the mail queue on oldwww.lemis.com. Most look like this: 3D6B41B728BA 1886 Fri Dec 6 01:31:43 [email protected] (host mx0.lemis.com[167.179.139.35] said: 450 4.1.1 <[email protected]>: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in local recipient table (in reply to RCPT TO command)) [email protected] This time that's really [email protected], a fake address that I use in this diary to protect against people like [email protected].
TIO complaint
Yvonne in round 10:00 this morning with the sad news ?We're off the net!?. And so it was. NBN planned outage? Presumably. It would be difficult to recognize an unplanned outage, since just about the whole day, every day, is slated for a ?planned outage?. Fortunately it was relatively short, barely half an hour, but it reminded me that I had set a deadline of last week for some kind of action to be taken. Of course none was. So: off to http://www.tio.com.au/ to enter a complaint. That in itself was a problem. They wanted all sorts of information that made little sense in context, but then there was a box to enter the details of the complaint.
Revenge through spam
I can't be the only person who is receiving torrents of spam from RAY-BAN and UGG BOOTS. Time to update my ~/.procmailrc file. Why do renowned companies resort to such tactics? Why, do renowned companies resort to such tactics? While looking at things to filter on, noticed that the headers appear to have nothing to do with the companies: From: "RAY-BAN[2019]" <[email protected]> From: "RAY-BAN" <[email protected]> From: "RAY-BAN[2019]" <[email protected]> From: "UGG BOOTS" <[email protected]> And so on. Interestingly, the domain part of the email address is correct, and they're presumably expecting people to use toy MUAs that are too polite to show the originator's email address.
X problems
One of the puzzling things I had with lagoon was still outstanding when I started the upgrade: Two years ago I put in the current display card, which identifies as: [ 1606.734] (II) NVIDIA(0): NVIDIA GPU GeForce GT 710 (GK208) at PCI:1:0:0 (GPU-0) That's very convenient, because on teevee I had: [ 18.506] (II) NVIDIA(0): NVIDIA GPU GeForce GT 710 (GK208) at PCI:1:0:0 (GPU-0) In other words, exactly the same hardware.
/etc/crontab problems: solved?
Why isn't cron on lagoon honouring the contents of /etc/crontab? Spent some time RTFMing, without any obvious insights. And then I checked the log files: Dec 2 09:43:00 lagoon /usr/sbin/cron[900]: (*system*) RELOAD (/etc/crontab) OK, clearly it's looking at /etc/crontab, and presumably it's doing it automatically. But that was 2 days ago, and it was the only time. When does it reload? When the file is updated, in other words when the modification time stamp increases? === root@lagoon (/dev/pts/0) /etc/X11 20 -> l /etc/crontab -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 768 30 Jun 2018 /etc/crontab That makes sense.
More mail forwarding insights
I worked around my problems with /etc/mail/aliases on lagoon by creating a file /root/.forward that forwarded all email to [email protected]. And that works, and I'm getting root mail for lagoon again. And then on a hunch I did: === root@lagoon (/dev/pts/3) /usr/src 6 -> diff /destdir/root/.forward ~/.forward === root@lagoon (/dev/pts/3) /usr/src 7 -> That's exactly what I did last time! So it's quite possible that mail on lagoon hasn't been working properly for a long time.
lagoon continued
OK, lagoon is up and running, but I had had some strange problems installing the userland after the last buildworld, probably as a result of moving file systems around. OK, update and build the latest FreeBSD 12-STABLE. It crashed on me! And in a way I know: Dec 4 09:05:05 lagoon kernel: pid 4073 (c++), jid 0, uid 0, was killed: out of swap space Dec 4 09:05:07 lagoon kernel: pid 4082 (c++), jid 0, uid 0, was killed: out of swap space Huh? I have 20 GB of swap!
YouTube reviews: fake news?
I've already taken Tony Northrup to task for his misinterpretation of ?ISO? and his claims of the demise of the Micro Four Thirds system. In the latter case, in particular, I suspected that he was paid to spread rumours, as he did two weeks ago again about Olympus closing their camera business. But it seems that he doesn't just have it in for Olympus. He also has a clip Nikon is DYING ?(but it's not too late)?, and most intriguingly, Are DSLR Cameas DEAD?!. That seemed worth watching. It seems that Ricoh (the only serious camera maker without a mirrorless offering) has claimed Ricoh Thinks Mirrorless Shooters Will Switch Back to DSLRs in 1-2 Years.
Email requirements
Email proves to be a bigger problem than I had expected. I need to take a step back and think what I really need, and then how I achieve it. There are at least three separate configurations: Firstly, the main email configuration at eureka, externally better known as mx0.lemis.com. This is the final destination for all mail to lemis.com. What do I need? Send mail to the outside world with a uniform domain name @lemis.com. This is not the standard, which leaves the complete hostname (for example @lagoon.lemis.com).
lagoon again
Basically things are working on lagoon now. Email continues to be a problem, but I have workarounds for the time being, and I'll need to spend more time to consider all the issues. Apart from that, there are things like the nightly backups. They're run from a cron job in /etc/crontab: 0 21 * * * root /home/local/bin/cleanup But for some reason it doesn't get started, and there's no obvious reason why not. As expected, there were problems running my photo software. The strangest one was: === yvonne@lagoon (/dev/pts/1) ~/Photos/20191203 26 -> for i in `ls *.jpeg *.gif *.png 2>/dev/null`; do echo $i; done | by 2 /Photos/Tools/mktinysmall.php /Photos/Tools `pwd` tiny 67500; MYDIR=`pwd`; IMAGELINKS=`pwd`/Imagelinks; if [ -f $IMAGELINKS ]; then (cd ~/public_html/Photos/`basename $MYDIR`/tiny && checkimagelinks $IMAGELINKS tiny); fi sh: /Photos/Tools/mktinysmall.php: not found ...
Understanding postfix
So lagoon is up and running, and so far Yvonne hasn't found anything wrong. But there's still the mail configuration to worry about, and it occurs to me that I haven't really ever understood postfix. That's why I still use a configuration that I cobbled together 18 years ago, and which I have been hacking ever since. Today I had two main problems. Firstly, I don't really understand postfix's main.cf configuration file. I've told it to use a virtual map for delivery outside the local system: # $Id: diary-dec2019.php,v 1.2 2019/12/03 01:51:17 grog Exp $ # While they're blocking 25 * smtp:eureka.lemis.com postmap then converts this to a database format.
Rusty Wrench again
Mail from Linux Australia today, soliciting nominations for next year's ?Rusty Wrench Award?: The Rusty Wrench Award is Australia's highest honour for community contributions to the Open Source movement in the country. It was eponymously named after luminary Rusty Russell, one of Australia's most prominent contributors and community members, founder of linux.conf.au (as CALU, in 1999), and the inaugural recipient of the award. And how about that, I was there at the first presentation, nearly 15 years ago at the conference dinner for linux.conf.au.
Google: don't obfuscate
Juha Kupiainen came up with some interesting information today: Google Slammed Over Chrome Change That Strips 'www' From Domain URLs . But it seems that Google doesn't care: When asked about this change in a long discussion thread on a mailing list, a Google staffer wrote: "www is now considered a 'trivial' subdomain, and hiding trivial subdomains can be disabled in flags (will also disable hiding the URL scheme)..." They may consider that to be the case.
Recovering lagoon, day 2
On with the recovery of lagoon today. In principle, it's simple. Change /boot/loader.conf on the first bootable partition: === root@lagoon (/dev/pts/3) /usr/src 36 -> rcsdiff -wu /destdir/boot/loader.conf --- /destdir/boot/loader.conf 2017/10/04 22:51:33 1.1 +++ /destdir/boot/loader.conf 2019/12/01 01:06:44 @@ -1,5 +1,5 @@ -currdev=disk0p1 -rootdev=disk0p1 +currdev=disk0p4 +rootdev=disk0p4 Copy or merge the important files in /etc/ to the new root partition, and we're away. Oh. The loader can't find the root partition. Somehow I had messed up my file systems, and the new /etc/fstab still reflected the old Vultr system: # Device Mountpoint FStype Options Dump Pass# /dev/ufs/rootfs / ufs rw 1 1 ...
Garage sale. Where?
Yvonne back from Ballarat with the news that there was a 5 town garage sale again, like they had last year. OK, details please. It's on the DEREEL OUTPOST Facebook group. OK, take a look: That's not exactly what I expected. Oh, says Yvonne, the addresses are on the ?rokewood, dereel, cape clear, cressy, skipton district buy swap and sell? list. OK, take a look. Members only. Apply for membership, but of course nothing happened. And Yvonne was out somewhere, so she couldn't help.
Recovering lagoon
What's the easiest and least disruptive way to recover the mess I made of lagoon? By the time I woke up this morning, the answer was clear: I need a Vulture. Off to create a new, small and temporary virtual machine, this time in Sydney, for no particular reason. OK, Create a new vulture, using FreeBSD 12.1, a relatively new release. The IP address brought back memories: 139.180.165.47.
Ports upgrade: sting in the tail
The upgrade to lagoon on Wednesday went relatively smoothly?I thought. Then Yvonne told me that she was having difficulties with her firefox. Oh. I had forgotten to stop firefox before upgrading it. In to take a look. Stop firefox. Start firefox. Hangs. That's very similar to problems I had under Microsoft on dischord a couple of weeks ago, and which I couldn't solve. It's been almost almost exactly 15 years since I started using firefox, and I still hate it with a passion. OK, start chrom* again. Ah, isn't that nice? It's too polite to state its name, going to the trouble of disabling the window manager in the process.
Web server load balancing
So how do you balance web servers? It seems that, for Apache, the answer is mod_proxy_balancer. Problem: my overload had gone away, so I could destroy Tokyo (OK, tyo.lemis.com). At least I know where to look next time. And the obvious thing to do is to install a web server on ffm.lemis.com, which isn't doing very much of use.
More web site overload
Last weekend was interesting for another reason. Syncing my diary to the external web server (www.lemis.com, alias w4.lemis.com) took forever, and then failed: Connection closed by 45.32.70.18 rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [sender] rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(226) [sender=3.1.2] Wed 27 Nov 2019 14:15:07 AEDT real 25m2.776s user 0m0.000s sys 0m0.034s Took a look at the top display, and once again the load average was up to 140 or so.
Upgrading lagoon
Yvonne off shopping today, time to upgrade the ports on lagoon, her system. She was gone for 4 hours, and I needed the whole time. Once again I got: Installed packages to be REMOVED: OpenEXR-2.2.1 emacs25-25.3_1,3 ImageMagick-6.9.9.28,1 ... Why does pkg always want to remove Emacs? It happens so regularly that I come to expect it. And once again it downloaded hundreds of binaries?716 of them, taking about 2 GB of downloads. And once again, when it was done, it reconsidered, and came up with: Number of packages to be removed: 45 Number of packages to be installed: 85 Number of packages to be upgraded: 576 Number of packages to be reinstalled: 44 ...
Faster mencoder transfer?
On IRC, Peter Jeremy suggested alternative processing methods for joining my video clips: <peterj> groggyhimself: Transcoding video using a CPU is slow. Is there a reason you need to transcode and can't just use ovc=copy oac=copy ? That makes sense. But then look at the difference in size: the transcoded files are 80% smaller. I think that makes up for the CPU usage.
Viewing the video clips
So now we have a total of five big video clips, nearly 10 GB in size (the values are MB): === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/17) ~/Photos/20191125 116 -> du -sc ../201911*/orig/*avi 1733 ../20191122/orig/1.avi 1052 ../20191122/orig/2.avi 1981 ../20191122/orig/3.avi 2578 ../20191123/orig/1.avi 2544 ../20191124/orig/1.avi 9886 total That's still only a fraction of the size of the originals: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/17) ~/Photos/20191125 117 -> du -sc ../201911*/orig/*MOV 66 ../20191111/orig/4B113692.MOV 35 ../20191119/orig/4B193845.MOV 3800 ../20191122/orig/4B223954.MOV 3799 ../20191122/orig/4B223955.MOV 1771 ../20191122/orig/4B223956.MOV 3803 ../20191122/orig/4B223957.MOV 2409 ../20191122/orig/4B223958.MOV 3799 ../20191122/orig/4B223959.MOV 3808 ../20191122/orig/4B223960.MOV 1541 ../20191122/orig/4B223961.MOV 87 ../20191122/orig/4B223962.MOV 3803 ../20191123/orig/4B233963.MOV 3808 ../20191123/orig/4B233964.MOV 3177 ../20191123/orig/4B233965.MOV 2 ../20191123/orig/4B234108.MOV 3792 ../20191124/orig/4B244136.MOV 3801 ../20191124/orig/4B244137.MOV 2681 ...
More Google pain
While uploading YouTube videos today, I found it convenient to do it from the browser instance running on eureka:0.3. Normally I do it from eureka:0.1 or eureka:0.2. It's the same IP address and the same browser (ancient version of firefox), but Google doesn't care: Read the message sent to your mobile phone, enter the digits shown on the browser into the phone. Done! Well, not even done. Not one, but two messages: A new device just signed in to your Google Account.
Microsoft problems?
Yvonne had 860 photos to process, made more difficult by her propensity to zoom in postprocessing. And she ran into trouble: the system seemed to hang, page refreshes didn't work. OK, stop DxO PhotoLab and try again. More problems. And then I noticed something strange: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/29) ~/Photos/20191122 1358 -> ruptime dischord down 0:42 eureka up 75+05:42, 22 users, load 1.87, 1.79, 1.70 euroa up 1+01:26, 0 users, load 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 lagoon up 34+04:11, 1 user, load 0.31, 0.25, 0.18 teevee ...
ffmpeg instead of mencoder?
mencoder was able to join my videos yesterday, but at what cost! One minute of video requires about 15 minutes of CPU time to convert! Can ffmpeg do better? Tried today and got similar results. The only difference was that it was much more complicated, and the first time I only managed to copy the first input file in about 90 minutes of CPU time.
Spam beats NBN
Seen in my inbox today: 207 + 22-11-2019 Aussie Broadband To [email protected] ( 584) + nbn Unscheduled Outage 208 N + 21-11-2019 UltraWifiPro Holiday To [email protected] ( 94) N + Give the Gift of High Speed Internet This Holiday Now wouldn't high speed Internet be a good idea? Reliability would be even better. To be fair to the National Broadband Network, this is one of the very few unscheduled outages. Normally they schedule them for just about the entire time. Was I hit by this one?
Joining video clips
So I have a number of videos from my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II, all less than 4 GB in size. How do I join them? Off looking on the web, and of course there's lots of stuff in the Microsoft space. But surely something like mencoder can do it? Off looking there and found surprisingly little basic information. But with a bit of experimentation discovered that I could join them with: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/14) ~/Photos/20191123/orig 245 -> mencoder -ovc x264 -oac mp3lame -o 1.avi 4B24413[678]* It wasn't all plain sailing, though.
More PIXIO fun
Today was the first day of Anke's clinic, but somehow she and Yvonne found time to do some more instruction in our arena, and I tried again to get the PIXIO ?Robot Cameraman? to track the rider. Last time I had tried an only slightly modified version of this arrangement from the manual: The only difference was that I had placed the camera in the equidistant from the sides. It also needed to point in the other direction (?out of the screen?) , but that has nothing to do with the orientation.
Dan Murphys: No customer service
Everybody knows Dan Murphy, the author of TECO, the first real computer editor. But in Australia there's another Dan Murphy, a large retailer of alcoholic drinks. And they're still trying to establish an online presence, and I have some kind of ?account? with them. Today they came up with an interesting offer: Adelaide Hills Sauvignon Blanc for $25 a bottle, but for members only $10. Is it worth it? They're selling in units of 6 bottles, so it was worth a try. Oh, you have to log in. No worries, details are saved, press ?log in?. After 5 minutes of spinning, gave up and tried in a different browser instance (also firefox), this time logging in first.
More Internet pain
Yvonne processed some photos today, by no means for the first time, but she ran into trouble syncing them to our external server. No response! Dammit, has it gone down? No, I could access it fine. But only from eureka. It proved that teevee couldn't access it either. After some examination, it proved to be the firewall (with ipfw and natd). The rules of interest are: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/11) ~ 363 -> ipfw show 00021 97446 86838832 allow ip from 45.32.70.18 to 167.179.139.35 ... 00050 608016833 700320792987 divert 8668 ip from any to any via xl0 So how does this work?
Goodbye, LEMIS
LEMIS ceased trading in 2007, but I've dragged my heels for years to get it deregistered. Finally it's done, as I discovered after asking my accountant what was going on?on 26 September. That's something like 40 years since it came to be, back in Friedrichsfeld. How time flies!
Preparing for NBN complaint
As if yesterday's outage wasn't enough, today I received a new announcement from Aussie Broadband: NBNCo has let us know that they are planning network maintenance in your area, and that your service at <strong>29 STONES RD, DEREEL VIC</strong> will be affected.<br> The details are: - Start date and time: Wed 4th December 2019 07:00 AEDT - End date and time: Thu 12th December 2019 20:00 AEDT - Window: 205.0 hours You may experience the following interruptions during the maintenance - 480 min - 480 min - 480 min - 480 min - 480 min Another 40 hours!
NBN: Goodwill exhausted
We've had an Internet link from the National Broadband Network for nearly 6 years now. When it was installed we were overjoyed. As Yvonne put it: But that was six years ago. During that time, you'd think that the NBN had done everything to erode this positive sentiment. Today, once again, we had an extended ?planned? outage, nearly 6½ hours. I suppose I should be grateful: they had promised three outages of 10 hours each. But what on Earth are they doing? In those 6 years we've had a total outage duration of over 5 days, or about 3.8 hours per month.
Updating photo workflow
I've been developing (not a pun) my photo workflow for nearly 20 years now, and I'm currently at revision 1.138 of the Makefile. A lot has clearly happened in that time. One of the central parts is a translation table in a file called Makejpeg. Its format has changed over the years: initially it was makejpeg and contained source file name, destination file name, rotation value and gamma correction value. Since I've been using DxO PhotoLab the last two are redundant, and I've been dropping gamma for some time. And makejpeg contained only photo information; I had a second single line file description that contained the description of the photos.
YouTube login restrictions?
Mail from Lena G. again today, explaining that youtube-dl is far too complicated for beginners. As I said, parallel universes, but I suppose it's more complicated if you've never been allowed to be in charge of a computer rather than having it in charge of you. And the question of being ?logged in?? She agrees, it doesn't make any sense: it comes from this video clip: Or does it? That clip (now 3 years old) doesn't mention ?logged in? at all, just the question of breaking copy protection.
Processing subtitles
We've been trying to watch an Austrian series, ?Vier Frauen und ein Todesfall?. Problem: it's in Austrian, and we really need subtitles to understand the finer points. OK, it comes with a subtitle file (in fact, depending on where I get them from, two, one ending in .ttml and the other in .de-AT.ttml). But mpv wants subtitles in .srt format. No problems, there's a program ttml2srt, which I have used a couple of years ago, not without pain. I got over that particular problem, but for a couple of weeks now I have been wrestling with this problem: === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/5) /spool/Series/Vier-Frauen-und-ein-Todesfall/02 6 -> python3 ttml2srt.py 02-03-Schlachtfest-14562238.de-AT.ttml > 02-03-Schlachtfest-14562238.srt Traceback (most recent call last): File "/home/local/bin/ttml2srt.py", line 169, in <module> print(content) UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character '\u2013' in position 31: ordinal not in range(256) ...
Video downloads: how the other half do it
Message today from Lena G. (she's too polite to mention her surname). It's strange for a number of reasons: it's in German, and it refers to a personal page http://www.lemis.com/grog/notes.php?page=Notes/radio, basically a list of download links. But she calls it an article and asked me to link to her page on YouTube download alternatives. There's another issue: I don't mention YouTube downloads at all on that page. OK, let's follow her link and find what it's all about. Two issues: how to download, and ?is it legal??. She mentions a surprising number of download programs that I have never heard of, all with some limitation.
Quora responds?
It's been several days since Quora ?collapsed? my replies, and I decided that I couldn't be bothered with them any more. I ?appealed? anyway, but didn't get any response. My ?couldn't be bothered? certainly seems to be appropriate. I still get messages asking for a personal response to questions, and I'd still be prepared to answer ones that are appropriate to my knowledge. So far, none of them appear to have been worth reading. Here are some, including the one that I think the best question: Is it safe to unplug a gas stove?
xkcd: Software update
I'm still dragging my feet about my software update, both on eureka and on the external servers. Today xkcd brought comfort: In particular, ?An update finally breaks a feature I'm unwilling to lose? reminds me of the breakage that firefox introduced a few releases back, meaning that I can no longer use Emacs bindings.
FreeBSD: Time flies when you're having fun
I have a daily cron job that sends me email showing the passage of my life, fraction by fraction, along with significant events that match the dates. From today's message: 5/8 life: Monday, 8 March 1993 2/3 life: Saturday, 24 February 1996 Feb 24 "Installing and running FreeBSD" submitted for publication, 1996 70% life: Wednesday, 8 July 1998 A third of my life already!
Your Academia web site
I've been subscribed to Academia for some time. A number of interesting papers appear there, and the ones I see are free, though clearly they're a commercial venture. From time to time I get a mail saying ?The name ?Greg Lehey? appears in a document?. That's interesting, of course, but every time I follow up I find that I have to pay to find out what the document is. And somehow there are too many references. Yes, I show up in various places, but (not surprisingly) mainly in computer literature, not quite Academia's focus. And I'm pretty sure that there are no false positives for my name.
SMTP for Dereel
OK, I have given up the idea of POP for the moment. Let's deliver mail directly to eureka and bypass this POP stuff. This is a long article, so there's a TL;DR. Why didn't I do this before? I did. It wasn't until I moved to Dereel and disappeared behind NAT that I had to give up direct delivery, because my external IP address keeps changing. But that's no longer the case: since I've been with Aussie Broadband, nearly 6 years, the external IP has only changed 3 or 4 times. So it makes sense to have the mail delivered directly.
Dovecot?
Now that qpopper no longer seems the way to go, started looking at setting up dovecot. That's no easier. Yes, there's a sample configuration file, but every line needs to be considered (and this time it's many more than 2), including all kinds of encryption to be done. Why? All this mail is transported in plain text via SMTP. Wouldn't it really make more sense to accept incoming SMTP on eureka? Why is this all so difficult? The problem with SMTP on eureka is that it doesn't solve Chris Bahlo's problems. But then it doesn't need to. She has a .forward file that forwards to her Gmail account.
Goodbye, Quora
Over the past three years I've spent quite a bit of time answering questions on Quora. Some were quite interesting and helped me learn things that I would otherwise never have considered. But there have been problems. Their policies for downvoting are non-transparent and offensive. I grumbled about this earlier this year, and it has happened again since. Downvoting is instant. Reinstating takes an ?appeal?, and that takes days. In every case so far, my replies have been reinstated, so the downvoting was clearly incorrect. But a little more even-handedness would go a long way. In addition, over the course of time the signal to noise ratio has dropped.
Mail pain, continued
There are really two parts of setting up email on the new server: sending mail (using Postfix (software) and receiving it (using not only Postfix, but also some POP3 client). Receiving is critical because it's very easy to lose mail if there's some configuration issue. And maybe I should try using eureka as the lowest-order MX. If something goes wrong, I can redirect the MX elsewhere. In the meantime, though, how about getting POP3 working? I'm using fetchmail on eureka and qpopper on the server. OK, try that. No joy: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/50) ~/public_html/net 18 -> fetchmail -p pop3 fetchmail: Connection errors for this poll: name 0: connection to www.lemis.com:pop3s [45.32.70.18/995] failed: Connection refused.
50 years!
50 years ago today, two milestones of computer history occurred, at least when seen from my perspective: At 6:30 GMT, the first two packets were sent across the first ARPANET link. Then one of the systems crashed. About 8 hours later I wrote my first computer program. How times change! Vint Cerf has written a blog entry from his perspective, carefully avoiding mention of the foundation of Yahoo!
Web site explosion
Another statistic from Statista today: ?How many websites are there?? Here their graphic: That makes me a really early adopter. When did I start? It must have been mid-1996, though Netcraft gives April 1997. That's unlikely to be the time I started: I was hardly at ?home? in April 1997 The only thing that came close was between about 20 April and 26 April, when I returned to Schellnhausen to pack up for our move to Australia. On the other hand, running a web site in those days was a very expensive business: I was on (ISDN) dialup, and almost every access caused the system to dial and cost me 0.12 DM.
Setting up mail on www
Setting up mail can't be that hard, can it? I described it in The Complete FreeBSD decades ago. But there are lots of twists. One is that the software has changed. I rewrote the MTA chapter for Postfix in 2002 and 2003, and the final printed version dates from 1 April 2003. And my Postfix configuration corresponds: revision 1.1 date: 2001/02/06 01:31:46; author: grog; state: Exp; Initial revision In those days, Postfix had multiple configuration files that have coalesced into main.cf. I really need to start from scratch.
Processing cropped images
Processing the images of the Thelymitras wasn't easy. DxO PhotoLab has a real issue with cropping: by default, it wants to maintain the aspect ratio of the original! And it really doesn't make it easy to override. And when you turn the forced aspect ratio off, magnify the image to 1:1 and select the crop tool, it selects the entire image, and you can't access the corners. Grrr! Apart from that, of course, there's the original image: Where are the flowers there? Even at full screen width (click twice) they're barely recognizable.
50 years of Unix
Warner Losh, whom I know from the FreeBSD project, has done a very interesting presentation about the origins of Unix: I'll take a while to look through it and consider the implications. But what hits me is how old he looks. That's not his fault: I haven't seen him for over 15½ years, nearly a third of the age of Unix.
Web site error messages: fixed?
These failure messages from the web site are coming in thick and fast: Subject: FAILURE: /grog/ThisshouldbeStrelitzia-2.jpeg.Isitmissing <- http://lemis.com/grog/diary-nov2015.php Why? The new web site is running happily on minimal load. Is there something that I can do about it? Took a look at the output generated by my showphoto () function: <a id="Photo-2" name="Photo-2" href="/grog/diary-nov2015.php?dirdate=20151102&imagesizes=112#Photo-2"> <img alt="ThisshouldbeStrelitzia-2.jpeg.Isitmissing" border="0" id="Photo_2" title="Photo Strelitzia-2.jpeg.
Ashampoo: speed demon
Since changing my processing to use TIFF intermediate files, I can get usable results from the Ashampoo optimizer again, though there's always a tendency for the result to be too green overall. But at what cost! It takes over a minute to process a single file: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/27) ~ 45 -> l -Trtc /Photos/Ashampoo-grog/ ...
Goodbye w3.lemis.com
One of the big successes of the last couple of days was the ease of setting up w4.lemis.com. And surprisingly it's doing much better than w3: Why the drop in load round 13:30? I'll have to follow that. But the puzzling thing is the lower network traffic. It's not because of DNS issues: w3 also had no traffic. Are they retries, maybe? Again, something to observe.
Mail on w4.lemis.com
In any case, w4 does have SMTP access, so time to install Postfix on it. That proved more complicated than I thought; for some reason I didn't keep the main.cf file on oldwww under revision control, and it looked nothing like the sample files. I'll have to go through with a fine tooth comb.
Mail flood!
Into the office this morning to find no fewer than 923 failure messages from w3.lemis.com, like: Received: from oldwww.lemis.com [208.86.226.86] by eureka.lemis.com with POP3 (fetchmail-6.3.26) for <[email protected]> (single-drop); Thu, 24 Oct 2019 01:37:29 +1100 (AEDT) Received: from w3.lemis.com (w3.lemis.com [66.42.97.229]) by oldwww.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 13EC91B72847 for <[email protected]>; Wed, 23 Oct 2019 14:23:00 +0000 (UTC) Received: from w3.lemis.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by w3.lemis.com (8.15.2/8.15.2) with ESMTPS id x9IFQf0f002179 (version=TLSv1.3 cipher=TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 bits=256 verify=NO) for <[email protected]>; Fri, 18 Oct 2019 15:26:41 GMT (envelope-from [email protected]) Received: (from www@localhost) by w3.lemis.com (8.15.2/8.15.2/Submit) id x9IFQfmF002178; Fri, 18 Oct 2019 15:26:41 GMT (envelope-from www) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 15:26:41 GMT From: World Wide ...
/photobackup was not properly dismounted
Yvonne changed the photo backup disks today, and I backed up on the new disk. But when I started, I saw in the system log (but not in the shell output): Oct 23 17:22:34 eureka kernel: WARNING: /photobackup was not properly dismounted Why that? It's clear that an external USB-mounted disk can easily be removed without umounting, but that has happened too many times, and I always check the mount status before disconnecting it. And yet only yesterday, with the other disk, I had the dreaded Oct 22 19:07:29 eureka kernel: WARNING: /photobackup was not properly dismounted Is this related to the kind of recording, specifically SMR?
Still more web site load problems
It's becoming ever clearer that the load average on my new web server has nothing to do with the redirected requests for mail.lemis.com and people.lemis.com. It seems more related to the time of the day. When I come in in the morning all is well, but by midday my time the load average rises. Here graphics from the Vultr pages: It's very clear that the net traffic and the CPU load follow the same pattern.
Another bloody net outage!
At 16:08, just as I was going to watch the TV news, another bloody power failure. Damn the National Broadband Network! But this time it was different. The display on the NTD was almost normal: normal signal strength, flickering STATUS LED, alternately flickering ODU LED. Well, almost. Sometimes the ODU stopped flickering and stayed on. Maybe link down between functioning radiation tower and POI? The net came back at 17:36, nearly 1½ hours later. That's typical. And mail started pouring in, as usual, including: Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 17:07:30 +1100 From: Aussie Broadband <[email protected]> Subject: [Outage Ref: 49940] Our apologies - we're experiencing an outage Apologies from the Aussie Broadband team - we're experiencing an outage in your region.
More web server pain
The load on the web server isn't the only issue, it proves. Today I got a mail bounce message: <[email protected]>: host mx66.FreeBSD.org[96.47.72.85] said: 450-4.7.25 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [208.86.226.86] 450 4.7.25 in case of permanent delivery errors (e.g. 5XX SMTP errors) please send your problem report from a non-blocked location (e.g. gmail/yahoo) to [email protected] and include the following information: time (Oct 19 23:22:35) and client (208.86.226.86). (in reply to RCPT TO command) Huh? That was from mail.lemis.com.
Orchids again
Over the past week I took a couple of photos of the yellow orchids just north of our property entrance on Stones Road. They weren't a success: Both are only marginally sharp, probably because of the wind. They're acceptable at the standard (?tiny?) size, but even a slight enlargement shows how bad they are: Today I took a couple of flowers back home and tried focus stacking under more controlled circumstances: ...
Web server: the results
So I left the old web server stopped overnight, so that it didn't redirect requests to inappropriate domain names to the new server. Came back in the morning and the load average on the new server was still below 10. Turned on the old server again, and bang! Within minutes I had: last pid: 16293; load averages: 31.65, 23.93, 13.76 up 53+19:32:08 01:16:42 Why does it make such a difference? Is it the content that keeps PHP busy?
Web site load puzzle
My web site load has dropped from the excessive load averages I have seen yesterday, but only to about 18. Why such a high load? Previously I had guessed at the multiple names for the web server, but it's been a week since I've been sending permanent redirects. Still, there are a number of requests coming in to oldwww. Played around with the web server configuration there to log redirects differently depending on the server name. That helped. After a few minutes my log files showed: -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 0 Oct 18 06:41 lemis-access.log -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 3502 Oct 18 06:45 mail.lemis-access.log -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 52586 Oct 19 01:10 people.lemis-access.log That was surprising.
Recovering from the outage
After the day's outage, recovery took a while. For some reason my outgoing mail tunnel to mail.lemis.com didn't want to restart automatically. When I started it, it hung. Oh. #!/usr/local/bin/bash # Set up and maintain mail tunnel to mail # $Id: mailtunnel,v 1.5 2019/09/21 23:12:52 grog Exp grog $ while :; do logger Restarting SMTP tunnel /usr/bin/ssh -n -N -L 2026:mail.lemis.com:25 www.lemis.com sleep 5 # don't flood done For reasons I forget, mail.lemis.com is 192.109.197.81, one of the last uses of my /24 network block, and an alias for the interface on the old www.
Bloody NBN!
Another all-day ?scheduled? outage from the National Broadband Network today, from 8:38 to 16:29, nearly 8 hours and almost exactly the whole working day. Spent some time hacking my network failures program to produce more interesting information, like: Summary from 1 January 2019 to 31 October 2019 Total 64 outages, total time 195460 seconds (2 days, 06:17:40) Longest outage: 28252 seconds (07:50:52) Start: 17 October 2019 08:38:34 End: 17 October 2019 16:29:26 Average time between outages: 392149 seconds (4 days, 12:55:49) Average duration: 3054 seconds (00:50:54) Availability: 99.22% ...
Five years of Ashampoo pain!
Ashampoo is currently celebrating their 20th anniversary. And I'm still having trouble with them. Their latest optimizer, version 7, works, but it seems to impart a greenish cast on many images. And version 6 no longer refuses to run: it now creates output files that are round 40% larger than the original, but otherwise appear unchanged. If I select a single image, it still fails. But that's nothing new. By chance I looked at my diary of 5 years ago. Same problems then. Why do I stick with them?
Web site calming down
After the extremely high load averages of the last few days, www.lemis.com is now returning to what I hope will become normal, with typical load averages below 1, though from time to time it goes up to 20. But barely has that problem gone away that I get another: From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: Vultr.com: Bandwidth Warning The following subscriptions have reached high bandwidth utilization levels: Subscription:3243454 - 2048 MB Server - 66.42.97.229 (w3.lemis.com): 78% used ... Please note: Your bandwidth usage cap will reset on the 1st of every month.
Can't sync photos
After doing yesterday's photos, ran my normal file sync script. Things didn't go exactly according to plan: rsync: mkdir "/home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/Photos/20191011" failed: No space left on device (28) rsync error: error in file IO (code 11) at main.c(670) [Receiver=3.1.3] rsync /home/grog/public_html/photos/dirlist www:/home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/photos rsync: write failed on "/home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/photos/dirlist": No space left on device (28) rsync error: error in file IO (code 11) at receiver.c(381) [receiver=3.1.3] Sat 12 Oct 2019 13:50:00 AEDT It took me a while to realize that the problem was at the remote end. That box has so much more storage than I need!
Redirecting web site names
I've established that one of the reasons that I have so much web traffic is because I have multiple names that respond to HTTP requests, so crawlers load each page several times. Apart from www.lemis.com, there's also mail.lemis.com, people.lemis.com and lemis.com. How do I tell the client to redirect to www.lemis.com? Out searching the web, and came up with myriad way to do similar things, including with mod_rewrite, like this page from the the Apache documentation. But further down it came up with the answer: a simple Redirect directive. Just what I was looking for, but why did it take me so long to find it?
Microsoft update pain
I've recently grumbled about problems updating Apple software. In many ways it seems that Microsoft does it better. But Microsoft is up to the challenge. I started an update yesterday?only a few hundred megabytes, something that I could download in 5 minutes?and today it was still hanging at 48% downloaded. Restart. From 48%? No, from the beginning, of course. I sometimes wonder what the issues are with their downloading process. Anyway, it worked this time.
How the other half live
Yvonne has borrowed a number of USB sticks from Julie Lannen which she wanted copied. All Microsoft format, of course, one of which eureka didn't want to know about. It proved to be in NTFS format, not a good idea for interchangeability, and I had to read it in on dischord. What a pain this Microsoft is! And all these file names with spaces in them; three even had leading spaces. What really interested me, though, is the attention people pay to these things.
No programme data!
Into the office this morning, and as usual checked TV programme data from mediathekview.de. Nothing! The cron job had failed. OK, try it manually: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/33) ~ 61 -> /usr/bin/fetch -o /var/tmp/Filmliste-akt.xz http://verteiler1.mediathekview.de/Filmliste-akt.xz fetch: http://verteiler1.mediathekview.de/Filmliste-akt.xz: Connection reset by peer That was repeatable. What now? The host name was interesting: verteiler1.mediathekview.de. Is there a verteiler2? Yes. And it works!
Migrating narrawin.com
Chris Bahlo has finally got round to updating her data on the new web server machine?with SFTP! I wonder how she keeps track of things. And of course it didn't work for her, because I was still running the zone on the old web server. OK, no time like the present, even if it is just before dinner. Copy across the information and run apachectl graceful. Error! The pathnames were a kludge that I needed on the old server, /usr/home/chris/www.narrawin.com. We don't need to put /home under /usr any more, so /home/chris/www.narrawin.com it is. OK, apachectl accepted that. And then I had to wait for the DNS to propagate.
More Apple fun
Yesterday's fun with the MacBook should have been enough, but there were still some loose ends to tie up. What is this machine? Were any of the 5.3 GB of updates yesterday actually installed? After reboot, I found these displays: What does the X in the circle mean? That the update failed? Or that this is Mac OS X? It seems that that ?Mac OS X? is an old, worn-out magic word, and that it's now called macOS.
Beware of Chris bearing gifts
Chris Bahlo along today with a couple of items that she wanted to get rid of: an Apple MacBook Pro and a George Foreman ?LEAN·MEAN CONTACT ROASTING MACHINE?. She had offered them to me a while back, so long ago that I had forgotten the details. Deferred the ?CONTACT ROASTING MACHINE? and looked at the laptop, which looks quite good. Problem: there's something wrong with the display, and from time to time it becomes more or less illegible. Repair will apparently exceed the value of the machine. For me that's not a significant disadvantage, since I'd want to access it over the net only.
Ashampoo optimizer again
Yvonne took a few photos this afternoon, about 430 of them. She zooms with the crop tool, so she was using dischord all afternoon, and I had to use eucla, the laptop. It doesn't have the latest and greatest Ashampoo optimizer, so I tried the old 2016 version that had broken on me last month. It didn't fail! But when comparing the results, though they were marginally bigger, there was no obvious difference in appearance. Optimizer fail. Later I ran the same photos through ?Photo Optimizer 7?, and it did improve them.
TIFF file sizes
While optimizing some images with Ashampoo photo optimizer, took a look at the sizes: -rwxrw-r-- 4 grog wheel 86,571,008 6 Oct 15:08 Carpobrotus.tiff -rwxrw-r-- 4 grog wheel 96,087,978 6 Oct 14:45 Cherry-1.tiff -rwxrw-r-- 4 grog wheel 121,229,452 6 Oct 14:48 Cherry-2.tiff -rwxrw-r-- 4 grog wheel 121,259,462 6 Oct 14:47 Eucalyptus.tiff -rwxrw-r-- 4 grog wheel 121,228,318 6 Oct 10:22 Kitchen-accident-1.tiff -rwxrw-r-- 4 grog wheel 121,276,118 6 Oct 10:22 Kitchen-accident-2.tiff -rwxrw-r-- 4 grog wheel 121,997,899 6 Oct 14:08 Leucadendron-1.tiff -rwxrw-r-- 4 grog wheel 121,625,698 6 Oct 14:08 Leucadendron-2.tiff -rwxrw-r-- 4 grog wheel 96,088,530 6 Oct 14:09 Leucadendron-3.tiff -rwxrw-r-- 4 grog wheel 96,088,608 6 Oct 14:09 Leucadendron-4.tiff -rwxrw-r-- 4 grog wheel 96,026,670 6 Oct 14:47 Oak-1.tiff -rwxrw-r-- 4 grog wheel 96,026,756 6 Oct 14:47 Oak-2.tiff -rwxrw-r-- 4 grog wheel 96,026,546 6 Oct 14:46 Paulownia-kawakamii-1.tiff -rwxrw-r-- 4 grog wheel ...
Removing TIFFs
For a few months now I have been converting my intermediate photos to TIFF rather than JPEG. And of course it's bloating the backups. Today I removed most of the intermediates. The difference is obvious. Here before and after: before: Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/ada1p1 7,629,565 6,125,172 1,428,096 81% /Photos after: /dev/ada1p1 7,629,565 5,738,401 1,814,867 76% /Photos 385 GB!
More wildflowers
Yvonne in this afternoon to point me at a flower growing in the ?sewage paddock? (the one with the soakage for the septic tank). She thought it might be an orchid: No, it's clearly not an orchid. But what is it? It reminds me of something, not necessarily indigenous. OK, time to look for programs that can identify flowers. I didn't find any! Only ?apps? for mobile phones! What a declaration of bankruptcy! What happened to our ideals of interoperability? And what a horrible thought to have to upload my photos to a phone to be able to identify them?
Going home, with help from Google
Finding my way out of the Bunnings car park wasn't easy. No signs apart from a couple of no-entry signs where I didn't need them, various barriers. In the end I decided that the only exit was to the south onto Webb Road, the way I went last time. OK, I wanted to go south on Cherry Flat Road. But other things prevented that: What's going on there? The most obvious thing was the flashing lights from the police car: They were blinding to the eye, almost completely obscuring the ?Road Closed?
Next migration issue
Yvonne in today with a problem: she couldn't upload her photos to the web server. Oh. I had forgotten that. She doesn't use the server for anything else, but she does have her photos there. And for that, the way I have it set up, she has her own account and ssh credentials. Or at least, she had. I had only set up accounts for Chris Bahlo and myself on the new machine.
Daily migration problem
Problems again today: my remote Squid proxy refused connections. Why? Took a quick look. Not much activity, since it's just for me, but there was no evidence of any problems. Nor of any connection attempts, even when I tried again. Bingo! It's running on oldwww, but the configuration in my browser points to www.lemis.com, now a different machine. Time to add a name squid.lemis.com.
Web site migration, day 4
Into the office again this morning to see, from the old web site: last pid: 12571; load averages: 1.29, 1.25, 1.25 up 416+14:01:08 01:41:34 73 processes: 2 running, 71 sleeping CPU: 50.0% user, 0.0% nice, 0.0% system, 0.0% interrupt, 50.0% idle Mem: 67M Active, 69M Inact, 326M Wired, 7004K Cache, 58M Buf, 3444K Free Swap: 1024M Total, 166M Used, 858M Free, 16% Inuse PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND 57141 root 1 103 0 95668K 524K CPU1 1 117.5H 100.00% perl Now that's something different.
Grocery shopping online
Email from eBay today: do my grocery shopping online and get it delivered to my door. That's one of the borderline areas I considered in my 2014 article The future of the Internet, and most recently here. How does it work? It seems that they're doing a deal with Coles, and that the delivery really is free, up to your kitchen bench. There's a URL, https://www.ebay.com.au/help/buying/grocery-shopping-ebay/grocery-shopping-ebay?id=4873, but I doubt that it's very durable. The most important thing is that it's only in selected metropolitan areas, the closest about 130 km away. They have my delivery address, so they could easily have established that I'm not a target customer.
Bad markup
It's the beginning of the month, time to finalize last month's diary. Part of that involves passing the page through two different validators at validator.w3.org: this one for the HTML version and this for the RSS version. Most of the errors are in copied markup, but this one baffled me: What's wrong with that syntax? That was from the XML validator, but the HTML validator, though different, was no clearer: While scratching my head, looked at the source with Emacs: Finally!
No email!
While waiting for the web traffic to settle, moved on to the question of mail. Moved the existing mail queue manually to eureka, and read: Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2019 13:46:45 GMT From: Mail Delivery Subsystem <MAILER-DAEMON> Subject: Warning: could not send message for past 4 hours ----- Transcript of session follows ----- <[email protected]>... Deferred: Operation timed out with mx1.lemis.com. Warning: message still undelivered after 4 hours Will keep trying until message is 5 days old And indeed, the message was still there, a couple of days later.
Website migration still not complete
Into the office again this morning to look at web server loads. Yes, gradually the new server was getting some load, up to a load average of 2 on occasion. And the old server was still round 20! What's causing that? Why can't Apache log the web server name?
Web server progress
In the office this morning, first looked at the web server load. new: last pid: 43838; load averages: 0.27, 0.39, 0.47 up 34+01:06:03 06:50:37 61 processes: 1 running, 60 sleeping CPU: 0.0% user, 0.0% nice, 0.8% system, 0.8% interrupt, 98.5% idle Mem: 53M Active, 1391M Inact, 21M Laundry, 392M Wired, 144M Buf, 126M Free Swap: old: last pid: 60303; load averages: 11.16, 14.44, 17.15 up 413+19:10:36 06:51:02 101 processes: 8 running, 93 sleeping CPU: 94.1% user, 0.0% nice, 5.9% system, 0.0% interrupt, 0.0% idle Mem: 124M Active, 21M Inact, 322M Wired, 4288K Cache, 58M Buf, 156K Free Swap: 1024M Total, 201M Used, 823M Free, 19% Inuse, 1864K In, 2588K Out Why is the old server still so loaded?
Alastair Boyanich visits
Alastair Boyanich (IRC nick uridium) dropped in with his friend Mick, literally for a cup of coffee. Well, Mick drank tea, but they only stayed about 20 minutes. They're on their way from Perth to Sydney via Melbourne. Managed to get rid of the ancient laptops that I found on Monday: Alastair is a collector of old computing hardware, and particularly the Dell prototype (made about 1995) pleased him.
Web site: just do it!
Other things have got in the way of my web site migration, almost as I had feared. But the old site is really glacially slow, to the point where people were getting timeouts. Time to hurry things through. In fact, with just a little corner-cutting, it only took a little over an hour, less time than it took to write it up. First, of course, I needed to get mail running. Or at least I thought I did, though it occurred to me that there was more work there than I really needed. In the course of the installation, I installed three additional packages: mutt, qpopper, squid, none of which had anything to do with the web server.
Happy birthday?
Yesterday was my birthday. At 47, there's not much to celebrate, and I received only a single birthday greeting in my email. But today Facebook made up for it, lots of people putting messages on my timeline, which I suppose I shall have to look at some time. It was also nice enough to send me an email so that I would find out. But why today? The rest of the world is a day behind. For Facebook (UTC-7/UTC-8) it's always yesterday, or at least 17 to 19 hours behind.
Abusive daemons
More spam today. Here from my index: 149 N + 26-09-2019 A??onym0us H??cker To mailer-daemo ( 100) N + IMPORTANT! You h??ve been recorded ??asturbating! I h??ve Mailer Daemon.mp4! 189 N + 26-09-2019 A??onym0us H??cker To abuse@lemis. ( 100) N + IMPORTANT! You h??ve been recorded ??asturbating! I h??ve Abuse.mp4! It's stupidity like that that gives hackers a bad name.
Bloody NBN!
Into the office this morning to find that we had been off the net since 07:09:10. National Broadband Network scheduled outage? Of course. They have just about the whole working week, every week, as a ?scheduled outage?. But then it occurred to me: I had seen people working on the tower in Enfield when I went past on Tuesday. They even had a backhoe. Were they installing fibre? Dream on! And then Yvonne saw them working both in Enfield and in Dereel yesterday. So out to take a look: Not exactly a hive of activity, but lots of cars, so maybe they were just out of sight.
New display card
Finally the new display card for teevee has arrived, only 3 weeks since I first ordered one. It's a no-name Nvidia GT730 card, a detail that the packaging tries to compensate for by spraying all kinds of logos, including ?Windows? 10 and various features I've neither heard of nor want to know. The old card was a GT710 from Gigabyte. But they're all the same, right? Yes, plug it in and it worked. But it's noisy!
Notworking: found the fault
After installing the powerline adapters, back to IRC. Juha Kupiainen had a comment about this photo: <juha> groggy, this looks wrong https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20190923/small/RJ45-4.jpeg OK, what's wrong with it? I had mainly been looking for mechanical damage, but on closer examination I could only see 4 out of 8 cables. Surely it couldn't have worked like that? No, a problem with the photo; I should have taken it against a dark background. And the sequence matches TIA/EIA-568 T568A: But that's not what Juha was talking about: he saw past that and saw these markings on the second set of wires: The stripes are ...
Sprinkler network connection: enough!
I've been trying to work around the network problems that I'm having with my sprinkler system for two days now. I haven't exhausted all possibilities: if I can find the other end of the network cable, I can test it and possibly fix the fault. If I can find a way for my access points to bridge as I want them to, I can use them. Or I could find those powerline Ethernet adapters. But I'm exhausted. I've had enough. Powerline adapters are available on eBay for round $35 a pair, delivery next week. Officeworks has them for $80, but today.
Yet another recalibration!
I've taken to monitoring my PV generation more carefully, with a display on one of the monitors. And today I saw that it had started yet another recalibration, from 12:28:23 to 13:51:27. I decided to leave it, but this time things went differently: it charged from the grid, although there was enough sunlight, but it didn't discharge: The pinkish line is PV power, and the purple line is grid power. Though there was plenty of sun, the inverter decided to charge from the grid, and on hitting 99% (apparently) battery charge it did mainly a discharge, though it did use some PV power as well.
More network pain
So how do I fix the problems with my network link to the shed? The correct solution is to fix the cable connection, but so far I haven't even been able to establish where the other end is. Is it maybe the connector? A few cobwebs, yes, but the contacts look fine. OK, I've tried the next step: use my second Wi-Fi AP to bridge the network connection. But though it appears to be correctly configured, it doesn't work. Potentially it isn't designed to bridge Ethernet inputs, only Wi-Fi cards. Next, the powerline Ethernet adapters. But where are they? Out to the shed to look for stuff, and indeed found lots of things: many old mains power adapters, two ancient laptops, an old Ethernet switch and an ADSL gateway box.
Tracing the network fault
All that was noise keeping me from my real business of the day: finding out what's wrong with the house network cabling. Why do I have 9 connections in the pantry for 10 network connectors? What matches what? Off with a real laptop (eucla.lemis.com, an ancient Dell Inspiron 5100 running FreeBSD 9.0) to take a look. The results were not encouraging. I didn't get round to checking the hard-to-access jack behind my bed, but I found at least two jacks that were dead: in the guest room and the second one in the lounge room. By the end I had established the following mapping in the pantry: Wall plate Main switch AP ...
Network problems, part 2
Just to annoy me, my mobile phone, taskumatti.lemis.com, beeped at me again: ?beep-beep....beep-beep? What does that mean? It shows a dark grey on black message for about 5 seconds, and then it goes away, never to be seen again: when I turn the thing on, there's no sign that it ever existed. OK, in the past it has meant ?we're off the net?. Took a look at the status. Yes, off the net. Why? The rest of the network was working normally. Look more carefully at the configuration: IP address 192.109.197.200, name server 192.109.197.152, network gateway 192.109.197.152. That's wrong! The name server and gateway are eureka, 192.109.197.137, and taskumatti should be 192.109.197.239.
Another bloody PV recalibration!
Nice, bright sunshine today, but somehow the PV system didn't want to know. Checking, found that it had entered another recalibration cycle. Damn that. I'll power cycle the thing. That worked, though it takes the inverter a while to become fully functional again. In fact, it took a very long while. It worked fine, but I couldn't access it on the network. What happened? Looking through the output of arp, I saw: ? (192.109.197.201) at 00:25:ca:0b:fe:05 on em0 expires in 1140 seconds [ethernet] Damn, I should really write down the MAC addresses of my devices.
More network pain
While looking for something completely different today, saw this in the log files, repeating about once a minute: Sep 22 09:04:11 eureka grog: Restarting SMTP tunnel Sep 22 09:05:31 eureka grog: Restarting SMTP tunnel That's the tunnel that enables me to send mail from my local network to the world, bypassing Aussie Broadband's well-meant blocking of outgoing port 25. But why is it failing? Try restarting manually: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/31) ~ 1 -> mailtunnel ssh: connect to host mail.lemis.com port 22: Host is down Damn!
PV inverter calibrating again!
My solar electricity inverter has started calibrating batteries again, running 18 hours from 2019-09-20 17:53:43 until 2019-09-21 11:54:43, and once again draining battery capacity to 0. It's been a month since the last time, and on that occasion Fred had promised to get a statement from the manufacturers of both the inverter and the battery. Nothing yet. Time to set a deadline: 11 October, which should give them more than enough time. After all, next month they should be installing the other battery. If they're not compatible, they'll have to install an alternative instead.
Alternative network link
What do you do when you don't have an Ethernet cable? Wi-Fi, that silly name for 802.11. And how about that, I have a second Wi-Fi access point. Why not put that in the shed and run it as a bridge to the access point in the pantry? One reason, I discovered, is because it's very hard to configure, at least with these el-cheapo boxes. The good news is: yes, they offer the function. The bad news is: so far they haven't delivered. There are clearly some issues with the web interface: they don't show the client list, for example, although taskumatti was connected to the pantry AP (air-gw-1) the whole time.
Debugging network cabling
Where do I start with the network cabling? In the middle, I would think. The house network is centred on top of a fridge in the pantry, behind a microwave oven that runs on the same wavelength: That's what it looks like now; when I installed it we had: The additional plate on the right is for teevee, installed when we moved the TV into the lounge room.
Installing the new sprinkler relay
The weather's getting warmer, and I still haven't installed my new sprinkler relay. How did that work? Good thing I documented it when I received it. OK: first thing is that it still has an RFC 1918 address. Add an alias: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/11) ~ 80 -> ifconfig em0 192.168.123.123/16 Aargh! Too late I noticed that I had forgotten the all-important alias! OK, I can reset it: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/11) ~ 81 -> ifconfig em0 eureka ^C Damn!
Shut up, bloody chrome!
Somehow I have had problems with web browsers almost since they came into existence. Each new browser seems to be worse than the one that came before it. mosaic, then netscape, then firefox. firefox is clearly on the way out, something that you'd think I would welcome. But I kept it because I was able (with some pain) to remap the keys to something closer to Emacs. How could that be allowed to happen? So firefox broke the interface that allowed that kind of addon. No advantage to firefox any more, and at least one significant disadvantage: PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND 5370 grog 89 20 0 4917M 3390M uwait 6 18.6H 14.79% firefox 5330 grog ...
Web site update, one more small step
I really need to get round to completing my web site migration, but somehow I never find time for it. In the meantime it occurred to me that I'm not alone on the site: Chris Bahlo also has narrawin.com on the same machine, so we'll need to move that too. Moved her stuff across and sent her a mail message, cleverly designed to arrive when she's at a mediaeval tournament somewhere in St Ives, so she won't have any time to look at it. Then took a look at my PHP problem. This code: if ($alignments [0]) { switch ($alignments [0]) ...
NBN not to be beaten
Two power failures? 10 seconds? Hah! The National Broadband Network can do better. Today we had 6 failures (sorry, ?scheduled maintenance?) with a total of 7058 seconds, nearly 2 hours. That's worse than it seems: somehow it completely disrupts the day. When writing this diary, for example, I frequently check things on the web, something that kept failing on me. As a result, I didn't get the diary committed until 16:24. How I hate the NBN! Why can't they get their act together?
Web site configuration, next step
I've been dragging my feet on configuring the new web site, but time is moving on. I need to complete the migration by the end of the month, and that includes moving Chris Bahlo's stuff as well. The current status was that Apache works, but I hadn't configured PHP. OK, off to look at the documentation. What documentation? I didn't find much of use. Though this page gave some ideas, it didn't relate directly to what I was looking for, and it also wasn't official. The official just had an indication to install mod_php71, and at FreeBSD handbook just had an indication to install mod_php56, not exactly the latest release, and said nothing about configuration.
Where did my mail go?
For the last couple of days I have had no automatic daily reports from teevee. Why? It's still running normally. Off to take a look. The first part of the problem was that I had removed the wrong disk when swapping the backup disks I have on eureka. I have two separate photo backup disks, and one is kept at Chris Bahlo's place. But a couple of days ago I accidentally removed the video backup disk, with the result that the nightly backups didn't continue (some hang, strangely). Fix that and run the nightly cleanup script: === root@teevee (/dev/pts/10) ~ 27 -> mailme cleanup It ran, but I got no output.
Smart devices: the pain
HowToGeek is full of articles about Smart Homes, including information about how to work around the complete lack of standardization in the area, but without explaining that it's a problem, or explaining why you would rather say ?Light in lounge room: off? rather than just turning the thing off. In general I'm still amazed by the amount of attention given to voice commands. Maybe it's an indication that people can no longer type, either because they never learnt, or because they no longer have something to type on.
Configuring w3 web site
For some reason I have been dragging my heels on configuring the new web site. I have until the end of the month for one deadline, but the fact is that the current site is completely overloaded, and I really need to do something. Did the first step today: straight Apache configuration. That was easier than I thought. I had some recollection of putting all web site descriptions in subdirectories, but the instructions I had (maybe almost as obsolete as The Complete FreeBSD) just modified the main http.conf file: --- httpd.conf 2019/08/22 04:02:47 1.1 +++ httpd.conf 2019/09/10 06:05:46 @@ -178,6 +178,7 @@ #LoadModule userdir_module libexec/apache24/mod_userdir.so LoadModule alias_module libexec/apache24/mod_alias.so #LoadModule rewrite_module libexec/apache24/mod_rewrite.so +LoadModule php7_module libexec/apache24/libphp7.so # Third party modules IncludeOptional etc/apache24/modules.d/[0-9][0-9][0-9]_*.conf @@ -213,7 +214,7 @@ # e-mailed.
Identifying USB disk drives
I have a number of external backup disks on eureka: one for eureka itself (/backups), one for the other computers on the network (/dump), one for photos (/photobackup) and one for videos (/videobackup): When eureka came up again, it identified the external backup disks in the wrong sequence. They come up as SCSI disks (/dev/da0, for example), but the numbering seems to change on every boot. The only way I can find to fix things (apart from editing /etc/fstab) is to disconnect all the ones including and after the first one that has been misnumbered.
Investigating Ashampoo compression
So how do the file sizes of Ashampoo Optimizer compare with Optimizer 6 when using the same JPEG compression setting? I can't convert with Optimizer 6, but I have plenty of images which have been converted, at the rather unusual default setting of 92%. Why not take the one I complained about six months ago? There I had: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/11) ~/Photos/20190316 89 -> l _Ashampoo_Photo_Optimizer_Backup/Hellebore-2.jpeg Hellebore-2.jpeg -rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 4,323,518 16 Mar 17:29 _Ashampoo_Photo_Optimizer_Backup/Hellebore-2.jpeg -rwxrw-r-- 2 grog lemis 23,475,024 16 Mar 17:29 Hellebore-2.jpeg OK, take that image (the unoptimized one) and put it through Optimizer 7 at different compression rates.
Improving JPEG size
After my experience of the last few days, spent some time today converting my photo processing workflow from using JPEG intermediate images to using TIFF. A couple of surprises: The TIFF output from DxO PhotoLab contains two images: a full-size image and a really tiny thumbnail: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/13) ~/Photos/20190906 390 -> identify Daffodils-Roses.tiff Daffodils-Roses.tiff[0] TIFF 5184x3888 5184x3888+0+0 16-bit sRGB 121.2MB 0.008u 0:00.125 Daffodils-Roses.tiff[1] TIFF 162x121 162x121+0+0 8-bit sRGB 121.2MB 0.000u 0:00.000 To convert the image to JPEG, I need to specify which image.
Ashampoo bug search
Another email from Ashampoo this morning: Date: Thu, 05 Sep 2019 11:47:17 +0000 please send an example picture (original before optimization and optimized after optimization) so we can take care of it. What a good idea! I should have had it myself. In fact, I did: Date: Mon, 02 Sep 2019 07:15:47 +0000 I don't understand why this has happened. I haven't changed any software or settings. I'm attaching one image in JPEG form (output from DxO PhotoLab). The original raw image is available, but your software doesn't like the size.
Ashampoo problems: solved!
Mail from a different person at Ashampoo today, with the usual plethora of attachments of previous messages, a total of 3175 lines. It started with: Kay Hasbargen, Sep 4, 17:22 CEST Dear Ashampoo customer, We've recently received word about software issues from a few Ashampoo® Photo Optimizer 6 users. We'd hate for you to experience similar issues, which is why we're happy to offer you a free upgrade to its successor! Use Ashampoo® Photo Optimizer 7, worth $39.99, completely free of charge! This program supports Batch processing as well. That was in reply to my message which included the line: I would really appreciate it if you would read my responses.
Ashampoo file sizes investigated
Why are the output files from Ashampoo Photo Optimizer so big? The original 7 fold size increases have been explained: they were due to the 100% ?quality?. But even when I select 75%, they're significantly bigger than the original. A poor choice of converter, perhaps? What happens if I create TIFF images, optimize them, and then convert them to JPEG with ImageMagick? Bingo! Much smaller images. Is the quality really comparable? How can you tell? With lossy formats, you can't expect two images of the same quality to be identical.
Daily NBN outage announcement
I wonder if there will ever come a day when no threat of an National Broadband Network routine outage exists. Today's came as usual: NBNCo has let us know that they are planning network maintenance in your area, and that your service at <strong>29 STONES RD, DEREEL VIC</strong> will be affected.<br> The details are: - Start date and time: Fri 27th September 2019 00:00 AEST - End date and time: Fri 27th September 2019 06:00 AEST - Window: 6.0 hours You may experience the following interruptions during the maintenance - 1 min The only surprise is the length of the outage.
Ashampoo 7 sizes: workaround
More thinking. Why should Ashampoo Optimizer 7 create output files that are so much bigger than the original? Then it occurred to me: you can influence the size of JPEG images by setting the compression. How was it set on versions 7 and 2019? 100%! What nonsense, but at least it's a partial explanation. What happens if I set it to 75%? It's still larger, but almost acceptable. So: I have reported this problem on multiple occasions. I'm told that only I have the problem, and that it must be my camera. It has (ostensibly) been reported to software development. Yet at least part of the problem is the ridiculous default compression that they set in their newer versions.
More Ashampoo pain
Many responses to my Ashampoo bug reports today: They were all merged with request 140274 of 16 March. That's nonsense, of course, because they have nothing to do with each other beyond my name and the product. But what is bug 140274? I read the text, such as I could understand. The message had fully 253 attachments, mainly application logs. Where was my description of what went wrong?
fsck!
Rebooting teevee wasn't the normal procedure I had expected: Why? And didn't I have this on SUJ? Oh, no, I had had hangs with large updates with SUJ. But this should have been a clean shutdown. And there were a couple of interesting details in the recovery. Yes, under some circumstances you need to repeat fsck, and this was one of them. But then something caught my eye: Why did the first pass say that the link count for the directory should have been 1?
Cleaning teevee
teevee has been making fan noises from time to time recently. Time to clean the dust out: Put it back together, turned it on. Yes, the noise had changed. Now it was continuous. I had forgotten the graphics card, which took a lot of trouble to get out: OK, more compressed air, ... The second photo is a view of the heat sink under the fan.
A replacement for Ashampoo?
Got round finally installing Ashampoo Optimizer 2019 and getting past the license checks. It looks just like Optimizer 7: it seems that about the only difference from the older versions is the gratuitous change of the user interface. It works. But how about that, it, too, enlarges the images. But it has one difference from Optimizer 7: no batch mode! For that you have to pay money and upgrade to Optimizer 7. So that's a non-starter. OK, I had some other package that looked like it might be able to do the same job. What was it... ah, right: movavi photo editor.
Ashampoo fail
Processing my photos involves putting it through Ashampoo photo optimizer. It often delivers good results, though I have had multiple issues with it over the years. But then yesterday I had no results at all. After putting it through my comparison program, there was no obvious difference. OK, do it manually. Crash! ?The photo could not be optimized correctly". What caused that? Lots of experiments, and also bug reports, in which I established: The problem was not related to the photo itself.
Blue Heelers: done!
Finished downloading my episodes of Blue Heelers rather more quickly than I had expected. That was due in part to the fact that many of the episodes were in lower resolution: 01/S1-E05---Waiting-For-Apples-BLUH-005.mp4 VIDEO: [H264] 1280x720 24bpp 25.000 fps 2495.2 kbps (304.6 kbyte/s) 01/S1-E06---Apprehended-Violence-BLUH-006.mp4 VIDEO: [H264] 1280x720 24bpp 25.000 fps 2497.4 kbps (304.9 kbyte/s) ... 08/S8-E03---Dead-For-Quids-BLUH8-003.mp4 VIDEO: [H264] 896x504 24bpp 25.000 fps 1499.3 kbps (183.0 kbyte/s) 08/S8-E04---On-The-Road-BLUH8-004.mp4 VIDEO: [H264] 896x504 24bpp 25.000 fps 1497.0 kbps (182.7 kbyte/s) So in the end I had ?only?
Bloody NBN!
The National Broadband Network kept its word and didn't cause any trouble yesterday. Today was a different matter, though: when I got home I discovered that we had been off the net since 9:55, and they kept it that way until 12:42. And in the course of the afternoon there were two further outages, keeping me on my toes until 17:45, a total of just shy of 4 hours of outages. What are they doing? Are they completely incompetent? If they're having so much trouble with their equipment, why don't they replace it?
PhotoME and focus point
Installed PhotoME today and took a look at the out-of-focus photo that I've been looking at: ME stands for Metadata (in other words, Exif) editor, so it's not surprising that the screen is full of Exif information: But there's a barely visible thumbnail image there, one that really warrants that description: It doesn't seem to be enlargeable, and as it is it's not much use: I can barely recognize the area, though it does seem to be mainly on the foreground.
NBN giveth, NBN taketh away
Yesterday's NBN good news was just a drop in the ocean. Shortly later I received no fewer than three messages: NBNCo has let us know that they are planning network maintenance in your area, and that your service at <strong>29 STONES RD, DEREEL VIC</strong> will be affected.<br> - Start date and time: Mon 16th September 2019 07:00 AEST - End date and time: Fri 20th September 2019 20:00 AEST - Window: 109.0 hours You may experience the following interruptions during the maintenance - 480 min - 480 min - 480 min - 480 min - 480 min - Start date and time: Mon 30th September 2019 07:00 AEST - End date and time: Wed 2nd October 2019 20:00 AEST - Window: 61.0 hours You may experience the following interruptions during the maintenance - 480 min - Start date and time: Mon ...
Finding the focus point
So where did I have the focus set on the photos of that I discussed yesterday? I had some recollection that Olympus' latest software (now called Olympus Workspace, and of course with a completely different user interface from the now-obsolete Olympus Viewer 3, which itself obsoleted ?Olympus Master 2?, now so old and crufty that their web site denies all knowledge of it. How do I display the focus point? I couldn't find out: everything has changed. Went searching on the web. It seems that you can't. Viewer? I couldn't find out how to do it there either. But while searching I discovered that various software can do it, notably a product called PhotoME, also advertised here.
New photography web site
Mail on the Hugin forum today. They're talking about migration to something even worse than Google Groups, and Bruno Postle suggested pixls.us, which he finds a good resource for various reasons. Worth looking at; they host a lot of free software of which I have never heard, though possibly there's a good reason for that.
NBN fail!
Network outage this afternoon at 15:30. Only 10 minutes! And I was grateful. Clearly the National Broadband Network is training me. After all, they've threatened to disconnect me for weeks at a time, and they haven't followed through with the threat: today was only the third outage this month. But once I would have complained strongly for having an unexplained 10 minute outage. And more good news from Aussie Broadband: tomorrow's 6 hour outage has been cancelled. Did they do it today instead?
Whence ?command line??
I've been using computers for nearly 50 years now, and for all that time my primary form of communication with them has been by text commands, usually imperatives with the syntax command parameter...: type something in to a computer, or punch it on a card in the olden days, and it will parse it and either execute what it thinks I said, or issue a rude remark. Initially each individual program did that, which made switching difficult, but even then (unknown to me) there were top level command interpreters that took the commands and either executed them directly or started a program.
Increasing network traffic allowance
Six years ago I was connected to the Internet by an HSPA mobile link, and I had a traffic allowance of 9 GB per month. Then the National Broadband Network came, and we had 50 GB for much less money. As these things go, we soon maxed out the 50 GB?downloading videos helps. What next? The next step was 250 GB, far more than we needed. But OK, the price difference wasn't much. And then, for no extra charge, the allowance was changed to 500 GB and then 600 GB, which I have (almost?) never managed to use. But now I have a series of TV programmes to load, about 500 GB in all.
Server setup, day 2
So how much time do I have to migrate my web server? It's the end of the month, and I pay RootBSD by the calendar month. In addition, the load average on www.lemis.com has dropped below 10, and things seem to be working acceptably. So it makes more sense to pay for www until the end of next month and take my time doing it right with the new server, including a completely new web server configuration file for the first time in probably 24 years. First, though, a few setup issues. Emacs doesn't want to work the way I want: it adds this silly half-colour scheme (changes the foreground, doesn't change the background).
A new kind of spam
Spam comes in many forms. In my view, from ?best? to worst: Common spammers. Email address harvesters. Malware distributors. Mail address sellers. But there's a fourth category, probably less obnoxious than any of those: lately I'm getting more and more people wanting me to link to their pages in my diary. As I've noted before, clearly they using automatic scanners, and maybe even the emails are sent automatically. Here's a recent one: Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2019 03:32:01 -0700 From: Watchideas <[email protected]> Subject: Great Article About Wristwatches!
Time for a new web server?
Two mail messages from Mike Jeays this morning: Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2019 11:30:52 -0400 Hi, Greg. I am not getting a response from www.lemis.com today. It responds to a ping, but that is all. Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2019 11:37:22 -0400 Correction; it does respond, but very, very slowly. OK, what's going on there? Took a look. top was informative: last pid: 94753; load averages: 29.66, 28.63, 28.18 up 379+15:03:07 02:43:33 329 processes: 28 running, 228 sleeping, 73 zombie CPU: 94.2% user, 0.0% nice, 5.8% system, 0.0% interrupt, 0.0% idle Mem: 175M Active, 21M Inact, 271M Wired, 2564K Cache, 58M Buf, 2256K Free Swap: 1024M Total, 442M Used, 582M Free, 43% Inuse, 1340K In, 540K Out Look at those ...
Online grocery shopping?
Decades ago (round 6), we lived in Kuala Lumpur, and most of our grocery shopping was with Naina Mohamed in Old Market Square. They had a delivery service: we could call up, and they would deliver by van either the same day or the next, at no additional cost. They also had order forms that we could fill out for delivery the following day. We used it a lot when we were living in Syers Road (in my case, until September 1962). For some reason we (my parents) stopped, though I don't know why. Possibly the opening of the Weld Supermarket (the first supermarket I had ever seen) put an end to the old-fashioned grocery shops.
Power fail!
While Fred was here, we had what appeared to be network issues. In to my office. No power. The RCD in the switchboard had tripped, presumably while we were working on the inverter, and I hadn't found out until the office UPS had powered its heart out. Damn! Just when I needed it. And for some reason I had these eternal boot configuration errors again. What's all this LUA crap? I thought this system was too old for that. So, is it disk0p4 or disk1p4? The former was set, and the boot failed, so I tried the latter. Still fail. After some time accepted the parameters as they were and typed in boot and?it booted.
Analysing the power issues
Call from Fred early this morning: he had heard from Spain that the behaviour we had heard is normal. Hrmph. I don't like the idea of having my system run out of specs and not using available solar power. He's going to find out how often they intend to do this. Spent a lot of time analysing the data, and came to a number of insights: During the battery discharge phases, both PV and grid power were not used at all.
More solar electricity issues
It's been sunny lately, and we've been generating a fair amount of electricity. But today the daily report came from Spain: Huh? Almost no power! But we had lots of sunshine.
Android and computers: bridging the gap
While looking for something else, came across scrcpy, a program that can display Android screens on a real computer, and access them with keyboard and mouse, something that I've been looking for for a long time. It's even in the FreeBSD ports collection. So installed it, started it, and got ?an error message?: === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/5) ~ 1 -> scrcpy adb: error: failed to get feature set: no devices/emulators found ERROR: "adb push" returned with value 1 That's not what the instructions said.
We don't need no steenking computers
I've been thinking of uploading some panoramas of places round here but outside the Street View range to Google Maps. I've seen plenty of them, but how do you upload? The map pages are too polite to assume that I don't know, but with a bit of googling I found this thread. Simple: you can't. You need a mobile phone to do it! O tempora! O mores! There are two basic but very serious issues: The only way to do it is with the wrong tool.
BN services are now available
It has proven to be a good idea to put a permanent answering service on my main phone line. The number of spam calls has dropped to 8 in the last billing period, and of course nobody left a message to be called back. Until today. Then I got a voicemail message: BN services are now available in your locality. So, for uninterrupted service, press 1 to speak to a technician. BN? A robocall that doesn't recognize an answering service message when it hears one, and thus doesn't wait for the beep.
Another NBN outage!
More mail from Aussie Broadband today: NBNCo has let us know that they are planning network maintenance in your area, and that your service at <strong>29 STONES RD, DEREEL VIC</strong> will be affected.<br> The details are: - Start date and time: Fri 2nd August 2019 00:00 AEST - End date and time: Fri 2nd August 2019 06:00 AEST - Window: 6.0 hours OK, nothing new that we have an outage. But isn't this in the middle of the behemoth 9 day outage that I grumbled about last week (not the first time this month)?
Winding up LEMIS
I founded LEMIS pretty much exactly 40 years ago, at a time when microcomputers were becoming a force to be reckoned with. Almost nobody knew about them?even at work few people had any contact with them?but I could see that there was to be a great future. This was two years after the introduction of the Apple II, and two years before the introduction of the IBM PC, the computer that would bring microcomputers into the mainstream. Microcomputer? Isn't that PC? Yes, it is now. It wasn't at the time, and that's why I called the company ?Lehey Microcomputer Systems?, abbreviated to ?LEMIS?.
Smart kitchens?
A few weeks ago HowTo Geek had an article on ?smart bedrooms?, which I tore apart. They're at it again, this time with smart kitchens. The same nonsense? Not necessarily. I really don't see significant applications of independent, non-standardized technology in the bedroom, but it's already there in no uncertain terms in the kitchen. And I've already argued against interoperability in the case of refrigerators. So it was worth reading. But it immediately became clear that we weren't looking in the same direction. They start off with a ?smart speaker? and a ?smart display?. OK, I've been using laptops in the kitchen for decades.
Understanding Trump supporters
Question on Quora today: ?If you live outside of the United States, what do you personally think about Donald Trump??. Just the thing I like to answer: Like nearly everybody outside the USA, my feeling towards Trump is a mixture of amazement, contempt and fear. Amazement that the USA could elect such a person to rule them, contempt for his behaviour, and fear for what he might still do to the world economy. Of course I got a comment from a Trump supporter: All that matters is the American workers.
Trust your mobile phone!
In this diary I've made it abundantly clear that I don't share the general enthusiasm for mobile phones, and in particular that I don't consider them secure. My friends laugh at me, but as long as I don't understand the security implications, I don't trust them. And they're just too complicated to be safe. Just a few days ago I had a case where Qantas sent a security code to an expired mobile phone number. How much information was in there? Probably not enough to be dangerous, but who knows? And then today How-To Geek published an article on mobile phone theft, including identity theft.
Still more NBN outages!
Mail from Aussie Broadband again today: NBNCo has let us know that they are planning network maintenance in your area, and that your service at 29 STONES RD, DEREEL VIC will be affected. The details are: - Start date and time: Mon 15th July 2019 23:00 AEST - End date and time: Tue 16th July 2019 06:00 AEST - Window: 7.0 hours You may experience the following interruptions during the maintenance - 270 min OK, I know that. I received notice on 25 June, and it was in yesterday's screen shot (which politely omitted the duration).
teevee upgrade, day 9
I haven't exactly been in a hurry upgrading teevee: there was no hurry. The only issue was the impending filling up of the /spool file system, which today still had 50 GB free. So: what was there still to do? Why did the mouse not work correctly? Grabbed the mouse from teevee and plugged it into tiwi. Works normally. So it seems that my suspicion of some interference between the two Logitech mice might really have been the issue. OK, what else? Replace the old Nvidia driver. And that just worked, without any issues with dependencies.
Lies, damn lies and Statista
I get at least one statistic every day from Statista, and some are quite interesting, though I often have my doubts about the depth of their research. Today was particularly interesting. The heading for the mail message read ?Australian 5G Slower than 4G?. OK, that looks interesting. And sure enough, that's what their bar chart shows: And they state in the text: Elsewhere, the fact that the technology is not fully mature is certainly evident in some countries such as Australia where 4G outperformed 5G in download speed.
Another bloody NBN outage! Another! Another!
In the middle of the morning, got an unexpected ?site not accessible? error. Dammit, I'm off the NBN again! Off out of the office, furiously cursing, but discovered that the outage wasn't that long, ?only? 20 minutes. But it wasn't alone. Two more, a total of 35 minutes in a 90 minute period: 1562805630 1562806828 1198 0.005 # 11 July 2019 10:40:30 11 July 2019 11:00:28 1562807924 1562808605 681 3.285 # 11 July 2019 11:18:44 11 July 2019 11:30:05 1562810598 1562810856 258 1.806 # 11 July 2019 12:03:18 11 July 2019 12:07:36 When is this ever going to stop?
teevee: back to Nvidia
Enough procrastination with tiwi, the new teevee. Time to test with the Nvidia card, of which I had one lying around. I wasn't overly surprised when I couldn't start X: (==) Using system config directory "/usr/local/share/X11/xorg.conf.d" (EE) Fatal server error: (EE) no screens found(EE) (EE) Please consult the The X.Org Foundation support at http://wiki.x.org for help. To be fair, it also referred to /var/log/Xorg.0.log, but I knew that. There I found the explanation that should have been in the startup message: [ 785.886] (WW) NVIDIA(0): The NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT GPU installed in this system is [ 785.886] (WW) NVIDIA(0): supported through the NVIDIA 340.xx Legacy drivers.
X configuration revisited
So how did my upgrade of teevee work out? Finally dragged out a mouse and tried things out. My all-important mpv worked, but not without grumbling: Playing: 6-Schnitzel-dell-arte--6_6--20190422-163000.mp4 (+) Video --vid=1 (*) (h264 1280x720 50.000fps) (+) Audio --aid=1 (*) (aac 2ch 48000Hz) (+) Subs --sid=1 '6-Schnitzel-dell-arte--6_6--20190422-163000.srt' (subrip) (external) Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0". [vo/gpu/opengl] GLX not found. Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0". Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0". [vo/gpu/opengl] GLX not found. Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0".
50 years of Unix?
Unix is 50 years old, more or less. At the start it seems to have been a way for Ken Thompson to get out of visiting relatives in summer 1969. In three weeks, so the stories go, he laid the foundations of Unix on a "little-used PDP-7?. What he actually did then depends on whom you ask. In a recent interview he stated that he spent a week each writing an editor, an assembler and an operating system. But we still don't know exactly when. Warner Losh has been doing some investigation of the ?little-used PDP-7? and came up with this photo from DEC sales literature: The interesting thing there is: no disk.
NBN: We have worse in store
I've been complaining more than usual about the National Broadband Network recently. Maybe they've noticed and tried to make things even more difficult. Today I received Yet Another email announcing long planned outages: NBNCo has let us know that they are planning network maintenance in your area, and that your service at 29 STONES RD, DEREEL VIC will be affected. The details are: - Start date and time: Thu 25th July 2019 07:00 AEST - End date and time: Fri 2nd August 2019 22:00 AEST - Window: 207.0 hours You may experience the following interruptions during the maintenance - 480 min - 480 min - 480 min - 360 min Yet more daytime work!
Which ports were removed?
Yesterday's port upgrade had a problem: I lost the log file. Peter Jeremy commented that there's a way around it: pkg (which also calls itself pkg-static some of the time) logs them: Jul 8 09:15:40 tiwi pkg[51138]: py27-setuptools-40.8.0 deinstalled Jul 8 09:16:26 tiwi pkg[51138]: mysql56-server-5.6.43 deinstalled Jul 8 09:16:35 tiwi pkg[51138]: mysql56-client-5.6.43 deinstalled Jul 8 09:19:24 tiwi pkg[51138]: samba47-4.7.12 deinstalled Jul 8 09:21:09 tiwi pkg[51138]: talloc-2.1.14 deinstalled Jul 8 09:21:09 tiwi pkg[51138]: tevent-0.9.37 deinstalled Jul 8 09:21:09 tiwi pkg[51138]: tdb-1.3.16,1 deinstalled Jul 8 09:30:09 tiwi pkg[51138]: bind914-9.14.0 deinstalled Jul 8 09:30:11 tiwi pkg[51138]: llvm39-3.9.1_7 deinstalled Jul 8 09:30:12 tiwi pkg[51138]: llvm50-5.0.2_3 deinstalled Jul 8 09:30:13 tiwi pkg[51138]: llvm40-4.0.1_13 deinstalled How many of those do I need?
tevvee upgrade?
So now effectively teevee has been upgraded. What do I need to do? Modify /etc/rc.conf: @@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ # # Decide whether this is a build system or a "for real" system. # This is set to 0 during build, and 1 during normal operation -FORREAL=0 +FORREAL=1 if [ $FORREAL -eq 0 ]; then hostname="tiwi.lemis.com" hostip=192.109.197.177 ... Shut down system, move disk and display card to teevee. Reboot teevee. Simple, isn't it? But the devil is in the detail. Why move the display card? I've continually had issues with the Nvidia display cards that I have been using for years: the drivers keep changing, and they don't always work.
MediathekView pain
Every morning I use MediathekView to update my list of German TV programmes. But today I got a message: ?Das Laden der Filmliste hat nicht geklappt? (?Loading the film list didn't work?) . Why? Ah, this is a modern program (written in Java, no less). Don't annoy the user with information. OK, this has been running for a while (and using gigabytes of storage). Let's shoot it down. Oh, no, please don't do that! I'll have to dump core. And dump core. And dump core. Why did it take so long? It dumped 6 GB of core, and at an average transfer rate of 60 MB/s, that's still 100 seconds.
teevee upgrade, day 5
In to the office this morning to discover that nothing had gone wrong with the port upgrade on tiwi, the new teevee: [1005/1010] Extracting Lohit-20140220_2: .......... done [1006/1010] Upgrading CoinMP from 1.8.4 to 1.8.4_1... [1006/1010] Extracting CoinMP-1.8.4_1: .......... done Message from python36-3.6.8_2: ... Well, almost nothing. It had deleted a number of ports, still fewer than expected. But I had been prepared for that. That's why I copied the output to a mail message to myself. But where was the mail message? Jul 8 09:40:52 eureka postfix/smtpd[32172]: connect from tiwi.lemis.com[192.109.197.177] Jul 8 09:40:52 eureka postfix/smtpd[32172]: EEBEB264CDA: client=tiwi.lemis.com[192.109.197.177] Jul 8 09:40:52 eureka postfix/cleanup[32229]: EEBEB264CDA: message-id=<[email protected]> Jul 8 09:40:53 eureka postfix/smtpd[32172]: disconnect from tiwi.lemis.com[192.109.197.177] ehlo=1 mail=1 rcpt=1 data=1 quit=1 commands=5 Jul 8 09:40:53 eureka postfix/qmgr[2129]: EEBEB264CDA: from=<>, size=20061, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Jul 8 09:40:53 eureka postfix/smtp[32230]: EEBEB264CDA: to=<[email protected]>, relay=tiwi.lemis.com[192.109.197.177]:25, delay=0.11, delays=0.11/0/0/0, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent ...
teevee upgrade, day 4
So was my issue booting the new teevee just because of the incorrect entry in /etc/fstab? Yes! After that it booted, and I was back in familiar territory building a new world: c++ -O2 -pipe -I/usr/obj/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/amd64.amd64/tmp/obj-tools/lib/clang/libllvm -I/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/contrib/llvm/lib/Target/X86 -I/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/lib/clang/include -I/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/contrib/llvm/include -DLLVM_BUILD_GLOBAL_ISEL -D__STDC_LIMIT_MACROS -D__STDC_CONSTANT_MACROS -DNDEBUG -DLLVM_DEFAULT_TARGET_TRIPLE=\"x86_64-unknown-freebsd12.0\" -DLLVM_HOST_TRIPLE=\"x86_64-unknown-freebsd12.0\" -DDEFAULT_SYSROOT=\"/usr/obj/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/amd64.amd64/tmp\" -DLLVM_TARGET_ENABLE_X86 -DLLVM_NATIVE_ASMPARSER=LLVMInitializeX86AsmParser -DLLVM_NATIVE_ASMPRINTER=LLVMInitializeX86AsmPrinter -DLLVM_NATIVE_DISASSEMBLER=LLVMInitializeX86Disassembler -DLLVM_NATIVE_TARGET=LLVMInitializeX86Target -DLLVM_NATIVE_TARGETINFO=LLVMInitializeX86TargetInfo -DLLVM_NATIVE_TARGETMC=LLVMInitializeX86TargetMC -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -gline-tables-only -MD -MF.depend.Transforms_IPO_PruneEH.o -MTTransforms/IPO/PruneEH.o -Qunused-arguments -I/usr/obj/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/amd64.amd64/tmp/legacy/usr/include -fno-exceptions -fno-rtti -gline-tables-only -std=c++11 -stdlib=libc++ -Wno-c++11-extensions -c /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/contrib/llvm/lib/Transforms/IPO/PruneEH.cpp -o Transforms/IPO/PruneEH.o In file included from /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/contrib/llvm/lib/Transforms/IPO/PruneEH.cpp:19: In file included from /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/contrib/llvm/include/llvm/Analysis/CallGraph.h:51: In file included from /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/contrib/llvm/include/llvm/IR/CallSite.h:32: In file included from /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/contrib/llvm/include/llvm/IR/Attributes.h:20: In file included from /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/contrib/llvm/include/llvm/ADT/ArrayRef.h:13: /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/contrib/llvm/include/llvm/ADT/Hashing.h:49:10: fatal error: 'llvm/Support/Host.h' file not found --- Transforms/IPO/PassManagerBuilder.o --- In file included from /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/contrib/llvm/lib/Transforms/IPO/PassManagerBuilder.cpp:18: In file included from /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/contrib/llvm/include/llvm/Analysis/BasicAliasAnalysis.h:21: In file included from /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/contrib/llvm/include/llvm/Analysis/AliasAnalysis.h:45: In file included from /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/contrib/llvm/include/llvm/Analysis/TargetLibraryInfo.h:19: In file included from /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/contrib/llvm/include/llvm/IR/PassManager.h:47: /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/contrib/llvm/include/llvm/IR/PassInstrumentation.h:58:10: fatal error: 'llvm/ADT/FunctionExtras.h' file not found --- Transforms/IPO/PruneEH.o --- ...
Panoramas with 7-14 mm lens
House photo day again today, and of course I had to try it out with the new M.Zuiko DIGITAL ED 7-14 mm f/2.8 PRO. Despite being the widest available rectilinear lens for the Micro Four Thirds system, it's considerably narrower than the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 8mm f/1.8 Fisheye PRO, so I mounted it vertically and took images at 60° instead of 90° steps. Things worked out quite well. Here a comparison with fisheye (first) and rectilinear lenses: One of the things that had impressed me by both Olympus fisheye lenses (the other being the Olympus Zuiko Digital ED 8 mm f/3.5) was the extreme lack of flare.
teevee upgrade, day 3
Why am I getting these errors with the teevee upgrade? Did something go wrong with copying the disk image from teevee? In particular, did I somehow end up with a node /dev that wasn't a directory? First tried rsyncing the file system again. Changes, of course, but none that pointed to a problem copying the files the first time. OK, one step at a time. I have two disks: the disk that is intended to bootstrap eureka, and the one that will become the new teevee. Both are GPT volumes, and both are partitioned in the same manner: they have two system partitions and a larger file system for everything else.
Upgrading teevee, day 2
So now I have the teevee file system on the new 8 TB disk, masquerading as tiwi.lemis.com. Boot up. Oh: What's that? Spent some time scratching my head. Clearly init is there, but what's this reference to /dev/dev? Error 2 is ENOENT, ?no such file or directory?. OK, put the eureso disk back in front of the tiwi disk and boot. And it had difficulties too: couldn't mount linprocfs.
Upgrading teevee
OK, time to upgrade teevee. Put the new 8 TB disk in my test box as a second disk, with the still-waiting eureso as the first. Partition, copy data, both the root file system from teevee and the video data from the backup disk. Based on previous experience, time to turn off soft updates journaling on the file system. That's easy enough, but reenabling it requires removing the file .sujournal in the top-level directory. It's not easy: the file is protected by all sorts of strange flags that I've never heard of before. There must be room for improvement there. That was all I could do today.
NBN: three days planned downtime!
From time to time I get messages from Aussie Broadband telling me that the National Broadband Network is planning yet more downtime for my network link. The last ones were particularly draconian: The details are: - Start date and time: Wed 10th July 2019 07:00 AEST - End date and time: Fri 12th July 2019 19:00 AEST - Window: 60.0 hours You may experience the following interruptions during the maintenance - 90 min - 90 min - 90 min The details are: - Start date and time: Mon 15th July 2019 23:00 AEST - End date and time: Tue 16th July 2019 06:00 AEST - Window: 7.0 hours You may experience the following interruptions during the maintenance - 270 min The best thing that I can say about that is that they're the first scheduled ...
Video copy: done!
The video backup copy that I started completed today at 13:58:12, not quite 48 hours after starting. 5.4 TB, about 31 MB/s. Not spectacular, but of course it's a SMR disk, so it kept taking breaks to rearrange the mess it has collected.
Photo processing without end
Spent much of the day processing photos, both yesterday's focus stacked photos and today's weekly house photos, postponed because of the terrible weather yesterday. And I didn't get either finished! But at least the focus stacked photos are finally showing promise.
New disks
It's only been a year since I replaced the previous ?3 TB? disk with a ?6 TB? disk, but in that time I have managed to fill it: === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/5) /spool/Series 198 -> df Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/ada0p4 64,456 41,057 18,243 69% / /dev/ada0p2 64,456 53,785 5,514 91% /destdir /dev/ada0p5 5,568,407 5,411,402 101,321 98% /spool eureka:/videobackup 5,722,572 5,431,612 233,734 96% /videobackup OK, that means two new disks: one for teevee and a backup disk on eureka.
Focus stack processing
Today I got around to processing yesterday's focus stacked images, 38 of them. Surprise, surprise: Zerene didn't want to know the last 7 of them, claiming that they didn't belong to the same stack. Here's the last one it accepted and the first one it didn't: What's wrong there? Decided that it could be being particularly finicky about some detail of the image conversion, so put the stack through DxO PhotoLab again with no changes to the photo gradation, and it worked.
What price lenses?
It's been (coincidentally) almost exactly a year since I last bought a lens, and then mainly to use up an eBay voucher. Still, it's clear that we need a better wide-angle lens, so spent a considerable amount of time this morning investigating the M.Zuiko DIGITAL ED 7-14 mm f/2.8 PRO. Like the other PRO lenses, it's not cheap. B&H offer it for US $1,199, corresponding (currently) to AUD 1,713. But we're not done yet: they also want $30 for shipping (admittedly, much cheaper than it used to be), though their calculations are strange: DHL Express delivery (4-7 days) for $30.01, or DHL Express freight (7-10 days) for $212, a little more than 7 times the price for a significantly slower delivery.
Painful houses and bedrooms
It's clear that I'm no fan of ?smart phones?, and I've grumbled at length about ?smart TVs?. But now there's a new source of pain: ?smart homes?. I've read various articles about them, mainly dealing with things like talking to your devices and remote controlling power points, but mainly the choice of a ?system? (clearly ?interoperability? is an old, worn-out magic word). It's not as if I don't have various parts of the house connected to my local network. My article above about the air conditioner is one example, and then there's the network-connected sprinkler system. But I don't want to be tied to one vendor, and remote control of power points seems rather pointless to me.
Focus stacking revisited
It's been some time since I discovered some flowers at the east end of Grassy Gully Road, and I've been meaning to take some focus-stacked photos of them since then; I now have three cuttings in various states of decay. In the meantime, I have a number of other issues: the problems with my Olympus STF-8 macro flash unit and focus stacking, the failure of my Viltrox JY-670 Macro Ring Lite, the arrival of the RF-550 ?MacroLED Ring Flash? and the availability of new firmware for my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II. Today I finally got round to trying out what I had planned to do when the LED ?flash?
Google messages revisited
A bit of finger trouble switching tabs on one of my firefox instances today, and I got this message: OK, two questions: why do I need a ?supported? browser, and why did I only get this message today? Off to try on another instance (firefox tries very hard to ensure that I only run one instance, but it doesn't understand X displays). Oops, wrong password: I hadn't logged in to Google since the repair of my Nokia 3 phone 4½ months ago, and of course I had changed the password.
eBay guaranteed delivery
Bought some more wine online today, and got the usual confirmation. Well, relatively usual: Guaranteed delivery: Tue, 25 Jun Your order has been processed. Please expect it in 7-10 working days if you live within metropolitan areas or at least 14 working days if you live in Australian regional centres and outside metropolitan capital cities. It'll be interesting to see what happens, and what recourse I have if the guarantee has to come into operation.
FreeBSD under VirtualBox, simplified?
Installing a FreeBSD system used to be a significant undertaking. 21 years ago I did an all-day tutorial at AUUG 1998 and didn't even finish installing the base system. No way I want to do that again. The standard way to install a system used to be to get a DVD image and install from that. But who uses DVDs any more? USB? While I was looking, I found a collection of virtual machine images, including one for VirtualBox. Just what I need! Download it and install. First step: install X, Emacs and Bash. WHAT? The virtual machine image was just big enough for the files that it contained.
Hugin bug on FreeBSD
I still haven't resolved the Hugin startup bug that was reported against FreeBSD nearly 2 months ago. It's puzzling: Hugin crashes on startup with one complaint too many. After the usual Gtk bitching and moaning, he gets: (hugin:6057): Gtk-WARNING **: 19:18:30.940: gtk_window_present_with_time() should not be called with 0, or GDK_CURRENT_TIME as a timestamp, the timestamp should instead be gathered at the time the user initiated the request for the window to be shown zsh: segmentation fault (core dumped) hugin The problem is, nobody else does. Thomas Modes of the Hugin project says that the function gtk_window_present_with_time() isn't called from Hugin, but of course it could be called internally.
Panic! on teevee
While watching TV this evening, the screen went blank. Only relatively briefly; then I got a startup display. teevee had paniced! That almost never happens. It had been up for 47 days, thanks mainly to the solar electricity system. What caused it? Jun 14 21:34:09 teevee savecore: reboot after panic: page fault Jun 14 21:34:09 teevee savecore: writing core to /var/crash/vmcore.4 OK, that shouldn't happen, so it's worth a look. === root@teevee (/dev/pts/8) /var/crash 4 -> kgdb /home/obj/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/11/sys/GENERIC/kernel.debug vmcore.4 GNU gdb 6.1.1 [FreeBSD] Unread portion of the kernel message buffer: Fatal trap 12: page fault while in kernel mode cpuid = 1; apic id = 01 fault virtual address = 0x0 fault code = supervisor read data, page not present instruction pointer = 0x20:0xffffffff829d83a4 stack pointer = 0x28:0xfffffe010f85c720 frame pointer ...
More web page mods
From time to time I quote web pages, which don't always play nice with the their title. For example, the NOAA Solar Calculator has a heading ?ESRL Global Monitoring Division?, which doesn't help much. And when I quote from my diary I get (for example, for this month) ?Greg's diary--June 2019?. That could be easier. Each article in my diary has its own URL fragment (the part after the # symbol), a coding of the date and time when the article was written. For some time now they have had their own title, like this one, ?More web page mods?. Why not put that in the window heading?
Offending Christians?
Yesterday I wrote: I personally liked ?EVIL? (?Electronic Viewer, Interchangeable Lens?) , but it seems that that is too whimsical for Christians and people with no humour, ... A gentle rebuke on IRC from a Christian participant. Yes, that's valid. I have nothing against most Christians, just the militant kind who tell me how to live my life. Like most adherents of other religions, most are good people. Sadly there are too many people of any religion who use it like a weapon and thus do discredit to their religion.
Fixing CJ's DID
Called up MyNetFone support today to ask about changing the DID for CJ Ellis' phone. This time I timed things. 3 whole minutes of various announcements, and then the confidence-inspiring male voice ?currently our wait times are?, then in a stressed female voice ?25 minutes?. So I was able to request a callback, which took another minute, because they were too polite to assume the number on which I called (one of their numbers), and then they wanted to read it back to me and get me to confirm. It didn't help much. They didn't call back, so after a couple of hours I took another look.
More VoIP pain
Call from CJ Ellis today. But his name didn't pop up on the phone; instead I saw a number starting with 09, an internal number used by MyNetFone. And he was complaining that people would call him but just get voice mail. OK, he now has two lines. Was the external number (which, I discovered, is called a Direct inward dial or DID) attached to the other? Got him to call me on it. No, still a (different, clearly) 09 number. Config issues with MyNetFone? Found my way into CJ's page on their web site. Yes, now he has not two, but three numbers, and the DID is attached to his old Mitron Analogue Telephone Adapter.
Focus stacking again
So I still don't have any good image series of the Schlumbergera. For the fun of it, tried stitching the ones I had, with the unsharp stamens. The results, stitched with Zerene Stacker were interesting: one (?PMax?) looked quite good, the other (?Dmap?) was singularly useless: The ?PMax?
More focus stacking
It's been a while since I did any serious macro photography, but now our Schlumbergera is flowering, and it cries out for focus stacked photos of the flowers. But how many? Once again, it's just plain guesswork. I set it up with the closest part of the flower at 25.5 cm from the M.Zuiko Digital ED 30 mm f/3.5 Macro?once again the optically better M.Zuiko Digital ED 60 mm f/2.8 Macro was just too long?and erred on the side of caution with 200 shots at f/5.6. That proved to be correct: it stopped after 57 shots with focus at ?. But the shots weren't sharp.
Another Android GPS check?
Last week I went to a lot of trouble to try to decide whether my new tablet had a GPS receiver or not. But after thinking about it, it occurred to me that I had had issues with OI.Share, which wouldn't install on a device without a GPS receiver. Is that still the case? Tried downloading. ?This app may not be optimized for your device?. But it installed, and of course it couldn't find my camera. Take me to the Settings menu? OK. But it couldn't find that either; presumably the tablet has hidden the Settings menu somewhere where OI.Share can't find it.
NFS problems
Watching TV this evening, we finished one programme and tried to watch another. === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/8) /spool/Series/Matula 441 -> mmp Matula---Der-Schatten-des-Berges-20180330-211500.mp4 bash: /home/local/bin/mmp: Input/output error === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/8) /spool/Series/Matula 442 -> df Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/ada0p4 64,456 40,374 18,925 68% / devfs 0 0 0 100% /dev /dev/ada0p2 64,456 53,785 5,514 91% /destdir /dev/ada0p5 5,568,407 5,359,841 152,882 97% /spool linprocfs 0 0 ...
ATA issues
CJ has now received a new Analogue Telephone Adapter, a Cisco SPA112, with which he is well pleased. It worked out of the box, and now people answer the phone much more quickly than before. I tried to explain that the answers didn't depend on the ATA, but it seems that maybe they did: previously the connection would drop on occasion, and I don't trust the ring tone to really correspond with a ring at the other end. I had suspected the power supply, since I had lent him an alternative, and he hadn't had any problems with that. My alternative supply only delivers 12 V at 1.5 A, whereas his old Mitron MV1 (MNFMV1?)
Photo processing confusion
After processing Chris Bahlo's photos, Yvonne came to me with a problem: the photos weren't all there when she tried to put them through Ashampoo photo optimizer. Why? She had processed 24 photos, and there were 24 photos there. No, half were missing. OK, more checking, and discovered that though there were 24 images, some of the images had been created from the wrong source image, photos that she had processed earlier. This is in the convert target, where I convert from the original image in the orig subdirectory to an image in the main directory. The mapping is described in the file Makejpeg, where the entries look like: 20190608_134405_DxO Ride-9 0 20190608_140257_DxO Ride-17 0 26081524_DxO Ride-8 0 26081536_DxO-1 Ride-37 0 The first column is the name of the source file (implicitly in orig), the ...
File archives in the Microsoft space
Chris Bahlo took some photos of a ride that she, Melanie and Yvonne went on yesterday, on her Samsung SM-G930F phone (why does Samsung have phone descriptions that have nothing to do with the marketing name?) . They were on Google Drive, another Google offering that I find hard to navigate. A total of 26 photos and 4 videos. How do I download them? Simple: double click with the on the minuscule little fingernail image to the left of a file name, or on the file name, wait 4 seconds, and you get a popup: Select Download and it loads the image for you.
Finally! Power feedin configured!
Email from Powercor today: Date: Wed, 5 Jun 2019 04:58:49 +0000 (GMT) From: CitiPower and Powercor <econnect_no-[email protected]> To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Subject: Notification of works completion for 29 STONES RD, DEREEL VIC 3352 Message-ID: <jwsug000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000PSM0I100X04Ra6oRStmO2WuOVAzfFw@sfdc.net> And the content? None. Ah, it's ?multipart/alternative?, except that there's no alternative to HTML. But that doesn't matter, because it's doesn't say much more than the Subject: line and the request number. My meter is now configured for power feedin, only a little more than three weeks after application and 7 weeks after installation.
New sprinkler controller
On Wednesday I received a new sprinkler relay controller, this time with a housing: But that was all that came with it. No instructions of any kind! How do I use it? I had sent a message to the seller and received the reassuring reply: Sorry for troubles caused to you. We will contact our supplier for help. Please kindly wait 2-3 days, thanks. Don't worry, we will be responsible for this issue. Tips:1.We need to deal with thousands of emails every day,in case we forget to inform you,kindly please remind us 2 days later,thanks for your understanding!
Phone GPS accuracy
I've been moaning about the inaccuracy of the GPS receiver in taskumatti, my current Nokia 3 phone. How about some comparisons? The new tablet proved to be a non-starter in that respect, since it doesn't have a GPS receiver. But what about talipon, the old Samsung GT-I9100T? Tried that out today, with both phones next to each other in my shirt pocket. The results were surprising but inconclusive. First taskumatti, then talipon: The first is from taskumatti, and the second from talipon.
On the move again
Following Donald Trump's tweets yesterday wasn't easy, especially as Twitter has decided that it doesn't like my firefox. OK, there are other alternatives, bringing with them typical silly messages: Date: Wed, 05 Jun 2019 03:30:29 +0000 From: Twitter <[email protected]> To: Greg Lehey <[email protected]> Subject: New login to Twitter from Chrome We noticed a recent login for your account @Twit. Device: Chrome Location: Traralgon, Victoria *Location is approximate based on the login's IP address. If this was you Great! There's nothing else you need to do. Traralgon is one of the more popular locations, probably because Aussie Broadband is located only 12 km from there, close enough for Twitter.
Another Android device!
ALDI had a 10.1" Android tablet on offer today for the attractive price of $100 (or, as they put it, $99.99). OK, that might be an interesting alternative to my aging car GPS navigator, so I got Yvonne to pick one up for me. What features does it have? The packaging and minimal instructions are far too polite to irritate me with technical details. Clearly it doesn't have a phone?it doesn't have a SIM card slot?and that's almost a reason to reject it anyway. But still, how about trying it out? Does it have a GPS receiver? On IRC, Jari Kirma was sure that it would have, but I've had one from ALDI before that didn't.
Moving around
I've done a lot of travelling in the last few days?just ask Google location services. While looking for something on the web, I was given a price in New Zealand dollars and a phone number to call, also in New Zealand. But that's gone now. Now I'm in South Yarra. How does it make these mistakes? Yes, the GPS receiver on my phone is pretty useless, but it's not that bad. Why can't I set the location myself?
More phone smarting
The whole affair with Brana was made worse by my Android ?smart? phone. I've come to the conclusion that it is next to useless for making phone calls. The first pain came when trying to contact the vets. Hit a recorded message saying that they were closed and specifying an emergency number to call. OK, we can do that later. Hang up. How? Press the ON/OFF button? Wrong, fool. That doesn't turn it off, but it does get rid of the correct screen from which you can hang up. So I got the opportunity to test Tim Bishop's suggestion from yesterday: swipe downwards from the display at the top.
A use for high-speed links
This month I have increased my Internet link speed from 20 Mb/s down, 5 Mb/s up to 50 Mb/s down, 20 Mb/s up. It doesn't really seem to make much difference: for most things, including video downloads, the limiting factor is upstream. Downloads from ARD run at between 184 kB/s (1.5 Mb/s) and 700 kB/s (5.6 Mb/s), while downloads from SRF run at between 1.2 MB/s (9.6 Mb/s) and 2.65 MB/s (21.2 Mb/s). The extra $10 for the higher speed just aren't worth it, and next month it's back to 20/5. But today I found a case where it does make a difference, uploading photos to DigitalOcean: s3cmd sync /home/grog/public_html/Photos/20150503/big/ s3://lemis/grog/Photos/20150503/big/ -P --delete-removed upload: '/home/grog/public_html/Photos/20150503/big/driveway-nw.jpeg' -> 's3://lemis/grog/Photos/20150503/big/driveway-nw.jpeg' [1 of 19] 12288363 of 12288363 100% in 8s 1483.51 kB/s done upload: '/home/grog/public_html/Photos/20150503/big/garden-centre.jpeg' -> 's3://lemis/grog/Photos/20150503/big/garden-centre.jpeg' [2 of 19] 14733364 of 14733364 ...
ON1: OFF
It's been a while since I installed ON1 Photo RAW 2019.5, which gave me headaches with claimed missing OpenGL 3.3, but I had established that I could start it if the display was the native monitor rather than my standard rdesktop. OK, the free trial is running away, so time to see how it works. Surprise, surprise. It wouldn't start on dischord even on the native display. So I had to start it on euroa, the laptop. One of the nice things about ON1 is that it comes with lots of videos, and I had looked at the basic ones. But even so, I couldn't work my way round the menu system.
Phone smarts
Mail from Tim Bishop and Oliver Musch today about my problems answering an Android phone. Tim noted from the screen shot that a call was pending. All I saw was: But what I should have seen was in the top left-hand corner: The lightning deflecting off the old-fashioned handset clearly means that a call is incoming. As Tim says: Pretty sure if you swipe down from the top of the screen there'll be something in the notification area that'll let you answer the call.
Finally I understand!
Mail from Andreas Leitgeb today, referring to Ken Thompson's T-shirt that I discussed a few weeks ago: Andreas writes: I know a little Greek - enough to understand the caption as "Finally I understood this". Fwiw, Googles translation is quite a bit off. " ??" is the Greek article "the", but without a noun following it, "this" would be a better translation.
Answering Android calls: unsolved mystery
Yesterday's inability to answer my phone concerned me, of course, so today I tried to find out what I should have done. Spent some time, without success. What I have established is that, using Android 8.1: If you pick your phone out of your shirt pocket, very carefully avoiding touching the screen, you get this display: As it says, ?swipe?
How to answer a mobile phone?
While I was talking to Peter O'Connell, my phone rang. Pulled it out of my pocket and somehow lost the ?answer phone? display. How to answer the phone? Went to the phone app, but that just wanted to show me my contacts and a keypad option. I failed. What is wrong with this system? Clearly there's a secret way to do this, but it evades me. No wonder they call them smart phones. From the Oxford English Dictionary: Mental pain or suffering; grief, sorrow, affliction; (sometimes) suffering of the nature of punishment or retribution.
GPS tracking: worth the trouble?
While writing up my diary for yesterday, processed this map of walking the dogs: What is that nonsense? The pointed ?path? at bottom right would have taken us a good 100 m through Fiona Drayton's paddock. I've seen paths like this when the app is allowed to guess location based on the network, but I had explicitly removed any such points. And the real track is ridiculously inaccurate. Is it even worth it? Today I got something only marginally better: Would a better GPS receiver do better?
More solar energy inverter information
While Fyodor was here on Tuesday, he showed me some other functions of the solar electricity inverter web server: http://inverter.lemis.com/#localinverters/datalogger gives a tailored display of parameters, going back apparently to the installation: This one includes all sorts of parameters that I haven't been able to find elsewhere, including grid voltage and frequency, and even ?Inverter. Phi Cosine? (what I call cos ?, but is generally referred to as Power factor). And at top right there's a little green box OK, I'll bite.
More clever error messages
While trying to create maps of yesterday's dog walk, got an unexpected error message: Yes, that was a link from the same site. But on closer examination it proved to be a new way of saying ?we can't find your input file?.
Wine!
Message from Australia Post today: my wine is waiting for me in Napoleons. But yesterday it still hadn't been picked up. How did it come so fast? Clearly by net transfer. It still hasn't been picked up. The tracking information reads (upside down, of course): Awaiting collection at NAPOLEON CPA NAPOLEONS VIC Fri 24 May ? 10:14am In transit WENDOUREE VIC Fri 24 May ? 5:53am Unable to deliver - Item carded and transferred to post office for collection WENDOUREE VIC Fri 24 May ? 5:52am Shipping information approved by Australia Post Tue 21 May ?
Inverter configuration error?
I've been playing a little with inverter settings. Today I set the ?charge from grid? rate to 1000 W and a maximum charge of 40%, pretty much the opposite of what I did last time. When trying to save the configuration, I got a message: ?Error writing config?, an indication of how modern this inverter is. What went wrong? Hard to say. A retry worked.
How far to walk the dogs?
I've been walking the dogs further than previously; instead of the 600 odd metres to Bliss Road and back, we're going further afield. Today I was on my own, as Yvonne was in town, and I went to the end of Grassy Gully Road, a distance I estimated at 2.4 km. OK, try to process the GPS data: Two problems: first, the obviously wrong track. I went up and down a road, so the two lines should overlap or at any rate be very close together.
Firmware updates for solar electricity system
Fyodor Torgovnikov along this morning and took a look at the solar electricity installation. My main concern had been that the inverter had stopped charging from the PV array, but his main concern was the battery. He had some reason: like all modern equipment that uses networks, it had to be its own Wi-Fi access point rather than join in to an existing network. I found an Android app that displayed network cells, but I lost my way through the maze of twisty little passages past the flood of advertisements, and couldn't find it again. What I did see was my own network, the inverter's private network (though it does exactly the same thing as http://inverter.lemis.com/) and the battery network?but only after Fyodor had power cycled the battery.
More power insights
After yesterday's fun with the solar electricity installation, spent a lot of time observing and analysing the results. About the only definite conclusions were that it happened again, this time during normal charging: +---------------------+------+----------------------+------+------+---------+--------+-------+--------+------+ | tstamp | Pac | Status | SOC | VBat | PacGrid | PacBat | PacPV | FromPV | W1 | +---------------------+------+----------------------+------+------+---------+--------+-------+--------+------+ | 2019-05-20 12:39:13 | 862 | On-grid | 74 | 268 | 0 | -209 | 1071 | 0 | 2 | | 2019-05-20 12:39:14 | -378 | On-grid (calibrating | 74 | 268 | 0 | -1469 | 1091 | 0 | 1169 | | 2019-05-20 12:39:15 | -491 | ...
ON1 tried again
So why does ON1 Photo RAW 2019.5 want OpenGL 3.3? Is it installed on my systems or not? Or is it an issue with remote desktop? Fired it up on euroa. Crashed. Do you want to report? Yes, of course. But it seemed that that referred to the last attempt. After that, sure enough, it started with no trouble and happily migrated to my remote desktop session. So maybe it is worth looking at after all. I just have to work my way through yet another maze of twisty little menus, all different.
Sprinkler problems
I've been dragging my heels again on cleaning the bore water filter, and it shows: the garden beds are no longer moist. OK, clean the filter, then run the sprinkler: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/21) ~ 47 -> netsprinkle 30 30 30 30 (nothing) Nothing! What went wrong there? Something to do with the other two issues, maybe? Discovered that it was off the net, or at least it didn't respond to pings. My best bet was one of the network switches in the pantry, so went and power cycled them.
Power fail!
Into the office this sunny morning, and almost as a matter of course looked at the ?dashboard? display of the solar electricity inverter. No power! The PV generation was off. What happened there? Out to take a look at the inverter. No, no problems there. Oh. PV array shows 478 V, which looks right, but 0 W input. Why? Played around with the menu system on the inverter and came up with a way to ?Start? and ?Stop? the inverter. OK, cautiously take the inverter out of circuit with the unmarked oscillator isolator to the right of the inverter: Then stopped and started the inverter.
ON1 again
ON1 Photo RAW 2019.5 (isn't the shouting nice?) has just been released. It offers a surprising number of features that I've been looking for, especially since it gives the impression of being an incremental release: Fast raw (sorry, RAW) processing Text Tool: Create posters, add bylines, or add editing annotations HDR Panorama stitching ...
Microsoft update, day 3
So now I have installed 6 out of 7 Microsoft updates; it has only taken 2 days. On to the last one: It stayed that for long enough that I lost interest, and the next time I saw the same picture, but claiming that updates had been installed today at 14:22 (sorry, 2.22 PM). Nothing that I saw, and definitely no reboot.
Microsoft update, day 3
Left the Microsoft update running overnight for a second night. It didn't help: Like Schrödinger's cat, it has both failed and is still working. OK, do what I had planned and install only some of the updates. But it came back with the same error message as before. Or did it? Ha, ha, only joking. I left it like that, but next time I looked, it had reconsidered: As far as I can tell, it didn't even download anything else.
Simplifying bank transfers
Yvonne is collecting money for the next Anke Hawke clinic. She received an interesting question: ?Do you have PayID??. Huh? What's that? Off looking and discovered https://payid.com.au/, which tells me that it's a way to replace two numbers (BSB and account number) with one number, apparently useful for people with limited memory. It wasn't until later that I discovered a real advantage, one that they don't seem to have bothered to mention: it's portable, so if you change banks, you can at least theoretically take it with you. But why wasn't I informed? Logged in to my ANZ ?Internet Banking? and saw nothing.
Microsoft update pain
A couple of days ago I tried to update the system on dischord, my Microsoft box. I failed: it hung about ? of the way through the download. OK, yesterday I tried again. And how about that, It stayed like that all afternoon. OK, Microsoft takes its time. Wait. But then I saw another detail: Last update 11/01/2019 at 7:22 PM?
The smart of Android
Somebody mentioned Google camera recently. It's for phones, of course, so off to the toyshop, where I found the description. OK, try it on the phone: Where is it? It comes up with all sorts of things, just not anything that's obvious Google Camera. What does Google Street View have to do with the search terms, for example?
MediathekView display issues
I use MediathekView on a daily basis to choose which videos to download. The download screen typically looks like this: The first image shows what it looks like on a full screen (1920x1080, and the second is reduced in size to make it legible. The bottom right is in two panes: the pane marked green in the second image (meaning ?download finished?) is a list of selected videos. The pane below is a description of the selected line (dark green).
What network speed?
Almost exactly 4 years ago I took part in a free trial of NBN's then-new 50/20 speed rating (50 Mb/s down, 20 Mb/s up). It seems that the trial lasted several months, because six months later I tested the speed pinging Google's name server 8.8.8.8 and came up with these results: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/14) ~ 28 -> ping -c20 8.8.8.8 ... round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 38.503/51.678/62.721/5.839 ms Things could have changed, of course: in particular, we now have two links from the Radiation Tower to the POP.
International money transfer pain
Yvonne has booked a course in Queensland in early spring. Nothing unusual in that, but we have to pay in Canadian dollars, and they wanted something like a 10% surcharge for transfers from outside the country. OK, I've been trying to arrange for cheaper international fund transfers for a couple of years now, and somehow I haven't got round to it. Most recently I found Transferwise and signed up with them, but never got round to doing any transfers. Finally started to do so a couple of days ago and ran into issues specific to the Canadian banking system?I think. So I sent off mail with questions and get replies today.
Facebook pain again
Question on Quora: ?Does Facebook remove EXIF data from uploaded images??. That sounded like an interesting question, and simple enough to confirm or deny. OK, enter a post. But how? Nothing echoes in the box provided. Gave up and tried again with Chrome, which echoed. And Facebook sent me a message: We noticed a recent login for your account @Groggyhimself. Device: Chrome Location: Traralgon, Victoria *Location is approximate based on the login's IP address. If this was you Great! There's nothing else you need to do.
Ken Thompson interview
Saw an interesting interview recently: Brian Kernighan interviewed Ken Thompson on a range of subjects, only barely touching Unix. I had some new insights, though I suspect that Ken might have been deliberately misleading in some of the stuff he said. For example, in (northern) summer 1969 he spent 3 weeks hacking while his wife visited relatives. Peter Salus writes that he spent this time writing a file system, which seems a tough enough challenge. But Ken said in the interview that he spent a week each writing an editor, an assembler and an operating system.
Real network problems
A rather surprising email this evening: Date: Thu, 9 May 2019 17:52:30 +1000 From: Aussie Broadband <[email protected]> Subject: [Outage Ref: 49072] Our apologies - we're experiencing an outage Apologies from the Aussie Broadband team - we're experiencing an outage in your region that may be affecting your service. Our network team are investigating as fast as possible. We don't have an ETA for resolution yet. Please keep in mind that our tech support call centre is likely to be pretty busy. You can find updates on our website support page at https://www.aussiebroadband.com.au/support/, or on our Facebook page.
Strange bedfellows
I forget why, but today I discovered this page, a relatively recent photo of Julian Assange with... rms: What's unusual about that? At the time Julian was in self-imposed exile, so rms must have gone to visit him. Clearly he never read the NetBSD fortune files: NetBSD - free yourself from all Stallmanist thought! -- Julian Assange I'm sure there are others, but I can't find them.
Internet signs of the times, 2019
I had nothing much to do after leaving the doctor's, so I took a somewhat roundabout way back to the car park, via the old Block Arcade, which has been looking down-at-heel for some years now. It looks quite different now from the photo they have on their home page: In particular, the premises on the right are empty and to let, not the only one in the relatively short arcade; I'd guess that 40% of the premises are empty. On through Myer, which has been looking in need of renovation for some years now, and in to Central Square It looks a lot better than the other two, but the writing is on the wall, literally.
Mediathek reliability
The German ?Mediatheken? (multimedia libraries, it seems) offer a large amount of TV material for free download, and one of my first actions every morning is to check the updates provided by MediathekView. Today I discovered that they're re-running (so to speak) the first year of ?Um Himmels Willen?. OK, start the download. Episode 2 failed for some unknown reason. That has happened before, and there's an alternative: go straight to the broadcaster's web site, in this case ARD, and download from there with youtube_dl. Search for ?Um Himmels Willen?. Nope, no hits: Huh?
Aussie Broadband: not what they used to be
In the mornings I download videos from German TV broadcasters. It's not always plain sailing, and today a couple failed on me. Why? The reasons are endless. But for once I received a specific error message: the proxy server was down. What? Checked. Yes, no access. We were off the net! Dammit, this happens far too often (the last time was less than 4 weeks ago). And the procedure was the same: check my saved mail. No, no planned outage. Call Aussie Broadband support. ?You are caller 33. Estimated wait time is 15 minutes and ... 40 seconds?. Damn, and that with a mobile telephone.
Microwave oven shielding
Question on Quora today: Is it true that if you put your phone in a microwave, then call it on another phone and if it rings then your microwave leaks?. Clearly he's talking about a microwave oven. Interesting. In principle I'd say ?yes?: the shielding on the oven is designed to keep out electromagnetic radiation in the order of 2450 MHz (wavelength a little over 12 cm). That's easy enough with the mesh in the door, which has openings round 3 mm, or ?/40. And mobile phones have lower frequencies (typically 900 or 1800 MHz, wavelengths 33 or 17 cm). So clearly a mesh that keeps out cooking microwaves should be able to keep out phone microwaves.
Firefox annoyances
One of my best reasons for not migrating to newer software is that they've done everything they can to make data entry more painful: Why did firefox come up with that message now? It has been running for days. And what was disabled? Nothing followed. Too polite to say? The links were, of course, generic, telling me what a great service they have done me by removing functionality upon which I depend. Dammit!
Ingecon on line again
So why didn't I have any output for my solar electricity system yesterday? I had guessed a problem at their end, and it seems that I was right. Today it was there, along with the data for today as well. And how do I access that data directly? Spent some time sniffing the traffic, but nothing interesting went past. What about the source for the local display? An ngrep showed: GET /dashboard/main.html HTTP/1.1..Host: inverter.lemis.com... GET /dashboard/css/kendo.com... GET /dashboard/css/kendo.black.min.css HTTP/1.1..Host: inverter.lemis.com... GET /dashboard/css/main.css HTTP/1.1..Host: inverter.lemis.com... GET /javascript/head.min.js HTTP/1.1..Host: inverter.lemis.com... GET /javascript/head.min.js HTTP/1.1..Host: inverter.lemis.com...
How much power am I using?
I'm still puzzled about the RCD trip that I had yesterday, so spent some time investigating. The first thing that occurred to me was the display from the inverter: OK, I know about a number of bugs in this display, including the fact that the day are the wrong way round in the second image. The first entry, marked ?Fr? is today. It seems that this always has tomorrow's day of the week.
Android navigation revisited
My GPS navigator has expired: it thinks that the date is some time in 1999, and there seems to be no way to adjust it. OK, it's over 5 years old, so it's probably time to replace it anyway. But are standalone GPS navigators still the way to go? Nearly every mobile telephone, even my el-cheapo Nokia 3, has not only a GPS receiver, but also accelerometers and a compass. Why not use that instead? An obvious reason would be my previous experience, which has brought nothing but frustration. Still, practice makes perfect. Finding my way to the Dorevitch collection centre in Victoria Street is not easy, since it's in a side road only accessible from the Bakery Hill roundabout.
Solar power monitoring strangeness
One of the problems that I had from the power outage was the loss of 2½ hours worth of data from the solar power inverter. Not much I can do about that, though it's interesting to note when the database updates finished: 6:40. That's when the office UPS died, of course. Was there anything of interest in the data in the hour before? Not that I could see. It would be really nice if the inverter would log things like mains voltage, which I suspect might play a part. And how did the ingeconsunmonitor.com site deal with the lack of data?
Recovering eureka
Rebooting eureka was an experience in itself. It failed to boot with an error I had never seen before, something about an inability to load some lua menu. I didn't think to take a photo: I was supposed to go be going into town for a blood test. But all the parameters looked right. What happens with just boot? It booted! But at a snail's pace. I couldn't even enter more than about one character per second on the keyboard. And I got lots of messages that I have never seen before, roughly at 10 second intervals: uhub_reattach_port: giving up port reset - device vanished The good news was that the journals recovered the big file systems almost instantaneously.
Power failure!
While getting up this morning, heard a ?beep? from outside. What was that? Yvonne resetting the RCD for the ?non-UPS? circuits at the back of the house. It had tripped again, like it had three months ago. Why? That's what I asked last time. Then in to the office to discover eureka, my main computer, dead in the water. Why? That didn't happen last time. Coincidence? A quick look at dischord, the Microsoft box, showed that it was still in sleep mode. All pointed towards eureka shutting down spontaneously. Recovering eureka was a story in itself, but later I discovered that dischord had been disconnected too?it just recovered automatically, something that I should set in the eureka configuration.
Facebook beats conventional photos
Went back inside and finished watching the TV news before processing the photos I had taken of the dog. Too late. Chris, outside and still in armour, had braved the glass keyboard of her mobile phone and published a photo of him on Facebook: She even got some kind of reply. But that reply seemed rather like my abortive attempts to contact RACV: no two-way communication. No response to the phone (just Facebook; what kind of world are we living in?)
Insurance claims: the pain
I'm finally getting round to making an insurance report for the accident I caused on 5 March. Partly the delay was due to the other side not reporting it until recently, and partly because the email was lacking a Subject: line. And, of course, my usual procrastination. OK, off to the RACV web site, which offered online reporting. Sort of: ?RACV Online is currently undergoing maintenance. Please try again later.? Dammit. Let's talk on the phone. Conveniently they have a real (not ?1300?)
More solar power insights
The weather continues to be cool and dull, and it shows in the solar power generation and consumption. It wasn't as bad as yesterday, and in fact 12.66 kWh don't look that bad, but it's still only 38% of the total need. And the more I look at it, the more this ?charge battery from grid? doesn't make sense. I currently have the system configured to discharge the battery to 20% while on the grid, and down to 5% when off the grid. But when I reach 20%, it's set to charge back to 30% from the grid. That makes particularly little sense early on a sunny morning.
Hugin pain
House photo day again today, and once again I ran into great difficulties getting Hugin to join the house-s panorama: Why? I can't see any obvious issue with that view, but I'm continually having difficulty with it. And to make my day, got a problem report: Hugin gets a SIGSEGV and crashes on start. That's about all he said. Clearly I need more information, but what? He shows a whole list of error messages, but for the most part this is just hugin whingeing when it thinks nobody is looking. It tails off like this: NAM:6-1-1 Shooting Pattern fails @api-max /usr/local/share/hugin/data/plugins/top_five.py CAT:Control Points NAM:keep 5 CPs per image pair fails @api-max /usr/local/share/hugin/data/plugins/woa.py CAT:Control Points NAM:Warped Overlap Analysis fails @api-max So ...
Solar energy: enough!
I've spent the best part of a week thinking about how to process data from my solar inverter, and I think I'm on top of how to get it into a database. But that's only part of the story. What do I do with the data in the database? Do I want to create another page like the weather page? In principle the pretty displays that come with the inverter do most of that. So maybe it's time to step back and do something else. One thing that strikes me: what is using all the power? The daily reports (the ones that come in triplicate) confirm what Powercor keeps telling me: we're currently using about 38 kWh a day.
Getting the most from solar power
I'm quite happy with the amount of power we're saving even at this time of year; the daily reports in triplicate from Spain show that I'm generating between 53% and 66% of my total usage. But it's worth thinking about how to ideally use the power. The algorithm used by the inverter is: Use power from the PV array first. If the PV array can't supply enough power, supplement from the battery. If the battery can't supply enough power, supplement from the grid.
More solar power software insights
More playing around with the solar power data stream today, and managed a partial conversion to an SQL INSERT statement, complicated by my lack of recollection of the syntax. But I'm getting there. The question remains whether I should do a proper parse of the JSON data, but I think I can get by without it. Other questions are more interesting: what do I do with the data? There's one record like this every second: data: { "Devices": [ { "Id": "127.0.0.1:502:1", "Pac": 1016, "SetPoint": 0, "Alarms": "", "Status": "On-grid", "SOC": 58, "VBat": 271, "PacGrid": 0, "PacBat": -4450, "PacPV": 5466, "FromPV": false, "Codes": "" }, { "Id": "127.0.0.1:502:1", "W1": -18, "W2": 0, "W3": 0 } ] } All those numbers appear to fit into 16 bits, but there are quite a few of ...
Cracking the inverter data
Yesterday I investigated sniffing the traffic between the inverter and a web browser, in the assumption that it would be easier than recreating the requests needed for communicating directly with the inverter. But Jamie Fraser and Daniel O'Connor (on IRC) saw it differently. Jamie suggested using the developer tools (F12 on most browsers, it seems). I've seen them before, but never used them in earnest, especially not to analyse HTTP streams. OK, try it out: That's not immediately obvious, but none of the traffic I'm looking for appears there.
Solar electricity progress
We've been planning the solar electricity for well over 4 years, and much of the delay was due to procrastination on my part, coupled with a complete inability to establish contact with Simon Reid of BREAZE. Chris Bahlo didn't have that luxury: she has no grid connection, so she had to have it installed for her new house (also four years ago). Today she came along and we compared notes. She paid about the same amount of money as we did. For that she got 7 (count them, seven) solar panels and a lead-acid battery of unspecified dimensions. But since she's only generating 1.75 kW, and the average hours of sunshine here are round 3.5 hours, it's unlikely that the batteries would store more than 7.5 kWh.
Still more PV software investigation
Yesterday's network sniffing gave some insight into how the photovoltaic inverter communicates, but not enough. Spent some more time sniffing with ngrep and found: T 192.109.197.246:80 -> 192.109.197.137:51800 [AP] 127..event: /ems/sse/stream.data: { "Devices": [ { "Id": "127.0.0.1:502:1", "Pac": 1563, "SetPoint": 0, " Alarms": "", "Status": "On-grid", "SOC": 31, "VBat": 265, "PacGrid": 0, "PacBat": 47, "PacPV": 1516, "Fro mPV": false, "Codes": "" }, { "Id": "127.0.0.1:502:1", "W1": -60, "W2": 0, "W3": 0 } ] }....EE..event: /e ms/sse/stream.data: { "Date": "2019-04-21 11:43:01", "Phase": 1, "W": 5, "Pac": 1541, "PacDischarge": 107 , "PacCharge": 468, "PacPVBatt": 1117, "EMS_VBAT": 265, "EMS_SOC": 31, "WatDigitalInput": 0, "PacRev": 0, "HWOutputs": 0 }....E4..event: /ems/sse/stream.data: { "Date": "2019-04-21 11:43:01", "Phase": 2, "W": 0 , "Pac": 0, "PacDischarge": 0, "PacCharge": 0, "PacPVBatt": 0, "EMS_VBAT": 265, "EMS_SOC": 31, "WatDigita lInput": 0, "PacRev": 0, "HWOutputs": 0 }....E4..event: /ems/sse/stream.data: { "Date": "2019-04-21 11:43 :01", ...
More photovoltaic software investigations
Yesterday's investigations brought me to two partial conclusions: the web application on the inverter has serious bugs, and I don't have access to the configuration menus. I could continue trying to break in, but it's probably a good idea not to do anything until the people come to inspect it. That should happen this coming week, but considering that Monday and Thursday are public holidays, I'm not betting on it. So what can I do? Clearly there's a lot of information going out of the inverter. How about firing up a wireshark and seeing what's going on? First stop all the web browser sessions and then start one and watch what happens.
Understanding the solar electricity installation
So now I have a correctly functioning solar electricity system, and it seems to be doing its job quite well. All I need to do is tweak it a bit. One thing's clear: the web display provided by the inverter is Just Plain Broken. After some comparison, it seems that the ?PV Generation? and ?Grid Consumption? figures add up to the number in the middle with the house symbol. And the ?battery charge? figure below is not directly related; to get the house consumption you need to subtract that number (7306 - 2838 = 4468 W). The dates are ridiculously wrong. It's even counting in the wrong direction: yesterday was ?Saturday?, but now it's ?Sunday?, and today is ?Saturday?: And there are no useful statistics.
X screen blanking again
Once again, eureka can't keep quiet. Blank the screen and it's back on again within seconds. What's causing that? I had had various programs under suspicion, but this evening I couldn't be bothered. Switch to X server 1, which doesn't have anything unusual running. But that didn't stop it. So what is causing this? I can't see any way that a program connected to one server can want to influence another server; there are few enough computers that run more than one X server. More head-scratching.
Apple: all your photos is belong to us
Getting hold of Daniel O'Connor's photos wasn't as easy as it sounds. In principle if you have an image in a web browser, you should be able to save it. But Daniel's photo is https://www.icloud.com/photos/#04YWjMDeSreIQ-Fi7InYEGESw. Apple. No, you can't just save it, you have to ask nicely by signing in with your Apple ID. OK, I can do that, since I couldn't find a way to delete it. Not so fast. First we'll send you an SMS to * ******70. Ah, that must be my normal phone that is always on auto-answer. Forget it. Apple, why do you always appear to me like a shyster after a quick buck?
Failed inverter
We talked a lot about inverters on IRC, of course. And Daniel O'Connor came up with a photo of a failed inverter, taken with his iPhone 6S: Where's the failed component? With that gradation it's hard to say. Got Daniel to tell me where it was and put it through DxO PhotoLab: Yes, nicely bent out of shape.
GPS time rollover revisited
Last week I discovered that my ?new? GPS navigator (less than 5 years old, anyway) had had a Y2K event and reset its date to August 1999. And that made me think: what would my ancient Garmin GPS2 GPS receiver do? Went looking, but couldn't find it. But coincidentally, because of the solar panel installation, I had to move the fridges out of the garage and into the shed. OK, take a look in the old cartons that have been there since we moved in... GPS receiver, a digital level and a whole lot of old important CDs that, for some reason, I haven't needed in 4 years.
Battery charging revisited
I've had a surprising number of issues with mobile phone batteries lately. Two different old Samsung phones needed new batteries. In particular, Petra Gietz' I9210 died a couple of months ago, though the battery wasn't that old. A replacement was dead on arrival. And then Petra recently told me that the third was also dead. There's something wrong there, and it's difficult to blame it on the batteries. Kept the phone and put it on charge, and by elimination discovered that one of the USB charge cords?and only one of them!?was defective. And the first of the three batteries wasn't so dead that it couldn't be recharged.
eureka upgrade, day 2
Started pretty early in the morning trying to get eureka back up and running. Given the issues I had, started copying the old root file system to the spare /destdir partition on the new disk, so that I would have the files to compare, and if everything went wrong I could boot the old system from it. The obvious next thing to do was to get X up and running again. Which driver version did I need? That's described on the list. I have a GeForce 9500 GT and a GeForce GT 640. Which version of the driver do I need?
Forced system upgrade
While processing my house photos this afternoon, the screen suddenly went black, to be replaced by a constant stream that I could only decipher by taking a photo: Ugh. " vm_fault: pager read error" doesn't look good. Some things still seemed to be working (the weather application beeped to say that it had once again crashed), but clearly it was reboot time. After reboot things still didn't look good: Apr 13 12:59:48 eureka kernel: ada0 at ahcich0 bus 0 scbus0 target 0 lun 0 Apr 13 12:59:48 eureka kernel: ada0: <SanDisk SDSSDHP128G X2306RL> s/n 134499401138 detached Apr 13 12:59:48 eureka kernel: g_vfs_done():ada0p2[WRITE(offset=21402058752, length=131072)]error = 6 ...
All bad things come in threes
Later in the morning Petra told me that she had heard a strange noise (click?) from my office, and thought that it might have been a power failure. Checked, and we were off the net! I didn't see any lights on the NTD. But while investigating, it was back again! No power failure after all, just a brief spell off the net. Whose fault? As time went on, that became clearer.
BSD man captured
Who's the most well-known BSD personality? Jordan Hubbard? Theo de Raadt? That depends on whether he's known for BSD or something else. From the NetBSD project we have proff, now better known as Julian Assange. And he's certainly in the news. What got me is how old he looks: He almost looks older than I, but he's only 47, young enough to be my son. I wonder what went on in the Ecuadorian Embassy. And will they reckon his 7 years' self-imposed imprisonment to whatever sentence he now gets?
Y2K for GPS navigators
My GPS navigator was behaving strangely today. The trip log to Ballarat showed the wrong date, 26 August 1999. And the time was off by a couple of hours. Hardware issues? Restarted the thing without any improvement. Back home, discovered that it had had its Y2K event: the GPS week count had passed 1024, and so it had gone back 1024 weeks in time. That doesn't explain the 2 hour time discrepancy. But what were the GPS designers smoking to limit themselves to 1024 weeks, somewhat shy of 20 years?
How to annoy customers
So I've gradually come to terms with the wine that I bought online last month, and in the meantime the seller (McLaren Vale Cellars) has been sending me direct mail offering me what look like good choices of wine. OK, let's try some Shiraz. Put a dozen bottles in my ?Shopping Cart? and try to pay for it: Warning: fopen(/home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/Photos/20190410/photolist.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /usr/home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/php/includes/onephoto.php on line 1361 Can't open /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/Photos/20190410/photolist.php: OK, that's simple: do what it asks.
Manipulating journaled soft updates
A while back I set journeled soft updates on teevee:/, which caused a rather unexpected problem: # dump -2uf - / | nice bzip2 > /dump/teevee-FreeBSD/2/root.bz2 mksnap_ffs: Cannot create snapshot //.snap/dump_snapshot: /: Snapshots are not yet supported when running with journaled soft updates: Operation not supported dump: Cannot create //.snap/dump_snapshot: No such file or directory What do I do there? I can hear ?Use ZFS!? ringing in my head, but the obvious thing is to disable them again. But how? Tried today and ran into unexpected problems: Warning: fopen(/home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/Photos/20190410/photolist.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /usr/home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/php/includes/onephoto.php on line 1361 Can't open /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/Photos/20190410/photolist.php: Warning: fopen(/home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/Photos/20190410/photolist.php): failed ...
Port upgrades
Hugin version 2019.0 is out, time to upgrade the FreeBSD port. And while I was at it, also finally committed a patch to upgrade enblend. And almost before I knew it, two email messages. First, errors: Date: Sun, 7 Apr 2019 07:07:27 GMT From: Portsnap buildbox CC: [email protected] Subject: INDEX build breakage ... make_index: /usr/ports/graphics/hugin: no entry for /usr/ports/graphics/OpenEXR Committers on the hook (CCed): antoine grog And then a fix: From: Antoine Brodin <[email protected]> To: ports-[email protected], svn-ports-[email protected], svn-ports-[email protected] Subject: svn commit: r498262 - head/graphics/hugin Author: antoine Log: Unbreak INDEX Modified: head/graphics/hugin/Makefile Modified: ...
NiZn and STF-8
I've had my Olympus STF-8 flash unit for over a year now, and I've hardly used it: it's such a pain to put on the camera. When I did so today to take the photos of the seedlings, the batteries were discharged. Discharged? Pretty much dead. All of them showed a voltage of 0.3 V or so. They're all Nickel-Zinc (NiZn) batteries, which I've been experimenting for over 8 years, and they should have a voltage between 1.6 V (discharged) and 1.8 V (charged). What happened? Put them in the charger. One just died, but the others charged again. My experience with NiZn has been that they discharge unevenly, so the voltages are very different on discharge.
Android from scratch
So I reset the phone and rebooted it. This time it seemed a good idea to write down the steps. First, even before anything else, it asked me if I wanted to restore from the cloud. OK, if that works, it's probably the easiest way. But first it needed to connect to the Wi-Fi network, which, for some reason, took several minutes. Why? And then it found: OK, that looks good (and makes me wonder why it thinks that this device is an ?unknown Nokia 3?)
Android: smart!
For reasons I don't understand, my Android phone (taskumatti.lemis.com) keeps waking up, turning on the display, sometimes making a noise. It's not annoying enough that I have bothered to try to find out why. It does enough more annoying things. Today, though, it excelled itself. Noted a display ?NOKIA? on the screen (it is, after all, a Nokia 3). And it alternated with various error messages, tastefully not left there long enough for me to get really worried. One suggested that Android had crashed, but that was clearly so worrying that it didn't come again. The others looked like this: How about that, a real crash.
Understanding Google Maps messages
Peter Jeremy, a Google employee, noted something that I hadn't about yesterday's problems with Google Maps: I had selected public transport, and that was clear from the error message. Clearly there is no public transport between Lauchröden and Eisenach. Is it? Isn't it? The error message was: Sorry, we could not calculate transit directions from "Eisenach, Germany" to "Lauchröden, 99834 Gerstungen, Germany". What is there in that message that says ?public transport?? The only possibility would be ?transit?, but that doesn't have any such meaning, outside Google at any rate.
Geography and Google Maps
Chris Bahlo over for dinner this evening, and we discussed the issue of the Encyclopædia Britannica for Arne Koets. Chris mentioned where he lived (Yvonne had just said ?Neufünfland?, but Chris knew where he lived: in Lauchröden. Where's that? Based on the name, I guessed somewhere in the middle (between the coast and the Alps), and that proved to be the case: in Thüringen. Google Maps to our aid and showed us that it's a little to the west of Eisenach. How far? Huh? It's only 10 km away. I've seen that between countries in Central Asia, but not between towns in Germany.
Web browser key bindings, again
I've never liked firefox, but I've stuck with it because I was able to set Emacs key bindings, something that Chromium is too polite to offer. But now it seems that even support for the old version has gone away: firemacs is no more, it seems. The "official download" page has gone away. Dammit, are all these browser makers trying to annoy me even more? What about Opera? Yes! It has a (well hidden) setting: Advanced/Shortcuts offers an ?Emacs .2?, which gives many Emacs bindings. Oh. It did in version 12.16, but clearly that was too useful, so they've removed it in 12.16.
Android resets ring tones?
I'm puzzled about the fact that my Android ring tones have reset twice now. Out looking for references on the web, and found them, many and varied. This page probably has the best overview, but I still don't know what to do with it beyond confirming that Android has issues with this configuration item.
Nokia forgetfulness
Phone call from Yvonne in town this morning. What's that noise? ?Nokia Tune?, it seems. But why? Only last week I had set it to a custom tune, ?O Freunde, nicht diese Töne? (?Oh friends, not these tones?). Why did it change? This wasn't the first time; only the day before that I had lost the previous ring tone. But in each case I hadn't lost them; they were still there, but something had changed the setting. What? Power cycling, maybe? That would be tacky.
Compatibility of base utilities
Over the course of the years I have added functionality to the FreeBSD version of ls, one of the base Unix utilities: HISTORY An ls command appeared in Version 1 AT&T UNIX. In so doing, I've been careful not to break compatibility with other BSDs, Mac OS or Linux, at least not more than absolutely necessary. My favourite gripe is: IEEE Std 1003.2 (?POSIX.2?) mandates opposite sort orders for files with the same timestamp when sorting with the -t option.
Aussie Broadband upgrade abort
After yesterday's flaky start to the Aussie Broadband network upgrade, things calmed down. For me, at any rate. Petra Gietz came by and told me that she had had great difficulty with her network connection. And in the course of the morning came emails announcing the end of the outage, and two hours later another outage notice, then an end of outage notice. Finally in the afternoon we got a message from Phillip Britt, the managing director, saying that the upgrade had been rolled back, along with the link to the technical background, which is in fact quite detailed, including: Outage two is where it all went to crap.
More solar energy insights
Phone call from Tomas Kucera of of Effective Electrical today, just after I finished writing yesterday's article. He hadn't seen the mail message yet, so I suggested that he read it and call me back. He didn't do that: instead he replied to the message, giving me partial answers and the email address of a Fedor (presumably ?????/Fyodor) Torgovnikov, who calls himself Fred. He sent me more information, including another data sheet that looked very different from the one I was looking at yesterday. In particular, it seems that the Ingeteam inverter can take 11.5 kW battery input, not the 6 that I had understood, and that it can also deliver up to 50 A (coincidentally the rating of our grid connection), 6 kW from battery and the rest from grid.
Aussie Broadband network upgrade
Into the office this morning to discover various TCP sessions dead. We were on the net, but clearly something had happened. Right! Aussie Broadband had had a planned outage, and in contrast to the National Broadband Network they had said why: significant upgrade to their routing platform.
More disk issues
While copying files from eureka to teevee today, teevee froze. What happened? Hard to say without a display, which was turned off. Nothing for it but the Big Red Button. OK, when I come up again, how about setting Soft Update Journaling? That would make recovery better. But it didn't quite work the way I expected: there was a file /.sujournal on the root file system, although journaling wasn't enabled, so tunefs refused. And it seems that at some point in the past I had disabled fsck on the /spool file system, so I had to run that first. That was scary: Can't read sectors?
Understanding solar energy, part n
I've spent even more time looking at the quotes that I analyzed on Saturday. The more I look at them, the more questions I have. The first was one that puzzled me at the beginning: Tomas told me that the Selectronic inverter had an output rating of 63 A, but the quote specified 8 kW, or maybe 8.2 kW. That doesn't match. OK, let's go looking at the specs, which he had supplied, here an excerpt: The model he had quoted was the SPMC482, not 8 kW or 8.2 kW, but 7.5 continuous, though it can go up to 18 kW for short periods of time (the first two lines, representing 30 seconds and one minute; the 8 kW are for 60 minutes and presumably longer).
Microsoft: not to be outdone
When I shut the machines down just before midnight, I didn't bother with dischord, my Microsoft box: it was hibernated, so it should Just Restart. But when I tried to access it (via remote desktop) nothing happened. Damn, turn on the monitor and take a look. Some display that took one look at me and disappeared, to be replaced by another: That way madness lies. Cancel! It seems that the madness had already set in. OK, let the thing run. If it fails, Easus should be able to reinstate the last backup.
eureka upgrade, attempt 1
So when I got up in the morning, no computer was running. An ideal time to migrate eureka to the new disk that I had prepared for it. Now that the computers are on the desktop, moving the disks was trivial. Fire up and into single-user mode. Damn! No response from the keyboard! It seems that I've had this before: the Sun Type 7 keyboard no longer works at boot time! After a couple of attempts and attaching a new keyboard (which apparently also didn't want to work), let it run into multi-user mode; it still didn't have any network connectivity (or so I thought), and the new /home file system wasn't mounted anyway.
Power fail!
Woke up at 23:45 and discovered that the power had failed. The primary UPS was still running, suggesting that it had just happened, but it had been out for a minute or two, so the likelihood of it coming back before the UPSs died was remote. Round the house and powered down the computers.
Facebook breakage and insults
I tried to post the URL of the photos above on the (closed) Facebook group. I failed: Facebook mangled the URL to a point that it couldn't find anything at all. Spent quite some time trying to work around the breakage, watching things get worse and worse: Does it not like the ?Bloody Facebook!?? No, a transient popup told me something about them sending an email. And to a certain extent, that's what happened: Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2019 20:05:06 -0800 From: Facebook <[email protected]> To: Greg Lehey <[email protected]> Subject: We sent you a message about your removed post.
Ring tones again
A few months ago I set a custom ring tone on my mobile phone. All well and good, except that it wasn't loud enough. I thought that mencoder might do it, but failed to find out how. Callum Gibson suggested that ffmpeg could do it. Now that I have effectively a virgin phone again, time to try it out. Started with a search ffmpeg set volume, which gave me lots of good looking hits, notably this one, which also has the advantage of being nicely formatted. There I read: If you want to normalize the (perceived) loudness of the file, use the ?loudnorm filter, which implements the EBU R128 algorithm: ffmpeg -i input.wav -filter:a loudnorm output.wav This is ...
More BigPond pain?
Both Brendan and Robert Herbert have email accounts with BigPond. That's a real pain: I've had great trouble communicating with BigPond subscribers, and it seems not to have improved. The issue is their anti-spam measures, which seem to exclude security (digital signatures trigger their mechanism, which appears to simply move the message to /dev/null). I turned off all security today, but that doesn't seem to have been enough. What a pain these people are!
Phone repaired
Back home, and finally my phone had come back, no thanks to Toll, who had caused no fewer than 5 phone calls and lots of frustration dealing with near-humans, with two attempts at each end. The phone was delivered by the same cynophobe who picked it up. Was he so afraid of our dogs that he didn't dare to go to the front door? Then he should look for a different job. And somehow the state of the package seemed to reflect their lack of care: Of course the first question was: what had been wrong with the phone?
More phone spam
It seems that some non-obvious configuration change that I did to my phone setup has resulted in me finally getting emails with voice mail from my main phone number, which is on permanent auto-answer to discourage spammers. In my mail today: 112 + 13-02-2019 Voicemail To Greg Lehey (5403) + Voicemail Message From "0414109081" <0414109081> 115 + 13-02-2019 Voicemail To Greg Lehey (5468) + Voicemail Message From "0371211942" <0371211942> 116 + 13-02-2019 Voicemail To Greg Lehey (5468) + Voicemail Message From "0405417099" <0405417099> 118 + 13-02-2019 Voicemail To Greg Lehey (5462) + Voicemail Message From "0217231932" <0217231932> 122 + 14-02-2019 Voicemail To Greg Lehey (5439) + Voicemail Message From "0351472123" <0351472123> 125 + 14-02-2019 Voicemail To Greg Lehey (5427) + Voicemail Message From ...
Organizing TV series
We download a large number of TV series. I have the space, so I keep the episodes when they're done, especially since in many cases they come out of sequence. But how? TV and other content suppliers are terrible when it comes to consistency. It has taken me a while to come up with a consistent plan. Here with the example of Großstadtrevier (?The daily lives of police officers in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg?) , and thus distinct from Notruf Hafenkante (?The stories of police officers and doctors working near the Port of Hamburg?; everybody knows, of course, that the port is centred around St.
Interruptible power supply
While looking at my soft updates journaling issues, looked at my uptime information. lagoon and teevee had both rebooted about half an hour before. Why? It was round 7:30, when we were not yet up, and nothing else had failed. My best bet is my main UPS. It is very flaky when the bore pump is running (currently between 4:00 and 10:00), and I continually hear the second UPS (in series) beep and the lights flicker. My guess is that it disconnected a little longer for once and took two computers out. That's ridiculous. This http://www.eaton.com.au UPS is really a very bad choice.
umount completed
In to the office this morning to see how my umount was getting on. Still not done, after 16 hours. OK, there's no reason to believe it will, and in any case, if the file system is corrupted, it would be quicker to start again than to wait any longer. So Big Red Button time. The system came back with few issues: The first two file systems recovered instantaneously. The third (/dev/ada0p5, the new /home file system) took a little over a minute.
Power usage data formats
Mail from Daniel Nebdal today: Hi again - the CSV from the power meter seems to be NEM12/NEM13, a somewhat over-engineered format for power meter readings. There's a python library for parsing it, with some useful links in the readme, here: https://github.com/aguinane/nem-reader That'll be something to follow up another day.
System upgrade, try 2
Tuesday's repartitioning of the new /home disk for eureka proved to have been a little hasty. I took the parameters from an older setup, giving myself 20 GB for the root file system (including /usr, and in particular /usr/local) and 10 GB for swap. In addition, I used effectively default settings for newfs on the new /home. The result was that the /home file system took up considerably more space than the original, several gigabytes more. Maybe part of the issue was the ridiculous number of inodes. Apart from that, the root file system was smaller than the current contents of eureka's root file system (30 GB), and I had already noticed that, despite have 32 GB of memory, eureka frequently comes close to 10 GB of swap usage.
More solar power insights
Call from Thomas Kucera of Effective Electrical today, about the solar power installation. He had a completely different approach: first look at my daily power usage for the past year and then make a suggestion based on that. How does he do that? Download the information from Powercor. All you need is a meter number, and you can get the usage data, apparently for the last 2 years, itemized in 30 minute increments, and in CSV format: 200,6203863822,E1,E1,E1,,A5860559,KWH,30,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, 300,20170207,0.418,0.413,0.391,0.428,0.396,0.418,0.511,0.435,0.807,1.028,0.82,0.459,0.46,0.4,0.452,0.537,0.512,0.529,0.527,0.569,0.983,0.784,1.021,0.553,0.526,0.528,0.615,0.896,0.955,1.063,1.137,1.255,1.204,1.635,1.633,1.717,1.353,1.449,1.078,1.016,0.848,0.811,0.609,0.596,0.66,0.547,0.831,1.015,V,,,2.01702E+13 400,1,46,A,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, 400,47,47,A,79,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, 400,48,48,A,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, 300,20170208,0.518,0.457,0.427,0.461,0.396,0.485,0.442,0.421,0.868,1.02,0.854,0.378,0.55,0.453,0.495,0.532,0.797,0.562,0.853,0.941,1.005,1.2,0.987,1.145,1.524,1.535,2.435,3.028,1.869,1.919,2.013,2.01,2.742,2.491,2.379,1.962,1.406,1.67,1.989,1.704,1.466,1.527,1.239,1.304,1.141,1.061,1.157,1.025,A,,,2.01702E+13 300,20170209,1.11,1.11,1.037,0.993,1.033,0.995,0.964,0.775,1.351,1.408,1.204,0.978,0.958,0.919,0.956,1.093,0.845,1.475,1.611,0.874,1.902,1.878,1.537,2.27,3.323,3.688,3.399,3.567,3.368,2.568,1.919,2.025,1.822,1.421,2.23,1.534,1.203,1.22,1.263,1.174,1.148,0.96,0.806,0.803,0.71,0.652,0.694,0.673,V,,,2.01702E+13 400,1,6,A,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, 400,7,7,A,79,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, 400,8,19,A,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, 400,20,20,A,79,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, 400,21,48,A,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, 300,20170210,0.639,1.187,0.6,0.615,0.601,0.679,0.57,0.583,1.006,1.056,0.841,0.488,0.453,0.574,0.671,0.639,0.926,0.654,0.593,0.439,0.847,0.931,0.971,1.462,1.927,1.761,2.88,2.8,1.834,3.823,3.443,2.996,3.271,3.196,3.225,3.594,2.864,1.684,1.212,1.435,1.279,1.105,0.887,0.745,0.768,0.784,0.74,0.912,A,,,2.01702E+13 He has programs that import it into Microsoft ?Excel?, and he doesn't have any further information.
Microsoft network problems
Ashampoo Photo Optimizer is one of the least reliable programs I know, but they're working on it?to make it less reliable, it seems. Today I had some issues with it, so I tried the standard Microsoft method of restarting it. But no, it told me that my (saved) license key was invalid. Please enter the correct key (displayed). But that didn't work because it hung, not for the first time. OK, next step: reboot the machine (dischord). And when it came up it told me that it couldn't connect to the Internet. In fact, it couldn't even resolve non-local names. What's wrong there?
Can't access photo
Mail from Daniel Nebdal this morning, telling me that he was getting an HTTP 403 error accessing some of yesterday's photos, like this one: What's unusual about that one? Daniel suspected the name, https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20190206/small/Skjómi-1.jpeg. There's a ó in there, something that US Americans don't use. Could it be that? There's an easy way to find out: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/6) ~/Photos/20190205 223 -> ln Skjómi-1.jpeg Skjomi-1.jpeg === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/6) ~/Photos/20190205 224 -> make sync s3cmd sync /home/grog/public_html/Photos/20190205/big/ s3://lemis/grog/Photos/20190205/big/ -P --delete-removed remote copy: 'Skjómi-1.jpeg' -> 'Skjomi-1.jpeg' In passing, it's nice to see how this software recognizes duplicates and does the right thing.
The joys of ?smart? homes
There's a lot of talk about ?smart homes? recently. In principle it's something that should be close to my heart. But everything I read about them screams ?NO!?. In principle, I have something like that already, though not the way the marketeers conceived: my garden sprinkler system is run by a network connected controller, using a program started by a cron job. It works well. But that's not what people think of when you say ?smart home?. What they think of is voice controlled systems in the house (what, you have to tell it what to do?) and controllers accessible by mobile phone app when you're not there, closely related to the stupidity of an Internet connected fridge.
New ThinkCentre
The ThinkCentre that I had ordered last week arrived in Napoleons this morning. That's a replacement for Yvonne's defective one, and specially ordered to be the same as dischord. I needed my old test box back to recover eureka's /home file system, so off to pick it up. It's completely different! A different way of opening it, a different layout inside, and a different disk carrier: According to the label, it's a MT - M 7033, but it was sold as an M91p.
Returning the Nokia 3, try 2
Friday's attempts at returning the Nokia 3 phone were both extremely frustrating and completely ineffective. But Saturday's experience with the iPhone 6S makes it clear that I need it back as soon as possible. OK, brave Toll (a company whose obvious URL http://www.toll.com/ belongs to a domain squatter) on 13 15 31 and try again. This time things were different. The phone was answered almost immediately, by unintelligible, I think with a Pilipino accent. She asked me for the usual stuff: ConnNote ID, account number and my name. Then she put put me through.to another unintelligible, whose name on repeated request sounded like ?Michaela?.
Getting rid of Apple
So, I've decided: life is too short for iPhones. Let's get rid of this horrible Apple ID. How do I do that? With extreme difficulty, it seems. Went searching and found this page. While I was doing this, I got a message on the phone: Where's Darlinghurst? Almost exactly 1000 km from here. Why is somebody trying to log in to my account from there? Why, is somebody trying to log in to my account from there?
Mobile phone: Die!
So after the failure of no less than three mobile phones in the last few days, I'm left without a phone. I had been planning to buy a second-hand one as a backup, but then I saw a special offer from ALDI today: a refurbished iPhone 6S for $469. Yvonne was going there anyway, so she could pick one up. I've had fun with iPhones a couple of years ago, and I quickly decided that it wasn't for me. In addition, that's more than I wanted to pay. But maybe I should give it another chance, and anyway, if I don't like it, I can return it within 2 months for a full refund.
Why no background fsck?
I have /home on eureka set for background fsck, but it never does it. Why not? Spent some time looking for criteria, which was surprisingly hard. Found this in the FreeBSD handbook: -F Determine whether the file system needs to be cleaned immediately in foreground, or if its cleaning can be deferred to background. To be eligible for background cleaning it must have been running with soft updates, not have been marked as needing a foreground check, and be mounted and writable when the background check is to be done.
Bending the network configuration
So I had to access the web while recovering eureka. I can do that, I suppose. Just connect dischord directly to the NTD, which I have decided to mount upside-down so that I can get at the connections: That ultimately worked. I had to change the network configuration, of course, to use DHCP. And while doing that I got one of the most amazing messages from the system: Unknown publisher?
Toll: Couriers at their best
The crash couldn't have come at a worse time. eureka is the main gateway for our home network, including the telephone. And I had given the number to Toll to call before picking up my phone. OK, call them up and tell them to call Yvonne's phone (the only one that still worked). Where's the number? They're too polite to write it anywhere on the documentation they provided, so I needed to look it up on the web. But that requires a computer! OK, we have computers, but they connect via eureka. I found a way around that that is worth another article.
Panic!
While looking for a backup phone, my mouse froze. Dammit, time for new batteries? I've had too many issues with batteries lately. But the keyboard was non-responsive too, and a quick check from teevee showed that eureka was dead in the water. OK, I have been meaning to move it to the benchtop for a while now. One of the hindrances in finally upgrading it was that I had to grovel on the floor. So I took it out from there, in the process removing much of the dust that it had accumulated (another reason not to leave it on the floor): Finally placed it to the left of my monitors, where it's relatively out of the way: ...
Mobile phones: die! die! die!
After my phone died on Wednesday, the obvious thing was to wake up my old Samsung GT-I9100T, which I did yesterday. It was half charged at the time, but it quickly discharged during the day. Put it on overnight charge. Today it was dead as a doornail: no voltage at the terminals of the battery. Why? Is that a result of buying cheap aftermarket batteries? What do I do? The phone is old, and a new battery will cost me at least $12. Is it worth it? Went looking for something on eBay, with results that are worth their own article: eureka paniced.
Mobile phone pain
A while back (decades) there was this quasi-riddle: "What does Bill Gates do if he drops a $10 note??. Answer: ?He moves on. In the time that it takes for him to pick up, he has earnt more than $10?. I don't have anything like these earnings, but today's attempts at getting my Nokia 3 phone repaired reminded me of this story. I paid about $100 for it, and in the course of yesterday and today I must have spent several hours trying to get it repaired. First step was to verify that the number I called yesterday (07 3062 8463) really didn't answer.
Nokia dead
Yvonne went shopping today, and it seems that she tried to call me at home. But I didn't hear anything: my three-month-old Nokia 3 is dead. No reaction, no display. How did that happen? Dead battery seems the most likely cause. But it was connected to the charger all the time. Could overcharge have damaged it? No indication of that in the ?instructions?, of course; that's barely enough to learn how to turn it on. But also nothing in the User Guide. The real question, of course, is: how do I get them to repair it? Going through the Nokia web site was particularly difficult, though it did confirm that, for Australia, there is a 24 month warranty with the option to repair or replace, so they can't fob me off with a refund.
Hacking Wi-Fi SD cards
Discussion on IRC today about network enabled SD cards. I bought one (a Toshiba FlashAir?) 5 years ago, and the stupidity of the network implementation means that I appear never to have used it. But then my two main cameras have their own ?network? connection as well, and I don't use them either: firstly, they're too slow (round 1 MB/s, which means about 20 s per photo), and secondly the implementation is brain-dead: they want to be a network access point and only talk a proprietary protocol to a mobile phone! The FlashAir? does the same thing. Why? Peter Jeremy had a counter-question: <peterj> groggyhimself: How do you configure the SSID and password into the card?
Panic!
While watching TV this afternoon, something unexpected happened. teevee spontaneously rebooted: Jan 29 16:19:55 teevee savecore: reboot after panic: page fault Jan 29 16:19:55 teevee savecore: writing core to /var/crash/vmcore.3 OK, it's been a while, but let's take a look... === root@teevee (/dev/pts/4) /var/crash 2 -> kgdb /boot/kernel/kernel vmcore.3 GNU gdb 6.1.1 [FreeBSD] (omitting political statements) This GDB was configured as "amd64-marcel-freebsd"...(no debugging symbols found)... Attempt to extract a component of a value that is not a structure pointer. twice #0 0xffffffff80a6fbbb in doadump () === kgdb -> bt #0 0xffffffff80a6fbbb in doadump () #1 0xffffffff80a6fbe4 in doadump () #2 0xfffffe010fc9b3b0 in ??
firefox: How to wear out a disk
My /home disk (yes, only one file system on the disk) is relatively noisy. And lately I've been hearing lots of ?a-clunk a-clunk a-clunk? every second. What's accessing the disk? === root@eureka (/dev/pts/3) /home/yvonne/public_html 36 -> iostat 1 tty ada0 ada1 ada2 cpu tin tout KB/t tps MB/s KB/t tps MB/s KB/t tps MB/s us ni sy in id 22 452 45.72 8 0.35 19.58 76 1.46 41.38 8 0.33 4 1 1 0 94 1 771 0.00 0 0.00 36.35 23 0.81 0.00 0 0.00 1 0 0 0 98 0 755 0.00 0 0.00 128.00 3 0.37 0.00 0 0.00 2 0 1 ...
USB pain?
Into the office this morning, and as usual pressed a key on the keyboard to wake up the display. But nothing happened. It worked with the mouse. The keyboard was non-responsive. Keyboard defective? Disconnected it from its ?hub?, which proved to be the new video backup disk, and reconnected. No reaction. Added a second keyboard, which worked. Further investigation showed (some repeated messages omitted): Jan 28 08:05:59 eureka kernel: ugen0.4: <vendor 0x0430> at usbus0 (disconnected) Jan 28 08:05:59 eureka kernel: uhub3: at uhub2, port 3, addr 3 (disconnected) Jan 28 08:05:59 eureka kernel: ugen0.5: <vendor 0x0430> at usbus0 (disconnected) Jan 28 08:05:59 eureka kernel: ukbd0: at uhub3, port 4, addr 4 (disconnected) Jan 28 08:05:59 eureka devd: Executing '/etc/rc.d/syscons setkeyboard /dev/kbd0' Jan 28 08:06:03 eureka kernel: usb_alloc_device: set address 4 failed (USB_ERR_TIMEOUT, ignored) Jan 28 08:06:04 eureka kernel: usbd_setup_device_desc: getting device ...
Bank of Melbourne, a day later
Tried to access the Bank of Melbourne ?Internet banking? again today. It worked perfectly. And there are still no hyphens in my account number. So whatever happened yesterday was transient and had nothing to do with me?as on previous occasions.
Bank of Melbourne does it again
I needed to transfer some money this morning, so brought up the Bank of Melbourne ?Internet? page and tried to log in. Normally the details are saved, but here they were gone again. Entered them manually and got an authentication violation: ?Please match the requested format? against the ?Security number? (a 6 digit PIN). I've seen this before, and more than once. When will they get their act together? Called up the bank and had the usual run-around: it must be my problem, because everybody else can log in with no trouble. She asked me to try logging in at http://www.bankofsa.com/ and http://www.stgeorge.com/.
ThinkCentre motherboard issues
Since Saturday's failure I've had the old lagoon, a ThinkCentre M 6073, waiting for reconfiguration. The documentation I found showed another board, so I first needed to find a layout for my motherboard, which looks like this: Where do you find that? It has to be somewhere, but it's not easy to find. Tried one place and was greeted with: Not only a bloody CAPTCHA, but one that wants specific web browsers!
Smart TV? No thanks!
Recently on IRC somebody had come up with a really cheap 75" smart TV, something like $1,200. That compares to the $1,699 that I paid for a ?dumb? 75" ALDI TV a year ago. Not that I want a ?smart? TV: I returned one because I couldn't find any use for it, but the price was interesting. Is that all due to continual price drop? Today I found this article, which is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, the claim: Geeks often ask for dumb TVs. They don't say why, but others on IRC confirmed.
A new ThinkCentre?
So what's wrong with lagoon? The obvious thing to do is to try to repair it. But these second-hand ThinkCentres hardly cost anything, and maybe it will make more sense to buy a ?new? one. Off looking on eBay, running into the same problems as on previous occasions: how do I know how fast the thing is? Some of the advertised systems don't even specify what the processor is. The ones that do don't give any idea of the relative performance, and not even the price is an indication.
Counting FAT bytes
Took a lot of photos today. The videos accounted for 7.4 GB, an amazing amount for the 15 minutes or so that I took. And while reading in from my 32 GB SD card, I ran an mdir -s to show all files. The summary was interesting: 474 files 7 204 379 128 bytes 14 164 066 304 bytes free That doesn't add up to 32 GB! But it also doesn't match what I read in: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/11) ~/Photos/20190119 716 -> du -sc orig/4*[FV] ...
Power fail? Computer fail!
Woken up this morning by the sound a fan running continuously. Damn, can't Yvonne turn the extractor off when she's finished showering? But no, it proved to be coming from lagoon, Yvonne's computer. It had rebooted round 7:56, and she tells me that there had been a power failure round that time. teevee had also rebooted, but was not making any noise. Both machines seemed to be running normally. First question: what power failure? Nothing else had reported a failure. The ones that did were on the external UPS. And in the course of the morning it experienced many hiccoughs, causing my office UPS (one of the clients) to beep annoyingly, sometimes more than once a minute.
Answering mobile phones
Into town today for a six-monthly blood test, forgetting to take my breakfast with me. Yvonne called me on my phone, twice, but I didn't hear it either time, Why not? It was in my shirt pocket the whole time, and it was set to vibrate. But I had my sunglasses in the pocket too, between phone and chest, and the ring tone is not as loud as it should be.
Chasing the Gmail video bug
So why does Gmail not want to play the videos that it displays? Back to take a look: Marvellous. What's that? I couldn't get rid of it; close the tab and start it again, and I still get the error. I had to clear cookies (why can't I do that on a per-site basis?) to get rid of the problem. Further messing around. About all I could establish was that if I press the Download button, it downloads correctly. Browser issue? That wouldn't explain it happening on four different browsers.
technology, opinion
While he was here, CJ brought his computer. He couldn't play videos from his Gmail index: What kind of error message is that? No details, no way to find any details. This stupidity really gets on my nerves. I'm beginning to regret that I installed Ubuntu on his machine. Went looking on the web, with surprisingly little information, much of it out of date. Where do I go from here? CJ will want to take his computer back. Does it maybe also not work on my machine?
Still more videos
While looking through my system, found another 157 GB of videos that I had moved to eureka. That's a total of 687 GB, or 430 IBM 3330s. When will I ever have time to look at them?
Where did my disk space go?
Recently I've been running low on disk space on eureka:/home. OK, that can happen, and I'm planning to move to a bigger disk. But in the short term I should remove some non-essential stuff, including hundreds of gigabytes of old stuff in ~/Downloads. But while searching I found this: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/3) ~ 208 -> du -sc /src/Videos/teevee-overflow/* 227645 /src/Videos/teevee-overflow/Air-crash-investigation 302366 /src/Videos/teevee-overflow/Cooking 530010 total Those numbers are in megabytes: over half a terabyte of old videos. OK, now I have space on teevee, and I was able to move them back there: === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/10) /src/Videos 124 -> mv teevee-overflow/* /spool In the process noted that nothing is removed from the source directory until everything is copied.
Lost: three objects
Mail from DigitalOcean today: Date: Wed, 9 Jan 2019 19:41:08 -0600 (CST) On November 30, 2018, we emailed you regarding a small percentage of Spaces Objects that became inaccessible as a result of a hardware problem that occurred during an emergency in our NYC3 datacenter. Since then, our Engineering Team has focused its efforts on restoring availability to the impacted Objects. Unfortunately despite those efforts, there are 3 Object/s that cannot be restored to your account. It goes on to talk about how the problem happened (hardware failure) and how they plan to ensure that it never happens again.
Lion's book: theft?
In a discussion on the TUHS mailing lists today, somebody pointed to a repository for the Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition. Closer investigation shows that it was lifted from my web site. Is that legal? Good question. It's not clear that my copy is legal. As noted five years agp, I found it on alt.folklore.computers about 25 years ago, in uuencode format, with the title ?Leo's Notes?. It was sent anonymously (in those days old Unix sources were tabu) by Warren Toomey. Since then the licensing conditions have changed. I subsequently published it on my web site, though I didn't note when, and that's what the Wikipedia article points at.
Relying on digital devices
Like most people, I have a number of digital devices in the household that have replaced older analogue devices, notably scales and thermometers. The digital display makes them much easier to use, and they're more accurate. Or are they? Decades ago I built a temperature controller using Dallas 1820 temperature probes. From memory, they have a granularity of 0.07°. But how accurate are they? Recently I had mechanical issues with an infrared thermometer, so I replaced it. But the old one still works, sort of: at room temperature it displays about 20° too high. That's clearly incorrect. But what would happen if it displayed 1° too high or low?
Abusive abuse@
The scam of the month are messages like this one: From [email protected] Thu Jan 6 16:25:09 2019 Return-Path: <[email protected]> X-Original-To: [email protected] Delivered-To: [email protected] Received: from cpc1-newt39-2-0-cust128.19-3.cable.virginm.net (cpc1-newt39-2-0-cust128.19-3.cable.virginm.net [77.101.118.129]) by www.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 21BB71B72837 for <[email protected]>; Thu, 6 Jan 2019 05:23:16 +0000 (UTC) Date: 6 Jan 2019 03:53:10 -0100 From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Subject: [email protected] was under attack! Change your access data! X-Mailer: Microsoft Windows Live Mail 15.4.3508.1109 Message-ID: <70FBA92AD1227852D98B08F3005A70FB@07XR3N843> Hello! As you may have noticed, I sent you an email from your account.
Android: taking screen shots
I've been dragging my feet on taking screen shots of my Android display, preferring to take photos instead. That's not an improvement: it means a lot of work, including straightening: And the results aren't as good. Or aren't they? On this occasion, showing typical behaviour of the VicEmergency app, I managed to get an image with very little of the almost omnipresent Moiré, and the gradation looks considerably better (second image): Still, it's not worth the work.
More newfs insights
I've had a few strange responses from one of my external backup disks. It's not the newest, and possibly it's an indication that it's dying. But since getting my new video backup disk last month, I have a 4 TB disk sitting around doing nothing. OK, use that. And the newfs parameters? I always agonize about them. But in this case I can take the parameters from the old backup disk with the help of dumpfs. Or should I take the parameters from /videobackup, the new disk? === root@eureka (/dev/pts/6) ~ 975 -> df -i /videobackup /backups Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on /dev/da4p1 5,722,572 3,491,581 2,173,765 62% 8,376 801,990 1% /videobackup /dev/da1p1 1,847,816 1,298,023 401,968 76% 13,897 244,606,389 0% /backups ...
Bushfire!
It was very hot today?the temperature reached 41.5°?and it was quite windy, so of course we were on alert for bushfires. And sure enough, round 9:16 my phone went beep-beep-beep-beep. OK, VicEmergency, where's the fire? None! So I dragged out my camera (why aren't I taking screen shots? Every Android release seems to have a different way, and I haven't found this one yet, though I really should look), and took a photo. Nothing in my area: While I was puzzling with this (and finding a good lens to use), finally I got the message: I managed to cut the time off the display, ...
Investigating the network configuration confusion
Spent most of the day trying to read in old log files from the beginning of December, the date of my last level 0 dump. I failed. Part of the issue was that the dump (in fact, a compressed tarball) was so big that it took hours of CPU time just to untar it, and I think during that time the daily dump ran and then umounted the backup disk from underneath it. Another day to wait...
Focus stacking revisited
There are a number of tiny wildflowers in the garden: I've been meaning to take photos of them for some time. But my experience two months ago suggested that I should do more preparation. Two months ago I was taking photos of Thelymitra pauciflora, flowers about 10 to 15 mm across.
Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Bushfire!
While chasing down my routing problems, my phone went ?Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!? a couple of times. What's that? Ah, that's VicEmergency's way of saying ?we have a report of a bushfire?. Where? Ah, you're going to have to find the emergency app and work it out for yourself. If you can guess what the 4 beeps mean, you should be able to make it. And yes, there's a certain logic in that. But given the effort Android puts into speech recognition, why do no apps use voice output? It would be so much more helpful.
Researching the Android problem
I still don't understand all the details of my Android download issues. I have at least: Where did the alias 180.150.55.199 come from? Why did the presence of the alias on xl0 prevent access to the subnet 180.150.0.0/16? Why does it work some of the time, apparently at random? First look at the routing issue. Added the alias again, and traced the external interface: 17:10:16.726059 ARP, Request who-has 180.150.1.28 tell 180.150.55.199, length 28 17:10:17.731029 ARP, Request who-has 180.150.1.28 tell 180.150.55.199, length 28 17:10:18.736971 ARP, Request who-has 180.150.1.28 tell 180.150.55.199, length 28 ...
Aussie responds
Call at 9:00 this morning from A at Aussie Broadband, to tell me yes, indeed, 180.150.2.214 was a Google cache server on their network. And that was all. Never mind that I had asked whether it was the correct server for my IP address; he still couldn't answer that. And once again he went off about DNS issues. I pointed him to the traces I had sent. Ah, they hadn't looked at that. And he wanted to run a traceroute to find out what was going on; the Aussie support people seem to confuse traceroute and packet traces. Sorry, Aussie, this isn't good enough.
Android upgrade, finally
After solving working around my network problems, I was finally able to upgrade the apps on taskumatti, my Android mobile phone. Or was I? What's this bloody ?waiting for WiFi?? Traces show that the thing is transferring data across the 802.11 link at about 3 Mb/s. Ah, first it needs to upgrade the system, something that I had tried several days ago. But since then I had erased everything that the download system ever knew?or so it claimed. But no, first 1.8 GB of data to download, to finally tell me some detailed error message like something went wrong. OK, that's not completely unexpected in view of the problems I have been having.
Aussie support for Android
Called up Aussie Broadband Support today, and to my surprise was connected immediately, to R. Basically I wanted to know if the address I was seeing, 180.150.2.214, reverse lookup cache.google.com, was part of the Aussie network. He didn't know! And he didn't seem to know how to address the problem, but clearly it was DNS. I tried to explain to him that I already had an IP address, and that I could access it from outside the Aussie network, so clearly it was either a routing issue or an incorrect reply. All went over his head, which usually means "go to top of script?.
Android connectivity debugging, solo
So what's the issue with my Android connectivity? Looking at the traces, it seems that this exchange is crucial: 11:48:24.845624 IP syd09s12-in-f42.1e100.net.https > taskumatti.lemis.com.41327: Flags [F.] , seq 4807, ack 938, win 245, options [nop,nop,TS val 1074666639 ecr 106313], length 0 11:48:24.849193 IP taskumatti.lemis.com.41327 > syd09s12-in-f42.1e100.net.https: Flags [.] , ack 4807, win 398, options [nop,nop,TS val 106334 ecr 1074666639], length 0 11:48:24.850218 IP taskumatti.lemis.com.41327 > syd09s12-in-f42.1e100.net.https: Flags [P.] , seq 938:969, ack 4808, win 398, options [nop,nop,TS val 106334 ecr 1074666639], length 31 11:48:24.851434 IP taskumatti.lemis.com.41327 > syd09s12-in-f42.1e100.net.https: Flags [F.] , seq 969, ack 4808, win 398, options [nop,nop,TS val 106334 ecr 1074666639], length 0 11:48:24.859707 IP taskumatti.lemis.com.43665 > cache.google.com.https: Flags [S], seq 3074810373, win 65535, options [mss 1460,sackOK,TS val 106335 ecr 0,nop,wscale 8], length 0 11:48:25.857894 IP taskumatti.lemis.com.43665 > cache.google.com.https: Flags [S], seq 3074810373, win 65535, options [mss 1460,sackOK,TS val ...
New NBN ODU
Just as I was getting up this morning, somebody arrived at the front gate: installers from the National Broadband Network wanting to install a new ODU (antenna). I had been expecting this for about 9 months, since the the tower was upgraded: they are moving half of Dereel to the higher frequency, 3.4 GHz. No, says Dale, the installer, it's 3.5 GHz. More to the point, why did he come without announcing the fact? Ah, the NBN doesn't announce. They only need to replace the ODU, so they don't need access to the house; the NTD supports the new antenna. And they have implicit permission to access the property from the Telecommunications Act.
Still more Android pain
I'm still not much further with my Android problems. A lot is pointing to Aussie Broadband, but that's not the only possibility. How about more suggestions, this time from Google? Without any attempt to identify the cause of the problem, the page suggests increasingly invasive methods: Reset the Toyshop cache and data, the latter producing dire warnings that it will forget everything it even knew. Reset the Download Manager, a function that it's too polite to normally mention; you have to select ?Show System?
Android pain, continued
Why can't I download software to taskumatti, my Android phone? I had done some tracerouting yesterday, which confirmed that there had been traffic. But I hadn't looked at it in more detail. Quite often these transfers appeared to end with an ARP request and reply, but I think that's more symptomatic of Linux' frenetic use of ARP. In this case, the transfer ended with the packet received at 14:52:19.210946, and it was a connection reset: 14:52:19.210946 IP syd15s01-in-f68.1e100.net.https > taskumatti.lemis.com.56302: Flags [R], seq 3610007318, win 0, length 0 14:52:37.962371 ARP, Request who-has eureka.lemis.com tell taskumatti.lemis.com, length 46 14:52:37.962396 ARP, Reply eureka.lemis.com is-at bc:5f:f4:c9:9b:bf (oui Unknown), length 28 OK, time to dig deeper.
Update pain, part 2
taskumatti, my Android phone, still won't update apps, hanging in states that suggest that it doesn't want to access the wireless net. Peter Jeremy, the master discover and interpreter of cryptic icons, noted something that I had discovered by more conventional methods: <peterj> groggyhimself: Have you considered installing the Android update that's waiting on your phone (the box with the downarrow in it). And the "waiting for wifi" is clearly something recent because your phone had updated a couple of apps the day before.
Update pain, part 1
Yesterday I left eureso to upgrade its ports. Did it finish without error? No, I hadn't expected that, and it fulfilled my expectations: [3/926] Installing xorgproto-2018.4... pkg: xorgproto-2018.4 conflicts with glproto-1.4.17 (installs files into the same place). Problematic file: /usr/local/include/GL/glxint.h How do you address that? glproto has multiple dependencies, so I can't just remove it: ===== Fri 28 Dec 2018 09:23:12 AEDT on eureso.lemis.com: pkg delete glproto-1.4.17 Checking integrity... done (0 conflicting) Deinstallation has been requested for the following 116 packages (of 0 packages in the universe): ...
The joy of online radio
Most of my ?radio? listening nowadays is via the Net at Radio Swiss Classic. But today it didn't work: I got an HTTP 404 (?not found?) error. Have they changed something? Off to check. Maybe. They certainly haven't turned off the service: http://www.radioswissclassic.ch/en/reception/internet lists the URLs (the wrong ones, for the German language programme), with the interesting information that http://www.radioswissclassic.ch/de/live/aacp.m3u offered better quality than the MP3 stream that I had been using. OK, try it out. At first it worked, but then I got: How I HATE these STUPID error messages that colour only the foreground!
Android apps: the pain
After installing the app from VicEmergency (a site without a home page, it seems), we went walking the dogs. On the way back, my phone beeped. Emergency? Hard to tell. In bright sunshine the display is completely illegible. It wasn't until I got inside that I discovered a message from ALDImobile, my phone provider: my credit was fully depleted. Why that? I should have had enough credit for another couple of months at the rate I use mobile phones. But on further investigation, it seemed that I had mobile data enabled, and for some reason it had used that rather than the in-house 802.11 network.
VicEmergency: the incompetence
Another hot day (the temperature reached 39.4°), with much danger of bushfires. And the emergency services web site was as useless as ever. Indirectly the news was good: no bushfires. But to find that I first had to follow the cryptic symbols on the map, which told me that there had been a bushfire somewhere a week ago, and that it was now under control. OK, since I now have a mobile phone that I use relatively frequently, how about installing the CFA bushfire app? Off to the toyshop and found two, I think, including the VicEmergency app. Tried to install the other and ended up with this one.
eureso upgrade: the pain
In this morning to see how the system build on eureso had progressed. After 24827.86 seconds (6.9 hours), it had failed: disk full. The previous builds had stored the object files in /home/obj/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/11/, but now it's FreeBSD 12, so the objects go to /home/obj/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/12/, and the old hierarchy wasn't deleted. Damn! OK, remove the files and try again, in the process increasing the number of CPUs to 6 (eureka, the host machine, has 8). Left it for a while, and back to look. No eureso window! Virtualbox told me that the VM was aborted. Huh? Rebooted, fcsk'd, and into multi-user. A fleeting stack trace and back to the boot screen.
eureso, next step
Since I'm not doing anything else, I suppose I could finally get round to upgrading eureka. I've been trying to track it with a virtual machine called eureso, but I never got to the point where I could consider it a drop-in replacement. OK, try again. While I'm at it, why not use the spare system partition as the system disk? My system disk is partitioned like this: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/6) ~ 854 -> gpart show => 34 250069613 ada0 GPT (119G) 34 128 1 freebsd-boot (64K) 162 83886080 2 freebsd-ufs (40G) 83886242 20971520 3 freebsd-swap (10G) 104857762 83886080 4 freebsd-ufs (40G) 188743842 61325805 5 freebsd-ufs (29G) ...
newfs: the cruft of decades
After I got my backup disk running, time to look at the code for newfs. To my surprise, the current source file (only one of them) is only 512 bytes long, including licenses, Usage() and option processing. And it's clear?up to a point?where the problem lies. The old BSD disk label didn't have partition types, just unenforced conventions: partition a was the root file system, partition b was swap, partition c was the whole disk, and other file systems were generally assigned from d to h. Come GPT with its partition types, and the difference in newfs was minimal: if (!is_file) /* already set for files */ part_name = special[strlen(special) - 1]; if ((part_name < 'a' || part_name - 'a' >= MAXPARTITIONS) && ...
Backup disk debugging
Continued investigating yesterday's problems with the new backup disk. What should I do first? Clearly it's designed for Microsoft, so how about checking if it works on Microsoft? Connected it up, and nothing interesting happened. The ?Computer? window showed the system disk, DVD and network ?shares?, but not the new disk. The ?Device Manager? saw it and said that it was working normally, but that was all. How do I repartition it? Discussion on IRC, with the usual definite statements: groggyhimself: How do I start disk management? groggyhimself: On W7. damian: go to start, punch in 'computer management' damian: and it'll bring up the gui in my first image damian: i THINK you can right click on 'Computer' and go to 'Computer Management', but it's been a while since i've used win7 OK, try that: ...
New backup disk
A new backup disk arrived today, a 6 TB Seagate ?Backup Plus Hub?; apart from the drive itself, it has a couple of additional USB 3 inputs. OK, what's on it? === root@eureka (/dev/pts/3) ~ 308 -> gpart show $DRIVE => 34 11721045100 da4 GPT (5.5T) 34 262144 1 ms-reserved (128M) 262178 2014 - free - (1.0M) 264192 11720779776 2 ms-basic-data (5.5T) 11721043968 1166 - free - (583K) We don't need any of that, of course.
Another IP address change
More network problems today. Investigation showed: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/3) ~ 281 -> ifconfig xl0 xl0: flags=8843 metric 0 mtu 1500 options=82009 ether 00:50:da:cf:07:35 inet 167.179.139.35 netmask 0xfffffc00 broadcast 167.179.139.255 nd6 options=29 media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX ) status: active That's not my external IP address. Well, yes, it is: Dec 18 10:02:38 eureka dhclient: New IP Address (xl0): 167.179.139.35 Dec 18 10:02:38 eureka dhclient: New Subnet Mask (xl0): 255.255.252.0 Dec 18 10:02:38 eureka dhclient: New Broadcast Address (xl0): 167.179.139.255 Dec 18 10:02:38 eureka dhclient: New Routers (xl0): 167.179.136.1 I wonder how often they intend to change things.
Move to IPv6?
We've been talking about IPNG IPv6 for decades now, and a while back I decided that I had no specific advantage from it, but the larger headers made it less efficient. But will the lack of advantages persist? If not, it's interesting to note that Aussie Broadband now supports it, according to this thread.
Building CURRENT? Or C++?
I have been reminded that it's been nearly a year since I committed any code to the FreeBSD source repository. That's an anniversary that brings along the Grim Reaper, the maintainer of commit bits. People have suggested that I make some trivial commit, but that's not the purpose of this timeout. As it happened, Bob Bishop (not a committer) piped up on a mailing list asking for somebody to commit a patch that he had submitted. OK, that makes more sense. First, bring current.lemis.com up to date?I haven't really done anything with it since February. And once again my source tree, which I sync daily, was out of sync.
Understanding online content
I hate Facebook! Somehow I can never find things on it. I receive emails for events that I haven't been able to completely understand, but I really need to follow the link from the email to find what it refers to it. Why is it so obscure? Today we had a case in point: Yvonne had sent Pene Kirk a ?Personal Message? about Nikolai, and attached a link to the photos. But Pene hadn't understood the link, and thus didn't see the photos.
Luminar revisited
About 18 months ago, it seems, I installed Luminar on dischord, my Microsoft box. It clearly didn't leave much of an impression: I didn't even mention it here. There's a lot of photo software out there, but the lack of mention at least meant that I didn't find it really terrible. But then Chris Baker, on the M43 Tech Talk on Facebook, came up with the idea that it was a good alternative to DxO PhotoLab. While that's unlikely, it occurred to me that it might be worth looking at again. Starting Luminar told me that there was a new version available.
Overlaying maps
Chris came for dinner tonight rather than the usual Saturday: Königsberger Klopse. Talking about maps after dinner, and generally lamenting how difficult it has become to use Google Maps. Somehow got on to this 1889 map of Dereel, which we investigated in great detail: I downloaded it three years ago, and to the best of my knowledge it's the only high resolution copy (5120x3598) of the map on the web, as discussed at the time. Chris thought it would be a good idea to overlay it with a modern map.
Emacs font sizes
After yesterday's change of font size for my xterms, it was time to do the same for Emacs. But how? Google is my friend: Select Set Default Font from the Options menu (I can hear rms grumble). And that seemed to work. But not the way I thought. It only applied to one window, and after trying a couple, I couldn't get back to where I started. When I tried it on a second window (from the same Emacs process), I got different results. And when I tried changing things in the first window, it didn't change it there?but in the non-active window instead!
More photo editing investigations
I now have a number of programs that can remove the extraneous objects from photos like this one: But I haven't done the job. Why not? I don't like the amount of manual intervention needed. All of them require you to mark what you want to remove, and that's very difficult with things like the fences line in front of the horses: Surely there's be something out there that can identify things like this and select them exactly to the pixel.
?Internet Explorer?: really better?
Why does DxO support claim that I should use Microsoft ?Internet Explorer? to download archives? Superstition, of course, but superstitions don't come from nowhere. Discussed it on IRC today and came up with some insights: From carnival: ?I think they work something out, decide a reason for why it worked, file it as done and try to use it forever.? And yes, that sounds very likely. ?If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".
Handling software support
Another reply to my tickets with DxO today. The one I entered yesterday (166777) was simply closed. No explanation, no follow-up possible, just assigned to my favourite support person. Had he deliberately closed it? Sent a follow-up ticket. That's 8 tickets in the last week or so, none of which have been closed to my satisfaction. Also a response from the person responsible for ticket 165481. I had explained: For what it's worth, the MD5 checksum of the downloaded files is: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/36) ~ 20 -> md5 DxO_PhotoLab* MD5 (DxO_PhotoLab2_Setup (1).exe) = 732dd80f53f1e66ca8b8ea3645f35c3e MD5 (DxO_PhotoLab2_Setup(1).exe) = 732dd80f53f1e66ca8b8ea3645f35c3e The first is the file I downloaded last week, the second was downloaded by Microsoft "Internet Explorer".
More DxO ?support? pain
While updating the outstanding support request that DxO is digesting (or, more likely, rejecting), it seemed good to mention other issues, notably sporadic inability to select images. From ticket 166777: On the two versions of PhotoLab 2 that I have used, I have occasionally had a situation where specific images displayed in the preview strip could not be selected, while others could. With PhotoLab 1 I had no problem selecting any image. Restarting PhotoLab 2 did not help. This is sporadic. Please let me know how to chase down this bug.
DXO ?support?, again
Since installing DxO PhotoLab release 2, I've had a number of issues, to the point where I seriously considered not upgrading, for the first time in years. I put in a number of bug reports, and I have more bugs that are too subtle to describe, but which persist: The navigation arrows on the preview strip at the bottom of the display (the top of this excerpt) are gone. Here version 1: The arrows to either side of the image count are gone in version 2.
NAT revisited
Yvonne received this cartoon via Facebook today: The text in the balloon translates as ?Why is a duck signalling ?SOS"?". Somehow this reminds me of the Internet nowadays.
netvigator.com: We don't need no email
How do you contact abuse addresses for Internet domains? There's nothing in the SOA record, though it does contain one (mutilated) email address. === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/29) ~ 20 -> nslookup -q=soa netvigator.com netvigator.com origin = ns5.netvigator.com mail addr = dnsadmin.netvigator.com serial = 2018110901 refresh = 10800 retry = 3600 expire = 604800 minimum = 1800 So when I wanted to inform netvigator.com of the ransomware threat, I looked it up and sent my message to [email protected] and [email protected].
Ransomware again!
Another email message designed to strike fear into my heart. Here with comments in italics: From [email protected] Mon Nov 26 14:16:38 2018 Return-Path: <[email protected]> X-Original-To: [email protected] Delivered-To: [email protected] Received: from eureka.lemis.com (eureka.lemis.com [192.109.197.137]) by eureka.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 578994494B3 for <[email protected]>; Mon, 26 Nov 2018 14:16:38 +1100 (AEDT) X-Original-To: [email protected] Delivered-To: [email protected] Received: from www.lemis.com [208.86.226.86] by eureka.lemis.com with POP3 (fetchmail-6.3.26) for <[email protected]> (single-drop); Mon, 26 Nov 2018 14:16:38 +1100 (AEDT) Received: from 132.225.76.219.static.netvigator.com (132.225.76.219.static.netvigator.com [219.76.225.132]) by www.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5FD4B1B72851 for <[email protected]>; Mon, 26 Nov 2018 03:14:43 +0000 (UTC) From: [email protected] To: unlikely password!
Reinstating real IP connectivity
Called up the Aussie Broadband support line again today?15 minutes wait! Spoke to Jacob, who reinstated my IP address as soon as I hung up. He could have done it during the call, but since I was using VoIP that would have been like sawing off the branch I was sitting on. Despite my instructions it wasn't completely smooth, in particular because the IP change restricted my access to the web server until I had finished the first few steps. But at least things are working again now.
IP address change, day 3
My change of IP address is pretty much complete, but I'm still having these continual dropouts: Disconnected at Sun 25 Nov 2018 15:54:57 AEDT Last login: Sun Nov 25 04:49:48 2018 from 119-17-139-240.nbn.mel.aussiebb.net That's a connection of only five minutes! I've established that it doesn't happen if I transfer data regularly, but that's not my intention. And then some interesting stuff on IRC: <carneous> ABB have changed some parts of VIC to CGNAT if you didn't pay for a static or have already requested port unblocking.
The joys of GPS tracking
Ruth took her mobile phone with her riding and recorded the track with an app called Runtastic. She showed it to me on her phone, and the map didn't look bad. I asked her to send me the log. How do you do that? How, indeed? Despite the obvious contradiction, mobile phones are surprisingly isolated. But no, she found a way to send it to me as an email: Ruth hat ein runtastisches Reiten über 5,83 km in 48m 18s absolviert https://www.runtastic.com/sport-sessions/4a6e4acc-5caa-4360-9c66-7f3cea9b75ff?sharing_token=5bea382f3b90413c285a589b&share_locale=de&utm_content=session.runtastic.riding&utm_source=runtastic.lite&utm_medium=gplus.android&utm_campaign=user_generated_sharing Von meinem Xperia?
Hey Google! Botanical Gardens!
We were finished at Ballarat Bird World earlier than I had expected. What now? Off to the Botanical Gardens? How do we get there? It's on the other side of town, and though I could find my way with no difficulty, I couldn't think of an optimum way. I hadn't learnt from my experience on Friday, and I still didn't have my GPS navigator with me. OK, what's Google good for? Hey, Google, take me to the Botanical Gardens. It didn't say very much, but showed me a map. In which direction should I set off? It was too polite to assume that I didn't know.
More Hugin strangenesses
Processing my house photos has got a lot easier since I created my batch scripts. Now I do a make pto and just have to do minor adjustments before the scripts continue. But from time to time I get really strange results. Here the house from the entrance: Why is it upside-down? Tried various things, but somehow they didn't work. In the end I edited the project file with Emacs, changing the orientation of the individual images. Here one of them: --- Hugin/house-from-entrance.pto~ 2018-11-10 12:20:00.222276000 +1100 +++ Hugin/house-from-entrance.pto 2018-11-12 12:03:35.190438000 +1100 @@ -5,13 +5,13 @@ # image lines #-hugin cropFactor=2.00308 -i w5182 h3885 f3 v126.811512466541 Ra0 Rb0 Rc0 Rd0 Re0 Eev11.9366378213403 Er1 Eb1 r178.950393178411 p4.12238129606885 y-75.5161071842899 TrX0 TrY0 ...
ALDImobile activation, day 2
First thing in the morning I checked my bank account for the promised deduction from ALDImobile. Nothing. There was other activity, but not from ALDImobile. Dammit, what now? Nothing for it, I had to brave their phone help service. This time <mumble>'s name proved to be Ann. Why is it so difficult to understand these names? I have never been able to understand them when they announce themselves, and I almost invariably need them to spell it for me. She, too, went through her script and wanted me to do the same thing I had tried twice before. Once again I got fed up and asked for a supervisor, and once again she insisted that she could help.
Activating a SIM card for Ruth
One of the first things we wanted to do for Ruth was to activate a SIM card for her telephone. OK, finally a use for the free Vodafone SIM that I got with my new phone. The first thing you need to do is to activate it, of course. The recommended way is ?Insert the SIM into your device, switch it on and follow the prompts?. OK, insert, switch on. Nothing exciting happens. Is that because there's no coverage? Or does it expect to be put into a Nokia 3? I could try activation online, but that way madness lies. Instead I took the ALDI SIM that I had bought for this eventuality and put it into the phone.
Ashampoo examined more carefully
Yesterday's fun with Ashampoo video optimizer had me wondering. In the past I had noticed stuff like that, where characters echo at about one every 30 seconds. So today I tried again. And sure enough, to get my extended trial period took me 27 minutes before my cut and paste had echoed and I was allowed to click on the Next button. And after that, another 4 minutes before the application actually started. Then it seemed to react normally. But can I be bothered? Not today. Peter Jeremy pointed me to FFmpeg, which can extract stills from videos. That's the second recommendation.
Another bloody power failure!
This morning was a day to trim my beard. Grabbed the trimmer, idly wondering whether it was worth fixing the old one that had suddenly just decided not to run any more. Clearly a wiring issue, but why bother fixing them when they're so cheap... Plugged in the trimmer. Nothing. Exactly the same symptoms. Power failure? No, other things were running, including the water pump. But on checking, discovered eventually that the circuit breaker for one circuit had tripped. Damn! Why did that happen? And, of course, it was the one circuit to which eureka was connected. I didn't have it on the main UPS circuits because that UPS keeps fluctuating (switching on and off based on the power input?)
DxO PhotoLab 2
For a couple of months now I've been investigating various ways to remove the artefacts from this image: On 11 September I tried Inpaint, and on 25 October I tried movavi Photo Editor. Both sort of worked, but they were fiddly: they don't offer any help to recognizing areas that I want to mark. And now DxO has brought out another release of PhotoLab. What are the features? What are the differences? Is it worth paying $70 for the upgrade? In principle I've been relatively happy with DxO, but documentation is not their forte.
Downloading film list: correction
A couple of days ago I discovered that I couldn't download MediathekView's file list using the internal download function: it timed out repeatedly. But using fetch worked fine, so I decided to do that instead. But things aren't that simple. Today fetch timed out repeatedly for over an hour. So I tried it with the internal downloader. It worked immediately! So whatever the issue is, it's not as simple as bugs in the internal downloader.
CJ's computer problems, next installment
CJ Ellis along towards evening. He hadn't called or sent email: his entire electronic infrastructure was offline, he said. Aussie Broadband had cancelled his service because he had accidentally replied to a spam message, so his VoIP service didn't work any more either. And his computer continually displayed pornographic images that he couldn't get rid of. OK, first things first. Contacted Aussie Broadband. No, the service was still intact. OK, fire up the machine. Indeed, as soon as I started chrome, up popped multiple very pornographic images like a Hydra: as soon as you closed on, another popped up in its place.
Android: ask the experts
Somehow I still don't know how to make the right gestures at an Android device. The more I try, the more I think that a raised middle finger is the appropriate gesture. Today I tried to call Yvonne (in town), and, as almost always, got her voice mail. And then the phone said ?beep beep?. Why? A message? Where are the messages hidden? There are always a couple on the home screen: But none of them were relevant. OK, we have IRC. Peter Jeremy says: Try swiping down from the top.
Modern error reporting
I run a program called MediathekView, which allows me to download German TV programmes. It uses a programme list that needs to be reloaded from time to time, at least daily. And it won't do it automatically. Lately I've been having difficulties. After a long time I get a typical modern message: ?Loading the film list didn't work?. Well, thanks for details. You want details? We have details, we're just too polite to vomit all over your screen. But start it from an xterm and we're much more detailed: .
Appliances offline: where's my stove?
Almost as expected, I received no reply from Appliances Online about today's delivery. OK, let's check the order status. Log in to the site. What was the password again? Looking in my list, I discovered that I didn't have a saved password for the email address I use with them, just an old one with my generic email address. Try logging in with that. Fool! That's not only an old, worn-out magic word, it's too short and doesn't contain some of the required characters. OK, forgot password. Sorry, we don't know your new email address. Never mind that we sent you a message to it a couple of days ago.
Google Translate: improving?
Chris Bahlo is now well on her way to becoming a mediaeval knight, and one of the things she needs is a helmet (?chicken?, it seems) with a motto on it. There are plenty of birds, but what motto? And in what language? Latin seems possible, but I thought that Middle High German would be more appropriate. In the process, came up with some ideas that we put against Google Translate. To my surprise, it handled them pretty well, a far cry from my previous experience nearly 3 years ago. OK, try to translate that page again. And how about that, still not good (and ?Mar?
WhatsApp portability
Ruth Viebrock had another question for me: how does she access her WhatsApp messaging system when she's in Australia and using a different SIM? How do I know? But I felt a slight responsibility: after all, WhatsApp grew up inside the FreeBSD project. Did some asking around and came to the conclusion that the documentation doesn't want to address the issue. But one of the people on IRC, one with a fantasy nick, tells me that you can do it. The problem is that the user ID is tied to the phone number?not a good idea for a component that isn't fixed to the phone?but you can log in from other numbers, though you have to keep ignoring the nagging.
Your appliances are available. Install webmail.
Email from Appliances Online today: Good News! We were able to source your items earlier than originally indicated. If you wish to keep your delivery date of 21 Nov 2018 then please disregard this email. If you would like to schedule your delivery date earlier than originally selected, then please choose one of the following options: Change delivery date to 2018-10-29 Change delivery date to 2018-10-31 Simply click on the date you wish to select, this will pre populate an email that you can then simply send to have your delivery date moved ?Simply click ...
movavi photo editor
I'm still looking for software to edit the kangaroo photos that I took two months ago. I tried one of the many emails from Zoner explaining how to do it, but the issue there is that they have moved to a subscription model, which is just too expensive. Never mind, I have a license for the predecessor version 18. Try the suggestions there. But I couldn't make head or tail of their instructions; they seemed to be completely unrelated to the software. After half an hour without being able to locate the tools that they described, I gave up, not for the first time: I came to a similar conclusion 6 weeks ago.
Maintaining contacts, the modern way
We're planning for a visit from Ruth Viebrock next month. Time to write down her contact details. Where? A couple of weeks ago I discovered Google Contacts, which has the advantage of syncing to all my participating phones, one of the few occasions where I really want everything the same everywhere. OK, off to find Google Contacts. Last time I was told to select ?Contacts? at the top left of a GMail window, which proved to mean top right. But this time I thought that I could find them without the help of my diary, which proved to be incorrect. Finally I found them via a Google Search: http://contacts.google.com/.
You have been pwned!
We've had some discussion about ransomware and such on IRC, and I expressed the opinion that you don't need to break in to a system to get a ransom. As if to prove the point, I recently got a ransom demand myself, exposing my perverse secrets. It's worth looking at the entire message, including the headers (only modified to point to the normal groggyhimself): From MAILER-DAEMON Wed Oct 17 18:10:17 2018 Return-Path: <> It's interesting that there's no domain name on this From line. I wonder why.
Setting Android ring tones
Some time ago I tried creating a custom ring tone for my old Android phone, the first few bars of Carl Maria von Weber's Andante e rondo ongarese. Time to install it on the new phone: I never found out how on the old one. After the usual pain moving data around to mobile phones, it worked almost without any problems at all. Problem: it's not loud enough. That's in the original, not the phone. Now I need to find a way to recode the original.
HDR photos revisited
The new Nokia 3 phone has a feature called HDR. How good is it? Time to do a comparison of the various methods available to me for better dynamic range. In fact, there are a surprising number. In rough order of increasing usability, I have: The old Samsung GT-I9100T, which I suspect to be the worst. The Nokia 3 in normal mode. The Nokia 3 in ?HDR? mode. My Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II in normal mode, with raw images and DxO PhotoLab.
More Android fun
Received the unlock code for my Nokia 3 phone today, much earlier than expected. 16 characters! And I have to type it in via this appalling touch screen interface. What happens if I get it wrong? Clearly something to check very carefully before submitting. OK, typed it, and there it was: ****************. It's too polite to display it! Checked again, watching every digit as it popped up briefly before being obliterated. Must be right. Yes, it was. But what kind of nonsense is that to hide the input? I can't think of any situation in which people aren't reading the code from some other surface to type it in.
A use for smart watches
The affair about Jamal Khashoggi (another of these unpronounceable names, like Mnangagwa. It seems that Khasohggi should really be called Khashoqji, based in the name ???? ???????) is fascinating for many reasons. None of them is the fact that today was his 60th birthday. Firstly, it tends to confirm my negative opinion of Saudi Arabia, who have been making life hell for their neighbours?the war against Yemen, with hundreds of thousands of casualties (over 50,000 children have died of starvation due to Saudi blockades), and trying to bully Qatar into doing what the Saudis want, including shutting down the Al Jazeera network, and their continued attacks on Iran.
Unlocking the Nokia 3
Suggestion from Jamie Fraser today: buy an unlock code for my Nokia 3 on eBay. Interesting idea, and sure enough, there are two different offers under $20. That still makes it cheaper than ALDI's $129 offer that comes up tomorrow. Clearly worth a try.
Where's my named config?
The new Android phone has a presence on my local net, of course, so it needs a name. Yes, I know most Android users are too polite for such things, but I'm not most Android users. What shall I call it? My first Android device was a tablet, so I called it flachmann. Then the Samsung GT-I9100T got the name talipon. What should I call this one? It's Finnish, so it should be a Finnish name, which really eliminates teflon. How about translating flachmann? taskumatti it is. Time to update the DNS configuration. Where is it? It used to be in /etc/named/db.lemis.com, but since then it has moved a couple of times, to /var/named/etc/namedb/db.lemis.com and then to /usr/local/etc/namedb/db.lemis.com.
Returning the Nokia 3
Stopped in at Woolworths in Sebastopol on the way home to return one of the Nokia 3s that Yvonne bought on Sunday. Too hard for the (surprisingly busy) person at the info desk, so she called a manager, Alex, who told me that they couldn't take it back for reasons unspecified. I pointed out that it was clearly still shrink-wrapped, and that it had been sold under false pretences. Oh, they only sell locked phones, and the salesperson should have told Yvonne that it's locked. Wrong answer. It should have been made clear on the packaging. I pointed out that the packaging warned that the microSD card was not included; why not the fact that it was locked?
Begone foul TIFF
For the past 6 months or so I have been using TIFF as the intermediate format for my composite photos (panoramas, HDR, focus stacking). They're big, typically round 120 MB per image, and for a single HDR panorama I typically need 12 of them. On Saturday alone my photos added up to 23 GB. Do I really need all this stuff? No, I can recreate it relatively quickly from the base photos. So today I deleted all the TIFF intermediate files from March to September. That was worthwhile. Here before and after: Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/ada2p1 7,629,565 5,077,266 2,476,003 67% /Photos /dev/ada2p1 7,629,565 4,762,431 2,790,837 63% /Photos A good 300 GB!
Have I been pwned?
I have my own approach to Internet security: keep important things exclusively behind a firewall, use separate email addresses and passwords for every site with which I am involved, don't use mobile phones for anything security-related, A recent discussion on IRC suggested that I go to http://www.haveibeenpwned.net/ to see if I had been compromised. Yes! 10 of my 466 email addresses were ?pwned?. Or were they? Email Pwned sites [email protected] River City Media Spam List [email protected] Onliner Spambot ...
New Android phone
Yvonne had to go into town today to pick up some food that she had forgotten. Time to pick up a couple of the Nokia 3 phones that I had been thinking about yesterday? Nope, the special offer was over. But she asked anyway, and how about that, there were exactly two left, and she got them for $90 each. Back home, the usual fun trying to set the thing up. Battery was discharged, of course, and when I connected it to the charger, nothing happened. But that was one of the amazingly few things they documented. The entire instructions are on a single sheet of paper (the safety instructions are much longer).
A new mobile phone?
ALDI have an interesting item in their weekly ?specials?: a Nokia 3 ?smart? phone (a term I've decided not to use where I can avoid it) for only $129. That's by far the cheapest phone I've seen from a brand name supplier, and since it's ALDI, I asked Yvonne to pick one up when she was there this morning. In the course of discussion we decided to make it two, in case Yvonne wanted one too. In the meantime, did some investigation and discovered that it was on offer at Woolworths in Sebastopol?just across the road?for $90 (or, as they put it, $89.99).
Anatomy of a DoS
On Saturday I read a message in the local Facebook group: Kim Baxter had ?lost Internet?. OK, let's do what I can to help. ?Try this?. No reply, just the interesting information that she was with Aussie Broadband, my ISP. So is Paul Shire, who also had no problems. But it turned out that it was an Aussie problem after all. A few hours later Kim stated ?a problem with their firewall?, and pointed me to their Facebook page, which indeed stated something about problems. Which problems? No idea. It's gone again. How I love Facebook! And why only on Facebook?
Facebook security?
A few days ago Facebook announced a new security breach. Was I affected? Probably not. Would it make any difference? Certainly not. There's nothing on my Facebook account that can be abused elsewhere. Even my place of birth, my domicile and my alma mater are wrong (though in each case a subtle hint that nobody has understood so far). Still, it would be interesting to see what Facebook says. First, where am I logged in? ?Windows? computer? I don't have no steenking ?Windows? computer. Oh, well, maybe I do, but it's sleeping. What Facebook means, of course, is that my firefox is claiming to be Microsoft to get around web sites that don't want to talk to FreeBSD.
Cooktops: defeated by technology
I really need to find a replacement gas cooktop to fit next to the new induction cooktop. It's not easy: most cooktops are 60 or 90 cm wide (and, strangely in Australia, not 600 or 900 mm). I want one that is only 30 cm wide, and there's not much choice. In principle I'm not asking for much: two burners, one a ?wok burner?. But in the past I've discovered a number of issues: The power output of the burners is very varied, sometimes just plain underdimensioned.
Why a new phone?
A couple of months ago I investigated new cordless telephones that could connect both to ?fixed line? (in my case really VoIP) and mobile phones. The search was painful, and negative reports abounded. Then last week I bought a phone, only to discover that the most important feature, mobile phone coupling, was missing. Today I tried again. I can only assume that the makers are doing everything they can to make the choice difficult. The only way I can compare phones from the same manufacturer (Panasonic) is by laboriously finding the hidden manuals with non-matching model numbers and reading the details.
Catching stupid thieves
Read today, the story of stupid thieves. They stole GPS tracking devices! And if that wasn't enough, one of them also managed to cut himself while stealing some drinks from the company fridge, leaving blood samples and fingerprints. If you're going to be stupid, go the whole way!
More image issues
Seen on IRC today: gr00gle: I don't see any Minox images. That was a reference to my article on Minox on Saturday. And sure enough, they weren't visible on the external web site. Normally that's because I forgot to sync my local copy, but in this case the images were from WikiMedia. So why did they display locally and not on the external site? My guess was that it was due to the lazy display code I use: <img alt="" title="Minox Riga.
Trying PTGui
I have now downloaded PTGui. Time to try it out with some of the images with which I had had trouble with Hugin. First one of today's panoramas: All the videos I have seen show PTGui to be very much like Hugin, but that must have been a previous version. Now it's even more Microsoft-like. Still, the ?Load images...? tab was clear enough. Reading in the images was straightforward enough, but then I got this strange popup: PTGui needs to know whether the images were taken with a fisheye lens or a regular [rectilinear?]
VBox errors
Fired up Virtualbox for the first time in months (hint: you need the kernel modules /boot/modules/vboxdrv.ko and /boot/modules/vboxnetflt.ko), and was greeted with this error message: Now isn't that informative? Yes, you can show the details: But why should you have to?
eBay: slowly, slowly DTRT
After the government introduced taxes on online sales, I discovered shortly later that eBay doesn't indicate the correct pricing for such items, and to my surprise many people agreed with them. But now eBay (though possibly not their sympathizers) has discovered the errors of their ways. Today I bought some batteries from Hong Kong, and was warned up front: Finally! Of course, we're not done yet.
How to destroy a free software project
So it seems that Linus Torvalds is taking time off from Linux. You can understand that, considering that it has been his life since he was 21 years old, well over half his life. But it seems that his main issue is anger management. Elsewhere I've seen another example, not so much anger as offensiveness: Thomas Modes, (now) the lead and maybe only developer of Hugin. Somebody on the mailing list asked for information on scripting Hugin, something that I had looked at in some detail a few months ago. So I answered: > I see that in regular Hugin Stitcher tab I can add command line options for > enabled, but I don't see a way to do that for nona.
Uploading videos
The videos that I took yesterday may not have been good, but they were voluminous, a total of 15 GB. Some were completely useless?the test clips at the start?but most were worth uploading to YouTube: Image number YouTube 19171661 1 19171662 2 49171257 3 ...
New s[cp]am techniques
Now that I'm receiving spam again, some attempts stand out. The most interesting was this one: From: Accountant <[email protected]> Subject: Payment Confirmation Please find attached our payment confirmation which we paid yesterday. Kindly check and confirm if you received the same. Thanks and best regards Clearly spam, right? But then look at the attachment: -- Mutt: Attachments I 1 <no description> [text/plain, 7bit, windows-1251, 0.3K] A 2 PAYMENT-04.tar [applica/octet-stre, base64, 2.0M] PAYMENT-04.tar?
DoS by spam report?
Mail from Tim Bishop today: I follow your diary via an RSS feed and recently (since your move to Digital Ocean for photo storage) I'm frequently seeing images not loading. I've just debugged a little further and I get a failure accessing this URL: https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20180912/small/Meter-box-5.jpeg Firefox helpfully says "Unable to connect". Chrome is a little more helpful with "ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED". Actually, scrub that, I just figured out why: % host lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com is an alias for blocked.kent.rpz. blocked.kent.rpz has address 172.23.2.2 So my institution is blocking it! In fact, all of digitaloceanspaces.com: % host digitaloceanspaces.com digitaloceanspaces.com is an alias for blocked.kent.rpz.
Migrating web site
Finally the rest of my web data has been transferred from www.lemis.com to ffm.lemis.com: === grog@www (/dev/pts/1) /var/tmp 15 -> scp try2.tar.gz ffm:/var/tmp try2.tar.gz 100% 7881MB 177.4KB/s 12:38:17 That's remarkably slow, but it won't stay there: I need two more machines to be the new www. And then I'll have the opportunity to compare the transfer rates.
More web server problems
It's been nearly a month since I migrated my photos to DigitalOcean, and it has been relatively easy. But today I got a flood of: Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2018 02:18:33 +0000 (UTC) From: World Wide Web Owner <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: Missing comparison image: https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20180113/Photos/20180113/New-TV-2.jpeg (/home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/Photos/20180113/small/New-TV-2.jpeg) Message-Id: <[email protected]> Page URL: http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-jan2018.php?dirdate=20180104&imagesizes=111111111211111111111112 Image URL: https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20180113/Photos/20180113/New-TV-2.jpeg File name: /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/Photos/20180113/small/New-TV-2.jpeg Main image: https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20180113/small/New-TV-8.jpeg Remote host: Remote IP: 66.160.140.182 Debug: compareimage Photos/20180113/New-TV-2.jpeg comparedir Photos/20180113 comparedirdate 20180113 comparelocalimagepath /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/Photos/20180113/small/New-TV-2.jpeg dir Photos/20180113 Between 12:15:04 and 14:09:06, 6842 seconds, the server generated 5501 such error messages, an average of one every 1¼ seconds.
Rats to you!
Got a reply from Spamrats today: You ONLY need to remove the IP Address from our list if you are running an outgoing mail server. (If you do NOT run an email server on this IP address, then being on this list should not affect you or your ability to send email through your email provider. If you ARE running an email server, your PTR (reverse) DNS is the problem. 180-150-113-90.NBN.mel.aussiebb.net Translated, this means: ?Tough, we're not going to do anything about it?. They don't seem to have considered the fact that the presence on the list is negative enough by itself, even if it doesn't affect operations.
New web server kit
I've been planning to migrate my web server for some time, but there hasn't been any particular urgency (apart from the US $35 that I pay for it every month, which I can reduce to $5). But maybe one's coming up: Hurricane Florence is due to hit the Carolina coast tomorrow. www.lemis.com is in Raleigh NC. Will it be hit? Probably not. But it won't do any harm to be prepared, so today I tarred up those parts of the system that I need and moved them to ffm.lemis.com, at a snail's pace: === grog@www (/dev/pts/3) /var/tmp 76 -> scp webstuff1.tar.gz ffm:/var/tmp webstuff1.tar.gz 100% 998MB 116.6KB/s 2:26:01 Why did it take so long?
Removing artefacts: solved?
More searching for ways to remove object from photos brought me to this page, which suggested that things would go relatively easily.
More DigitalOcean pain
I'm updating some of my old photos, and once again I've had issues syncing them to DigitalOcean: ... total size is 39,906 speedup is 31.82 rsync /home/grog/public_html/photos/dirlist www:/home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/photos Mon 10 Sep 2018 13:49:46 AEST date WARNING: Retrying failed request: /?prefix=grog%2FPhotos%2F20180909%2Fsmall%2F (('The read operation timed out',)) WARNING: Waiting 3 sec... ... WARNING: Retrying failed request: /?prefix=grog%2FPhotos%2F20180909%2Fsmall%2F (('The read operation timed out',)) WARNING: Waiting 6 sec...
Fotozones: Rats!
Mail from Dallas, the person behind Fotozones, suggesting that my IP address might be in a spam list. OK, even before checking, that's easy: I have two browsers running on different displays (and thus circumventing firefox's ?There can only be one rule?) that use proxies on different continents. And how about that, it worked! So: who's blocking my IP address (180.150.113.90)? https://whatismyipaddress.com/blacklist-check finds no blacklisting, but the almost identically named https://whatismyip.com/blacklist-check shows that I'm blocked by http://all.spamrats.com and http://dyna.spamrats.com, names that don't resolve, but http://www.spamrats.com/ does. Why am I on the list? It seems that they have had lots of spam, not from me (obvious: my ISP blocks outgoing SMTP), but from ?the class C block?, which extends to neighbouring addresses and which is so serious that the whole address block has been blocked as a Worst Offender, and I can't even apply to have it removed!
Fotozones: Blocked!
Received an email from Fotozones today. What's that? I thought it was the makers of Zoner Photo Studio, but it seems to have nothing to do with them. It contained a link to a lens review, but when I selected it I got: Why that? Not even the opportunity to log in. Found the contact form and had to put up with the CAPTCHA to end all CAPTCHAS: And when I was done, all I saw was ?Banned?
Photo processing pain
I frequently geotag my photos, though it's seldom that important. But clearly yesterday's navigation attempts were a problem. And of course the geotagging worked fine?except for exactly those photos. ?Time out of range? or some such. Dammit, what's wrong? Checked the logs. This photo was taken at 15:12:41 local time, corresponding to 5:12:41 UTC. And in the track logs I have: <trkpt lat="-37.675468758679926" lon="143.78172263503075"> <ele>433.0999755859375</ele> <time>2018-09-07T05:12:31.000Z</time> <course>0.0</course> <speed>0.0</speed> <geoidheight>-5.9</geoidheight> <src>gps</src> <hdop>1.0</hdop> <vdop>1.7</vdop> <pdop>2.1</pdop> </trkpt> <trkpt lat="-37.675499226897955" lon="143.7817555759102"> <ele>427.0999755859375</ele> <time>2018-09-07T05:12:50.000Z</time> <course>0.0</course> <speed>0.0</speed> <geoidheight>-5.9</geoidheight> <src>gps</src> <hdop>0.8</hdop> ...
Zoner: the chameleon
Spent quite a bit of time today trying to work out how to fix my kangaroo photos and the photo of my pension card with Zoner Photo Studio. I failed. What I did find was: I can remove the serial number from my pension card quite easily with Hugin by simply masking the number out: But that leaves a black field.
Photo editing
I use a fair amount of software for special functions, but certainly doesn't do everything I'd like done. In particular there are two things I'd like to be able to do well: add text to images and remove irritating objects, particularly annoying in the case of these photos, which I won't be able to retake so easily: A more important thing, though, was the photo of my pension card on Monday, where I tried to use DxO PhotoLab to obscure the card number.
Gmail: let's confuse the users for no good reason
While he was here, CJ complained about the fact that he couldn't find anything on Gmail any more. Where's the spam folder? Took a look. Indeed: Gmail has changed their appearance and navigation, and it's difficult to find things now. It took me a while to understand. CJ, non-technical and 80 years old, doesn't have a chance. Why do they do these things? From my point of view, it's significantly worse than before. But nearly everybody in the Microsoft/Apple/Linux do this all the time.
Debugging PHP
Spent some time?too much time?modifying my PHP scripts for the house photos to modify the check for the presence of photos. The script contains the date of the most recent photo series, but I don't always take photos from each view. So it goes backwards through a second file, photo-dates.php, which despite the name is just a list of the dates on which I took any photos. For each photo it then checks if this photo was taken on that date. Previous the check was simple: while ($thisday >= 0) { if (file_exists ('../Photos/' .
Network problems: explained?
Since yesterday's outage the network connectivity has been back to normal. Finally got a reply from Aussie Broadband support: they've been overwhelmed by new customer calls. Hopefully that doesn't mean that their support will stay that way. The explanation: problems with the Ballarat POI that were resolved on Friday. OK, what does that have to do with the problems I experienced on Saturday? About the only thing of interest was that in case of further problems they'd rather see an mtr (implicitly) to 8.8.8.8 or 202.142.142.142 (the latter of which resolves to dnscache1.wide.net.au).
More NBN pain
The availability of the network over the weekend has been really bad, and some of the video downloads that I started yesterday morning didn't finish until 3:00 this morning. And then at 12:50:56 we went off the network completely for (just) over an hour. Why? Things worked well after that, so maybe it was hardware maintenance on the radiation tower. But oh! for a reliable network!
Object storage: next problem
On the whole my transition to object storage has proceeded very well, but I keep coming up with strangenesses. Today is was the house photos. Yes, it works fine here, and it it works fine out in the global Internet. But there it claims that the last photos were taken on 18 August. Why? Because those are the last photos that I uploaded to the server. My PHP scripts check for the presence of the files and look for the most recent one if necessary. Another thing that I need to fix, in this case by checking the photo lists for the day.
Completing Olympus firmware update
The network connectivity continues to be bad, so updating my Olympus software wasn't an option. But I had to do something about my camera's configuration, so I tried to load my settings again. And this time it just worked! Why? I'm guessing that the firmware update program doesn't store the firmware on the host computer: it connects the camera directly to the net and then downloads the software from the remote host. What happens if the net connection goes down during the transfer? Bricked camera? Hopefully it first stores the firmware on the camera and then updates it only when the download is complete and (hopefully) when the checksum is correct.
Olympus firmware update pains
Olympus has issued a new firmware update for the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II. I hadn't installed the last one because of their horribly broken update system, but this one potentially addressed something that I could use: Corrected issue of C-AF not operating correctly when using the "LEICA DG SUMMILUX 25mm / F1.4 ASPH.(H-X025)" interchangeable lens produced by Panasonic. Start updating. It took forever! A total of 23 minutes. And when it was done, it failed to restore the old settings.
Signing up for Transferwise
High time to do something about our pension transfers from Germany. I did some comparisons last April, but I didn't include HiFX or Bank of Melbourne. And now I have Transferwise. Time to do another comparison? No, that's just too painful. There are other aspects to consider: first, the trustworthiness of the institutions. Based on that, I'd put Transferwise and Bank of Melbourne out in front. And then there's another issue that I had uncoupled from the money transfer issue: how do I pay for things in other countries? Paying by credit card is really expensive, but I haven't found any way to get a European credit card.
Gmail spam protection
About 6 months ago I was awarded a free subscription to the New York Times. But today it occurred to me that I hadn't received any copies since Monday. Was it maybe only a 6 month subscription? Off to check my mail. What I found was amazing. I filter my email through Gmail, because they have the best spam detection. But clearly something has gone seriously wrong: of the 550 ?spam? messages, fully 250 were false positives! Why? In the past I had had issues with Gmail not understanding forwarded messages with SPF headers. But that's not what it said today: ?It is similar to messages that were identified as spam in the past?.
Pump problems?
By chance I was awake at 5:00 this morning, the time for my cron job for the garden sprinklers. The first sprinkler is directly outside the bedroom window, and I hear it when it starts. I can literally tell the time by it, since it's started from eureka, which is NTP synchronized. But today I heard nothing. When I got up, checked the output from the program that talks to the sprinkler. Yes, all was well. It wasn't until later that Yvonne came and told me that there was no bore water. Yes, the system had lost pressure. Started the pump again and all was well.
File names with spaces: the pain
A while back I discovered a strangeness in my video directory: drwxr-xr-x 2 grog home 15360 25 Aug 19:36 Mord-mit-Aussicht drwxr-xr-x 2 grog home 12288 24 Aug 15:42 Notruf-Hafenkante -rw-r--r-- 1 grog wheel 1056443712 22 Jun 09:52 Notruf-Hafenkante drwxr-xr-x 2 grog home 512 23 Aug 19:35 Otto How can I have two entries with the same name? It became clear in an Emacs window, where I highlight unusual spaces: So I got to thinking: how does Microsoft handle that?
More random object storage issues
Yvonne has been taking a lot of photos recently, and it occurred to me that I had forgotten to install s3cmd on lagoon, her machine. OK, do that, copy the config file, and run it: === yvonne@lagoon (/dev/pts/1) ~/Photos/20180824 48 -> make sync s3cmd sync /home/yvonne/public_html/Photos/20180824/big/ s3://lemis/yvonne/Photos/20180824/big/ -P --delete-removed ERROR: /home/yvonne/.s3cfg: None ERROR: Configuration file not available. ERROR: Consider using --configure parameter to create one. Huh? I had just copied the file!
Cheap money transfer
I pay something like $100 a month in bank fees for pension transfers from Germany and France. I've been planning to do something for over a year now, but the real question was deciding which service to choose: I have four to choose from. In principle OANDA looks best, but I really need to get down and decide. But that was yesterday. And then I got mail today: As of August 31 2018, we will be discontinuing the OANDA Money Transfer service.
House photos, next hurdle
House photo day today. Gradually things are settling down after my transition to the new workflow. But there are always surprises. Today I discovered that DxO PhotoLab created output images of (considerably) different sizes for the component images of one view. Yes, I know that this can happen, and I have a script to trim them to size. But I don't apply it until after the HDR images have been created, and this particular one breaks Photomatix. OK, run the script against the input images. Sorry, no, this is TIFF, and there are two images in the file, greatly confusing the script.
More cordless phone investigations
I've established that the Panasonic cordless phones available in Australia have a particularly emetic menu structure. But they're the world's biggest maker of cordless phones. Surely something must be going for them. So I went looking on the Panasonic US site (at great difficulty: it tried to divert me to the German site, and wouldn't take no for an answer). A maze of twisty little images, all the same, 36 models in all. Where are the specs? We don't need no steenking specs. Manuals? A circular set of pages telling me to look for ?support" in the source page. Finally I found two different kinds of page, but in each case searching for ?PDF?
Twitter: more signs of the times?
Another statistic from Statista today: One day after Facebook lost the greatest market capitalization in US history, Twitter also seems to be suffering. People might see a connection with Donald Trump's abuse of the platform, but I'm beginning to wonder if there isn't a trend here. Away from social media? Maybe people are getting fed up with the novelty of smart phones? Yes, their sales have also reached a plateau, but I think that that's only because the market is saturated.
Internet signs of the times: cordicutting
An article today about cord-cutting. What's that? Replacing wired Ethernet with 802.11? No, it seems that it's replacing cable TV with Internet offerings. Not quite what I envisaged in my Internet of the Future paper, but close. How-To Geek isn't always very perspicacious, but this observation makes sense: Find a kid who has always had access to Netflix and try to explain to them that their favorite shows are only on at a particular time, once a day. They will think it?s just the dumbest thing, because it is.
House photos again
House photo day again today, and gradually I'm getting my routine adjusted. But there are still some strangenesses. For reasons I don't understand, I got this image layout: Running it with the Hugin aligner (what's the difference?) brought out what you'd expect: The more I look, the more I find strangenesses in Hugin.
Out of storage!
A slew of strange email messages this evening: From double-[email protected] Fri Jul 27 19:50:04 2018 Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2018 09:48:30 +0000 (UTC) From: MAILER-[email protected] (Mail Delivery System) Subject: Postfix SMTP server: errors from unknown[198.12.118.56] Transcript of session follows. Out: 220 www.lemis.com ESMTP Postfix In: EHLO mail.resourcestecs.review Out: 250-www.lemis.com Out: 250-PIPELINING Out: 250-SIZE 51200000 Out: 250-VRFY Out: 250-ETRN Out: 250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES Out: 250-8BITMIME Out: 250 DSN In: MAIL FROM:<jointdiscomfort-[email protected]> BODY=8BITMIME Out: 452 4.3.1 Insufficient system storage In: RCPT TO:<[email protected]> Out: 503 5.5.1 Error: need MAIL command In: DATA Out: 503 5.5.1 Error: need RCPT command In: QUIT Out: 221 2.0.0 Bye Clearly spam, and to a non-existent user, but why am I getting error messages about it?
Maximum social media?
Facebook presented disappointing earnings for the last quarter, as this Statista chart shows: The commentary relates to the ?stalling? growth. But in Europe, it has dropped, and in the USA it's essentially stagnant. Why? One obvious reason is that everybody already has a Facebook account, even I. But potentially it relates to an open question in my Internet in 2034 paper: How important will social networks be? Will they reach a plateau or even decline?
A new phone?
Who uses phones any more? They're all smartphones nowadays. But we have two ?landlines? (really VoIP over NBN). I access them via cordless phones, but as I age and become generally less tolerant, and my eyes are not what they were. Even when they were new, it was difficult to read the phone displays. First, the fonts are very distorted (high and narrow), and even with illumination called numbers are difficult to read, especially at an angle and at a distance (pick up the handset and it disappears): In addition, the newer one (bought three years ago) doesn't really fulfill its promise.
multimedia, technology, opinion
A while back I received mail from Ashampoo: Ingenious converter for all formats Find, record, download and convert music, movies, series, videos, TV and radio broadcasts OK, that sounds interesting, even if the price didn't. Where's the demo version? None. Ah, I missed ?(Ashampoo Partner Shop)?. OK, go looking on the web and find (surprise) http://www.audials.com/. Downloaded the demo version and started installing. It hung! After some investigation discovered that it was downloading another package, Audials_Radiotracker-Setup.exe, over 100 MB in size.
Hugin: no control points
To try out my new leveling head to its best, I took photos from more locations than usual, though the one in the verandah is particularly boring: But for reasons I don't completely understand, Hugin's cpfind found no control points at all between these two images: Why? There are plenty of similarities, and I was able to add control points manually. But cpfind decided that they were 200 pixels apart, and there was nothing I could do about it.
HDR: worth the trouble?
The photo of the Schinus molle in the car was a challenge: dark inside the car, full sun at the back. So apart from the normal photo, I also took a 3 shot bracket and processed with Photomatix. I needn't have bothered: DxO PhotoLab did it for me with the single shot.
Image resolutions through the years
After dinner, looking through some old photos with Chris, like this one: The fun there is that there are only four people in the image. But while looking at the details, like these ones, it occurred to me that the images aren't very sharp. Forgetting the stitching artefacts, how about this? That's a crop from one of the component images, so it hasn't been affected by any stitching issues. It's really not as sharp as it should be. Why? It was taken with my Zuiko Digital ED 9-18 mm f/4.0-5.6, which I used again today, with much better results.
The decline of the web site
Not everybody has a web site, of course, but I'm getting the feel that the threshold is getting higher. More people are creating Facebook pages instead, like Formosa Gardens nursery. Is this a good way to go? If it means that they can keep things up to date better, then probably yes.
Refining Hugin workflow
House photos again today, and another chance to work on my panorama stitching workflow. It went pretty well. I forgot to save the intermediate images as TIFF, giving myself the opportunity to refine (and simplify) my mkpto script to handle this case. All went relatively well with the exception of one panorama, where mkpto managed to get it inverted by 180°. Why? I was able to work around that, of course, and the fact that I could leave the stitching until later really speeds things up.
Goodbye PC?
I've had a computer at home since 1977. At the time people were amazed. Nowadays, of course, just about everybody does. But the times are changing, as this statistic from Statista shows: I'm assuming that this statistic includes other desktop and laptop-style computers, such as Apple Mac. Why are the shipments dropping? The real question is maybe: why do non-technical people use PCs? Because there's nothing else, I suspect. Now they have something even worse, smart phones, and they don't need computers any more. It's difficult to understand how people can put up with mobile phones, but it probably makes a great difference if you can't type.
Daily Hugin learning experience
Reading more panorama scripting in a nutshell today. It's horribly out of date. I'd like to fix it, but I don't know all the details yet. I'm left wondering how to write draft updates to a wiki. One of the really serious issues with an ?easy? toy markup language like MediaWiki. Almost the easiest way would be to convert it to a real web page (simple enough with the ?view source? function of any browser), and then tidy it up and edit it. But how do I then convert the result back again? In any case, apart from mentioning various obsolete tools, it also pointed me at hugin_executor, a wrapper that runs both nona and enblend, effectively replicating the Stitch!
Hugin stitching
As planned, spent some time today trying to automate Hugin stitching. There are two steps after masking and cropping: run nona on each image individually to create reprojected and cropped images, then run enblend to blend them together to a panorama. But how do I find the parameters with which to invoke the programs? The Preferences tab in Hugin gives some parameters for enblend, but there's no mention of nona, probably because there's a choice of blender, but none for the reprojector. OK, create a fake script called nona closer to the beginning of PATH. No go. We don't need no steenking environment variables: the program is /usr/local/bin/nona, and that's the way it stays.
Hijacking SMS messages
I'm rather irritated that Aussie Broadband wants to use SMS to verify my credit card change. Dammit, it's a toy! And I don't use it. But then I found this article about hijacking SMS. Not directly applicable, but maybe enough to present as an argument.
Revisiting old panoramas
Writing yesterday's article on mounting hardware required looking back at old entries. And inevitably I found things that needed changing. Link rot, photos that didn't look as good as they could... It kept me going all day. One thing that I didn't understand was that something crashed when stitching this image (here the old version): Hugin has the irritating ?feature? of displaying progress in a popup window and then deleting it and the log when it's finished. In this case it seems that enblend died, but I didn't get a chance to see what went wrong.
More Hugin processing
Filthy weather today, but somehow I managed to take my house photos. The new way of processing is getting better, but I still run into problems. The big one at the moment is that pto_gen (part of Hugin) does more than advertised and changes the colour balance of the images. Here an example: i w5180 h3884 f0 v75.6560113424287 Ra0 Rb0 Rc0 Rd0 Re0 Eev11.6147098272241 Er1 Eb1 r0 p0 y0 TrX0 TrY0 TrZ0 Tpy0 Tpp0 j0 i w5180 h3884 f0 v=0 Ra=0 Rb=0 Rc=0 Rd=0 Re=0 Eev11.6147098272241 Er1 Eb1.00921658986175 r0 p0 y0 TrX0 TrY0 TrZ0 Tpy0 Tp i w5180 h3884 f0 v=0 Ra=0 Rb=0 Rc=0 Rd=0 Re=0 Eev11.6147098272241 Er0.992248062015504 Eb1.00460829493088 r0 p0 y0 TrX0 T Those are descriptions for three images.
Goodbye terrestrial TV
Seen in the mail today (https://www.statista.com/chart/14559/americans-favorite-tv-platforms/): Even now, terrestrial broadcast TV only accounts for about 18% of TV viewing in the USA. The rest is delivered mainly by some kind of network connection, either Internet or cable. That's one of the things I predicted in my paper The Internet in 2034: Radio and TV broadcasts will gradually cease. They are costly: they use a lot of power, and that transmission and reception equipment are also expensive.
Panorama workflow: complete?
More work on my panorama workflow today, mainly to do more of the alignment work with scripts, so that at the end I just needed to tweak the panoramas, mainly mask, align and crop. That took its time, of course, but it seems to be worthwhile. My overall workflow now is: Take photos, three images per view bracketed at ±3 EV, offset by about 1.3 or 1.7 EV more exposure, in other words, typically +1.7 EV, +4.7 EV and -1.3 EV.
Smart phones: easier to use!
I got a rather surprising response to yesterday's article on phones on IRC today: * AlephNull wonders why he messes around with inconvenient and hard-to-manage landlines when he has a mobile phone That blows my mind! How can a (smart) mobile phone be easier to use than a conventional phone? It's worth considering how we got here. I can identify at least 6 different phone technologies that I have used in my lifetime: Phone with (almost) no dialling methods: We used one of these in Kota Bharu in the mid-1950s.
The future of telephones
By chance I saw the display on my second phone today, the one connected to the published phone number: ?Messages waiting?. I have this phone on automatic divert to voice mail, which has done a very good job of discouraging the eternal telemarketeers. But MyNetFone should send me email when a message comes through, and it doesn't. Several messages from Linda Swift next door, wanting to see Graham Wallace, the farrier who came along (and went) this morning. And then a call from an unrecognized mobile number. No message, just the phone number. OK, called back, got voice mail. Left a message, and a few minutes later I got a call back: it was Graham, Linda's husband.
Depth of field revisited
While scanning my old photos, I've noticed significant focus issues, like this one, taken in August 1971: That's my cousin Mick, still with hair, also with my Edixa-Mat Reflex D. But it's out of focus: It was taken with my Asahi Pentax “Spotmatic” with the Super-Takumar 50 mm f/1.4. Why is it out of focus? It's not because I forgot to focus: I just focused on our mutual cousin Gillian, on the left: What aperture?
More hugin problem investigation
Spent much of the day chasing down my panorama stitching problems. I had already noted that under some circumstances, I got no control points at all between adjacent images. But what was causing that? I tried: Different image formats (JPEG instead of TIFF). No change. Different processing (enfuse instead of Photomatix PRO). No obvious change. Change control point detector. No obvious improvement. Hugin version? Installed the latest version (a good idea in any case).
Scam mail gets more sophisticated
Received in the mail today: I bought something from FarmVille games? No way. But a second look makes things clear: Costumer"? Not just misspelt: it should be my name, but they don't know that. And of course if you have a sensible mail system you can look at the envelope details: From exp-[email protected] Sun Jun 3 03:40:08 2018 Return-Path: <exp-[email protected]> Received: from indra.neolocation.net (indra.logos.by.sys.neolocation.net [91.149.189.186]) by www.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 142351B72837 for <[email protected]>; Sat, 2 Jun 2018 17:37:50 +0000 (UTC) Received: from apache by indra.neolocation.net with local (Exim 4.88) (envelope-from <exp-[email protected]>) id ...
More house photo pain
Saturday is house photo day. Once again today I had pain with the photos; somehow it seems to be getting more complicated all the time. Spent some time investigating different issues, without coming to any clear conclusion. Last week I had suspected that the problem was related to my changes in processing, in particular using TIFF and Photomatix PRO, but today I got the same results with the old method. I didn't get beyond this panorama (here from last week): This is taken with 4 or 5 images.
Hugin bug!
I've been assigned a bug report about the FreeBSD port of Hugin, which I maintain. The latest version of Hugin can't process PNG images. Sample images to reproduce the bugs? None. OK, create my own. Yup, it can't access the images. Problem confirmed. And it doesn't exist on the 2017 version. What can cause that? Looking at the changes between version 2016.2.0 and 2018.0.0 (the current version), there's almost no difference.
Location services for emergencies
There are plenty of workarounds for the lack of native support for location reporting. In the process discovered an app that might really be useful under the circumstances, Emergency+, a National Triple Zero Awareness Work Group Communication . Which nation? When I read national , I immediately think of the USA, since that's the country that usually doesn't bother to name itself. But triple zero (000) is the phone number for the emergency services in Australia. And sure enough, it's Australian. Installation worked easily enough, and then I had to read the license: How much of this stuff is there?
A real use for smart phones
One of the myriad things that irritate me about the current generation of smart phones is the almost complete lack of interoperability. Spent some time discussing it on IRC today. Once again I'm amazed by how little insight shown by people whom I otherwise respect. Once we had ways of doing things that were bigger than the devices that perform them. But today I get things like: the root cause of much of your angst is that you're expecting computers to make sense to computer scientists.
Debugging Hugin
Why am I having so much trouble with Hugin lately? As I considered yesterday, there are many possibilities. The first step was to go back to where I was some months ago, creating JPEG intermediate images and then merging the HDR images with enfuse. And how about that, that worked much better. OK, which part of my current work flow is to blame? Photomatix PRO or the use of TIFF for the intermediate images? Tried creating JPEGs with Photomatix, and got results that seem to be intermediate between yesterday's problems and the old-style work flow. A number of issues make this particularly difficult: it all takes quite a bit of time, and the preview image doesn't match the final image.
Moving files in the smart phone age
So Chris and I had each taken photos of the moon. Clearly I needed her photos to write today's articles. OK, download the photos. Or is that upload? Dammit, no. The word is copy . We spent an hour trying. I had got Chris to install WiFi File Transfer on her machine, so that should have been simple. But of course she has a different phone from mine (a Samsung SM-930F, also known as herolte or one of the various nonflammable Samsung 7 range), so of course the directory layout was different. Never mind, we tried My Photos , and sure enough, there were photos, going back 2 years up to about a week ago.
Modern digital photography
Chris Bahlo along for dinner this evening (curry pierogi), and showed me a photo that she had just taken outside the house in the last fadings of twilight: What's that ring? Chris thought that it might be temperature sensitive. I thought that it was probably refraction in ice crystals and thus independent of the temperature. Out to take a look. Yes, the moon was higher, but the halo was clearly visible. Take a photo with a real camera. Summilux 15 mm f/1.7 ASPH.? That's completely out of focus! Also, the ring is too large to get the outside.
Protecting my private data
Yesterday the GDPR came into effect? Or is that the DSGVO? Or maybe the RGPD? And like so many people, I have received hundreds of messages with subjects like We promise to keep your data safe from companies I've never heard of, as this page describes. OK, probably the law is useful, though it seems that the provisions are so complicated that some sites have chosen to shut down rather than to attempt to comply. I have chosen to do nothing. Firstly, I feel that anything people put on the web is effectively public. That limits things like banking, of course, but my understanding is that there are separate laws for that sort of thing.
Traffic Nazis again
Two months ago Yvonne received a speeding ticket: I had been driving her car down an almost empty freeway in good weather and good condition, but I had been fined nearly $200 for driving at 105 km/h in a 100 km/h speed limit, a speed that would be legal just about anywhere where there are roads of this quality. There's nothing you can do about this sort of thing. Yvonne sent off a nomination form saying that she wasn't driving, I was. And we heard nothing. Some sane person at the fines department looked at the ticket and discarded it because it was stupid?
Fixing mplayer?
I've been using mplayer for over 15 years, and in the course of that time I have found enough cause for complaint. But it works, sort of, and the code is clear enough that I was able to add missing functionality, notably the ability to store file positions and to display information on the screen in a useful (for me) format. As a result, I have a set of patches that I have to apply to every new version. But there are still things that I need to do. MPEG positioning is only to a key frame, and there's no way to step backwards frame by framesomething that we had with VCRs 30 years ago.
Weather: too bad for weather
The weather lately has been particularly unpleasant, almost British: rain. Only 10 mm, but a drizzle that lasted all day long. And for some reason the two halves of my weather station stopped communicating with each other. Why? Took the internal unit to the door of the verandah, where it's in direct line of sight with the external unit, about 20 m away. No reaction after a couple of minutes. Batteries? Changed them, and how about that, it worked again. Problem solved, especially as I discovered, as so often, that one of the batteries was weaker than the other two. And then it failed again!
The 18 minute umount
Time for another photo backup today, as usual with Yvonne waiting impatiently for it to finish. And it took its time: instead of the usual 15 minutes it took 25. And then I had the same thing I saw last weekend: it hung after the final df: That's exactly what happened on Tuesday. On that occasion I had suspected that it was something to do with umount flushing buffers, but I didn't see any activity. Today I took another look. Yes, umount was running. The disk was no longer mounted, but there was I/O activity, quite a bit in fact: round 150 32 kB transfers per second, 4.8 MB/s, probably enough to saturate the slow external disk.
ANZ: Confirming your expectations
The other night I had asked IB to put in a formal complaint about ANZ's security measures , specifically asking that the response be from somebody in authority, thus rejecting the telephone complaints line asking that the response be in writing, and not via their broken mail system. I noted at the time that I had little hope of a sensible reply. Today those fears were confirmed. Yvonne received an email: Received: from mail1.bemta26.messagelabs.com (mail1.bemta26.messagelabs.com [85.158.142.5]) by www.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6F4A41B72837 for <[email protected]>; Thu, 17 May 2018 23:29:04 +0000 (UTC) Received: from [85.158.142.99] (using TLSv1.2 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 (256 bits)) by server-5.bemta.az-a.eu-central-1.aws.symcld.net id 34/20-11732-E301EFA5; Thu, 17 May 2018 23:29:02 +0000 Received: (qmail 29020 invoked from network); 17 May 2018 23:29:01 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO EXIAU001MELP002.ecorp.anz.com) (203.110.235.211) by server-19.tower-224.messagelabs.com with DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 encrypted SMTP; 17 May 2018 23:29:01 -0000 From: Your Feedback <[email protected]> To: ...
Buying second-hand cameras
For nostalgia's sake, I've been thinking for some time of buying an Edixa SLR, like the ones I had in the 1960s. They pop up on eBay from time to time, usually in pretty rough condition: despite being German, the quality was never good, as I noted shortly after I bought it over 50 years ago. Nowadays it's almost impossible to find one where the leatherette coating on the body isn't peeling off. The last one went away for far too much money. But then it came again. It took me a while to recognize that it wasn't the same camera.
ANZ: We don't like you
Yvonne wanted to pay for something via the ANZ web banking service today. For the first time ever, they came up with one of these really stupid security questions : Where was your wedding reception held? . Yvonne didn't enter anything, just pressed Continue . Wrong, Fool! Your account has been blocked! Clearly this isn't something that anybody would do with intent to defraud, though it's a good way to ensure denial of service. So we called up and asked for the account to be unblocked. Spoke to IB (that's what he said his name was), who asked all sorts of questions which are easy to answer when online, and very difficult otherwise.
Ransomware!
CJ Ellis showed up this afternoon with the news that he had been targeted by ransomware a year ago, and hadn't bothered to tell me. Instead he had paid to have it unlocked. That's bad enough, but now they came and told him that the unlocking was only for one year, and now they wanted more money. The interesting thing is that they had given him a lot of company contact details, and he had written them down. I scanned in the information: a company calling itself Web Security Experts , also Kastra Logic (not surprisingly marked as a scammer), with a phone number 1800-815-923, support email [email protected], also a web site http://www.helpme.net/ and a Facebook number (whatever that means).
Panic! fsck! fsck! fsck! FSCK!
Backing up photos this morning had a funny twist at the end. Normally it ends with something like: sent 25,416,008 bytes received 167 bytes 44,707.43 bytes/sec total size is 5,457,064,167,617 speedup is 214,708.32 Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on /dev/da2p1 7,629,565 4,632,938 2,920,331 61% 1,607,294 1,636,352 50% /photobackup Tue 15 May 2018 13:34:52 AEST Photo backup started Tue 15 May 2018 13:44:55 AEST Photo backup ended But today it hung after the df output.
Warning: HostIfNotConnecting
Another timeout on upgrading eureka, which I have been planning to upgrade for over a year. Tried to fire up eureso, my next generation machine. But it didn't resume cleanly: it hung at 97%: What's that? Tried rebooting, but then it didn't come up at all. And other VMs had the same problem, so it looked pretty much like an issue with the environment. Much messing around, and finally it occurred to me that I may not have had the vboxnet module loaded.
More panorama stitching pain
Saturday is house photo day. I've been doing this regularly for over 10 years now, and I've been making panoramas with Hugin for over 9. In principle there's not much difference each week. But things don't always turn out the way I expect. Today things were particularly strange. And for some reason, the errors weren't completely reproducible. Here an example, first what I got, then what it should have been: How did that happen?
Cloud storage: the death of interoperability
In principle I'm interested in using cloud storage for my online photos. But how? Currently I store my files in a file system (after all, that's what they're for). But that's an old, worn-out magic word, it seems. Now you access files via a URL that the storage cloud makes up for you, though in some cases it may bear a relationship to the name it had in a file system. Why? People have invented a whole new set of paradigms to access the storage, and they're not even consistent from one cloud to the next, though there seems to be a tendency for new arrivals on the scene to be at least marginally compatible with Amazon S3.
Woo hoo! Your password has been revealed
Mail from Twitter today informing me of a potential security breach, and recommending that I change my password. OK, that makes sense, though I hardly use Twitter, and even if my password were to become public, there's little anybody could do with it except impersonate me on Twitter. But I changed it, and was rewarded with the message Woo hoo! Your password has been changed! How exciting! I wonder when these sites will grow up. That wasn't the only message of that nature today, however.
Off the net again
Coming into the office this morning, discovered that no mail had arrived all night. That's a bad sign, almost certainly that we're off the net. Bloody NBN! But no, the net was up. My somewhat cryptic status messages looked like this: 1525301987 34.8833 4 0.0 www # Thu 3 May 2018 08:59:47 AEST 17.124 ms 1525302001 32.7086 4 0.0 www # Thu 3 May 2018 09:00:01 AEST 16.925 ms That tells me that I had a ping time to the next hop of round 17 ms (normal for my fixed wireless link), that there was no packet loss, and (from previous entries) that pings to www.lemis.com were failing, and had been since Wed 2 May 2018 20:51:43 AEST (10:51 UTC).
Microsoft camera capture, next attempt
I still haven't managed to get a clean image from Chris Bahlo's dongle on Microsoft. Doesn't the system come with a multimedia program? Ah, right, Windows Media Viewer. Can I use that? Off to Google to find many references to windows media player camera. Millions of hits, of course, many pointing to Media Encoder , free but not included. Spent a lot of time before checking Wikipedia. Media Encoder is an old, worn-out magic word ( discontinued ), now 15 years old. It seems that I should be using Microsoft Expression Encoder. OK, look at that page. Status: Discontinued. Replacement? Not mentioned. Sigh Why is this so complicated?
Compressing backups
How efficient is the compression on my EaseUS Todo backups? For the fun of it, I ran bzip2 on the old backup. It ran for about 5 hours, maxing out a core. Here the results: -rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 229,987,848,192 12 Feb 13:33 System Backup (1)_20180212_Full_v1.pbd -rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 206,841,590,660 12 Feb 13:33 System Backup (1)_20180212_Full_v1.pbd.bz2 That's about 10% savings. Is it worth it? It represents about the total storage capacity of all computers I used in my first 15 years of computing, but nowadays it's peanuts.
Next VHS copy program
Today was the turn of filmora for copying my VHS cassettes. The results were much more consistent than with vlcplayer. It consistently crashed: Was that because of the problems with the signal, or because of incorrect usage on my part (greatly helped by the non-intuitive user interface)? Do I care? Software that crashes can't be relied on for anything. On with the searchsome time. ACM only downloads articles once.
Backups: the sense of security
It's a truism that most people don't back up their Microsoft boxen. I can almost understand them. I had dischord set up for a weekly backup every Sunday, but one day it just Stopped Working (a term that Microsoft seems to like). Why? I never found out. Instead I installed a free backup utility, EaseUS Todo. And it, too, has its strangenesses, requiring me to reinstall on one occasion for reasons that I didn't understand, and forgetting name servers in the process. And for some reason, scheduled backups don't work. The result is exactly what I don't want: I do backups when I remember.
Copying VCR tapes with Microsoft
As discussed yesterday with Chris Bahlo, downloaded vlcplayer for Microsoft and tried reading in data via the dongle. The issues were as described, modulo audio, which I didn't bother to try: Somehow the digitization just didn't work. Why? Clearly it could be the program or the dongle. While the latter seems more likely, it's cheaper to try a different program. First I tried the tried and trusted mplayer, but their Windows downloads were managed by some get-rich-quick group who first wanted to sell me all sorts of other junk.
Copying video cassettes
After the problems I had copying Chris Bahlo's NTSC VHS cassette on Tuesday, I turned my attention to the USB stick that she has: How does it work with Microsoft? Chris said that it was just recognized. So tried it on dischord, and sure enough, it showed up in the hardware list: OK, what do I do now? Once again I feel lost in the vast vagueness of Microsoft.
Hugin strangenesses again
I'm gradually getting into the swing of creating my weekly house photos with TIFF images and Photomatix PRO. But to make up for that, Hugin put a spanner in the works. Firstly, it came up with wildly different exposures and colour values for the individual images, like here: Looking at the photometric data, I have: That shows different EV values from the original images, which were taken with EV 13.3.
Another NBN outage!
In late morning, yet another NBN outage. Was the techie right on Monday when he didn't sound overly enthusiastic that his replacement would solve the problem? After we had been off the air for a bit over an hour, went over to see what was going on: Is that the same van as on Monday? With extreme cropping I was able to get: But that didn't help.
New induction cooker
Finally got round to looking at the induction cooker that I bought at ALDI on Saturday. It certainly looks OK: But how does it work? Unlike their el-cheapo induction cookers, this one doesn't specify the amount of power used at each level, though it does state that levels 1 and 2 are (both) suitable for Delicate warming for small amounts of food , Gentle simmering and similar. Are they? I can't put my hand on the instructions for the portable unit, but I seem to remember similar claims.
More NBN outages!
In the early afternoon we disappeared from the net. I had just got round to grumbling when it came back againfor all of 7 minutes. Took a look at the NTD, which showed: That orange LED is labeled ODU fail , implying (incorrectly) a defect in the outdoor unit , which other people call an antenna. Again, the connection came back pretty quickly. But it continued like that, and after 15 minutes starting at 14:50, I headed off to the Radiation Tower to see if anything was going on.
New kitchen equipment
Into town this morning with Yvonne, she to Pilates, I to buy some kitchen appliances from ALDI: a range hood and an induction cooktop. Why? They're cheap, and I can bring them back again if I don't like them. The most important reason, though, is that buying them is the only way to find out the specifications, maybe only by trying them out. They'd save themselves a lot of money with better descriptions. The first shop (town centre) didn't have any cooktops left, 1 hour after opening. Off to the shop in Learmonth St, near the now-defunct Masters, where they did.
Deciphering Exif lens details
Looking through my photos, I discovered this in the Exif popup: What's wrong there? The lens is wrong. The lens is an M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100 mm f/4.0 IS PRO, which is identified in the Exif data like this: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/23) ~/Photos/20180417 81 -> exiftool Rose-4.jpeg |grep Lens Lens Type : Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100mm F4.0 IS Pro Lens Firmware Version : 1.303 Lens Properties : 0xc140 Lens Info : 12-100mm f/4 Lens Model ...
ANZ: We lost your money, but we don't care
Last month I had a lot of pain with ANZ Bank because of a transfer that hadn't arrived. They weren't encouraging, but I still wasn't prepared for the letter I got: To summarize: You asked us to transfer money. We did it. It's gone, and we can't say where it is. Bad luck . Bad luck? I gave them instructions to perform a transfer. They removed the money from my account, but it didn't arrive at the destination: they lost the money.
Moving data in the modern age
I'm coming ever closer to an all-out rant about the lack of interoperability of modern computing devices. If there's one function that is absolutely basic, it's moving data from one place to another ( copy , to use an old, worn-out magic word). Today I read an article the best ways to automatically back up the photos on your smartphone . Isn't that simple? Copy them to your computer? That's what I do, even with a phone. Why should I need a different method because it's a phone? Ah, but I don't understand: this is modern: use Google Drive, Amazon Prime Photos, Dropbox or iCloud (if you want to lock yourself into Apple for the rest of your life).
House photos under difficult circumstances
The weather this weekend has been particularly bad. Yesterday it was far too windy for my house photos, and it really was today as well. But there's no sign of it letting up, so I took them anyway. Surprise, surprise! Photomatix PRO managed to merge the HDR sequences really well. Here an example where La Tigre was moving as I took the sequence: The poor image quality is because two of the images were exposed 3 EV from the correct exposure, and I corrected it to make the comparison more uniform.
Targeted spam
It seems forever since I signed up with LinkedIn, and I continually get link requests from people I've never heard of, this despite my request on my profile page to establish contact before just blindly asking for a link. That's not surprising, though: it seems that they have modified their web site and either removed the about me section or made it so difficult to find that I can't find it even when I know it was there. My policy with such requests is: if they're linked to somebody I know personally, I usually accept it. Otherwise I ignore it (I can no longer say that I don't know the person).
Power fail!
Up this morning to be told by Yvonne that the server is offline , apparently something that her software had told her. Sure enough, eureka was down after a prolonged power failure. And why not the others? Some time ago I put eureka on its own UPS because of issues I had had with the house wiring. Originally it was in series with the house UPS, but issues with power distribution caused it to complain all the time, so I connected it to a non-UPS power point. And clearly the dedicated UPS didn't maintain the power as long as the house UPS.
NBN insights
As promised, discovered that we had had a further 5 National Broadband Network outages overnight, still only a total of a little less than 15 minutes in total. But that's now 15 planned outages in just over 4 weeks, now a total of 60,304 seconds (16¾ hours). And they're promising even more. Called up Aussie Broadband today, mainly for a billing inquiry, but also took the opportunity to talk to support about the NBN fiasco. Spoke to Rob, who did, indeed, have a few interesting comments. It seems that they're upgrading the towers to dual frequencies. So far they operate in the 2,300 MHz range, but they're adding support for 3,500 MHz.
Computing: extreme masochism
Going through my email list, I saw this partial subject line: If You Want to Use A Phone as Your Main PC, You Shou... How do you complete that? My best guess was If You Want to Use A Phone as Your Main PC, You Should Get Your Head Read , but no, it recommended Android. Based on my experience, that's a real condemnation of Apple.
Still more outages!
Aussie Broadband have announced still more NBN outages! We have received the following advice from nbn: This notification is to let you know that we will be performing network maintenance work. Due to this activity the services listed below will experience a loss of connectivity for up to 1 hrs 0 mins during the change window. nbn estimates the above interruption will occur between: Start: 12/04/2018 11:00:00 PM End: 13/04/2018 01:00:00 AM START DATE: Thu 12th April 2018 23:00 AEST END DATE: Fri 13th April 2018 06:00 AEST CHANGE WINDOW: 7 hours START DATE: Tue 1st May 2018 08:00 AEST END DATE: Thu 3rd ...
FreeBSD: why no desktop market share?
A week or two ago there was a question on Quora: Why does FreeBSD have virtually no (0%) desktop market share? . Good question, one worthy of clarification. What's a desktop? What's a market? I wrote an answer making assumptions in both case, and (somewhat to my surprise) it was relatively well received. Later, Terry Lambert also wrote a response. I can't call it an answer, because it went off on a tangent about the uselessness of X. Terry's not stupid, and some of the things that he wrote made sense. Only they didn't have anything to do with FreeBSD. The only mention of FreeBSD was to note that Linux and FreeBSD both have the same issues with X.
NBN: Still more outages
The National Broadband Network promised three outages over the last month. Or were they 9? Or maybe only one? Who can tell based on the information I have received? All I can say is that we had three outages, and the last scheduled date was two days ago. But then we had an outage today! And an outage! And an outage! In total, there were six of them.
Progress is coming. Get used to it.
I still read the daily email from How-to Geek, though much of it seems poorly prepared. Today I was told why smart fridges are the future. It seems that the clever thing about them is that they contain a camera, enabling you to see what's in there without opening the door, and also while you're shopping. Somehow I can't relate to that. I often enough have difficulty finding things in the fridge with the door open. How many cameras do I need to be able to show all the shelves? Two per shelf (the second to show what's in the door)?
Time for a new programming language?
House photo day again today, and I'm still having my fun with my processing software. Things like generating the contact prints still don't work correctly, and I'm having difficulty debugging the (very crufty) script that almost does the work. Somehow I really don't like the Bourne shell programming language. 12 years ago I learnt PHP for a web project, and that proves to be easier for many things, even if many of my right-wing BSD friends laugh at me because of it. But it's not really designed for this kind of work, and some of the language details show it. Perl?
More online video sources
One of the online sources that I'm subscribed to is SBS On Demand, from the Australian broadcaster SBS. Before I stopped using broadcast TV, SBS was my channel of choice, and they have a reasonable number of foreign-language programmes. But SBS On Demand is so painful to use that I don't bother. Today, though, I took another look. Paris Etc (their capitalization) looked like a possibility. Please log in. OK. And I ended up with an empty screen that stayed empty for longer than made sense. But I have the URL. Can youtube-dl make any sense of it? It seems unlikely, but yes, it could!
Free online storage!
Somebody on IRC pointed at this page today. Use other people's DNS cache to store your data. Amusing. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Back to gmail?
Since moving away from Gmail two weeks ago I have had lots of spam, not surprisingly. Is it worth it? My issues with Gmail were related to SPF, and that is only set for some sites, like FreeBSD. For FreeBSD I set my email address to send directly to Gmail, so that problem no longer exists. What about the rest? Can I do it with them too? It's worth a try. ACM only downloads articles once.
More NBN pain?
The DEREEL OUTPOST Facebook group came to life again today: NBN outages again. And somebody pointed to something I had said that today was the third day of outages. But all I saw was some pretty flaky connectivity round 10:10. When we got home from town, though, it was another matter: we had had an outage of between 20 and 30 minutes (my current reporting is not very accurate). Was this an NBN-related outage? If so, hopefully we're finally done with them. ACM only downloads articles once.
Answering smart phones
Why couldn't I answer my phone yesterday, despite two tries? Asked on IRC, where I discovered a lot more than I expected. First, this is a Samsung GT-I9100T, so (I'm told) the user interface (for which I have found no documentation) differs from the standard Android interface: I interpret this as press on the green phone symbol in the circle and slide your finger to the right . And that's what I did. It's clear that there's a danger here, as I had already discovered: go too far and you're in the red area, so it will hang up for you.
Your account has been compromised!
While in town, Yvonne called me to tell me that she was done at the physiotherapists. Damn these smart phones! Just getting it out of my shirt pocket was bad enough, but then I couldn't answer it! Yes, I know that I need to steal swipe the icon to the right, but it didn't work. I must have made the wrong gesture. But then, maybe I was just too gentle. According to the OED, swipe can also mean to strike at with the full swing of the arms" or to deal a swinging blow or hit at . I certainly felt like it.
Next NBN outage
Yvonne to me this morning: The phones aren't working . And sure enough, the NTD showed all I needed to know: The second NBN outage! So much for my guess that there would only be one. But this time the NTD status was different. Were they doing something else? Off to take a look. Yes, there were people there: What were they doing?
What does Facebook know?
Lately a number of us have been downloading our Facebook archived data, because we can. I didn't expect to find anything of interest, so I wasn't surprised that I didn't. Only the strict separation of text and images was rather annoying, since I couldn't (easily?) find out what belonged to what. And since my basic data is deliberately incorrect, it's difficult for Facebook to classify me. But then Peter Jeremy suggested that the real information is in the connections: who are my friends? Where do they live? Good question. But Facebook doesn't show much evidence of having good geographical understanding. The two Facebook groups I visit relatively frequently are M43 Tech Talk (Australia) and DEREEL OUTPOST (clearly local).
Copying DVDs, yet again
Chris Bahlo has some new horse DVDs, by Anja Beran. So I had to read them in to a computer. And once again I forgot how. I had thought that vobcopy was the way to go, but that no longer seems to work. And then there was a script called copydvd. That's still there, but it only copies one track at a time. Why is this so complicated? Still, after consulting my diary, it seems that this is the way to do it. And that worked for the first DVD, which for some reason really contained two titles. But not for the other two.
TIFF, not JPEG
Today was Saturday, the day for my weekly house photos. I had a little time, so I finally started on something I have been planning for a long time: make all the intermediate images in (16 bit) TIFF, not JPEG. That promises better quality, but required considerable attention to my scripts. One of the biggest headaches is the plethora of extensions . In various scripts I currently have: EXTENSIONS="_DxO.tif _DxO.tiff _DxO.jpg .jpeg .jpg .JPEG .JPG .gif .GIF .png .PNG .tiff .tif" And that's not including raw formats, which are even more poorly defined.
More Facebook fallout
Seen on The Shovel today: Wishing him a happy birthday for last week and complimenting him on the new shirt he bought today, Mark Zuckerburg reassured 26 year-old, university educated, soccer-playing junior accountant James Samuel Jimmy Wilson, that Facebook only collects the basic data required to run his account... ACM only downloads articles once.
More nvidia pain
Yesterday I built a new system for teevee, the TV display computer. But when I tried to start X, I got a failure message that printed only on the display, and not in the log files. The system log had nothing, and /var/log/Xorg.0.log had only: [ 1644.802] (EE) NVIDIA(GPU-0): Failed to initialize the NVIDIA GPU at PCI:1:0:0. Please [ 1644.802] (EE) NVIDIA(GPU-0): check your system's kernel log for additional error [ 1644.802] (EE) NVIDIA(GPU-0): messages and refer to Chapter 8: Common Problems in the [ 1644.802] (EE) NVIDIA(GPU-0): README for additional information.
Banks: beware of scams
Two messages in mail today, one from each of my banks. The one from the Bank of Melbourne read: Subject: Security Alert - Important Phone Scam Information Bank of Melbourne will never send you an email asking for your personal details or link to a sign-in page. Keep your system security up to date. For more information visit bankofmelbourne.com.au/hoaxemails View this email with images At Bank of Melbourne, helping our customers avoid falling victim to scams is our top priority.
Facebook stole my personal data!
The big news at the moment is that Facebook has been caught giving user data to Cambridge Analytica. People are up in arms. Did they steal my data too? No, probably not, at least not in this case. As one commentator notes, Cambridge Analytica could just be the tip of the iceberg, so maybe others have. Am I worried about my personal data? No. I never did trust Facebook, so I'm not disappointed. most of my profile information on Facebook is incorrect. Place of birth (currently Kandahar), place of residence (currently Aleppo), education (started at the University of Melbourne in 1952; this part is true, but it was a kindergarten).
Goodbye Gmail
After 24 hours of routing my FreeBSD mail to Gmail, it seems that Peter Jeremy's assumption is correct: Gmail is rejecting mail specifically because it has been forwarded from mail.lemis.com, and thus fails the SPF test. Other mail continued to be filtered. That, combined with Gmail's clumsy mail selection method (click on the tiny box next to Every Message), makes it impractical. That's a pity, especially since there seems to be no way to tell Gmail's spam checker to ignore that kind of problem, or, better, to accept it if it comes from mail.lemis.com. So for the time being at any rate, it's goodbye Gmail.
Another multimedia content site
Mail from Carsten Holtkamp today, suggesting: I had a look on your diary entry: Dealing with online multimedia. So, I think the reason for the 30 days rule is, that the content is only available for that time due to legal restrictions. That's a reasonable assumption, but it's not the case. There's lots of older stuff there, like the example I discussed yesterday, which is 3 months old and has a specified expiry date of 31 December 2018.
More Internet effects
Part of shopping involved getting some cash from an ATM. Since ANZ closed their ATM in Sebastopol a month ago, that has become a problem. Since I was in town, I went to Bridge Mall, noting quite a queue in front of me. Summary: wait time 2 minutes, transaction time (including everything) about a minute. On down Bridge Mall, noting the lack of people and the number of premises for lease: OK, it was mid-morning on a Thursday.
NBN outage, day 2
No NBN outage yesterday, as expected, and when I came into the office, the network was still up, confirming my theory that nothing would happen this month. That was a little premature, unfortunately. At 7:38 we went off the net, and it didn't come back until 15:10, almost exactly 7½ hours. On the way into town, and also on the way back, I drove past the radiation tower to see what they were doing, but there was nothing obvious. After the net came back, there was no obvious improvement. In fact, there was quite a bit of congestion for several hours, after which things came back to normal.
Gmail false positives
I've been using Gmail for spam filtering for over 2½ years: first I receive the mail via one of my 450-odd email addresses, then send it on to Gmail for spam filtering. On the whole it works relatively well, though the filter is definitely a bit on the aggressive side: there are many more false positives than false negatives. But in the last couple of days things have changed significantly. Today I ended up with 174 messages in my spam folder. Of these 28 were genuine spam, 115 were FreeBSD commit messages, and there were 31 others.
NBN public relations
While writing my article on the National Broadband Network outage, I went to their home page. How about that, they're listening to their customers: That links to another page with planned obsolescence: it refers to February , without a year. It explains the three key areas that they find important: Progress Were rolling it out, with more than 6.3 million premises able to connect today.
PCs for septuagenarians
I'm gradually heading towards my 70th birthday, and a statistic from Statista brought that home: Desktop computers are for septuagenarians! Why is that? Unable to change with the times? No, I think that the real answer is that I don't have to change with the times. I've been using mobile phones since 1990, long before most people I know: in fact, I was known at Tandem as that guy with the cellphone . But I had a good reason then: I was moving around a bit, and people had difficulty contacting me.
Finding online TV content
In the previous article I glossed over how to find online TV content. That's not always simple. We had watched the first episode of Die Kirche bleibt im Dorf , and decided to download further episodes. OK, off to the ARD Mediathek, which has a search function: Sorted by relevance, the top hit is Kundin bleibt Kunde ( Customer (feminine) remains customer (masculine) , a legal decision about German grammar). What earthly connection does that have? A couple of false positives could be acceptable, but nothing this far off the mark, especially since the thing I was looking up didn't show up at all.
Dealing with online multimedia
I've been fighting multimedia software and data for over 13 years, and somehow it's not getting much easier. Now I can get material online, and I've been able to turn off my TV broadcast reception, but the software and the suppliers still cause problems. The big plus I found some months back is that nearly all German public broadcast TV programmes are available online, notably at the ARD Mediathek and the ZDF. I'm still hoping to find something similar in English. But how do I find the content? There's MediathekView, but for some reason it limits itself to a maximum age of 30 days, and even then it doesn't find everything.
Preparing for the Big Outage
Tomorrow is claimed to be the first of six total Internet outages announced by the Australian National Broadband Network for the next 3 weeks. Can I believe that? Asked a question on the DEREEL OUTPOST Facebook group and discovered a number of things: Most people hadn't been informed at all, including Telstra customers. Some had been given different times. Part of the different times seems to be that I didn't receive some of the messages. One of the people quoted messages from Aussie Broadband that I hadn't seen.
Comparing computer products
Another borderline spam message today today: I noticed your website sends users to Privoxy here on this page - http://lemis.com/grog/diary-sep2008.php. I wanted to warn you that they're sending their visitors to a couple of shady sites, like a binary options review website which promotes known investment scams (take a look at the bottom of each page). I'm sure you don't want your visitors getting scammed - if you're looking for an alternative, may I suggest our list of free VPNs as an alternative? http://ctech.link/free-vpn. In case you???re unaware, a VPN is another type of proxy that achieves the same end result as Privoxy.
Did Craig Weber (klearview) defraud you?
One of my most irritating experiences with eBay recently was in regard to seller klearview_au, otherwise known as Craig Weber, who took my money, opened a non-payment case, causing me to pay again, and never delivered the item. Both eBay and the police saw no reason to intervene: too much trouble. I'm not the only one. Although it seems difficult to find, two others have found my diary entries and contacted me. I sent a message to the police, and got no reply. How many people do we need to get something done? And how do they find out about the rest of us?
NBN: How fast?
Mail from MyNetFone today, pointing to this page, explaining Internet link speeds with the National Broadband Network. Isn't that simple? 12/1, 25/5, 50/20, 100/40, in each case Mb/s down and up. But no, those are old, worn-out specifications. No silly confusing numbers any more, only Plans : Basic, Standard, Standard Plus and Premium. And their speeds are very different. At peak the downlink speeds are 7, 15, 30 and 60 Mb/s. That's round 60% of the old values. That's not what the NBN promised. Is this just an indication that you shouldn't sign up with MyNetFone, or is the industry diluting its promise?
Has my password been stolen?
One of the things I'm very careful about is not to share passwords across various Internet services. In particular, I never log in using a Facebook or Google password, and I use different IDs (including email addresses and password) for each service. So I was rather interested to read this article, which pointed me to https://haveibeenpwned.com/. OK, let's check. Yes, indeed, I have had my password stolen! Really? Tried again with my standard fake email, [email protected], the one I only use in examples in this diary. Bingo! It too has been exploited: Problem.
Camera USB problems cornered
I have continued to have intermittent but frequent problems reading photos in from my Olympus OM-D E-M1, but not with the OM-D E-M1 Mark II. Lately I've had exactly the same syndrome with the E-PM1, which at least suggests that the problem isn't in the camera. The E-M1 (Mark I) and the E-PM1 use Olympus' old-style USB 2.1 cable, while the E-M1 Mark II uses a USB 3.0 type C cable. Could it be related to the connection? On a whim, changed the cable to a different USB hub. Bingo! The problem no longer occurs (after only one or two attempts).
Remove that link!
Received a strange email today: Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2018 20:51:50 +0000 (UTC) From: EAG Marketing <[email protected]> Subject: Link Removal Request Message-ID: <1702181020.31743.1520455910533@ip-10-1-0-82.ec2.internal> Reply-To: EAG Marketing <[email protected]> [-- Type: multipart/alternative, Encoding: 7bit, Size: 2.3K --] Hello, I am writing on behalf of the Hertz Corporation. I work for EAG , which is one of Hertz digital agency partners. I???m working on cleaning up links to www.hertz.com, and I need your help in removing some links from your site. While we appreciate the support, at this time we are requesting that you please remove this links as we strive to better control our backlink profile.nk profile better.
NBN: Some uptime possible
I've commented frequently in the past that the Australian National Broadband Network is not the most reliable. But it seems that I ain't seen nothing yet. Over the last couple of weeks I have received the following mail: We have received the following advice from nbn: ---- This notification is to let you know that we will be performing Fixed Wireless network capacity work. Due to this activity the services listed below will experience a loss of connectivity for up to 30 hrs 0 mins during the change window NBN estimates interruption 1 (Listed Above) will occur between: Start: 14th Mar 7:00AM End: 14th Mar 9:00PM NBN estimates interruption 2 (Listed Above) will occur between: Start: 15th Mar 7:00AM End: 15th Mar 9:00PM NBN estimates interruption 3 (Listed Above) will occur between: Start: 17th Mar 7:00AM End: 17th Mar 9:00PM ---- ...
Internet banking , not our problem
I needed to do a bank transfer this morning, from the Bank of Melbourne this morning, using their Internet Banking service. But this time logon failed in a number of different ways. To log in you need three parameters: an access number, a Security number , effectively a PIN between 4 and 6 characters long, and an Internet Password , where the word Internet is doubly superfluous. But when I tried to log in, I got a transient error messages against the Security number : Please match the requested format . The value is numeric, of course, and this looks like the page's way of saying You entered a non-numeric character .
Next HDR software
My experience with Aurora HDR was mixed: it was much better than HDR Express, but still left a number of questions unanswered. Before looking in more detail, it seemed worthwhile to look at the alternatives, notably the top of the list that I had found. In passing, it's interesting to note that I received no reply from Macphun about my findings. I would have expected some kind of reply, though clearly they would not have agreed with me. That's Photomatix PRO, and to my surprise I discovered that I had had contact with it before, nearly 9 years ago.
Olympus firmware: worth the trouble?
Taking the photos of the flowers brought a surprise: they were stored in LN format, which in Olympus speak means full sized JPEG, average quality , round 3 MB in size. This was with the OM-D E-M1, where all the settings got reset. Spent something like 30 minutes putting them in again, with the exception of one that I forgot to write down and can't find: instead of the Super Control Panel , display a single menu item at once. Is it worth upgrading the firmware? The purpose of this particular upgrade was: Corrected issue of autofocus (AF) function not operating correctly when using the "LEICA DG ELMARIT 200mm F2.8 [sic] / POWER O.I.S.
Refund: done!
Last week I cancelled a purchase of a lens cap, because it didn't fit. The seller responded quickly with a refund and the indirect recognition that the cap was faulty: he didn't want it back. That was confusing, though: I got a message saying that the purchase price had been refunded: Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2018 23:21:34 -0700 From: eBay <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: Seller initiated a refund: Leica Plastic Lens Cap Press Tabs apx 46mm just under 2&quot; Superb But that was just the purchase price, not the postage.
E-M1 Mark II Firmware 2.0
After fighting my way through the firmware update for my Olympus equipment, I finally have not only new features, but also a new manual . So what's new? The list is here, but most of it is uninteresting. The things that interest me are: Smaller AF points. This could be of use most of the time, but I'll have to play with them. Focus stacking (Olympus terminology for in-camera focus stacking) now supports the M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100 mm f/4.0 IS PRO.
Updating Olympus firmware
Olympus has released firmware upgrades for several products that I have: the OM-D E-M1 Mark I, the OM-D E-M1 Mark II and the M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100 mm f/4.0 IS PRO. The pre-release discussion suggests a way to download the firmware and install it from an SD card, just what I have been looking at for a long time. The information was posted on Facebook, so I can no longer find it, but it seems to be related to this page. It let me download the code (88 MB!) , but it's structured so that I can't find out how to do the transfer to the SD card.
Free as in free beer?
Where do I find maps that I can embed on my pages without worrying about copyright? Google Maps allows embedding, and OpenStreetMap exists for that purpose, but neither of them do atlas-style maps. So I went looking and found this page, which looked like it could do exactly what I'm looking for: But it only showed a small fraction of the maps, unsorted. How should I sort them? Nothing useful. And why sort by price ? In the end, I didn't find just what I was looking for (a world map centered on Asia and Australia).
Reading mail attachments
My MUA of choice is mutt, a descendent of the original elm. It can handle MIME attachments, but not well. The mail from Dr Tagkalidis had about 8 PDF attachments, which were not the easiest to view, so I bounced the message to gmail and looked at it there, confirming that other MUAs don't do very well with this kind of document either. Each document was presented as an icon with three different sensitive areas, one to display directly, one to download, and another that took me a while to understand. After reading one document, I got the message safe to drive , which I suppose made sense given that it didn't relate to a procedure.
Next HDR software
I've spentwasted over a week on HDR Express 3, but I'm still no closer to a solution for my ghosting. What alternatives are there? Off to search for best hdr software, and of course got lots of responses. Interestingly, I didn't see HDR Express in the list. For some reason, picked on Aurora HDR, number two from this list. Download and installation went smoothly, and it seemed straightforward ( intuitive ) enoughuntil I tried to save a file. Ah, you don't save, you export. OK, I can live with that, though I'll probably continue to bitch and moan for a while. And then it offered me: Save as "JPG files" (*.jpg) Where did the experts go?
HDR Express: final sting
So I've given up on HDR Express 3. As planned, sent them an email pointing to my diary articles. And they had one last surprise for me: How do I enter the email address? So I filled out the (required) fields and hit Send. It flagged all the fields as required . So I tried again, and got: So somehow they had moved the email address to the bottom.
HDR Express, yet again
I've been trying to use HDR Express 3 for a week now, and I have yet to create a single image. Yes, it's Microsoft space, but surely I can master even that. After the last attempt I decided that I should watch the video tutorials after all. So I fired up the program, once again cursing the mouse, and selected tutorials from the main menu. It wasn't a video tutorial after all. It was the document hidden inside the program about which I complained about earlier. But this time I found a way to save it! So now at least I can look at the manual on another display.
Nvidia
Mail from Nvidia today asking me how I liked my support experience. I've described this in painful detail, notably the absence of a real online bug report submission and the fact that the support person wasn't aware that the problem was solved in a newer version. But what got me was this: Submitted Online ? How? If they really have that option, they're hiding it well. Hopefully my comments will get read, and they'll fix that. ACM only downloads articles once.
Server down!
Mail from Callum Gibson this evening, telling me that I (my proxy) had disappeared off the IRC channel. Strange. The proxy bip, runs on the external web server www.lemis.com. It occasionally hangs (I think there's a file descriptor leak somewhere), but I had just restarted it. Off to take a look: === grog@www (/dev/pts/1) ~ 1 -> uptime 11:13AM up 6:22, 2 users, load averages: 0.58, 0.59, 0.52 The server had gone down again! That's the second time this year. Somehow RootBSD is not what it used to be.
Offensive code of conduct
It's no secret that I'm opposed to codes of conduct , specific interpretations of what the codifiers see as good behaviour. Apart from the fact that there are too many of them, all with loopholes and inconsistencies, they shouldn't be necessary in the first place. Six years ago I decided against attending linux.conf.au (seasonal URL) because of their insistence on a code. Two years ago I noted a perceived issue with the FreeBSD Code of Conduct, requiring (in their view) an overhaul of the code. Now it's there, and we had a long discussion (as it happened, started by myself, though I didn't stay in the thread for long).
FreeBSD: how stable
Discussion of my recent panic on IRC this morning, and John Marshall expressed surprise that I was running FreeBSD-STABLE on my machines. Why? That's the most stable version. But not according to John: jrm: huh. grog uses -STABLE. groggyhimself: Is that good, bad or ugly? callum: I would consider it sensible groggyhimself: My thoughts too. I was wondering what jrm was thinking. jrm: it was an observation jrm: my understanding was never to use -STABLE unless it was absoutely necessary jrm: as it is anything but 'stable' - and is not even guaranteed to compile - despite its name.
HDR Express: still no luck
My previous attempts with HDR Express 3 were less than successful. But OK, since I can't comfortably access their manual (it can only be displayed from the running program!) , I was going by what seemed to make sense, not necessarily what you should do with Microsoft-based programs. And then it occurred to me: I had come to this program because of a book, The HDRI Handbook 2.0 , by Christian Bloch. The obvious thing (apart from the discrepancy in version numbers) would be to follow the instructions there. Went to some trouble (connecting a DVI cable from dischord to my right-hand monitor) to be able to start the program on dischord, something that I hadn't been able to do before because of the rdesktop bug.
nVidia pain, next step
I've had a lot of pain with the nvidia driver for FreeBSD lately: first the performance bug I experienced last month, and then yesterday's panic. The two are not completely unrelated: as the result of the performance issue, I'm using an old version of the driver. Could it be that only this driver causes problems? In any case, I had a rather strange request from the person handling the driver bug: Can we get video showing performance drop when only single display is connected to the gpu?
Panic!
Updated the system on teevee today, as I do about once a month. The last time was: FreeBSD teevee.lemis.com 11.1-STABLE FreeBSD 11.1-STABLE #2 r327971: Mon Jan 15 10:55:53 AEDT 2018 [email protected]:/home/obj/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/11/sys/GENERIC amd64 Nothing very interesting there, which is why I almost never mention it. Today it finished, I rebooted, went away briefly, and came back in time to see the system displaying: reboot after panic: page fault writing core to /var/crash/vmcore.1 Huh?
More playing with HDR Express
My previous experience with HDR Express 3 was not the most positive, but then, it is a Microsoft space program. Maybe I'm trying to do too much at once. Let's take one step at a time. Fired it up again, this time remotely from euroa, and confirmed once again that I got a black screen. Started it locally and migrated to rdesktop, again with no problems. This time I took the normal interface. And once again it insisted on looking in C:\Users\grog\Pictures. But this time the Preferences screen looked completely different, and in particular didn't allow me to set a default folder.
Trying HDR Express
My last attempts with commercial HDR software were with Franzis HDR Projects 4. Not an unqualified success: in fact, an unqualified waste of money. On the other hand, the method I'm using now, using enfuse, doesn't handle ghosting at all well, so it's probably time to look further. The next one I found was HDR Express 3 from Pinnacle Imaging Systems. I downloaded a trial copy a few days ago, but have only just got round to trying it out. The view on startup was unexpected: That's certainly minimal.
E-M1 USB problems
I read photos from my cameras to the computer using a script called syp. It uses a feature of the Olympus file naming scheme. The names are of the form PMDDNNNN.JPG, where P is an (apparently) arbitrary letter, M is a one-character abbreviation for the month (1 to C), DD a two character representation of the day of the month, and NNNN a number that is incremented for each photo. The P can be changed to just about any character you want, so I have changed it on all my cameras to identify the camera (1 for the E-M1, 2 for the E-PM2, 3 for the E-PM1, and 4 for the E-M1 Mark II).
GPS pain
What time did we pick up the prescription at Health First yesterday? It was somewhere between 15:30 and 16:00, but I didn't note the exact time. Never mind, I have a GPS navigatortwo, in factso I can use something like GPS Visualizer to show where I was. But that shows two serious issues. First, the track is extremely inaccurate. In Ballarat, we parked between Eyre St and Dana St, a block south of Health First, and walked north along the west side of Doveton St. When we left (by car), we turned left into Dana St and left again into Dawson St.
The demise of the file
More and more my objection to modern digital devices is pointing in one direction: inability to manipulate files. Thirteen years ago I grumbled that this new firefox browser had lost editing functionality. More recently I've been grumbling about inability to move data from one place to another without going via a server, more than likely at the other end of the world. Today I had another example, also involving another rant favourite, Android. I received an SMS message from somebody, something that I don't see in a timely manner. And I wanted to answer it. With an SMS? Heaven forbid! That's what email is for.
Backups and image integrity
Over to Chris Bahlo's house today to get my backup disk number 6, which I used for my photos from November 2013 until March last year, when it became too small (only 4 TB). Since then it's been sitting on a shelf at Chris' place. That's just what I need for the video backup I've been working on for the last week or so. OK, newfs and start backing up. But what about the content? It contained are all my photos up to a year ago. Yes, I have three other copies, but what if they're all corrupt? How can I even tell if they're corrupt at all?
Disk power supplies: the solution
I've spent several days looking for power adapters for my external disks. I've found a couple on eBay, but they all have connectors with 2.5 mm internal diameter ( guaranteed to fit both 2.1 mm and 2.5 mm sockets ). I know better. But then it occurred to me: ask Chris Bahlo. And sure enough, she had exactly the power adapter I was looking for, on indefinite loan if not to keep. Finally I had enough power adapters for all my disks. And then I discovered: Feb 11 09:25:04 teevee kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): READ(10). CDB: 28 00 00 d6 d9 36 00 00 08 00 Feb 11 09:25:04 teevee kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error Feb 11 09:25:04 teevee kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): SCSI status: Check Condition Feb 11 09:25:04 teevee kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): SCSI sense: MEDIUM ERROR asc:11,0 (Unrecovered read error) Feb 11 09:25:04 teevee ...
X-rays for Leonid and Zhivago
While I was in Bannockburn, I asked Greg Coates for copies of the X-ray files, something that they had done in the past. He seemed confused, and suggested taking photos of the screen of his laptop with a mobile phone! I explained that this had been done in the past and suggested that he send me the files as email attachments. He said that he would see what could be done. Later I received a mail message from Charyn, surname unstated, giving links for the images, starting with http://itxviewer.com:8080/itxviewer/index.html. No response from the server. nmap showed: rDNS record for 104.155.198.195: 195.198.155.104.bc.googleusercontent.com Not shown: 997 filtered ports PORT STATE SERVICE 22/tcp open ssh 1022/tcp closed exp2 5432/tcp closed postgresql Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 16.88 seconds So ...
VicEmergency app
Petra Gietz told me that there was a fire in Napoleons yesterday. Did I hear about it? Of course not. I don't have the mobile phone app necessary to get the reports. But why not? I have a mobile phone, and (presumably) the app is free. So why not install it? Now I know: First, try to install: Why does it need access to my photos?
The power connector conundrum
External disk drives now almost invariably come with a 5 V power adapter that plugs directly into the mains and delivers power to the disk via a 2.1 mm IEC 60130-10 type A connector (and not the 2.5 mm variety). And clearly I get one with every disk I buy. But where are they? Disks die much faster than power adapters, but I have many more disks than adapters, and it's becoming a nuisance. OK, off to eBay to buy a few. What do you call them? Wall wart? None found. Power supply? No, that has too many false positives. Finally eBay told me: Power adaptor.
Stuck sprinkler
Looking out the window this morning when I got up, the garden bed looked particularly wet. Time to reduce the sprinkler time? Not quite: the sprinkler was still going, and had been for at least 3 hours. Dammit, has my sprinkler program hung or crashed? A known bug issue is that if the program stops abnormally, it won't turn the sprinkler off. But no, the program wasn't running, and the sprinkler relay was off. No crash. Power cycled the relay board. Nothing. The sprinkler solenoid itself had stuck on. That's not the first time I've had that problem. In fact, this particular solenoid was a replacement for one that failed, purchased conveniently just over 12 months ago, so that the warranty had expired.
More network congestion
My network performance is still not good, though it's not as regular as I thought. But how do I report it? I'm not happy with the packet drop measurements I have been making, and so far I haven't got round to hacking netstat to produce the kind of information I want. But there's a standard test that every [IR]SP seems to use: Speedtest.
More network problems
Into the office this morning to find that my packet loss rates had gone through the roof round midnight. Looking at the raw data, I found packet drop rates of up to 75%, and several TCP sessions had timed out. This doesn't match the regular pattern I had been seeing so far. But why don't Aussie Broadband and the National Broadband Network know about this stuff? It seems that neither of them have monitoring in place. Time to complain? No, I don't like those packet drop rates for a different reason: they're implausibly high. Even 2% or 3% causes severe performance issues, but I'm not seeing anything that severe.
More network investigations
It's been a few days since I've updated my network statistics page, and it's now showing a very clear pattern of congestion from 18:00 to 24:00. There are still a number of loose ends, in particular the question of whether ICMP packet loss has any particular relationship to TCP packet loss. Well, netstat can show TCP packet loss: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/5) /usr/src/usr.bin/netstat 161 -> netstat -p tcp -T Proto Rexmit OOORcv 0-win Local Address Foreign Address ... tcp4 0 460 0 aussie-gw.50060 streamerapi1.fin.https tcp4 5 0 0 aussie-gw.60748 110.141.224.69.61829 tcp4 44 0 0 aussie-gw.20026 S0106004063d9302.6905 tcp4 145 62 0 aussie-gw.27601 ...
Ports maintenance
For some weeks now I've been getting automated reports of build failures of enblend on the FreeBSD test boxes: Subject: [package - head-i386-default][graphics/enblend] Failed for enblend-4.1.4_15 in build ... !!! Jail is newer than host. (Jail: 1200056, Host: 1200054) !!! !!! This is not supported. !!! !!! Host kernel must be same or newer than jail. !!! !!! Expect build failures. !!! ... c++ -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I.. -isystem /usr/local/include -I/usr/local/include -D_THREAD_SAFE -pthread -D_GNU_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -I../include -I../src/layer_selection -O2 -pipe -fstack-protector -isystem /usr/local/include -fno-strict-aliasing -Wno-c++11-extensions -isystem /usr/local/include --param inline-unit-growth=60 -O2 -DNDEBUG -Wall -MT enblend-enblend.o -MD -MP -MF .deps/enblend-enblend.Tpo -c -o enblend-enblend.o `test -f 'enblend.cc' || echo './'`enblend.cc c++: warning: argument unused during compilation: '--param inline-unit-growth=60' [-Wunused-command-line-argument] In file included from enblend.cc:181: In file included from ./enblend.h:43: In file included from ./assemble.h:43: ./include/vigra_ext/impexalpha.hxx:197:43: error: no matching constructor for initialization of 'std::auto_ptr<vigra::Decoder>' ...
More eBay pain
Various mail from eBay today. First, one that was completely unintelligible. The Subject: line was Subject: eBay will begin intermediating payments on its Marketplace platform . What does that mean? Looking up in the OED didn't help. The verb intermediate (with long last vowel: /jntYÈmi?djejt/) has four meanings, only one of which is in common use: To act between others; to mediate. So we need a direct and an indirect object. But here I only get one: eBay is happy to announce plans to further improve the customer experience by intermediating payments on our Marketplace platform.
SBS on demand
Yesterday I had lots of pain trying to register Garry Marriott for SBS on demand, and noted the slow responses and the poor image quality. The image quality is probably SBS' fault, but what about the rest? Decided to sign up with a Real Computer. Result: yes, much of the pain is thanks to SBS. It turned out that I already had an account, but I couldn't access it because they wouldn't accept my password, which was most certainly correct last time I used it. Send password reminder? It didn't like the email address (also once correct). OK, sign up again.
The daily net monitoring
One of the interesting things that I saw in my network logs yesterday was that the latency (more accurately, ping time to the next IP address, affectionately called radiation-tower.ausssiebb.net) had dropped. Two weeks ago I had stated that it ranged from 15 to 50 ms, but yesterday it looked like it had dropped to generally under 20 ms. OK, we can track that (blue trace): Yes, indeed, it's looking a lot better, barely ever over 25 ms. But later it became clear that things deteriorate in the evening, with packet loss rates exceeding 20%: What else can I add to these graphs?
More network monitoring issues
Into the office today to find a strange looking graph of the network link stats: What went wrong there? It started at midnight, the time when my log files wrap round, so it seems reasonable to think that I broke something in my updates. But no, the log files looked normal. It took me quite some while to realize that this is the way it should look: connectivity 5 at all times, and packet loss 0. It just looked so strange. So what changed?
More network monitoring
Yesterday's network monitoring experiments took a while to show results: I needed to gather the statistics. This morning things looked better, but it became clear that there was still significant packet drop, and that 5% steps just didn't cut it. So I did a bit of tuningping -c 100 instead of ping -c 20and came up with some graphs that looked a lot more reliable: But why so much packet loss (scale on the right)? It goes up to 10%! That should cripple the link, but in fact it wasn't that bad.
Rebooting
First thing this morning was to reboot eureka, which had been down for one of the longest periods ever. Things came back pretty quickly, sort of: connecting to the National Broadband Network failed first time round, and I had to stop and restart dhclient. This has nothing to do with yesterday's caching issues: this was the same interface and thus the same MAC address. And then officephone.lemis.com, my VoIP ATA, couldn't connect. Examination showed it sending registration packets to the SIP server, but getting no reply. Dammit, why do these things happen when I have other things to do? Spent a lot of time trying to contact the server.
More network pain
Why does it take such a long time to download files from German TV stations? In general I can't get more than 500 kB/s, and though it's intended to be viewed online, the speed can't keep up. Today, though, things were much worse. Downloading the Tagesthemen ran at about 30 kB/s, and firefox gleefully told me that it would take 6 hours. Where's the bottleneck? Looking at my network statistics showed a familiar sight: 1517106263 10.1182 4 ftp.netbsd.org # Sun 28 Jan 2018 13:24:23 AEDT 98.832 ms 1517106277 10.7967 4 www # Sun 28 Jan 2018 13:24:37 AEDT 92.621 ms 1517106291 4.23026 4 ftp.netbsd.org # Sun 28 Jan 2018 13:24:51 AEDT 236.392 ms 1517106306 4.5556 4 ftp.netbsd.org # Sun 28 Jan 2018 13:25:06 AEDT 219.510 ms That shows 4 minutes in a row with at ...
Valvoline web site pain
Our Holden Commodore has low power steering fluid levelin fact, I could barely find any at all. Problems, or normal leakage over several years? Hard to say, but clearly the first thing to do is to refill and see if it stays that way. Chris Bahlo can sing a song about that with her Toyota Landcruiser, which is old enough to have voted in the last three or four federal elections. She carries fluid with her at all times. But is it the same fluid? She sent me a photo indicating that it was part number 8631 LB8631, though maybe there was a different indication on the other side.
Nvidia responds
Not one, but four messages from Nvidia today. The first two confirmed receipt of the report and that it had been sent to the Linux Support group (why, when they call the driver a Unix driver?) . The third told me: You can submit a linux bug by emailing [email protected] There is more info here: http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/384.111/README/addtlresources.html It seems difficult to get it across that this is a FreeBSD installation. But yes, with some searching, I found the corresponding page for FreeBSD, which told me: If you believe that you have found a bug or have a problem that you need assistance with ...
Reporting the Nvidia bug
Yesterday I got round to entering a bug report on the Nvidia X driver. Normally that's the difficult part. All I need to do is submit it. But how? I've been through this before, most recently yesterday. They don't seem to have a web-facing bug tracking system. OK, the least ridiculous way to submit it appears to be by chat (thus giving an idea how ridiculous the other options are). Where's the chat? It's mentioned here, along with a big, green CHAT NOW button that takes me to a site custhelp.com, which proves to be run by Oracle. OK, worth a try.
nVidia driver bug report
After searching in vain for an online bug reporting system for the nvidia X driver, I've decided to report it here. nvidia, feel free to contact me and explain where the bug database is really located. Title: nvidia Unix driver loops identifying display Description: The current nvidia Unix driver (version 384.98) identifies certain flat panel displays correctly, but continues to log identification information at the rate of up to one or two times a second. This causes performance degradation. Severity: Moderate. Driver works, but performance is degraded and motion is jerky. Operating system: FreeBSD, though others have reported the same problem with Linux.
Reporting nvidia bugs
I have a regression issue with the nvidia graphics card driver: the current version 384 loops identifying the TV at frequent intervals. I've found a workaround (revert to version 340), and I'd like to submit a bug report, but I can't find out how. I searched the Nvidia web site without success, but Google pointed me at this page. But that's only for people developing software based on the drivers! It states: For end user issues this is not the correct forum. There is http://forums.geforce.com and http://www.nvidia.com/page/support.html.
David Newall visits
David Newall and friend Julianne along to visit this afternoon. It's been over 10 years since I last saw him. Much active discussion about all things technical, including the new TV. David came up with a good way to report bugs about products with no clearly defined bug reporting mechanism: Facebook or Twitter. That sounds interesting. I suppose I should try that. They were also surprisingly interested in my photographic equipment, particularly the field monitor, which I discussed in some detail on 5 December and 10 December: ACM only downloads articles once.
Server down again!
Into the office this morning and found a surprising lack of mail. Where did it get stuck? Connected to the external server and found: === root@www (/dev/pts/0) /home/grog 2 -> date; uptime Sat Jan 20 22:31:38 UTC 2018 10:31PM up 12:27, 1 user, load averages: 0.24, 0.24, 0.25 So the machine had rebooted yesterday evening. Why? /var/log/messages only showed: Jan 20 08:55:08 www qpopper[63737]: Stats: yvonne 0 0 1 1066 180-150-113-90.nbn.mel.aussiebb.net 180.150.113.90 Jan 20 09:00:01 www qpopper[63806]: (v4.1.0) TLSv1/SSLv3 handshake with client at 180-150-113-90.nbn.mel.aussiebb.net (180.150.113.90); new session-id; cipher: AES256-GCM-SHA384 (AES256-GCM-SHA384 TLSv1.2 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=AESGCM(256) Mac=AEAD), 256 bits Jan 20 09:00:05 www qpopper[63806]: Stats: yvonne 1 18788 1 1066 180-150-113-90.nbn.mel.aussiebb.net 180.150.113.90 Jan 20 09:00:10 www qpopper[63808]: Stats: yvonne 0 0 1 1066 180-150-113-90.nbn.mel.aussiebb.net 180.150.113.90 Jan 20 10:05:15 ...
Rebooting teevee: finger trouble
The first time I rebooted teevee, I saw, half a second too late: it was eureka, my always up machine! AAARGH! But there was nothing to be done with it. On my way to the office to watch the reboot, I thought of David Newall, who, years ago, once unnecessarily rebooted www.auug.org.au, in the days where the site still meant something. I ensured that wouldn't happen again by renaming the shutdown command to something that wouldn't be chosen by accident: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/5) ~ 4 -> mv /sbin/shutdown /sbin/shutdown-if-you-must As if that wasn't bad enough, the system wouldn't come up again!
nVidia bug cornered
On today with my attempts to stop the nvidia driver from reconnecting to the TV one or two times a second. One of the suggestions I had seen (where? lost the URL) was to revert to an older version of the driver. OK, I can try that. Currently FreeBSD has three versions in the Ports Collection: === root@teevee (/dev/pts/1) ~ 13 -> pkg search nvidia-driver nvidia-driver-384.98 NVidia graphics card binary drivers for hardware OpenGL rendering nvidia-driver-304-304.137 NVidia graphics card binary drivers for hardware OpenGL rendering nvidia-driver-340-340.104 NVidia graphics card binary drivers for hardware OpenGL rendering I had nvidia-driver-384.98 (the latest) installed.
NBN: the experts
Yesterday I added a link to the National Broadband Network web site in the outage article. I check all links, of course, but I wasn't prepared for this one: What an advertisement! And what grammar! ACM only downloads articles once.
NBN outage follow-up
Call from Will at Aussie Broadband today, following up on my problem report yesterdayafter 24 hours! I would have expected a more timely response, but as it was, of course, the problem went away without help from Aussie or me. Interesting discussion, in which he asked for more information, including MAC address (why?) and confirmation that the interface was configured for autonegotiation. All that comes from the ifconfig output, and of course we were able to confirm that it was correct. He also considered the possibility that the issue was congestion. That's possible, of course, but it would have had to be between the ODU and the POI (National Broadband Network-speak for Outdoor Unit, the antenna on our roof, and Point of Interconnect, where they connect to other networks).
Flaky networking
Into the office this morning to find a surprising status on display :0: 1516142279 0 4 ftp.netbsd.org # Wed 17 Jan 2018 09:37:59 AEDT 1516142293 3.33714 4 www # Wed 17 Jan 2018 09:38:13 AEDT 299.658 ms 1516142350 0 2 freefall www.freebsd.de ozlabs.org # Wed 17 Jan 2018 09:39:10 AEDT 1516142353 14.044 5 # Wed 17 Jan 2018 09:39:13 AEDT 71.205 ms 1516142426 18.4199 4 ozlabs.org # Wed 17 Jan 2018 09:40:26 AEDT 54.289 ms 1516142428 4.41454 5 # Wed 17 Jan 2018 09:40:28 AEDT 226.524 ms 1516142522 3.9794 2 www www.freebsd.de ozlabs.org # Wed 17 Jan 2018 09:42:02 AEDT 251.294 ms 1516142547 3.80602 3 www.freebsd.de ozlabs.org # Wed 17 Jan 2018 09:42:27 AEDT 262.742 ms 1516142572 4.06215 3 www ozlabs.org # ...
The positive side of HDMI
I may have cursed the HDMI cables that I was playing around with this afternoon, but one person found them convenient: ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Cloud storage
Spent some time looking at cloud storage options. This article looked promising, and so did some of the prices. I need about 250 GB at the moment, and it seems that I can get up to 1 TB for $10 or so a month, maybe cheaper. Or, as the article puts it for the first two, with adventurous exchange rates: Price: 2GB free. 1TB for $10 a month (£6.58, around AU$11) with Dropbox Plus Price: 15GB free.
Server outage, day two
Yesterday's server outage was finished by 15:00: === grog@www (/dev/pts/1) ~ 3 -> date; uptime Sat Jan 13 03:56:04 UTC 2018 3:56AM up 1 min, 2 users, load averages: 0.57, 0.22, 0.09 Or was it? Today we discovered that mail was not working. Why not? It was in fact working, just rejecting everything: Jan 12 23:51:35 www postfix/smtpd[41627]: connect from unknown[60.168.180.5] Jan 12 23:51:36 www postfix/smtpd[41627]: lost connection after UNKNOWN from unknown[60.168.180.5] Jan 12 23:51:36 www postfix/smtpd[41627]: disconnect from unknown[60.168.180.5] UNKNOWN?
Shopping in the Internet era
At dinner this evening we discussed the Delacombe Town Centre with Chris Bahlo. Somehow the idea of building new shopping centres doesn't match what is going on elsewhere, as I noted last week. And even in Australia we have the recent failure of Masters Home Improvement to think about. Chris observed that there were still some things that people needed to do on site, like hairdressingexactly what I had noted earlier this week. And we discussed the opportunities for people delivering food ordered locally (with the example of us buying in Ballarat and having it delivered to Dereel). Yvonne considered that she would still go shopping, because she would want to choose her melons, grapefruit or papayas.
System down, won't come up, customer screaming for blood
When I came inside after installing the water pump, Yvonne had a message from Chris Bahlo: The server is down, whatever that means . Really? Yup, www.lemis.com was off the air. Off to investigate. The system is run by RootBSD in North Carolina, and there's VNC access to the system console. But that didn't work either! Something serious? I was able to access their ticketing system, which reported that all was well, and so I entered a ticket, at 2:55:12 UTC. But then I looked at the existing tickets. One issued just yesterday: Greg Lehey [email protected] 2018-01-12 05:14:32 You are receiving this message because you currently have services on our old VM infrastructure.
Everybody hates Twitter
It's no secret that I don't like social media. But I thought I was relatively alone until I read this statistic from Statista: More people want to kill Twitter (that's the bluebird without text in first place) than keep it alive! I wonder if that has something to do with Donald Trump. ACM only downloads articles once.
Internet future: on track?
I've seen a number of things lately related to my essay the future of the Internet. One thing I didn't get quite right (yet) is the demise of the fixed line telephone network. I claimed that it would be replaced by VoIP, but this statistic from Statista tells a different story: That's definitely a perspective problem on my part. I don't see (have) a need for mobile phones, and my $15 recharge keeps me going for a year. On the other hand, calls to mobile phones make up the bulk of my call costs, so I try to avoid them.
eBay: 1 point up, 1 point down
Returning my terminally broken roll holder proved more difficult than expected: the seller strung me along and kept trying to compromise ( we'll refund $12 and you can keep it ). So this morning I asked eBay to step in . And that they did. I don't know how long it took them, since they don't give me copies of this kind of request, but it must have been less than 10 minutes. One point to eBay. And of course the seller got negative feedback. Finally he reacted: could you please revise the negative feedback for us,as it is very bad to my job and our account, i am just a customer service here and i may loss job because of the negative feedback.
Buying a new kitchen roll holder
The seller of the kitchen roll holder that I got last week is stringing me out, but the real issue is to get a new one. They're either expensive or ridiculously expensive in postagethe most expensive postage I have seen was ¬ 99. And then I found one from a company called ibuys. Also not cheap, but in total round $55. So I tried to buy it, fighting as usual the stupid web forms that all these companies have. This one had an additional trick: it refused my email address. Why? I don't know. I couldn't complete the purchase. So I tried their contact page.
Spam writer's network?
Found while cleaning out my spam folder today: From: Janet Rogers <janet@your-rv-lifestyle.email> Dear Editor, My name is Janet and Im a writer at Your RV Lifestyle. I was doing research on things to do in England and just finished reading your wonderful blog post: http://lemis.com/grog/diary-oct1968.php In that article, I noticed that you cited a solid post that Ive read in the past: http://www.imagesofengland.org.uk/Details/Default.aspx?id=92788 I just finished writing a guide that is even more detailed, updated and comprehensive on the 100 best things to do in England. It is over 10,000 words and packed with practical tips and advice.
Erase that link!
A while back I became interested in house prices round Newton Abbot in Devon, where I spent a lot of time in the early 1960s. And somehow I'm now on a real estate mailing list that gives minimal information about properties. Today another one arrived. Things have changed a lot since I was in Devon. In May 1969 I considered a houseadmittedly not in the best conditionfor sale for £300. Now it seems that something (they didn't divulge what) in the Newton Abbot area sold for round £200,000, roughly what we paid for our current house. OK, enter the address into Google Maps and take a look.
Mobile phone fun
Petra Gietz along this morning with her phone. She tells me that despite the new radiation tower, her coverage was no better. Charged the phone for her and confirmed that it worked fine. It seems that she had thought that the Dereel tower would cover Enfield as well. That raises the question: where is the tower that services Enfield (13 km away)? They used to have better coverage than here. While we were at it, got her to call my phone to confirm that we had coverage, and also to capture her mobile phone number. I didn't hear the phone ring.
Smart TV usage
Finally got hold of Danny at The Good Guys in Ballarat, and told him of my pain with the TCL 60"(152cm) UHD LED LCD Smart TV . No, he didn't know that the thing didn't have a microphone. He also didn't know that Android TV relied on it. That's good for me: it means that nobody warned me that it was incomplete. Danny was happy for me to return it for a refund or exchange, so that's fine. But why didn't he know? My guess is that nobody uses Android TV. Certainly I find it pretty useless, and the fact that the manufacturer offers a castrated version seems to suggest that it's basically a box to tick on the spec sheet, not something that somebody uses.
The future of retailing
Four years ago I participated in a Coursera course about the history of the Internet. One of the assignments was an essay on what the Internet might be like in 20 years' time. I've been following it ever sinceit's amazing to think that 20% of the time has already elapsed. Today I read an article in the Washington Post about the shutdown of the last department store in Hermitage, PA. Hermitage has a population of about 15,000, and the nearest larger town is at least 50 km away. This will probably kill off the Shenango Valley Mall as well.
How to friend strangers
A few days ago I received a fairly typical message: Date: Tue, 26 Dec 2017 07:48:05 -0800 From: Facebook <[email protected]> To: Greg Lehey <[email protected]> Gloria Maria Rivera Rivera wants to be friends with you on Facebook. Guia at Travel By México, Guía Turística de México 1 mutual friend · 2,276 friends - 19 groups A tourist guide in México? I don't know her. But we have a mutual friend. Who is it? A very well-known member of the Internet community. How did he get to know her?
eBay: 1 point down, 1 up
A month and a half ago I ordered blindfolds for covering my face when sleeping, from three different sellers. Two of them arrived after average timing, but the third,which eBay Australia tells me was bought on 11/20/17 4:... , didn't. Checking the item showed amazingly detailed tracking for something that cost $1.00 including postage. It showed: The texts are strange, as are the times, but it's clear that the trail stopped over 3 weeks ago, and that they consider it still in transit . OK, contact the seller and ask for resolution.
AV cables for Olympus
The field monitor for my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II works relatively well, but it's made more difficult by an apparently deliberate bug in the camera firmware that switches focus stacking off when an HDMI monitor is connected. How about the composite video output? I had one for my E-30 years ago, and used it to connect a viewfinder to the camera. Where is it? After some investigation, I discovered that it came with the camera, so it went with the camera too. And more modern models don't have that cable. OK, they cost almost nothing. Off to take a look.
Finally usable focus stacking photos?
I've been pondering about how to calculate parameters for focus stacking for nearly a month, without coming to any really concrete conclusions. But then, nobody else has either, and they're still taking good focus-stacked photos. OK, time to try again. I've established that I can use the Feelworld FW760 with the focus stacking mode of Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II by turning to AV input before taking the photo. Otherwise the camera refuses to focus stack. With this setup I finally got a worthwhile photo of a Hibiscus rosa-sinensis: Which of the two photos?
X on Bauhn TV
Spent some time today playing with X setup on the new TV. For some reason the IgnoreEDID option didn't help, and I kept ending up with the same old mode lines. But then I thought a bit further. This isn't an analogue system. The data comes in from the HDMI interface and is immediately processed. In this particular case, the TV needs to know that it's 1920×1080 and upscale it to 3840×2160. The sync delays are irrelevant. So why was it overrunning the screen? That's typical of analogue systems, where the sync pulses and delays are necessary for a correct display.
XXX TV
Yvonne off to town today for Pilates. She called me back from ALDI: she had been looking for one of the TVs they had on offer last weekend. I told her that it was a hopeless case and that she shouldn't waste her timebut she had found one! I later heard from Jamie Fraser that at his local shop in Horsham they even had four of them. That's quite unlike ALDI's electronics specials, especially not directly before Christmas. I wonder if the size was an issue. So she brought it back (a Bauhn ATV65UHD-1217, according to the package, and with a 165 cm (65") diagonal), and we swapped out the TCL: I'm not even going to try to add a URL for the new TV.
Olympus firmware upgrade
Release 1.4 of the firmware for my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II was released a couple of days ago. To install it, I had to connect the camera to dischord, my Microsoft box, because Olympus, in its wisdom, will only install firmware with its own programs (in notable contrast to Canon, who just place it on the storage card and let the camera install it). Firmware installation is now more complicated: first you the program saves the camera settings, then it installs the firmware. Then you power cycle the camera and reload the settings. I've done this before, and modulo the glacial speed and the inconvenience, it just works.
Daily Android pain
Gradually I'm coming to understand what little there is to know about Android TV, but there are still details to follow up on. Somebody recommended VLC for Android. That's a program that I have used before, so it seemed reasonable. But of course it has been dumbed down for Android, and once again I found myself facing guessworkand the lack of an online help window. The complete lack of windowing on Android TV borders on the insane. Yes, I could have gone and got euroa, my Microsoft laptop, but I pressed on with guesswork. And how about that, I was able to establish a connection to eureka using SMB (really Samba).
Still more Android TV
I really must have more interesting stuff to do than annoy myself with this brain-dead Android TV. But somehow I want to understand it better. I still can't see how anybody could have come up with such a stupid interface, unless they have been hiding under a stone for the last few decades (or think that their customers have). One thing helped: I found the manual online. Surprise, surprise: it also has a greyscale title page, though there is some use of colour inside. That enabled me to search the manual and discover some things that I haven't seen before. First, it seems to describe different hardware from what I received.
Android TV: enough!
Spent a lot of time this afternoon trying to make my Android TV useful. I failed. What would I need to replace teevee with the TV itself? At the very least a shell, a web browser and software to play videos. I already discovered a couple of shells, and $ Termux seemed usable. What about playing videos? Do I have a deal for you! Every time I press the Home key, I get suggestions of what to watch, typically at the price of $2.99 per programme! The only one I found even remotely interesting was one I had already recorded from TV, and that Yvonne found so interesting that it's still on disk.
More Android TV experience
I'm still not convinced that there isn't more to be gained from my Android TV, and today I did some more attempts. The entire instructions are on 2 sides of A4 paper, and they're correspondingly vague. The biggest issue I had was that the toyshop wanted me to use voice input, but that didn't workat all. I don't know if the microphone is broken or non-existent, but I don't really care, since voice recognition is such a long way from being useful. The instructions didn't help, of course: they didn't even mention voice input (so maybe there isn't a microphone). But it seems that enough clicks (more than 1) in the right place enable it to read the keyboard.
Bloody connectors!, part 4
Connecting the TV to the network involved adding a switch in the lounge room: That went easily enough, but later I discovered that copying image files from eureka went at a snail's pace. A quick examination with netstat -biIem0 1 confirmed. Here first with the switch connected, then disconnected and teevee connected directly to the wall socket: The fourth column is the number of bytes input per second.
Vultures available!
Two weeks ago I tried to set up a server with Vultr, only to be told that there were none available at my chosen location (Frankfurt/Main). So I put myself on a please notify list. But the following day I discovered that they were available after all, and set up a machine quite rapidly. But vultrs don't forget, it seems. Today I received an email: Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2017 17:35:23 -0500 (EST) From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Subject: Vultr.com - Deploy in Frankfurt! Vultr.com has added additional capacity in our Frankfurt location!
Configuring new TV
OK, let's configure the new TV. Where's the configuration menu? There seem to be four different ways to access parts of the configuration.
Bloody connectors!, part 1
Took advantage of the power outage to finally install the new 4 TB disk drive in eureka. The good news is that the reboot worked with no trouble. Services that still require manual start are: mailtunnel, set up an ssh tunnel to the external server, since Aussie Broadband block outgoing port 25. linkcheck, a script which checks network connectivity. wh1080, which runs the weather station software. Yes, there are probably ways to get them started automatically, but that would require thinking, and there are some non-obvious issues involved, like loading ssh keys.
A new TV
My TV has been giving me problems: from time to time, when I turn it on, it runs for a minute or so and then hangs hard, requiring a physical power off to continue. But today, even that didn't help, and to watch the news in the afternoon I put a normal computer monitor in its place. What do I do now? I bought this TV 4½ years ago, my first ever digital TV. And like the three projectors before it, I really only need it as a monitor: the interface to real TVs was just too fiddly. It has a 58" 1920x1080 ( Full HD ) display, and I was estimating that it would last 4 years, by which time 3840x2160 ( UHD ) would be the norm.
New Hugin
A new beta version of Hugin is out. Built it today, and it just worked, once I rebuilt the pkg-plist file (a good thing we have make makelist). ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Zerene stacker on FreeBSD
I have already established that Zerene will install on FreeBSD. But will it run? In principle if a program that runs on Linux installs on FreeBSD, it will run too. So I tried it out, in the process tripping over a few nits. Yes, it runs, loads files, displays them. But then I got an unexpected surprise while trying to stack them: That's more than just an adaptation issue. Something to do with locking? It could be complicated. A good thing I don't have to rely on the functionality.
Buying Zerene
My experiments with focus stacking software last month made it clear that I should buy Zerene and not Helicon Focus. And today I needed to do so: my 30 days free trial were up. So off to the Zerene web site, where they asked me for $89, as advertisedand $8.90 GST! Why that? Imported stuff under $1,000 is (still) free of tax. Sent an email asking why, and half an hour later got an answer from the author, Rik Littlefield, explaining the situation, after having checked the ATO web site. He didn't find the $1,000 limit (that's here), but did note that it didn't apply to companies with a turnover less than $75,000 per annum, so he issued an invoice without tax, and with a 10% Christmas rebate that hadn't made it to the web site.
Buying Zerene
My experiments with focus stacking software last month made it clear that I should buy Zerene and not Helicon Focus. And today I needed to do so: my 30 days free trial were up. So off to the Zerene web site, where they asked me for $89, as advertisedand $8.90 GST! Why that? Imported stuff under $1,000 is (still) free of tax. Sent an email asking why, and half an hour later got an answer from the author, Rik Littlefield, explaining the situation, after having checked the ATO web site. He didn't find the $1,000 limit (that's here), but did note that it didn't apply to companies with a turnover less than $75,000 per annum, so he issued an invoice without tax, and with a 10% Christmas rebate that hadn't made it to the web site.
More Exif investigations
I've been pondering on how to analyse the Exif data from my camera for nearly two weeks now. It's not easy. Today I went back to my investigations of March 2016, which were incompletely noted. It seems that the hacks I described there were against /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/Image/ExifTool/Olympus.pm. I still don't understand the format, and clearly some of it is wrong, but even so, they had one advantage: they show which tags exist, along with some representation of them. OK, how about a shotgun? For all potential tags between 0x300 and 0x3ff, just add a line like: 0x333 => { Name => 'Focus333', Writeable => 'int16u' }, That completely ignores data types, but it will at least find the tags and give some representation.
MediathekView bugs
As I said a few days ago, I've been using MediathekView for some months now, and parts of it are excellent. But in the last day or two it stopped listing Abo (short for Abonnement , subscription) programmes. I've been wondering why, and today I spent quite a bit of time reinstalling and comparing configuration files. It's interesting to look at what the ~/.mediathekview3 directory looks like after it has been running for a while: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/47) ~/.mediathek3 5 -> l -rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 80,929 4 Dec 11:07 downloadAbos.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 133,820,824 5 Dec 18:19 filme.json -rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 112,747 4 Dec 13:01 history.txt ...
Powerline Ethernet revisited
Jamie Fraser has bought some second-hand powerline Ethernet adapters. I've been there before and had very poor results. But was that maybe due to the power wiring in Kleins Road? I still have a couple (why did I keep them?) , so I tried it out today, moving a file from eureka to teevee. The result? 935,505,198 bytes transfered in 9 minutes, 11 seconds. That's 1.7 MB/s, or 13.6 Mb/s, marginally more than half the capacity of my external Internet link, and about 2.7% of the claimed speed of 500 Mb/s. At least I have confirmed my opinion that they're useless unless connectivity is the most important factor.
Fastest camera wireless connection
I've noted my disappointment with the wireless performance of the Olympus OM-D E-M1 four years ago today, as it happens. Is this just Olympus' fault? It seems not. This article presents the fastest ever ( blazing fast ) wireless controller for a camera: 10 Mb/s! At that speed, it would take nearly 20 seconds per image to transfer photos across the network. Clearly more development is needed. ACM only downloads articles once.
Field monitor, take 2
Why doesn't my new Field monitor display the viewfinder image? Last week I was only able to display images that I had already taken, though I noticed discrepancies in the instructions . So I've been planning to research further, and today I finally got around to it. And how about that, I found this video showing almost exactly what I was looking for, using an Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II. It's a marginally different monitor, and the first quarter of the 13 minute clip is spent raving over the packaging. But finally he shows the camera doing exactly what I want it to do.
More video download alternatives
I've been using MediathekView for some months now, and parts of it are excellent. But there are a number of issues: It only shows the programmes for the past month. That's the maximum; it defaults to two weeks. And there's no good reason: it has older programme data, but you can't access it directly. There's a different view for series, where the time limit doesn't apply, and it shows that (currently) the programme data goes back decades: the oldest date is March 1978, and from about 2005 on there are multiple programmes.
Hugin: classic aliasing
While doing my house photos today, I ran into a particularly bad mismatch in a control point. On closer examination, I discovered that it's a bug, not a feature: I wonder how to fix that. ACM only downloads articles once.
More work in Frankfurt/Main
Yesterday's installation of ffm.lemis.com, my virtual machine in Frankfurt am Main went very smoothly. It does what I want it to, but I'm sure it could do more. The obvious first thing to do is to bring the system up to date. Checking out the source tree was nice and fast, but the build itself took forever. There's only one CPU , which claims of itself: CPU: Virtual CPU 714389bda930 (2400.11-MHz K8-class CPU) Origin="GenuineIntel" Id=0x306c1 Family=0x6 Model=0x3c Stepping=1 Features=0x783fbff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2> Features2=0xfffa3203<SSE3,PCLMULQDQ,SSSE3,FMA,CX16,PCID,SSE4.1,SSE4.2,x2APIC,MOVBE,POPCNT,TSCDLT,AESNI,XSAVE,OSXSAVE,AVX,F16C,RDRAND,HV> AMD Features=0x28100800<SYSCALL,NX,RDTSCP,LM> AMD Features2=0x21<LAHF,ABM> Structured Extended Features=0x728<BMI1,AVX2,BMI2,ERMS,INVPCID> XSAVE Features=0x1<XSAVEOPT> Hypervisor: Origin = "KVMKVMKVM" real memory = 1073741824 (1024 MB) That's significantly different from www, which claims: XEN: Hypervisor version 4.4 detected.
The vultrs are coming
While writing yesterday's diary entries, checked the Vultr web site, not made easier by the fact that they give me a different view of the world if I log in: my current machines (none, of course). But somewhere down the bottom of the page I found a Deploy link. OK, give me a machine in Frankfurt am Main. Can do! And indeed I set up a machine running FreeBSD 11 with surprisingly little difficulty or documentation. How do you set up a completely new remote machine? I was given ssh access Something like: Get root password from the web site.
We have radiation!
The Dereel Facebook community lit up today: the second radiation tower (Telstra mobile phones) is active. We now have coverage, though some people have reported that things aren't significantly better. I don't see us using our mobile phones significantly moreit's much more expensive than VoIPbut it would certainly be useful if the National Broadband Network fails Yet Again ACM only downloads articles once.
Vultures in Frankfurt?
For various reasons I need a web presence in Germany. A proxy would do it, if I could find everything I need like that. But then Jamie Fraser came up with Vultr, a provider of really cheap virtual machines. I already use one with RootBSD, and I'm happy with them. But they're not in Germany, and I pay $35 a month. Vultr offers VMs (with FreeBSD) for as little as $2.50 per month, though they would charge more than RootBSD for the configuration that I have there. OK, take a look. Before anything happens, they want my credit card number. After recent experiences, I preferred PayPal, where I had to pay $10 up front.
Understanding focus stacking
I've been thinking for some time about how Olympus' focus stacking works. In principle it's simple: the camera takes multiple photos with the almost the same settings, only changing the focus distance between each image. But by how much? How many photos do I need to be able to assemble a final image? This page by Richard Turton gives a lot of insight. But I've read it twice now, and it doesn't really present things the way I want, and it's difficult to convert. In particular, I want to know how to set the focus differential and number of shots parameters in the camera menu.
Cornering YouTube breakage
We've been discussing the breakage of YouTube's live stream of Al Jazeera News for a while. Some people think it might be a codec issueand indeed it might bebut there are also considerations of video drivers. That would fit the problems with teevee, since I've just upgraded the video drivers. Then there was another loose end: Pale Moon, which is in the Ports Collection after all. It claims to support all the old addons that firefox no longer wants to know about. Installed it and got a particularly old-fashioned looking interface, and font sizes approximately twice the size of those of firefox.
AGM with Skype: the pain
Nele Koemle along this afternoon with Ellie, a laptop and copious quantities of paper for the AGM of the Islandic Horse Association of Australia. Chris Bahlo was there too, of course. And that was all. The rest was done by Skype. Things didn't go well. Nele had problems getting her laptop on the network, something that should happen automatically. But her machine (Microsoft Windows 10) connected and said something about limited access. What does that mean? They started network debugging the way that I would never have done, and rather than have an argument, I left them to it. After a reboot and I don't know what else, the meeting started only a little late.
Timely message from eBay
Received this morning: From bounces+1434781-7b60-[email protected] Mon Nov 27 16:30:05 2017 From: eBay <[email protected]> To: dereelyauctions <[email protected]> Subject: Hip hip hoorah, Greg???you never know what you'll get on Cyber Monday! This is one of these silly messages they continually send to an auction address I registered a while back when they couldn't work out how to let me sell in Australia. The content matches the emetic commercials that they publish on YouTube. But look at the date! Cyber Monday was all but over when they sent it! Yes, clearly they're behind the times on apps, and would I like to secure them.
Feelworld Field Monitor
The field monitor that I ordered two weeks ago has arrived, so in to Napoleons to pick it up. What's it like? On the whole, very good, but with some unnecessary issues. To my surprise, the base package comes with no power supply whatsoever, something very stupid. I had already discovered that it can be run by battery or mains power, and that it comes without a battery or charger, so I bought a kit which included those components. But no mains power supply? That's tacky. The battery and charger have their issues too. There appears to be no way to clip the battery into the charger, and I needed to wedge it in with a bit of plastic.
Craig Weber/Klearview: partial refund
One of my nastiest experiences in recent times was my attempt to buy a disk on eBay from a seller called klearview or klearview_au, run by a certain Craig Weber. He first claimed that I had not paid, causing me to accidentally pay twice. Then he didn't deliver. eBay didn't want to know because it was a bank transfer, and to rub salt into the wound they removed my negative feedback with no explanation, although I demanded one, something that I find criminal on the part of eBay. At some time I received a refund, quite possibly from eBay, but only for one payment.
Communicating with Skype
The IHAA is having its Annual General Meeting tomorrowat our house! The 50 odd members are spread around Australia, so it's impractical to meet face to face. Amy Heldane is president, but she's in Yambuk, in the middle of nowhere. Chris Bahlo is vice president, and Nele Koemle is treasurer. Both of them will be in Dereel tomorrow, and they've co-opted Yvonne to be returning officer, so it makes sense to do it here. And the rest? Skype conference. I've used it in the past, during my MySQL days, and I still have the important people of those days in my contact list.
Al Jazeera breakage: YouTube, not me
The Al Jazeera Live Stream on YouTube is still broken, though eBay has replaced their moronic commercial with a marginally less stupid one. OK, I use FreeBSD and firefox, the latter of which is currently suspect. But Real Users use Microsoft. What happens there? Exactly the same thing as on teevee. In fact, the only system that will currently display it is eureka, running old versions of FreeBSD and firefox. Friends on IRC confirmed: for some it works, for others it crashes after the morons. Why isn't YouTube doing something about it? At the very least a warning with Some people have a problem displaying opening this stream.
Content-free email
Email from ALDI Mobile today. Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2017 11:31:17 +1100 From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Subject: AldiMobile - Expiry Warning HTML only content. Pointed it at my browser and waited. It displayed a logo and nothing else. OK, what does the HTML markup say? <html><body><img alt="ALDImobile header" src="https://unite.aldimobile.com.au/images/540/Email_header_image.png"><p></p></body></html> Isn't it amazing how broken email can still be, after over 40 years? ACM only downloads articles once.
Video player pain
So I got round to trying mpv, a fork of mplayer. And how about that, it displays the subtitles correctly. Or it did. Somehow, while playing around with the subtitle file, I managed to break it. There's nothing obvious, but mpv, mplayer and vlc now all refuse to have anything to do with it. Why? Who knows? They're all video players, so they all don't believe in no steenking error messages. Emacs still reports valid XML, and I can't see anything wrong with it. The character encoding is correct. I suspect permissions or modification timestamps, but no, that all works too. What a pain these programs are!
YouTube pain
I've continually had problems with watching Al Jazeera news. They stream via YouTube, but they keep changing the channel. Today, though, I had problems I haven't seen before. Firstly, I was presented with the most stupid commercial I have seen in a long time, from eBay. Clearly it's an indication of whom they think their customers are. But on other systems that didn't happen. After that, I got a fraction of a second of Al Jazeera, and then an error message ( something went wrong. Find out what , followed by a completely unrelated link). What caused that? YouTube might have an idea, but they're keeping very quiet.
Firefox pain
Some discussion on the FreeBSD mailing lists about the status of firefox today. I think that, basically, firefox 57 is broken. Yes, of course, the breakage is intentional, and there are good reasons for it, but some plugins aren't extensions, they're basic functionality. Once upon a time everything X had Emacs bindings, but that was too easy, so they broke it. And firefox has also tried to be a (very bad) editor in itself. I was able to work round this breakage with two addons, firemacs and It's all text. Both work acceptably, but not on the new firefox. I'm sure I'll find many others.
X pain
On Thursday I upgraded lagoon, Yvonne's machinealmost. I couldn't get X to work with the nvidia driver. I have to do that when she's not here, so today was the next opportunity. As planned, I copied the configuration from teevee, which has almost identical hardware. And I failed again! What went wrong? In each case, I ended up with a black display with only a cursor, and a resolution of 640x480. The cursor wouldn't move, and externally started clients didn't display. The same happened when I built a new configuration file using nvidia-xconfig. OK, that's what log files are for. [167358.439] (==) NVIDIA(0): Depth 24, (==) framebuffer bpp 32 [167358.439] (==) NVIDIA(0): RGB weight 888 [167358.439] (==) NVIDIA(0): Default visual is TrueColor [167358.439] (==) NVIDIA(0): Using gamma correction (1.0, 1.0, 1.0) [167358.439] (**) NVIDIA(0): Option "UseEdidDpi" "FALSE" [167358.439] (**) NVIDIA(0): Option "DPI" "150x150" [167358.439] (**) NVIDIA(0): Option "ModeValidation" "NoMaxPClkCheck" [167358.439] ...
Automatic vacuum cleaner
ALDI had a Robot Vacuum Cleaner on offer yesterday. We've tried one before and not been impressedI don't even seem to have mentioned it in my diarybut there's a specific use I have for one, to pick up the dirt that the dogs bring in from outside and deposit in the hallway. So Yvonne bought one, and today I tried it out. It didn't work well. By far the biggest issue is that it doesn't seem to understand carpets: It also seems to have a very poor understanding of its surroundings.
Moving away from Dereel
I've commented a few months ago about the inaccuracy of web location services. On that occasion some anonymous location service decided I was in or near Traralgon, and there was nothing I could do to change it. Never mind, things changed on their own. Now I clearly live in Geraldton. While researching recipes (how terrible recipes are on the web!) , I was offered pricing at the local Coles supermarket: That's no longer 300 km away: now it's 12 times the distance, 3,611 km!
Multimedia interface, modern style
One of the questions I was left with after yesterday's subtitle investigation was whether vlc can be controlled by anything except a mouse. I had discovered, mainly by accident, that it does interpret f to toggle full screen. So I went looking and found this simple explanation of how to Remote Control VLC. TL;DR: enable HTTP interface, select unrecognizable button, set up passwords, reconfigure firewall, download mobile phone app, and after potential troubleshooting you can remote control vlc with your mobile phone. The functionality appears to be limited to what you can do with a mouse, but unlike with a mouse, you need to look at the device to be able to control it.
Subtitle mutilation
Yesterday's build of mplayer gave me the remote control again, but while watching TV ( Die Rosenheim Cops , in mild Bavarian dialect), I noticed significant problems with the subtitles. In particular, the German letters ä, ö, ü and ß were frequently dropped, replaced by ? or other characters, but also frequently displayed correctly. And on a couple of occasions they were really badly mutilated. Here three examples: In this case the text was correct up to the first ü.
Computers: end of an era
With the old lagoon, an era goes to end. I've had computers at home for a little over 40 years. I can divide them into roughly 3 periods: 1977-1987: Homebrew computers with proprietary and S-100 buses. 1987-1997: IBM PC clones, mainly with tower cases to hold the large disks, like these ones: 1997-2017: I increasingly replaced the tower cases with mini-tower cases like this: ...
Upgrading lagoon
Yesterday I received a new display card for Yvonne's machine, lagoon.lemis.com. Today she went shopping, so I had time to do the next step of my hardware upgrades: replace the current machine with another Lenovo ThinkCentre. It should be a piece of cake: it's exactly the same thing as the upgrade of teevee that I performed last week. Put the card in the new machine, confirmed that it worked. Removed the system disk from old lagoon and put it in the new machine. Boot. Normal problem with the Ethernet card not being recognized (do we really need a different interface name for every kind of interface?)
Firefox: POLA violation
firefox Quantum has been released. More performance. More security: lots of add-ons that used inappropriate interfaces have now been disabled. That's good for the product, but it also makes it useless for me. To quote the commit message: r454194 | jbeich | 2017-11-15 06:04:44 +1100 (Wed, 15 Nov 2017) | 9 lines www/firefox: update to 57.0 (marketed as "Firefox Quantum") Not a MFH candidate due to POLA violation per redesigned UI, broken legacy addons and auto-reviewed new addons. In particular, firemacs and It's All Text! no longer work with Quantum. One step forwards, at least two steps back.
Remote control woes
When upgrading mplayer I lost the remote control with lirc. Why? Time to investigate the port. First step was to notice that there's a build option for mplayer: OPTIONS_DEFINE= AALIB AMR_NB AMR_WB ASS BLURAY CACA CDIO DEBUG DV DVDNAV \ ENCA FONTCONFIG FRIBIDI GIF GNUTLS GSM GUI IPV6 JACK \ LADSPA LIBMNG LIRC LZO NAS OPENAL OPENGL \ ... OK, set that, and confirm that it gets set in the options file: === root@teevee (/dev/pts/4) /usr/ports/multimedia/mplayer-local 2 -> cat /var/db/ports/multimedia_mplayer-local/options # This file is auto-generated by 'make config'.
Upgrading
One issue I still have with teevee is tearing of the displayed image on images that pan (horizontally). That's a common complaint, but in my case it started after my upgrade in June, where the software stayed the same and the hardware got faster. No obvious reason why it should start tearing. Went searching on the web and found the usual recommendations, including VDPAU. Looking at my wrapper scripts, I found that I didn't specify VDPAU anywhere. Try out with explicit -vo vdpau and got: === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/1) /teevee/spool/Series/Deutschen 24 -> /home/local/bin/mplayered -vo vdpau Die-Deutschen-II-\(6_9\)-20171004-153000.mp4 MPlayer SVN-r37862-snapshot-3.4.1 (C) 2000-2016 MPlayer Team Playing Die-Deutschen-II-(6_9)-20171004-153000.mp4.
Wikimedia error messages
Some while back I linked to some images on Wikimedia. Today I discovered that one wasn't loading. My loading mechanism includes some JavaScript magic, so all I saw was a loading message that took too long. OK, follow the link manually. A remarkably vague error message taking up the entire height of a 2560×1440 screen: OK, page down... Wouldn't you think that they would have found a better way to report that particular error? The one they mention is Just Plain Wrong. ACM only downloads articles once.
Revisiting old focus stacks
I'm gradually getting to the stage where my Zerene results are sufficient for most purposes. What about my older attempts? Can it help there? My first attempts at manual focus stacking go back nearly 5 years, but on that occasion I had to give up because my software wasn't up to it. Today I got: That's not perfect by a long shot. It can't be: I only had two images, and there's an intermediate area that is out of focus in both shots.
Revisiting old focus stacks
I'm gradually getting to the stage where my Zerene results are sufficient for most purposes. What about my older attempts? Can it help there? My first attempts at manual focus stacking go back nearly 5 years, but on that occasion I had to give up because my software wasn't up to it. Today I got: That's not perfect by a long shot. It can't be: I only had two images, and there's an intermediate area that is out of focus in both shots.
Object schema-validation controller throttled?
Tim Bray wrote an article yesterday days ago about the image quality of his Pixel 2 as processed by various software. Interesting, but not spectacular. How would a real camera have handled it? Decided to leave a comment. But of course there was a form to fill out. Did that ( How many sides does a triangle have? Three, of course), and got an error message: Insertion Aborted Error: Object schema-validation controller throttled; exiting. Huh? Deliberately obfuscated error message ? It seems so. Subsequent attempts (including replacing three with 3 ) brought no joy, but interesting variants on the error message: Configuration Interrupted Error: Subsystem normalization controller failed health check; exiting.
An end to blogs ?
I've been keeping an online diary for over 17 years now, following on from a paper diary that I kept for nearly 8 years in the 1960s. In March 2009 I was informed that my blog had been added to the ACM Queue blog roll. Blog? I don't have no steenking blog. In fact, I created one to make my point. Where does the word blog come from? Weblog , of course. Even the Oxford English Dictionary describes the term in detail, including this reference (under weblog): 1997 J.
Boot problems?
Although I had no real problems setting up the new teevee, there was one strange issue. On boot I got an unexpected message: gptboot: Invalid backup GPT header That looks like some kind of data corruption on disk, and that's all that I found on the web. It's benign in the sense that it doesn't stop the machine from working, but it would be interesting to find out how to fix it. ACM only downloads articles once.
teevee: Finishing touches
Yesterday's work on tiwi.lemis.com (the new teevee) was successful but not complete. I still needed to move disks around and put the new box in the TV cabinet. teevee has had two disks for a remarkably short period of time. My last upgrade started on 1 June and took over 3 weeks to complete. By comparison, this time was a breeze. Last time round I added a new boot disk to teevee, leaving the old one untouched. That proved to be useful today: I was able to copy the entire root file system to it, greatly simplifying the transition. In fact, about the biggest problem was physically moving the machine from its provisional position to inside the cabinet: That also involved swapping names: ...
LinkDelight: revenge is sweet
I was really upset by the way, far from accepting my best offer on eBay, LinkDelight increased the Buy it now price of the FW760 monitor from $230 to $247. But they also had one on auction, initial bid $225. OK, wait until the end and then buy... for $225, the price they had rejected yesterday. That feels good. To be fair to LinkDelight, their price was probably really too low. But if you offer Buy it Now and Best Offer , you shouldn't increase the price when people make an offer, at least not for that one person. ACM only downloads articles once.
Completing tiwi
Yesterday's upgrade attempts for teevee were almost completely successful, except for the issues with the display. I established a procedure, and today I tried it out. First, connect the cables again, paying special attention to the seat of the HDMI cable. And it worked! Was it really just a badly sitting cable? After some consideration, I've decided yes . Next step is to move the physical disks around. My media are still on teevee, which is less than optimal. ACM only downloads articles once.
New display card for teevee
The package that Australia Post so lovingly matured was a display card for teevee, my multimedia box (or TV driver). Yes, of course it has a display card, but it's full height, and I wanted to migrate teevee to a Lenovo ThinkCentre: How do I migrate easily and with fallback? I can't even just take out the disks from teevee and put them in the new machine (provisionally called tiwi): if something goes wrong, I'll have to rebuild again, and I won't have the option of comparing how they behave.
ON1: No thanks
Recently I heard of a company called ON1, who have just released a new version of their photo software. OK, I can try that. Fought my way through their web site: I needed to provide my (one-off) email address before they would talk to me, and for that I needed to tell them about myself and what kind (only one) of photos I took. Finally I was registered, logged in and... had to tell them all over again. My guess is that this is a case of Hanlon's Razor. Finally installed the software, and got the message: And they didn't think of that before?
More viewfinder investigations
Spent quite a bit more time investigating viewfinder monitors today. There's an amazing choice. Some of the better ones seem to come from a company with the unlikely name Feelworld, which calls them on-camera monitors or HDMI Camera Field Monitors . But which? The current list (probably predestined to link rot) lists no fewer than 19 different models, in addition to 18 SDI Field Monitors . They differ at least in resolution and screen size. But even after limiting to 7" diagonal and 1920×1080 resolution, I'm left with 5 different monitors, with an actual resolution of 1920×1200. Why do they use this aspect ratio?
Hibiscus photos: finally!
It's been over 18 months since I started trying to take focus-stacked photos of Hibiscus rosa-sinensis flowers. So far technology has always got the better of me. Today I had another go, and finally I have a couple of photos which are almost acceptable: I need to look at it in more detail, but I don't see any artefacts. About the only issue is the depth of field. In each case, I took 20 shots, the first at f/4 (a little wide for this lens) and the second at f/5.6.
Reinstalling DxO
Time to run DxO PhotoLab on euroa again. The installation is still broken, and remained broken after uninstalling it. But when I fought my way the maze of twisty little directories folders after deinstallation, the files were still there. OK, rm -rf /cygdrive/c/Users/grog/Local/DxO/ and reinstall. It worked. What use are these deinstallers? OK, I had put stuff in there that hadn't been installed, but surely they can deal with that. At the very least they can report the fact. Microsoft! ACM only downloads articles once.
Focus stacking wildflowers
Spent some time today processing yesterday's focus stacks of the wildflowers. There were slim pickings: in most cases I had managed to miscalculate the beginning or end focus point, and I ended up with results that were just plain out of focus. I really need a better viewfinder. One possibility would be a small normal monitor connected to the HDMI output. There were only two photos worth looking at. Here's a Diuris sulphurea rendered by Zerene (first two images) and Helicon Focus variants A (weighted average) and C (pyramid). . I wasn't able to get any results for Helicon B (depth map): every time I moved the mouse towards the button, the application crashed.
Radiation Tower progress
The new Telstra radiation tower has now been erected, but they're still working on it: Still, it can't be long now before we finally get coverage. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Olympus goggles
Olympus has announced a new product, the EyeTrek Insight EI-10L That report, from Digital Photography Review, is the most informative. Their own page is much less so, but shows some truly horrendous prices: the unit itself costs $1,500. Even the battery charger costs $249, more than I paid for Yvonne's E-PM2 with lens. It's billed as developer's edition , which I translate as solution looking for a problem . I have a suitable problem: I need a remote viewfinder for my camera for use out in the open. With suitable imagination, this device could be adapted.
Getting photos off Android
Yesterday I took a couple of photos with my mobile phone: I hadn't expected to need to do so, and I had left my camera in the car. But how do I get them off the phone? I've grumbled about the opacity of the Android user interface in the past, but I've always managed to get them off there with a little bit of searching. But not today. WiFi File Transfer, a program that fills in for missing basic Android functionality, offered to find My Photos , My Pictures (what's the difference) and other Mys, but it couldn't find them. Neither could I.
Microsoft memory use
dischord.lemis.com, my Microsoft photo box, has 16 GB of memory, still a comparatively large amount. But after my photo experiments today, the task manager showed it using about 15 GB physical memory. After stopping the photo software, it dropped to 2.23 GB: This is Windows 7, though I'm not too sure it would be very different in older or newer releases. But why do programs that aren't currently in use use so much physical memory? Is their Virtual Memory model really that bad?
More focus stacking comparisons
Two weeks ago I took some focus-stacked photos that were less than optimal. The results with the out-of-camera stacking were surprisingly good, but limited in focus depth (only 8 component images). I took another series of 84 images of a Burchardia umbellata, of which FOCUS Projects Professional made results that I wouldn't want to use: Due to the stack size issues, I haven't been able to get Zerene or Helicon Focus to produce any results. But now I can normalize the sizes. What do I get?
eBay pain, yet again!
Mail from eBay today, coinciding with a routine access to my eBay : Unauthorized use of your account -- action required We have reason to believe that your eBay account has been used fraudulently without your permission. Weve reset your eBay password. If you had your PayPal account linked to your eBay account, we've disabled your PayPal link to protect your funds. Any unauthorised activity, such as buying or selling, has been cancelled and any associated fees have been credited to your account. Any listings that we removed are included toward the end of this email.
Zerene on FreeBSD
Another potential advantage of Zerene is that there's a Linux version. Will it run on FreeBSD? Spent some time checking, and came to the answer Yes . The main issue proved to be, once again, that eureka is so down-rev that I can't run modern Linux binaries on it. But it worked almost out of the box across the LAN on lagoon. Yet another reason to upgrade eureka. ACM only downloads articles once.
Normalizing image stack sizes
DxO PhotoLab creates output images that can vary in size by up to about 6 pixels on a side. That's not a big deal, much less than 1%, but it breaks various software that processes multiple images and expects them to be exactly the same size. What I need is a program that can take a stack and crop the larger images to the size of the smallest. Where can I find that? I looked, but couldn't find anything. Maybe I didn't have the right search terms. In any case, searching became more difficult than doing it myself, so I wrote a script myself.
eBay manipulation?
I'm still annoyed about the way I've been treated regarding the matter with Craig Weber (eBay seller klearview_au). When I get over my anger I'll follow up. But today I was curious as to whether he was still registered with eBay. Yes. Not only that, since then he has become a top-rated seller! And that with the feedback I left him! Went checking what feedback he had received since thenand mine was gone! So was another one of similar character. Working my way through the little twisty passages of eBay links brought me to https://feedback.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewFeedbackLeft, where I could enter the item number (352142223044), which the page obligingly removed, and then displayed: Mutually withdrawn?
World's most widespread Unix
What is Unix? That depends on whom you ask. The lawyers have always had a different viewpoint from the techies. And while it's reasonable to say that Linux is Unix-like, can you say that about Android Yes, it has a Linux kernel, but the whole interface is foreign. In my book, not Unix. Similar considerations apply to Mac OSmacOS (barely fits my definition of Unix and iOS (doesn't). Given my definitions, it's clear that macOS is the most widespread version of Unix. Or so I thought. Then I read this article: Every Single Processor that Intel has made in the last 8 or 9 years contains a hidden processor running MINIX.
Apple touchpads: the expert speaks
Mail from Malcolm Caldwell today about my touchpad article a few days ago: Recent trackpads on macs allow various options for right button (or as they call it "secondary click"). I use "two finger" clicks for right mouse button. It has become so natural for me, so much a part of muscle memory, that I could not remember that without sitting at my mac and seeing what I do to activate right click. This is actually well "documented", but in a completely non-obvious place: its under settings->touchpad. There you can set how you want to activate clicks, secondary clicks etc.
More focus stacking
Taking the opal photos was only the first part. Now I also had a good subject for focus stacking. In this case, of course, in-camera stacking works well enough, as long as you don't forget the crop, which is significant: I didn't even bother to try with FOCUS projects 3 professional, but I downloaded a trial version of Zerene and compared it with Helicon Focus. The results were interesting. Helicon is much faster, round 5 times the speed, it feels. But the results aren't quite up to scratch.
Analyzing focus stacking Exif data
How does the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II focus stacking work? It provides you with two basic settings: step distance , a number between 1 and 9, and step count. This photo gives some details: Richard Turton has done some investigation of the meaning of focus step , and come up with a relationship to the aperture for one lens, not completely coincidentally the M.Zuiko Digital ED 60 mm f/2.8 Macro with which I took today's photos: it's the obvious choice for this kind of work. But in the process he introduced another parameter, focus count .
Debugging DxO PhotoLab
After playing around with DxO PhotoLab on euroa, it reliably hung in about three different ways. I couldn't get it to work. Deinstalling, both with Microsoft's standard tools and with a hastily downloaded Ashampoo Uninstaller 6, followed by subsequent reinstallation, didn't help. OK, time for a problem report. How do I describe it? A video clip sounds like a good idea. OK, let's try: What a catastrophe! It reminds me of what I tried to do with my camera 50 years ago, before good photocopiers were available to Mere Mortals.
Reinventing the button
Chris Bahlo has an ancient Apple MacBook which, she says, has a defective video display. The display is on the motherboard, and when she took it to the Apple people in Ballarat, they told her that it was nearly 5 years old, far too old for them to have spare parts. I don't use the display on computers that don't run X, so that was of no problem to me, so I asked her to give it to me. She did, but there's a problem: I can't find anything wrong with the hardware. Still, time to play around with it. But how do I communicate with it?
More focus stacking experiments
Despite everything I've been doing, my curry tree still has mites. Time for a few photos. They weren't good. The first, using in-camera focus stacking, was pretty fuzzy: These images are at approximately 1:1 magnification (in other words, the width is about 17 mm). And yes, the mites (about 0.5 mm across) are recognizable, but none of them at all are really sharp. What about the postprocessing alternatives? Putting the same images through FOCUS projects 3 professional and Helicon Focus (which, I discover from the tutorial videos, is pronounced H+licon ) gave me: Once again a completely garbled output from H+licon.
Information rot
I've been keeping this diary for over 17 years, and I link to a number of other places in the web. I'm amazed how many of them rot. Somehow xkcd summarizes it: I've taken to keeping copies of all the images I link to. ACM only downloads articles once.
More bank scams?
Another mail message today, ostensibly from ANZ, my bank, and also potentially related to the fraud case: Date: Wed, 1 Nov 2017 06:10:42 +0000 From: ANZ Customer Enquiries <[email protected]> To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Subject: Your Pay Anyone Disputes - Do Not Reply To This Email Message-ID: <5E045F2C4F1AEA4A9AA3177E0CAA1CC424CCFDF8@EXUAU020HWT151.oceania.corp.anz.com> Received: from mail1.bemta3.messagelabs.com (mail1.bemta3.messagelabs.com [195.245.230.161]) by www.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5EFE31B72806 for <[email protected]>; Wed, 1 Nov 2017 06:11:37 +0000 (UTC) Received: from [85.158.137.35] by server-1.bemta-3.messagelabs.com id A0/46-27020-89569F95; Wed, 01 Nov 2017 06:11:36+0000 X-Env-Sender: [email protected] X-Msg-Ref: server-8.tower-134.messagelabs.com!1509516664!23298582!18 X-Originating-IP: [203.110.235.80] Received: from unknown (HELO EXIAU002MELP003.ecorp.anz.com) (203.110.235.80) by server-8.tower-134.messagelabs.com with DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 encrypted SMTP; 1 Nov 2017 06:11:32-0000 Received-SPF: PermError (EXIAU002MELP003.ecorp.anz.com: domain of [email protected] used an invalid SPF mechanism) Received-SPF: PermError (EXIAU002MELA002.ecorp.anz.com: domain of [email protected] used an invalid SPF mechanism) Dear Gregory Please ...
Still no Police contact
It's now been 6 days since I received notice to contact the NSW Police. And despite all attempts, I failed. OK, email to to [email protected], explaining the situation and asking for help. And how about that, I got a call back from Senior Constable Adam Ginnane within an hour, saying that he couldn't get in contact with DSC Todd, who was apparently out of the office on another matter, but that he had spoken with a colleague, and I would get a call back later in the day. He also gave me details of how to contact him if needed. It seems that Joan's comments yesterday were wrong: [email protected] is in the same building as the help line I have called so many times, and they could have put me through.
Learning DxO PhotoLab
Spent a bit more time today trying to understand DxO PhotoLab. The first thing of interest is that each version of DxO wants its own Modules directory. What about a symlink? Played around with that on euroa. I didn't get it to work. The first time round, after replacing the directory with a pointer, it just hung when I started it. Maybe building a database? There's a file CAFList1010.db in the main directory, and from previous pain I know that it relates to the correction modules. But after an hour, it still hadn't done anything. OK, stop DxO PhotoLab, replace the local directories, and try again.
Learning about DxO PhotoLab
Yesterday I took a first look at DxO PhotoLab, but didn't find the tutorial videos. Off to look for them today. The web page doesn't inspire confidence: currently the menu at the top is non-functional, and when I finally found, at the bottom, a tab Learn: How to get started with DxO PhotoLab , which led me to a page with lots of tutorials about DxO Optics Pro , including old versions, and also completely irrelevant tutorials about their DxO ONE toy camera, but not a single tutorial about DxO PhotoLab. Maybe they'll come, but I'm left wondering whether DxO realize how bad an impression this makes.
DxO: Changing of the guard
DxO Optics Pro is dead, long live DxO PhotoLab. What's the difference? It's no longer Pro (a word that has long been meaningless), and it probably describes the current functionality better. Once it was just there for optical corrections, but in the 6½ years since I started using it, it has continually gained in functionality, much of which is not optical in nature. And from the somewhat garbled information I have on it, that trend seems to be continuing. So maybe the name makes sense. Downloaded the software and tried it out. Yes, a very familiar looking interface. But what's that green hook over each photo preview?
Cybercrime!
Received a strange email today: Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2017 15:06:31 +1100 From: NSW Police <[email protected]> To: undisclosed-recipients: ; Subject: Information for Victims of Crime [SEC=SENSITIVE] Message-ID: <[email protected]> Victim Card Information The NSW Police Force is committed to providing support to victims of crime. The details of your report are as follows: Time/Date of report: 24/10/2017 14:41 COPS Event Number: 66233235043 The Police Officer in charge of your matter is: NAME, LIKELY Email : [email protected] Station : SCC CYBERCRIME UNIT Address : 4, 219-241 CLEVELAND ST Phone : 02 93846850 Please contact the above officer for any enquiries about your matter and quote the COPS Event Number.
Induction cooking caveats
Changing the fat in the friteuse is always an issue. The fat is solid, but you can't heat it with the element because it needs to be immersed in fat. So in the past I've melted the fat separately in another pot and then put it into the friteuse. But now I have an induction cooker, and the pan of the friteuse is ferromagnetic, so I can do it directly. And it works. But it's still not without its problems. While heating it, I saw a spot in the pan glow red hot. No chance for a photo, of course, but it left its mark: Yet another reason to use thicker metal for cooking.
Stacking photos again
Finally I have yesterday's stacked photos converted to JPEG. Time to stack them. Once again DxO Optics Pro had produced output images of marginally different sizes, so align_image_stack refused to touch them. I've run into this problem in the past, and I should be able to find a way round it, either with different settings for DxO, or by manually trimming the images. On the other hand, align_image_stack has absolutely no support for deghosting, so presumably it would make a real mess of the moving flowers. So instead I used FOCUS Projects Professional, a program that I haven't used much. The results are really quite stunning.
Police reports in time of Internet
OK, still no refund from Craig Weber, about whom I only know phone numbers ((02) 9638 5221 and 0412 25 00 00), eBay user ID (klearview_au) and email address ([email protected]). Time for the police. Or is it? Checked the web site and discovered that it's not possible to report crimes online. Call the police station. So at 13:10 I called up the police in Ballarat on (03) 53366000, was presented with a long list of topics organized from their point of view, so finally chose uniform , something that is completely irrelevant to me. They weren't very helpful. After a while, they suggested an acorn.
Mobile phone GPS: inadequate
Somehow the accuracy of the GPS receiver in my Samsung GT-I9100T mobile phone leaves a lot to be desired. Lately I've been taking it while walking the dogs, but the logs suggest that I haven't left the property. Today I took it with me while taking photos of the mobile phone tower, with the car GPS navigator as a backup. It's easier to get the logs off the phone, so I did that. But the location I got was over 500 m away! That's clearly a different problem: It was further south, where I didn't go at all. The car GPS navigator worked fine, but of course showed the location of the car, not the location of the camera.
Another radiation tower!
The Dereel Facebook group is active again. There's more construction work going on round the National Broadband Network radiation tower on the corner of Rokewood Junction Road and Ballarat-Colac Road: Had a talk with the people erecting it. As expected, it's for Telstra mobile phones. Finally! It should be finished less than 5 years after Denis Napthine promised. They should have the tower up by the end of next week or so. It's not clear how long Telstra will take to activate it, but the foreman tells me that they installed the other end of the microwave link (on the Buninyong tower) at the beginning of the year.
The future of cars
Margaret Swan has a new carwell, a different, newer one, a Subaru Forester with all bells and whistles. She's having difficulty with some of the bells (or was that whistles?) , so I came over today and took a look. There are two main issues of confusion: first, how do you start the car? For every car I have ever driven, there's an ignition key, usually coupled with a starter. Not on this car. Yes, there's a key, if you can reinterpret the information in the 300 page manual, which tells you to press in the wrong place, but you don't need it, and it doesn't help start the car.
Network foot-shooting
Part of repartitioning my (IPv4) network is to reset the net masks. Previously they were full /24 spaces (netmask 0xffffff00), and now they need to be set to /25 (netmask 0xffffff80). On my external machine the interface configuration looked like this: xn0: flags=8843 metric 0 mtu 1500 options=503 ether 00:16:3e:06:34:53 inet6 fe80::216:3eff:fe06:3453%xn0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x2 inet 208.86.226.86 netmask 0xfffffffc broadcast 208.86.226.87 inet 192.109.197.81 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.109.197.127 nd6 options=29 media: Ethernet manual status: active OK, that's simple enough: === root@www (/dev/pts/0) ~ 6 -> ifconfig xn0 inet 192.109.197.81 netmask 0xffffff80 No response.
Garden sprinkler failure
It's getting warmer, and I've been keeping an eye on the soil moisture. Today I discovered that the sprinkler system wasn't working At All. Further investigation revealed an interesting reason: the sprinkler controller was off the net. For quite some time I haven't really been doing much with my Class C network block, but it's probably about time. All my systems at home are in the top half, so I can do things with the other half, including migrating the web site to that area. That seemed straightforward enough until I discovered that our sprinkler system wasn't working any more: a network configuration error.
Lens image stabilization?
When I bought my Leica DG Vario-Elmarit 12-60 mm f/2.8-4, one of the first things I did was to test the image stabilization. One of the drawbacks of using a non-Olympus lens was that I could have lens stabilization or body stabilization, but not both. And it turned out that the body stabilization was much better than the lens stabilization, so that feature wasn't worth much. Now I have the M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100 mm f/4.0 IS PRO, my first stabilized Olympus lens, so of course I wanted to see how much difference that makes.
Dealing with technology
My trip to Misery Creek Road involved a fair amount of technology: camera, mount and GPS recorders. The mount worked well: I think that tripod is one of the best purchases I have made recently. But other things didn't work as well. The photos of the Chamaescilla came out so dark that I thought there was no recovery possible. DxO Optics Pro proved equal to the task, but why the bad exposure in the first place?
Orchid hunt
On Tuesday I found a new orchid in Misery Creek Road: It's a Caladenia major, and it's out of focus (only visible on enlarging the image). Today the weather was calm, just the conditions for focus stacking, so off to Misery Creek Road again to look for one.
IP-IP tunnel experiments
Somehow I still can't get my head around IP-IP tunnels. Last time I set one up, I only had one end to contend with. Now I have two, and NAT in between to boot. Made a clone of a virtual machine to play with, and followed these instructions. They didn't quite work for me, but I'm wondering if my translation of the IP addresses wasn't to blame. One of the more bizarre messages was: Oct 13 17:41:37 stable-11 kernel: gre0: loop detected I suspect that has to do with use of the same IP range on different interfaces.
Still more lagoon mail problems
Yvonne came to me today with a bounce message I had never seen before: I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below. The mail system <[email protected]>: cannot update mailbox /var/mail/yvonne for user yvonne. file is a symbolic link Well, yes, it's right. /var/mail/yvonne is a symlink. And so it has been for longer than I can remember, maybe 15 years. Is this some new thing in postfix?
Compressing web pages?
Discussing what a reasonable web page size is today on IRC. Jamie Fraser thought that 2 MB is too much. I wondered how big my diary pages are. Checked with last month's diary: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/27) /var/tmp 78 -> fetch http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-sep2017.php diary-sep2017.php 738 kB 275 kBps 00m02s Is that too big? That's even without the images. People suggested compression. Here a part of the discussion for my future reference: <fwaggle> gr00gle: doesn't look like your webserver is gzipping your html would would probably slash that <gr00gle> Do all web clients understand that?
Fixing lagoon mail
Got round to looking at the mail system on lagoon today. Put in the configuration files from the old system, restarted postfix, and found: postfix: Postfix is running with backwards-compatible default settings postfix: See http://www.postfix.org/COMPATIBILITY_README.html for details postfix: To disable backwards compatibility use "postconf compatibility_level=2" and "postfix reload" postfix/postfix-script: refreshing the Postfix mail system Oct 12 09:36:29 lagoon postfix/qmgr[55707]: 3838B2730FD: from=<>, size=2687, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Oct 12 09:36:59 lagoon postfix/smtp[55776]: connect to dereel.lemis.com[192.109.197.135]:25: Operation timed out dereel.lemis.com? That's been out of commission for years, since I put everything into eureka.
lagoon: problems gradually arrive
Last week's upgrade to lagoon went remarkably smoothly. The only issue was with mutt, which really had nothing to do with the upgrade. But today Yvonne wanted to send an important mail message, They wanted her to print out a file, fill it out by hand, scan it in, and send it by email. She came to me and said don't bother about the email I sent you. Chris will print it for me . Huh? Why do we need Chris to print files for us? Went to show her how to download a PDF file and print it out. === yvonne@lagoon (/dev/pts/2) ~/Downloads 51 -> lpr MEA-Application-Form.pdf lpr: Error - scheduler not responding.
Debugging mutt
Why did Yvonne's mutt stop working after I upgraded her system? I discovered that it was due to mutt_dotlock failing, and that unlike on previous occasions, it was not due to NFS. But it worked for me, and it didn't work for Yvonne. Why not? Finally found time to have another look. Things weren't made any easier by the fact that mutt_dotlock runs setgid, so ktrace doesn't trace it. How about the good old debugger? How do you create a version of the program with symbols? A couple of months ago I found how to do it for FreeBSD software, but mutt is a port.
Playing with Marble
One of the GPS-related software components that I wanted to look at was marble, and did so today. It's a KDE application, which means that if I don't have a KDE environment, I don't get any help. Still, this stuff is straightforward, right? No, it's KDE. Climbing directory trees is bad enough with firefox, but KDE goes one step further by renaming the directories: Home isn't /home, it's (in my case) /home/grog/. How I hate software that tries to hide the system from you! Tried it out anyway. There's an Open tab, which I used to painstakingly walk my way to my GPS logs.
Bloody eBay, day 3
OK, it's been nearly a month since I ordered a disk on eBay, and I still have neither item nor refund. And eBay, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that A refund won't be issued for this case . I've already complained vociferously about this decision. But that's just eBay. I still have a case against Craig Weber (eBay seller klearview_au). Call up Consumer Affairs Victoria, and while waiting in the inevitable hold pattern, was referred to the web site. For once, that might make sense, and so I took a look. Buying from a private seller online fits the bill. And in my case, they recommended that I contact the police: If consumers used an instant cash transfer system (such as Western Union or MoneyGram) or deposited money ...
Processing GPS information
Yesterday's journey left me with no fewer than 8 GPS logs, none of them covering the entire journey. I left the phone (talipon) charging until we got to Halls Gap, and the car navigator (the other seven) stopped logging every time I stopped the car, so I had some gaps. In any case, I didn't know how to process the logs. There must be a converter... After a bit of searching, found GPSBabel ( convert, upload, download data from GPS and Map programs ). Just what I need, and there's a FreeBSD port for it, so I installed it. === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/4) ~ 24 -> man gpsbabel No manual entry for gpsbabel Clearly a modern program.
eBay does it again!
Clearly it was a mistake on eBay's part to close my case yesterday without a refund. Maybe the first one was done by computer, but clearly an appeal should get the attention of a human. Maybe it did, but I was still astounded by their final (final) decision: Again no reason. How can they get away with this? Time to make some noise. Every time (far too many of them) that I have trouble with eBay, I try to find some valid, honest reason.
GPS: How to ruin an outing
Off to Halls Gap today for the annual Grampians Wildflower Show, as mentioned yesterday. I had spent some time planning the route: unlike in other countries, small back roads are usually faster than the main highways. They're more direct, usually in acceptable condition, and the main Western Highway is usually congested. In the days before GPS I worked out a number of ways from Skipton to Ararat, and the navigator took me somewhere round there. So yesterday I stored the route in my GPS navigatornot an easy business, since navigators go by addresses, not generally landmarks. So I had had to manually type in the coordinates, which it didn't like much either: not reachable by road.
eBay: No item, no refund, no explanation
As if I didn't have enough to do over the weekend, eBay decided about the seller who took my money and didn't deliver. They decided that that was correct, and that I should not get a refund: A final decision! With the option to appeal. That sounds right for eBay. But what nonsense! How can they refuse to admit a refund? And why don't they attempt to justify their decision? Of course I appealed.
Grampians wildflower show?
This weekend is the Grampians Wildflower Show, whose web site includes a prominent 404 ( Spring into the Grampians ) and few details. The heading EVENT DETAILS promises more information closer to the date, and there's no address for the main venue; you have to find that elsewhere (it's 117 Grampians Road, Halls Gap). While I was there, I looked for a few other locations of interest in another link that I found, with nice pictures but again hazy on location. Boroka Lookout looks stunning, but a 90m walk each way? That's too long for us, and it wouldn't fit in the time plan.
IP tunneling
ZDF seems to have a different algorithm from other German broadcasters for determining whether I'm in Germany or not, and for some reason they have decided that I am not. Presumably this is based on analysing different IP addresses. OK, my Class C is routed internationally, though it stops somewhere in North Carolina. I can easily route it on to here, but various considerations make it a bad idea in general. What I really need is the way to tunnel a specific IP address from there to here. OK, that's what an IP-IP tunnel is, right? I've used one of them before, and have exact instructions.
How do you like AusPost service?
Automatic phone call from Australia Post today to ask me how I liked yesterday's interaction with their customer service team. Answered appropriately, and was offered the option to be connected with customer service for a follow-up. OK, since they asked, selected the option and was connected to Orrin. Asked him to forward a problem report to the IT people that their server 116.240.201.166 didn't have reverse lookup. OK, noted, will inform people. A little too fast ( let's get rid of this crank ). Asked him to repeat the number, and of course he couldn't. Asked to be connected to a supervisor, and he went through the motions, came back and started asking questions about my item.
More lagoon problems
It turned out that yesterday's fix to Yvonne's read-only mailbox issue didn't work. Her index page looks different, and the % sign indicating read-only status was in a different position. Back to my diary to find out what I did last time. On 13 June 2010 the issue was a missing rpc.lockd process. But that wasn't the case today. On another occasion I rebooted, and that worked round the problem. That sounds so Microsoft. So I went looking. Permissions? Yes, that seems reasonable, but they were all correct. Make a local copy? Worked. So an NFS problem. ktrace showed the mailbox being opened twice, each time O_RDONLY.
Latest compromise attempt
Lately I've been getting a lot of mail messages like this: 524 N + 03-10-2017 World Wide Web Owner To [email protected] ( 6) N + FAILURE: /backup.sql.bz2 <- http://lemis.com 526 N + 03-10-2017 World Wide Web Owner To [email protected] ( 6) N + FAILURE: /backup.sql.bz2 <- http://lemis.com 560 N + 03-10-2017 World Wide Web Owner To [email protected] ( 6) N + FAILURE: /dump.sql.tgz <- http://lemis.com 580 N + 03-10-2017 World Wide Web Owner To [email protected] ( 6) N + FAILURE: /dbdump.sql.gz <- http://lemis.com 601 N + 03-10-2017 World Wide Web Owner To [email protected] ( 6) N + FAILURE: /dump.tgz <- http://lemis.com 654 N + 03-10-2017 World Wide Web Owner To [email protected] ( 6) N + FAILURE: /db.tar <- http://lemis.com 673 N + 03-10-2017 World Wide Web Owner To [email protected] ( 6) N + FAILURE: ...
Upgrading lagoon
Yvonne was shipping in town today, a good time to upgrade lagoon, her computer. It went surprisingly well: On eureso, the development VM, which has eureka's file systems mounted, tar --one-file-system -cf /src/r / The name is deliberately short to make it easier to enter on the console. /src is a symlink from /home/src. Boot the new machine from DVD.
Upgrading lagoon
I now have a new system disk for lagoon, Yvonne's computer. Time to upgrade the system, which also involves moving it to a smaller, quieter box, my old ThinkCentre that was once called despair. First problem: despair does not have a DVI output. Will I even be able to start X on it in native resolution? But that's in the future. For the time being, how do I migrate? Downloaded the latest FreeBSD installation disk and started it. Things have changed at some point, and I was rather surprised to see the install DVD want to fsck itself. Chose my standard disk layout: two alternative root file systems, 40 GB each, 20 GB of swap, and the rest of the 2 TB 1.8 TB as /home.
More multimedia download stuff
Continued investigating how to get programmes from SRF today. There's this script, which complained about non-implemented functionality. It starts: #!/bin/sh Who uses /bin/sh any more? Linux people just link it to /bin/bash, so I guessed that it required bash functionality. Changing the first line to point to bash fixed it. Then I ran it, and got no output, neither on the screen nor on the disk. Time for some script reading. It seems that it's really just a wrapper for rtmpdump, which proves to be related to mplayer.
More multimedia download insights
I'm still trying to find out how to download videos from SRF. MediathekView can download some of them, but only some of them. Yesterday I had tried to view one that doesn't show up in the MediathekView list, but had been told that, due to content restrictions, it was only accessible between 22:00 and 6:00, implicitly CET. That's OK here, especially since we moved to DST: it corresponds to 7:00 to 15:00 here. And then I was told it was only accessible in Switzerland. It did that with some other programmes too, including stuff that was included as free in MediathekView.
Determining entrance pupil: no progress
Last month I worked out a way to use Hugin to determine the entrance pupil of a lens based on the parallax error in the control points. But two weeks ago I tried it in earnest, and it didn't work out the way I had hoped. What caused the problems? I don't know for sure, but I had a couple of ideas to follow up: just plain sloppy measurements, inappropriate choice of control points, phase of the moon... One thing was sure: the entrance pupil was in a position that caused that the end of the focus rail to intrude into the image.
Package upgrade: the bloat
I've been meaning to keep my software packages up to date on all machines, but it's not easy. I was going to catch up today on lagoon, Yvonne's machine, but the upgrade process wanted to remove Emacs and not replace it. That looks dangerous, so I've put it off until I upgrade the machine, which should happen when I get my new disks next week. Today I upgraded teevee, where the upgrade process wanted to remove Samba. I can live with that: I don't use Samba on that machine. But why does the upgrade remove software and not replace it? Is this a political statement?
Power fail!
Into the office this morning to notice an eerie silence. All computers were off. Power failure? No. The RCD had tripped. Why is not longer important, but there's a good chance that it's related to the fact there's only one for the whole house. Next time we have an electrician here, I should get a separate RCD installed for my office, in place of the current circuit breaker. Back for the eternal fsck (I can hear friends chanting ZFS! ZFS! ZFS!) . Used the time to do a much-needed tidy up of papers to be filed, and in the process noted that /home took something over a hour to complete.
eBay's clear policies
Bulk mail from eBay today, announcing reasonable changes to their policy. But the wording confirms my general opinion: Our updated User Agreement will take effect on 25 October 2017 for new users and upon acceptance for new users. And for me? ACM only downloads articles once.
eBay beats Google
More pain with eBay today, trying to get my money back from the person who took money for the disk I ordered two weeks ago, but didn't deliver. It seems that eBay won't help much because I paid by bank transfer, so I'll have to take legal channels. But eBay told me what they thought of what I did today: We have reason to believe that your eBay account has been used fraudulently without your permission. Weve reset your eBay password. If you had your PayPal account linked to your eBay account, we've disabled your PayPal link to protect your funds.
Old panoramas revisited
An indirect result of our discussion about Piccola yesterday, I noted an entry describing the pain of taking house panoramas. Back to look at the images again today. Things have improved considerably, and I was through with the whole thing in less than 30 minutes, with considerably better results. Here before and after: Strangely, the old images don't look as bad as I thought.
VoIP problems, worked around
CJ Ellis has problems with his MyNetFone VoIP service again! That's the fourth time that he has had the same issue: outgoing calls work normally, but incoming calls divert immediately to voice mail. This time it happened at a particularly inopportune time for me, with the Arne Koets clinic taking up most of my time, so by this morning I had had time to consider what I could do without getting MyNetFone support involved. Clearly there's something wrong if the ATA thinks it is registered, and can make phones to prove it, but the network thinks it isn't. But what's causing the problem?
Where's my disk?
On Monday I discovered I hadn't paid for an eBay item, so I rectified that quickly. Sent a message to the seller. No reaction. Sent another message to the seller. Still no reaction. OK, time to take further steps. Where eBay had claimed that the item was paid when it was not, it now claimed that it was not paid when it was. Back to eBay's confusing web site. Take action . What action? I've been there before on Monday. OK, get eBay to call me valued customer and walk me through. Maria called back pretty quickly. Problem: she had a strong fake American accent (probably originally from the Philippines), and I really couldn't understand her.
MediathekView insights
Why can't I download Mediathek videos that I can watch online? It all sounds like a web proxy issue. So how do I set a web proxy for MediathekView? Once again Google to my aid. It pointed me at this forum discussion (!) , which states that you should start MediathekView like this: java -dproxyset=true -dproxyhost=<proxy server> -dproxyport=<port> -jar mediathekview.jar And how about that, that did the trick. It's not clear why, but who am I to complain? ACM only downloads articles once.
Where in the world am I?
There's something funny about MediathekView: sometimes it doesn't find things that are listed in the Mediatheken, and sometimes it can't load things that I can watch directly, claiming forbidden (HTTP error 403). Why? One reason could be something that I've frequently observed: my network block ( Class C ) was allocated in Germany in the dark ages, round 1992. When I moved here, it moved with me, but much software still thinks I'm in Germany. In general it's a minor nuisancesome broken sites of Big Business decide to redirect to their German subsidiary when I access their site, for examplebut in this case it appears to tell the Mediatheken that they can display the contentif I use a Class C address and not the gateway address.
Intuitive error messages
I've mentioned in the past that I'm quite happy with the Mendhak GPS logger. It works well, while the corresponding function in OI.Share is fiddly to turn on, and it frequently turns itself off again for reasons that I haven't established. But today I had no logs at all. The entire directory was empty. But the logger was working: Only nothing got written to disk. Why was the message Gpx10FileLogger.write in red? Is that an even more polite way of saying failed, but I don't really want to tell you ?
eBay: Unpaid bill
This time last week I bought a disk on eBay. Unlike just about everything nowadays, there was no PayPal option, so I had to pay by bank transfer. But this morning I received a mail message from the seller, and discovered that he had opened a non-payment case. How could that happen? No idea, but after checking my bank accounts, no transfer had been made. Either I forgot it (unusual), or the bank messed up, which wouldn't be the first time. There's no way to tell which it was any more. Either way, the seller was right that he had almost certainly not received any payment.
Gmail: more intrusions
For reasons I forget, I accessed Gmail from the browser on my :0.1 display instead of the normal :0.2. Same browser (outdated firefox), same computer. But I still get a message: I suppose things are getting better: now at least it gives a (correct) IP address. But how does it recognize the device ? It's the same one I use all the time, and so is the browser. I wonder if I will get new messages when I upgrade the browser. ACM only downloads articles once.
Strange umount issue
While making a regular backup to my external backup drive, I had a strange experience: at the very end, it didn't complete. Checking, I found that the backup drive was no longer mounted. But umount was the very last thing that happens in the script. Further investigation showed: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/36) ~ 31 -> ps aux | grep umount root 3267 0.0 0.0 12384 1968 5 DL+ 9:30am 0:00.41 umount /photobackup === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/36) ~ 32 -> ps alx | grep umount 0 3267 1364 0 31 0 12384 1968 biord DL+ 5 0:00.43 umount /photobackup So umount had umounted the disk, but it was still reading.
The pain of online purchases
I've been buying things online now since the end of the past millennium, and it would be my favourite way to buy thingsIF. You'd think that by now people would have got their act together, but in fact, on reflection, there seem to be problems Every Single Time. Today I finally came to the conclusion that I needed a new lens, the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 8mm f/1.8 Fisheye PRO. What do they cost? B&H are my price benchmark: not necessarily the cheapest, but reasonable. They want US $999, but of course they're in the USA, so the very cheapest shipping is another $39.
Scary spam
Call from CJ Ellis today: Gmail was preparing to delete his email account: From: gmail.com <[email protected]> Date: 6 September 2017 at 13:04 Subject: Your account will be -deactivated To: [email protected] Hello cjhimself, This is to inform you that your request on: 9/3/2017 1:30:15 p.m. to remove your account from gmail.com server has been approved and will initiate in one hour from the exact time you open this message. Regards. ignore this message to continue with email removal or Please confirm if this is genuine as i have not made any such request.
How many car displays?
Last week ALDI had some special offers: a dashcam and a wireless reversing camera. I've had a reversing camera before, which connected to my GPS receiver, but it required running wires through the car, and I never got round to installing it. This one least obviates that problem. The reality, as so often with ALDI special offers, is different: the camera part can be mounted either wired to the reversing lights, or unwired with a switch. So when you want to reverse, you get out and press the On button. If it's wired, it only works when it's powered, either by the reversing lights or the tail lights.
More MyNetFone problems
CJ Ellis has problems with his MyNetFone connection again! It's the third time now: for reasons that nobody has been to explain, outgoing calls function normally, but incoming calls divert immediately to voice mail. This first happened two years ago, then repeated six weeks ago. CJ is non-technical and deaf, and has difficulties understanding non-Australians (including Yvonne), so I offered to talk to support for him. On each occasion the MyNetFone support people told me that the ATA (a Mitron MV1) was not registered. Wrong! The ATA was registered, otherwise CJ would not have been able to make outgoing calls, including the ones he made to report the problem.
Android usage
One of the big issues I have always had with mainstream computers is that it's difficult to use more than a few programs at a time. Not surprisingly, mobile phone operating systems like Android are the worst. I find it really difficult to switch between the four or five apps that I use for camera and location services. So it's not surprising to see this statistic, which notes that most users don't use more than 3 apps on a regular basis: ACM only downloads articles once.
More PayPal pain
Finally I've found a cheap amplifier for my office, a Samyang San112 for $30, with pickup in Sebastopol. Paid for it with PayPal and received an unexpected message: Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:19:37 -0700 From: [email protected] To: Greg Lehey <[email protected]> Subject: Your payment to ebayseller is pending This transaction is pending. In accordance with our policies, we review certain transactions to make sure they don't pose any risk to us or our customers. Your payment is currently under review. We will complete this process within 72 hours. Please note, this review involves this transaction only and does not affect the use of your PayPal account for other transactions.
Understanding fisheye lenses
Wide angle lenses have been occupying my thoughts for a while now. How do you represent things wider than a normal angle of view? There are many projections, foremost being the rectilinear, now called gnomonic , just to confuse you. The confusion is not made any easier by the relationship between image projection and map projection. Then there's a spherical projection, which for some reason Wikipedia doesn't even describe. My understanding is that that's the projection used by most fisheye lenses. Hugin has a plethora of other projections, most of them uninteresting. One of the useful ones is cylindrical projection, a hybrid of rectilinear gnomonic projection in the vertical direction and spherical in the horizontal direction.
Affinity: not a bug!
After my fun with Serif Affinity Photo a couple of days ago, I added to their forum page: There's another reason: you will get this message if you use Affinity via Remote Desktop. It appears to be a bug: I can start Affinity from a local display, then move to remote desktop without stopping Affinity, and then continue on the remote desktop. A bug? We don't have no steenking bugs, as the reply from Serif staff said: By doing it that way round, you start the application normally, which passes the checks, and then start remote desktop which disables DWM whilst the application is running.
Bing: invasion of privacy
I don't use euroa, my Microsoft laptop, very much. Today I brought it to the dining table to help discuss our menu for the following week. Started firefox and got a home page: bing. I don't use bing at all. My home page is local on eureka. How did I end up with bing? I can only assume that some update reset my home page. I consider that criminal. ACM only downloads articles once.
Serif Affinity photo software
I'm always on the lookout for photo software that will fit into my framework and allow me to do things that I can't with my existing software. GIMP should be a contender, but it's so difficult to use that I keep it only for emergencies. And of course there's Photoshop, which was once unattractive because of its price, but which has been made all the more unattractive by the new subscription model. Recently I've heard great things about Serif Affinity Photo, like this one, but also personal recommendations. OK, might be worth trying. It seems that I already had a mail address for Serif, so tried that.
Olympus GPS logs
Over the last few days I've spent quite some time investigating GPS logs from Android devices. But Olympus has its own OI.Share application that also does GPS tagging. Where does it store the logs? Finding files is the usual problem with consumer digital devices, and today I was unsuccessful. While looking for them, found this page, apparently official, containing information about the app that I haven't found elsewhere. And, of course, it's at least partially incorrect: Before taking any photos, turn the switch on the Home screen to On to start logging.
More GPS fun
On my way into Ballarat, saw this at the front gate: By chance the map is oriented with north upwards. The correct direction was via Grassy Gully Road, to the south-east and just visible at bottom left in this view, and it's about the only way out of our area. Yes, I can drive the length of Progress Road, turn left into Rozenstein Road, left again into Bliss Road, left again into Stones Road, and then right into Grassy Gully Road, a distance of about 3.3 km.
Another GPS visualizer
Did some more half-hearted searching for software to display GPS logs, and came up with GPS Visualizer. At first it looks very complicated, but maybe that means it offers functionality that wikiloc doesn't. One way or another it looks like a can of worms. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Uses for smart watches
After our discussion of smart watches recently, it was interesting to note this statistic about the uses to which people put their smart watches: All sorts of things. How can anybody possibly read email on a watch? The mind boggles. The most important use is conspicuous by its absence: telling the time! ACM only downloads articles once.
More Misery
On the way home, drove down Misery Creek Road in Enfield again for a few more photos. The total distance from the Ballarat-Colac Road to Berringa is about 7.5 km, but it seems that the most interesting stuff is between Ballarat-Colac Road and Orchid Track, only about 2 km away. That also makes it much closer to return home. More photos of what I'm sure is the Grevillea bedggoodiana, still not quite in flower, but with a surprising number of flower spikes: I also came across a couple of other plants that I hadn't noticed last time.
Visualizing GPS logs
I now have two GPS logs of my journey along Misery Creek yesterday. How can I visualize them? Went looking on Google, and as expected, found a number. The first I came across is wikiloc (which my fingers insist on spelling wikilog ), which allowed me to upload a logfile (from flachmann.lemis.com, my tablet). The map is visible here, but I still haven't had time to play with it, and it's not clear that it's the best choice. At the very least I need to find out how to edit things better than their almost non-existent documentation explains. And it would be nice to compare the track recorded by talipon.lemis.com (my phone).
UFS or ZFS?
I've been using UFS for nearly over quarter of a century, during which time it has been polished, bugs removed, performance improved. I have a good feeling about it. But our continual power failures bring home that it recovery is really fsck based, meaning lots of time lost on days like today. Yes, there's a journalling option, but it never seems to have caught onprobably old fogeys like myself help thereand I'm not convinced that it's as reliable. Every time this happens to me, people on IRC get up on their hind legs and chant ZFS! ZFS! . And yes, it's probable that I'd be better off with ZFS in this particular case.
Power failure! fsck! fsck!
Woke up round 5:50 this morning to discover that the power had failed. Really? Looked outside and saw the LED on the water pump still running. Into the garage to the fuse box. All breakers on. Out to the meter box. Meter dead. Clearly we no longer had power. But why was the LED on? It normally fails (understandably) with the power. My best guess is that it was not a total power failure, and that some residual voltage remained, sufficient to run the LED, and presumably nothing else. The power came back at 7:17, and I went out to restart the computers.
More GPS insights
I had my GPS receivers enabled when I went down Misery Creek Road, of course. In the process I discovered a number of things. First, a step back: how do you interface a GPS receiver to a program? That looks like a variant of a typical operating system task: the operating system presents the receiver as a device, and the program reads it. If it wants to reconfigure the device, the operating system should mediate. After leaving Napoleons, I checked my devices. The tablet was working fine. I had set tracking on the car navigator, but it seems that it forgets that when it powers down, so I had to restart it.
More GPS fun
The trip into Ballarat gave us the opportunity to get a more detailed GPS log, this time with log delay set to 0. The result? <trkpt lat="-37.560112" lon="143.8601387"><time>2017-08-21T05:38:25.142Z</time><src>network</src></trkpt> <trkpt lat="-37.5601136" lon="143.8601253"><time>2017-08-21T05:38:29.171Z</time><src>network</src></trkpt> <trkpt lat="-37.5601124" lon="143.8601356"><time>2017-08-21T05:38:33.167Z</time><src>network</src></trkpt> <trkpt lat="-37.5601019" lon="143.8601346"><time>2017-08-21T05:38:37.087Z</time><src>network</src></trkpt> <trkpt lat="-37.5601095" lon="143.8601355"><time>2017-08-21T05:38:57.655Z</time><src>network</src></trkpt> <trkpt lat="-37.5601092" lon="143.8601309"><time>2017-08-21T05:39:01.564Z</time><src>network</src></trkpt> <trkpt lat="-37.5600957" lon="143.8601412"><time>2017-08-21T05:39:05.469Z</time><src>network</src></trkpt> Again, src is network . What does that mean? The coordingates show that we were outside The Good Guys, which is correct. So what network does it mean? And why is there no speed information in the log file? The other thing to note is that the log entries are roughly every 4 seconds (with a noticeable gap in the middle).
FORTRAN history
There was a discussion recently on the Unix Heritage Society which diverged towards FORTRAN, discussing why it was such a horrible language. I had input on that: I think the arithmetic IF was put into FORTRAN because it was easy to implement with the CAS instruction. It doesn't make much sense from a mathematical point of view. ... my guess is that the authors of FORTRAN were looking for the cheapest solution, not the fastest one. For decades to come, the fastest solution was assembler.
Understanding GPS locations
As of yesterday, I wasn't much closer to establishing the cause of my GPS location inaccuracies. One photo was interesting. Here the complete photo, then crops: That was taken with my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II, which normally records local time. But exiftool's -geotag function adds information. Here the tags, bold from exiftool: Modify Date : 2017:08:19 14:38:59 Date/Time Original : 2017:08:19 14:38:59 Create Date : 2017:08:19 14:38:59 Date Time UTC ...
GPS positioning
House photo day again today, and finally I remembered almost everything. I just forgot to adjust the bracket correctly. I think I really need that checklist... Fortunately I was close enough, and the only photo that didn't work was this one: Why that? That wasn't parallax: the cord moved between individual images. With masking I can improve on it, but not completely eliminate it on the left: And the GPS locations?
Building NetBSD, continued
I've received mail from coypu, an email ID without a matching real name (domain removed to avoid spam) about my trouble building NetBSD. He made some suggestions, reminding me that NetBSD has also abandoned the simple build mechanism of the last millennium, and now uses a script called build.sh. One of his build suggestions: ./build.sh -U -u -j 4 -m amd64 -O ~/myobjdir tools ./build.sh -U -u -j 4 -m amd64 -O ~/myobjdir kernel=GENERIC Problem: it doesn't work for me. RTFM time, which shows that build.sh is required for crossbuilds, and the old make build is still supposed to work.
Another new GPS navigator
Di Saunders has bought a GPS navigator to help her find her way here. It didn't work: she couldn't work out how to program it. It's a NAVMAN MiVUEDRIVE FHD, as the web site claims, though I think that includes gratuitous shouting on the part of the WEBMASTER. She paid $200 for it, far more than I have ever paid for a navigator. What does she get for it? A considerably smaller display (but bigger than the one on her iPhone; that's why she bought it). Free monthly map updates, 1080p video camera and a G-sensor to record the direction of impact during a collision.
Postal services in the Internet Age
Three years ago I wrote an essay about The Internet in 2034, and I've been watching things develop since then. 17.5% of the time has already passed! One of the things that I predicted, and which I'm still very sure will happen, is the transition from on-site to off-site purchases. That implies more emphasis on transporting these goods. Somehow, though, that isn't going according to plan. Transporting goods is getting slower, not faster. A while back Australia Post raised prices and slowed down deliveries. Today was a case in point: last week, after 3 days of trying, I finally purchased a new battery for my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II.
Goodbye ache
The name ache goes back to the early days of the FreeBSD, decades ago: it was the user ID for Andrey Chernov, one of the first developers. He died yesterday, a couple of weeks before his 51st birthday. Of what? We don't know, but it seems to be related to osteoporosis, not exactly a common complaint for a person in his position. In a recent mail message he wrote: Sorry, I can't be constructive for some unknown time, because I broke my leg yet again, due to osteoporosis.
GPS tagging: done?
So now I have GPS tagging working relatively well, and I can modify my scripts to take it into account. In the process, I also modified the scripts to read in photos from the cameras. Previously I added author information to the raw files, but now I'm just adding it to the converted files. This has two advantages: first, it maintains the integrity of the raw file (just as it came out of the camera, which can be important for some broken software, such as DxO Optics Pro ), and secondly it's a lot faster. And tagging is simplicity itself, as I noted a couple of days ago.
Interesting maps
Over the last few days I've come up with a couple of interesting maps. The first is a submarine cable map that gives some idea of how communications get round the world. It may also be interesting to consult if one of the fails. The other is an antipode map, more fun than anything. ACM only downloads articles once.
GPS tagging: done!
Today, while walking the dogs, I remembered to take my mobile phone with me, and logged the locations of my photos. And how about that, tagging Just Worked. It's so much easier than using OI.Share. Here's the procedure: At some time, set the camera time accurately. OI.Share will do this if you connect the camera to the phone. Then you can disconnect again. Take photos as normal, ensuring that the phone is nearby.
More GPS tracking insights
Mail from Michael Hughes this morning telling me about exiftool's built-in GPS tagging. And of course I took my house photoswithout taking the mobile phone with me. There are so many small details in setting up for taking those photos that I almost think a checklist is a good idea. I suppose I should get used to carrying the phone with me whenever I take a camera. The other thing that interested me was time synchronization. When is it done? The sensible thing to do would be when the phone connects to the camera for any purpose. But the other (non-exclusive) possibility might be to do it when tagging.
EXIF GPS tagging: done!
As planned, spent some time looking for alternatives for GPS tagging photos today. It didn't take long: exiftool has built-in GPS tagging. That's particularly good news, since I use it anyway, and the whole thing is easily scriptable. I'll try it with my house photos tomorrow. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Cameras and GPS
Going in to Ballarat was an opportunity to try more GPS logging with the camera. Fired up my old Android tablet and started installing stuff on it. Surprise! OI.Share didn't want to install: the device is not compatible, it says. Why? I've run it on this tablet before. The whole thing is silly. One issue, of course, is that OI.Share uses GPS navigation, which won't work without the corresponding hardware support. But a phone or tablet without GPS could still work as a remote viewfinderif only they would let it. What's wrong with my tablet now? While installing GPS Status I discovered that the tablet doesn't have a compass.
Online shopping, the wrong way
I've had my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II for over 5 months, but I haven't bought a spare battery for it yet. In the past after-market batteries appeared within a month or two of the camera, and for the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark I I received new batteries within three weeks of getting the camera. But it seems there's more intelligence in the BLH-1, and so far nobody has come out with a lookalike. That's a pity: the lookalikes cost round $20, and the originals starting round $100. But it's about time that I got a second one, so on Sunday I decided to buy the first one available for $100 or less, including postage.
Telstra: There can only be one
Petra Gietz along today, it would seem to visit the dogs: While she was here, I took a look at her phone to establish whether her new SIM card had been activated. I failed in that due to lack of coverage, but looking at the phone brought a surprise: Please turn off WiFi [sic] in your settings to get the latest data usage . What a declaration of bankruptcy!
More GPS insights
Why did OI.Share stop logging GPS data, although it was switched on? No idea, but possibly because it lost signal. That's no excuse, of course: it should just have logged the fact and continued when the signal returned. As it was, I turned logging off and then on again, and then it continued. No idea whether the two occurrences are connected. Then off round the garden looking at what GPSLogger showed me. Almost no updates; I could walk the 50 m from the house door to the front gate without it showing any different location. That's clearly not OI.Share's fault. Time to try with my old Android tablet.
Understanding GPS logs
On Saturday I finally got some sense out of GPS tagging with OI.Share, and also discovered something about the log format. I even installed a C library of conversion routines. When I went to Geelong yesterday, I turned on GPS reception and OI.Share logging, in case I took any photos (I didn't). But when I got back, the log was empty, something that so surprised OI.Share that it hung with a blank screen, and had to be stopped. Why didn't it log anything? Have I forgotten some magic handshake? So when I went to Enfield today, I enabled another logger with the descriptive name GPSLogger.
Visiting Petra
Off to Enfield this afternoon to visit Petra Gietz, who needed help with her ISP changeover. She had had an account with Telstra which covered Internet, (VoIP) telephone and mobile phone. She changed her Internet and landline phone to Aussie Broadband a while back, but Aussie's mobile phone packages are more expensive than I like, so (also on my recommendation) she bought an ALDI SIM card. But she was puzzled by the heavy data usage on her phone, so I decided to check whether her router was still accepting 802.11 connections. I made the mistake of bringing euroa, my Microsoft laptop.
GPS logs, finally!
So finally I had my GPS logs where I could look at them. In the process, ran across a mail message from Gmail: my logs had finally come through, though I didn't see them in my Gmail list. Either way, they're rather strange: $GPGGA,015152.594,3748.0184,S,14345.0758,E,1,00,00.00,0.0,M,0,M,0,*5d^M $GPRMC,015152,A,3748.0184,S,14345.0758,E,000.0,000.0,050817,00,*1^M $GPGGA,015558.495,3748.0050,S,14345.0652,E,1,00,00.00,0.0,M,0,M,0,*50^M $GPRMC,015558,A,3748.0050,S,14345.0652,E,000.0,000.0,050817,00,*c^M $GPGGA,015758.493,3748.0087,S,14345.0535,E,1,00,00.00,0.0,M,0,M,0,*5c^M $GPRMC,015758,A,3748.0087,S,14345.0535,E,000.0,000.0,050817,00,*6^M $GPGGA,015958.491,3748.0260,S,14345.0603,E,1,00,00.00,0.0,M,0,M,0,*5d^M $GPRMC,015958,A,3748.0260,S,14345.0603,E,000.0,000.0,050817,00,*5^M $GPGGA,020158.491,3748.0224,S,14345.0492,E,1,00,00.00,0.0,M,0,M,0,*59^M $GPRMC,020158,A,3748.0224,S,14345.0492,E,000.0,000.0,050817,00,*1^M $GPGGA,020358.495,3748.0172,S,14345.0573,E,1,00,00.00,0.0,M,0,M,0,*51^M $GPRMC,020358,A,3748.0172,S,14345.0573,E,000.0,000.0,050817,00,*d^M $GPGGA,020658.510,3748.0286,S,14345.0651,E,1,00,00.00,0.0,M,0,M,0,*53^M $GPRMC,020658,A,3748.0286,S,14345.0651,E,000.0,000.0,050817,00,*3^M $GPGGA,022912.855,3748.0312,S,14345.0647,E,1,00,00.00,0.0,M,0,M,0,*57^M $GPRMC,022912,A,3748.0312,S,14345.0647,E,000.0,000.0,050817,00,*b^M What's that? Hambier's blog tells me that they're NMEA 0183 format sentences , probably the native format of most GPS receivers. The $GPGGA sentences are fix information , in other words information specifying time and location.
OI.Share GPS logs
What else does the OI.Share Geotag function do? It shows a list of logs, back to front: What can you do with them? It's obvious, isn't it? Otherwise it would be documented. But it's not obvious to me. Press on on of the blue buttons on the left hand side and you get a display that is presumably intended to be a map: But that's more than puzzling.
GPS tagging revisited
Today was house photo day, and I finally wanted to GPS tag the images. I've spent some time trying to get my head round the details of Olympus OI.Share's GPS tagging. It's a modern system, so of course it's not documented. I'll try to document it at some later stage. What I've found so far is: the bottom panel of the main display offers Add Geotag : That's more than inaccurate. If you turn the slider ON , it enables GPS logging, no more.
Understanding mouse issues
My problems with the Logitech M705 MARATHON mouse continue despite my attempts to limit it by software. I need to look more carefully into the logic to understand how the daemon works, but two things are clear: Not everybody can suffer from these problems, or Logitech would be out of business. On the other hand, it happens with multiple mice, so it could be a software issue. The problem appears to occur when the mouse moves from one screen to another.
Raspberry pi again
My lack of success with installing NetBSD and OpenBSD got me wondering: what about Raspberry pi? I was given one a few years ago, but I never used it. Is now not the time? The FreeBSD Wiki page was noteasy to understand. It seems that I need two partitions (MBR and FreeBSD), and there are ready-made images on the FTP site, though not at the address specified on the page. But what's on the image? Do I still need hooks? Downloaded the image, which has xz compression, and copied it to the SD card: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/8) /src/FreeBSD/ISOs 133 -> xzcat FreeBSD-11.1-STABLE-arm-armv6-RPI-B-20170727-r321617.img.xz | dd obs=64k of=/dev/da5 2097152+0 records in 16384+0 records out 1073741824 bytes transferred in 12603.412285 secs (85195 bytes/sec) 3½ hours to copy 1 MB!
Learning about photo drones
I've been tempted several times to play around with photo drones, but it looks like a can of worms. My one attempt wasn't exactly successful. This article, currently the first and only part of a promised three-part series, looks helpful. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Trying OpenBSD again
My experience with NetBSD was somewhat underwhelming. But how about OpenBSD? I was never a member of the OpenBSD team, and thus have used it even less. But it's worth a try, if only to compare it to NetBSD and FreeBSD. Once again a tiny image, leaving much space on a CD-ROM. The install programs don't seem to have changed since last time I looked at them, which must have been over 10 years ago. They're decidedly primitive by modern standards. At least it didn't trip over SMP. Partitioning the disk still believes in CHS geometries. It recognized the NetBSD partition, and offered to create a second partition that overlapped.
Building NetBSD
So the install image on kimchi doesn't understand something about SMP on the board, and I have to boot manually every time. Sure, I could probably find a knob to tweak to turn it off by default, but it makes more sense to bring the system up to date and be able to use SMP. So after checking out a source tree, I did a make build. Not what I expected: install ===> tools/gmake make[5]: Entering directory `/eureka/home/src/NetBSD/cvs/src/tools/gmake/build' /eureka/home/src/NetBSD/cvs/src/tools/gmake/../Makefile.gnuwrap:5: *** missing separator. Stop. make[5]: Leaving directory `/eureka/home/src/NetBSD/cvs/src/tools/gmake/build' *** Error code 2 Stop.
Audio equipment and pumps
I got the timing of my physiotherapy appointment wrong and left an hour early. What to do? Started to turn around, and then decided to do a bit of looking round Ballarat. Not a good idea. Went to The Good Guys and JB Hi-Fi again looking for cheap amplifiers, maybe special offers, but there was nothing at all at The Good Guys, and JB Hi-Fi still didn't have anything below $300. Why are these things so expensive? At The Good Guys I found some cheap Mini Hi-Fi units for round $100, including CD player and loudspeakers, and some even had RCA sockets.
Exploration
So once again I have a NetBSD, kimchi.lemis.com, currently with two issues: despite installing MySQL, I can't find the header files needed to build my weather station software software, and it hangs on boot unless I disable SMP. Decided to address the second problem first. Where do I get the system sources? There's a program called sysbuild that I hadn't heard of before, but it's not overly convincing: === root@kimchi (/dev/pts/0) ~ 15 -> sysbuild sysbuild: E: No command specified Type 'man sysbuild' for help === root@kimchi (/dev/pts/0) ~ 16 -> man sysbuild man: no entry for sysbuild in the manual.
A use for mouse button 9
Quite frequently I need to reformat paragraphs in my diary. Simple: position somewhere in the paragraph, and execute the Emacs function fill-paragraph. But when you do that 100 times, it becomes tedious: Move to the next paragraph, maybe with the mouse. If with the mouse, click. Press M-q, which executes fill-paragraph. Clearly something to automate, so I wrote this little function and bound it to mouse button 9: (defun mouse-select-and-justify () (interactive) (mouse-set-point) (recenter) (fill-paragraph) ) But it doesn't work.
NetBSD revisited
I can't corner my USB problems with FreeBSD, so how about a different BSD? It's been some time since I ran NetBSD, but my recollection was that the USB stack is more mature. So downloaded an ISO, all 390 MB of it, and installed. It hung on boot! But it had a couple of unexpected boot options: boot without ACPI, boot without ACPI and SMP. When I disabled both, it ran fine. The installation doesn't seem to have changed much in the last 15 years, but the package system has. Still, it was close enough to the FreeBSD version that I was able to install my base packages without any issues.
Ease of installation and debug symbols
I've been writing software for FreeBSD for well over 20 years now, and the time shows. The simplistic attitude we had in those days no longer suits modern times. A case in point: my modifications to moused. I wanted to run it under a debugger, but how do I generate executables with debugging symbols? Simple, it's the -g flag to gcc clang. But how do I set it? The canonical method is via CFLAGS. But that's created deep in the bowels of the Make system. OK, RTFM. But there's nothing there about creating debug executables. OK, UTSL. Nothing in /usr/src/Makefile about it, just this: # For individuals wanting to upgrade their sources (even if only a # delta of a few days): # # 1.
File name obscenities
For some time now I've been getting apparently benign error messages from my daily backup script, something about invalid parameters to if(1). That's an irritating issue, and not easy to debug. Since it also didn't seem to stop the backups, I didn't pay much attention. Finally I put some echo commands in the script to at least locate the if in question. They pointed to: for fs in $filesystem/*; do if [ ! -f $fs/dontdotar -a -d $fs ]; then ... What's wrong with that? On closer examination, (this time) it was only a single file system: Sun Jul 30 21:00:19 AEST 2017: Partial backup of /home/Book since 1-Jul-2017 gtar: Removing leading `/' from member names [: /src/New: unexpected operator Sun Jul 30 21:00:21 AEST 2017: Partial backup of /home/OLD-STUFF since 1-Jul-2017 ...
identify beats exiftool
Yesterday I established beyond reasonable doubt that exiftool produced results far faster than ImageMagick's identify. That still puzzled me, and I tried again today. No, this time identify ran rings round exiftool. Why the repeatable contrary yesterday? Dependent on the last bit of the day number? ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
GPS EXIF data surprises
Doing today's house photos brought another surprise during merging: Directory OlympusCs, entry 0x0101: Strip 0 is outside of the data area; ignored. Error: GPSInfo pointer references previously read (Last IFD item) directory. Ignored. Error: GPSInfo pointer references previously read (Last IFD item) directory. Ignored. Error: GPSInfo pointer references previously read (Last IFD item) directory. Ignored. Warning: Directory OlympusCs, entry 0x0101: Strip 0 is outside of the data area; ignored. Error: GPSInfo pointer references previously read (Last IFD item) directory. Ignored. There should be GPS no information in these images. Has the camera recalled earlier times?
Aligning images
My HDR investigations a couple of days ago ran into trouble because I really wanted to align the various images so that I could switch between them to show the difference, but align_image_stack didn't want to play because they're not all exactly the same size. I could use HuginI've even written a tutorial on the subjectbut it's relatively complicated. How about a script? First, of course, I need a way of recognizing the dimensions of an image. Then I go through all of them and find the maximum dimensions that they all have. But how? I can use ImageMagick's identify, or I can use exiftool.
More weather station pain
My weather station software is giving trouble again. Increasingly it's failing because it can't access the device: EIO, Input/output error. When I disconnect the device and reconnect it, it works again. It's hard to see how this one is my fault. Time to see if it happens on NetBSD as well. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Tranquilizing mouse
This M705 MARATHON mouse continues to get on my nerves with its reported multiple button presses. How can that happen? In any case, fought my way through the almost uncommented code of moused and added a maximum number of simultaneous button presses, currently defaulting to all of them. The -b flag then says how many can really be reported at any one time, If more are pressed, the whole event is ignored: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/7) /usr/src/usr.sbin/moused 164 -> /usr/src/usr.sbin/moused/moused -f -b 1 -m 2=4 -p /dev/ums0 -t auto -I /var/run/moused.ums0.pid moused: 8 buttons pressed, ignored moused: 4 buttons pressed, ignored moused: received char 0x7 moused: received char 0x0 moused: received char 0x8 moused: received char 0x0 moused: received char 0x0 moused: received char 0x0 moused: received char 0x7f moused: assembled full packet (len 8) 87,7,0,8,0,0,0,7f moused: ts: 1231855 545600743 moused: flags:80000000 ...
New switch
My new Netgear JGS516 switch arrived today. Put it in circuit with teevee in the expectation that it would solve the slow interface carrier detect problem. No. Whatever the problem is, it's not the switch in the pantry. So it came into my office, where it immediately got 9 connections (and thus justified replacing the 8 port switch), though some of them are currently not active. On the other hand, there are another 7 machines in my office that could potentially be connected (if I ever find the AUI connector and console cable for the Tandem LXN), so there's even the potential of needing more than 16 connections.
HDR photos: another example
The weather was dark and menacing when we went down to the house forest, just what we need as an example of HDR. Once again there are a number of options. Out of camera, HDR1, HDR2, 3 shot bracket, 5 shot bracket. Here's how they came out of the camera (or out of enfuse for the bracketed sequences): None of those look really good, but they're a starting point.
HDR software issues
My attempts at HDR comparisons yesterday have run into technical problems. To align the images, I first need to ensure that they're exactly the same sizeeven one pixel in either direction is too much for align_image_stack to digest: Images have different sizes. Normal-18mm-CW-3-3-0-1EV.jpeg has (3888x5184) pixel, while Normal-18mm-CW-3-3-0+1EV.jpeg has (3888x5186) pixel. This is not supported. Align_image_stack works only with images of the same size. So how do I ensure they're the same size? DxO Optics Pro is supposed to do that, but I've probably relaxed the requirement to improve image optimization. Never mind, ImageMagick's unambiguously named convert to the rescue: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/32) ~/Photos/20170725/C 212 -> convert -geometry 3888x5184 18mm-CW-3-3-0+1EV.jpeg foo === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/32) ~/Photos/20170725/C 213 -> exifx 18mm-CW-3-3-0+1EV.jpeg foo File 18mm-CW-3-3-0+1EV.jpeg Date taken: Tuesday, 25 July 2017, 12:28:49 Camera: ...
DHL tracking
I bought the tripod from B&H in New York, paying the high US shipping costs because the tripod itself was relatively cheap. It was shipped with DHL, who offered email notification of significant events. Watching the progress is interesting. On the positive side, DHL do a better job than most of displaying tracking information: Yes, it's upside-downyou can't expect that to go away in a hurryand the dates are specified without time zones, in this case significantly confusing the issue, but it's well laid out and legible.
Still more HDR investigation
I've been having a discussion about HDR imaging on the mu43 forum. I don't know why: the other people on the forum disagree with me completely, mainly without producing valid reasons for the disagreement. But there are a couple that may be valid, even if the reasons aren't presented. So: let's consider: How does automatic exposure work? I had claimed that it tries to preserve highlights as much as possible ( Expose to the right , a term which may not be appropriate).
Typesetting units
Andy Farkas came up on IRC today with an interesting quote from Wikipedia: Later Apollo missions used Nikon F 35mm cameras with a special f1.2 aperture 55m lens in order to take photographs in low light conditions... He thought that could do with improvement. So did I: f/1.2, not f1.2. But he was really looking at the focal length, and 55 m really did seem rather long. Clearly it should be 55 mm. Or should it? Andy thought 55mm . And that's a question that's been in the back of my head for a while.
New network hardware
There's another issue with teevee: slow NFS mounts, is gradually beginning to make sense: after configuring the network interface, it takes nearly 10 seconds before it comes up. During this time the system attempts NFS mounts and fails. And, as I noted, this happened on tiwi before it, a machine with completely different hardwarein the box. It still connected to the same switch in the pantry, which has given me other cause for concern. So high time for a new switch. I don't really understand switch pricing. I can buy a 5 port switch for as little as $8.73 including postage from Hong Kong, as long as I like white.
teevee progress
More playing around with my teevee issues today. The colour difference on xterms proved to have nothing to do with bash: I had forgotten the .Xdefaults file, and that fixed that. It also made the window manager menus more legible, but it didn't change the font sizes in firefox. And to add to the list, mail isn't being delivered: That's not overly serious, since I don't really need mail from this system, but I suppose I should fix it. ACM only downloads articles once.
DxO fisheye
My Olympus Zuiko Digital ED 8 mm f/3.5 fisheye lens suffers from considerable chromatic aberration, and DxO Optics Pro doesn't have a profile for it. As a result, the best correction I can get is this (from the image shown below): But thanks to its simplistic approach to recognizing lenses ( We don't need no steenking EXIF ), DxO thinks that it's a Panasonic Lumix G fisheye, because it has the same focal length and maximum aperture. And it keeps nagging me to download the module.
Scanning old negatives
As I go through my 1964 diary, I'm re-scanning the photos I took at the time. I had already scanned them with the ill-fated Canon 9900F scanner, but I can do better now. Or can I? After letting the Epson Perfection 4990 Photo spend hours scanning the negatives, I ended up with: What the hell went wrong there? One of the scanner parameters? But which one? The settings in the scanner program are: Which are useful?
Hugin stitch problems: solved
For the past couple of weeks I've been puzzling about why my first panoramas two weeks ago didn't stitch correctly. Today I finally found out why. cpfind was finding control points on the end of the panorama bracket: That makes sense, and it's something I had been concerned about some time ago. The real question is why it didn't cause a problem before.
The web meets Dereel
A while back, while looking for builders, I signed up with an online business search site that promised me three quotes within a ridiculously short space of time. The results were meagre at best: no online reply, though one person who contacted me may have come from them. But they keep spamming me with more offers for things I don't need: From: hipages <[email protected]> To: Greg <[email protected]> Subject: Here's Dereel's Gutter specialist X-Mailer: Create Send Message-ID: <[email protected]> Reply-To: [email protected] Guttering and downpipes need to work correctly to protect your home in winter.
teevee: current status
So we have teevee substantially working as intended. But there are still some rough edges that I need to attend to, and it's worth noting them. Some are trivial, others less so. xterm background is the wrong colour. I think this is a bash prompt issue. I fixed this on another machine some time ago, but I forget where. NFS mounts are slow on boot. This is a race condition: it tries to mount the file systems before the network interface is up, and has to retry a minute later.
teevee network issues
So it seems that most of the functions of teevee are working correctly. Today I moved the disk with the recordings from tiwi to teevee, so I no longer need to have it running. That also means that I no longer need the switch in the lounge room, so I disconnected it and plugged teevee directly into the wall socket. No carrier! After some messing around, discovered that it would only work with the switch. Why? At one point I thought it might be a crossover cable issue, but it was the same cable, and just to be sure I tried a couple of different cables.
MyNetFone escalation
For reasons that I don't understand, CJ Ellis has genuine issues with his VoIP connection with MyNetFone. I've been using them for years, and have had relatively few problems. But a couple of years ago CJ had a strange problem: incoming calls were diverted immediately to voice mail, and MyNetFone support claimedincorrectlythat the ATA wasn't registered. Outgoing calls worked normally. It took forever for them to fix it. Now CJ has a problem: incoming calls are diverted immediately to voice mail. Outgoing calls worked normally, but MyNetFone support claimsincorrectlythat the ATA wasn't registered. There's clearly something really strange in their configuration.
Hugin alignment issue
As planned yesterday, tried the instructions to solve the problem that I had earlier this month aligning panoramas. The issue was supposedly related to an incorrectly calculated focal length, and the instructions showed how to reset it. It didn't work. It recalculated the incorrect focal length, and the panorama still was a complete mess. Another thing to investigate more deeply. ACM only downloads articles once.
teevee: going live
So everything seems to be OK with teevee. Time to take it out of the office and connect it to the TV in the lounge room. I need to keep tiwi running along with teevee until I'm sure that everything is OK. That means new cables and stuff, of course. Where have all the power cables gone? Found some new ones, and even an additional power strip. That was the easy part. Next, Ethernet. Found my old 5 port Ethernet switch, but where did the power supply go? I was using it only a few months ago, until I gave up on TV.
Other mods for new teevee
Also addressed some other issues needed to get teevee to run in the TV environment. I'm starting a HOWTO page describing the modifications necessary. Today it was mainly how to ensure that X gets started automatically on boot: Log in automatically as grog. Modify /etc/ttys to contain: ttyv0 "/usr/libexec/getty autogrog" cons25 on secure /etc/gettytab gets: autogrog|al.9600:\ :al=grog:tc=std.9600: Ensure that ~/.bashrc contains: if [ "$HOSTNAME" = "teevee" -o "$HOSTNAME" = "tiwi" ]; then if [ "`tty`" = ...
teevee: done?
It seems that teevee is now as good as ready to run. The only issue was with the remote control. Reading my diary entry for 23 November 2006 was instructive: it seems that in lircrc, lirc assigns every button to a specific program. To avoid search issues, I had put a copy in ~/.lircrc, and it contained entries like: begin prog = mythtv button = down repeat = 1 config = Down end It's understandable that's not going to talk to mplayer.
Sound on teevee
Now I have X up and limping on teevee, the next step is to get sound working. First problem: which driver? Tried kldload snd_driver, which loaded something like 20 drivers, none of which probed anything. OK, unload, try loading each in sequence. Nothing. No matter what I did, I didn't get a probe result. What is the sound hardware, anyway? === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/2) ~ 4 -> pciconf -lv hdac1@pci0:0:20:2: class=0x040300 card=0xa1021458 chip=0x43831002 rev=0x00 hdr=0x00 vendor = 'Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]' device = 'SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA)' class = multimedia subclass = HDA ...
X configuration: solved?
Installing FreeBSD from DVD is pretty straightforward: I have a second root partition on teevee's disk, so I can just install to that and ignore the rest. But there's an even simpler way: copy the disk image from eureso, my one-step-ahead VM. That would also help identify whether my messing around with ports installations last week had an influence. Did that and restarted X. No difference: still only 1024x768. But then I saw, in the log files: NVRM: The NVIDIA GPU 01:00 (PCI ID: 10de:128b) installed NVRM: in this system is not supported by the 304.135 NVIDIA FreeBSD NVRM: graphics driver release.
Which OS?
As planned, downloaded the lasted FreeBSD ISO image today. And then Peter Jeremy asked why I didn't download PC-BSD. OK, that makes sense: it's specifically tailored to a desktop, and it is based on FreeBSD, so I don't have any painful adaptation. But where is it? http://pcbsd.org/download/ shows many links, all crossed out. You can still access them, but they're ancientthe latest one is based on FreeBSD 10.3 and was made in March 2016. Not a good sign. Then somebody pointed out that PC-BSD is an old, worn-out magic word, and it's now called TrueOS.
X pain, continued
So where do I go from here with my X configuration issues? Do Linux versions have the same problem with this hardware? There's an easy way to find that out: the biggest issue is to identify a disk on which to install a Linux release. Chose Ubuntu 17.04, which took its time installing, notably a period of several minutes after I agreed to install third party drivers (thinking, of course, of the nvidia driver). But it installed, and came up out of the box, sort of: Ubuntu is trying to be a better Microsoftthey even use the term folder and it seems that they come up with a different window manager interface every release.
DxO: We support your lens
Two months ago I discovered that DxO Optics Pro reports my Leica DG Vario-Elmarit 12-60 mm f/2.8-4 as a Zuiko Digital ED 12-60 mm f/2.8-4.0 SWD. Why? Same focal length range, same aperture range. It must be the same lens. Who cares that the EXIF lens type code is different? My ticket on the subject was closed without action (or, as they put it, solved ). My Olympus Zuiko Digital ED 8 mm f/3.5 fisheye lens is also not supported, as I noted most recently last month. Well, that was the case until today. Now I'm given the opportunity to download a correction modulefor a Panasonic LUMIX G Fisheye 8 mm f/3.5 (or, as they prefer to misspell it, 8mm / F3.5 , or even H-F008E).
X: 25 years of pain
Chris Bahlo brought me my new GeForce 710-based display card today, so finally I can make progress with the new teevee machine. Put it in and booted. No display. Neither from the onboard chipset, nor from the new card. Took it out again and looked at the BIOSUEFI settings. Set for display board first, on PCI. There were also settings for PEG and PEG1. Clearly this board is PCIe ( PEG ), but which slot is which? And why should it make a difference? The probe output showed that the board was recognized: Jul 15 14:48:57 teevee kernel: vgapci0: <VGA-compatible display> port 0xef00-0xef7f mem 0xfb000000-0xfbffffff,0xc8000000-0xcfffffff,0xd6000000-0xd7ffffff irq 16 at device 0.0 on pci1 Jul 15 14:48:57 teevee kernel: vgapci0: Boot video device Jul 15 14:48:57 teevee kernel: hdac0: <NVIDIA (0x0e0f) HDA Controller> mem 0xfcffc000-0xfcffffff irq 17 at device 0.1 on pci1 ...
teevee: NFS mount problems
Apart from my X problems, I've been having issues where teevee doesn't mount NFS file systems on startup. It's some kind of race condition: mount can't look up the remote system name that early on in the boot. I've worked around the issue by putting eureka into /etc/hosts, but I don't like the solution . ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Australia Post: yesterday, no Monday
The display card that I ordered on Wednesday was sent with a tracking information sent to my eBay email address, so yesterday I was informed that it arrived in black hole Sunshine West the same evening at 20:19, and that it should be delivered on Thursday. This information continued until late evening, long after any hope of delivery had expired. This morning, as expected, it had found its way to Wendouree in only 32 hours, and was available for collection at NAPOLEON CPA . Estimated date of arrival? Monday, 17 July: I never cease to be amazed.
ATA fail!
Petra Gietz has just changed her [IR]SP from Telstra to Aussie Broadband, and she's very happy, maybe too happy in view of her limited experience after the changeover, which, however, was seamless. One issue: what about VoIP? While we were talking about, I looked at my ATA and discovered that the power light was indicating rederror! What caused that? I couldn't communicate with the device. I had a vague recollection of a similar issue last year. That prompted me to buy a second ATA, though I was never quite sure whether the problem was with the ATA or the plug-in power supply.
Use NBN for high performance!
Somebody posted this anonymous image on IRC today: Clearly it carries a political message: up to 150,000 homes within a single week . Presumably that refers to the number of installations and not the number of destinations you can ping in that time, so I assume it comes from the National Broadband Network. But looking at the details is interesting. First, it's clear that this is a display from http://www.speedtest.net/, a company with a not quite unblemished record (it refuses to believe that I'm in Australia, for example).
eBay: Yet another bungle
Mail from eBay today: Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2017 23:55:54 -0700 (GMT-07:00) From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Subject: Nicht autorisierte Nutzung Ihres Kontos ??? dringender Handlungsbedarf es gibt Anlass zu der Befürchtung, dass Ihr eBay-Konto ohne Ihre Zustimmung zu betrügerischen Zwecken missbraucht wurde. Wir haben Ihr eBay-Passwort zurückgesetzt. Wenn Sie Ihr PayPal-Konto mit Ihrem eBay-Konto verknüpft hatten, haben wir diese Verknüpfung deaktiviert, um Ihr PayPal-Konto zu schützen. Alle nicht autorisierten Aktivitäten, wie das Kaufen und Verkaufen, haben wir storniert und etwaige Gebühren wurden Ihrem Konto gutgeschrieben. Unten finden Sie eine Liste aller Angebote, die von uns entfernt wurden.
Radeon driver: should I care?
I still haven't been able to get teevee to run with the X radeon driver. I'm torn between ignoring the problem and trying to find out what's wrong. In favour of the former course is that I really want a display with HDMI output, and the motherboard doesn't offer that. So after some consideration I ordered an ASUS card with the GeForce 710 (a page that I could only find by second-guessing the URL scheme on their terminally broken web site) and passive cooling. That'll set me back $57, much less than the pain with the radeon driver. But it didn't leave me any rest.
Mouse: caught in the act
Why is my M705 MARATHON mouse vomiting all the time? Started moused with debug mode, which is very verbose. By the time I the problem recurred, I had: -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 27,283,039 12 Jul 17:11 mouse-vomit.0 The output is less than inspiring. Normally there's lots of: moused: received char 0x83 moused: received char 0x0 moused: received char 0x0 moused: received char 0x0 moused: received char 0x0 moused: received char 0x0 moused: received char 0x0 moused: received char 0x7f moused: assembled full packet (len 8) 83,0,0,0,0,0,0,7f moused: ts: 1460099 492117118 moused: : 1460092 816280814 moused: flags:00000001 buttons:00000001 obuttons:00000000 moused: activity : buttons 0x00000001 dx 0 dy 0 dz 0 moused: mstate[0]->count:1 moused: button 1 count 1 moused: received char 0x87 ...
SIM cards: pint in a quart pot
The credit on my old mobile phone SIM card (0401 265 606) runs out on Wednesday. I don't like the numberI can't even remember it easilyand I have another that I do like and can remember (0438 490 494), so it's a no-brainer to put that in the phone instead. Well, not quite a no-brainer. The new card was in my iPhone, and had thus been trimmed to Nano-SIM format. My old Samsung GT-I9100T (Galaxy S2?) takes a larger Micro-SIM format; So how do I put it in?
Mouse: caught in the act
My new M705 MARATHON mouse still vomits over innocent windows from time to time. Today an Emacs caught it and reported: <triple-drag-mouse-9> is undefined <triple-drag-mouse-10> is undefined <triple-drag-mouse-11> is undefined <triple-drag-mouse-12> is undefined <triple-drag-mouse-13> is undefined <triple-drag-mouse-14> is undefined How did that happen? With the exception of button 9, those buttons don't even exist! And according to the manual, triple-drag means that the button has been pressed three times in rapid succession and then dragged. Is this an issue with moused, or is it really a problem with the mouse?
teevee progress
Finished my comparison of the configuration files for LIRC today. One unexpected configuration detail was the driver specification. The startup file is /usr/local/etc/rc.d/lircd, and it contains: name="lircd" load_rc_config ${name} : ${lircd_enable="NO"} : ${lircd_device="/dev/lirc0"} ... command_args="-d ${lircd_device} --driver=dvico ${lircd_config}" run_rc_command "$1" The first four lines describe what parameters to load from the real configuration file: whether to start it at all, and if so, which device to open. And the driver ? That's the --driver=dvico, and clearly it should be a parameter. But it isn't. At the very least I need to update the startup scripts.
teevee: next step
I've been busy with other things lately, so configuring teevee, my new TV computer, has taken a back seat. I've given up trying to configure X with native resolution, and the next task (maybe the last) is to configure LIRC. Things didn't start well: I've mislaid the second USB receiver that I had planned to use, so I had to remove the one from tiwi. And, as half expected, nothing happened. Starting lircd was straightforward enough, and it recognized when the mplayer process started: === root@teevee (/dev/pts/6) /home/grog 6 -> /usr/local/sbin/lircd -n --driver=dvico --device=/dev/uhid0 lircd: lircd(dvico) ready, using /var/run/lirc/lircd lircd: accepted new client on /var/run/lirc/lircd lircd: initializing '/dev/uhid0' lircd: removed client lircd: closing '/dev/uhid0' mplayer said: MPlayer SVN-r37862-snapshot-3.4.1 (C) 2000-2016 MPlayer Team mplayer: could not open ...
Hugin detect failure
House photo day today, and a miserable start it was. It wasn't until I got inside that I discovered that light drizzle had marred many of the photos: Still, part of the point of taking this series is to show the garden in different weather situations, so I started to stitch it. But things didn't turn out the way I expected. This panorama preview should show something like the final panorama: What went wrong there?
eBay: Pay! Pay! Pay! Pay!
So I've decided not to sell anything on eBay again until people can convince me that they have their act together. So what happened over the last couple of days? No fewer than four inoices! 1848 N + 05-07-2017 DoNotReply_Billing@e To groggyhimself@le ( 20) N + Your eBay invoice for June is now ready to view 1850 N + 05-07-2017 DoNotReply_Billing@e To groggyhimself@le ( 20) N + Your eBay invoice for June is now ready to view 2095 N + 07-07-2017 eBay To groggyhimself@le ( 220) N + Your July 1, 2017 invoice is ready for download 2096 N + 07-07-2017 eBay To groggyhimself@le ( 220) N + Your July 1, 2017 invoice is ready for download Do they include it in the email?
GPS tracking with OI.Share
More playing around with OI.Share today to try to understand GPS logging. In fact, it's not difficult. All you need is documentation. I still don't have that, but I'm working on it. In the meantime, it seems that the app (or the phone) maintains a location log, and at some later point you can connect the camera and get it to update the EXIF information of the photos in the camera. That's how I managed this photo, for example: The image information (run mouse over the image) shows the coordinates, and the larger ( small ) image includes the link: Display location on map.
New Hugin
The newest version of Hugin, 2017.0, has been released. For once it was relatively trivial to update the port, and all seems to work. Hopefully it'll stay that way. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
More mouse fun
Mail from Daniel Nebdal about my mouse fun: the Logitech receivers are designed for both keyboards and mice, so there's no extra hardware cost involved in adding keyboard functions to mice. That makes sense. Still, I now have three mice, two of which have side buttons that don't work with X, at least not without some unspecified configuration. But I have a Microsoft laptop too, euroa, and the mouse I was using for that is a Logitech m705 (as it was called in the days before they grew up to be M705 MARATHONs). So why not try the J.Burrow comfort vole?
Mobile phone battery: wrong again
Last week I had ordered a replacement battery for Petra, and she came along again today with her phone. Six months ago I had managed to buy the wrong battery model, so this time I had been particularly careful, but it still made sense to check that it's the right battery before opening it. Again! How the hell did I manage that? It certainly doesn't help that Samsung has two different names for each model: the marketing name ( Samsung Galaxy 2 à ) and the name on the phone itself (GT-I9200T): Once again, it might fit, but this time I think I owe it to Petra to get the right battery.
NBN ready phones
I'm vaguely on the lookout for new cordless phones: the ones I have are getting a little flaky, and the one that is supposed to support Bluetooth is effectively useless because I can't adjust the volume. So while at JB HiFi and Officeworks I also looked at phones, without finding anything exciting. Except, maybe, the claims at Officeworks: NBN ready . What is there about a cordless phone that is NBN ready? I was going to ask, but forgot. I'll have to do so next time. ACM only downloads articles once.
More mouse fun
At Officeworks I found a mouse that I hadn't noticed before, because nothing in the description suggested that it had more than two real buttons (not counting the scroll wheel). But for $19 I bought a J.Burrows Wireless Comfort Mouse Black (is this a mouse or a vole?) , with the description: The J.Burrows Wireless Comfort Mouse is designed to make you more comfortable when using the computer. The shape of the mouse fits naturally in your hand to reduce the risk of injury and the design gives you greater control over your browsing with integrated buttons.
GPS tagging Olympus photos
On the way home, there were a number of photos that could have done with GPS tagging: the road works and the wildflowers. But how do I do that? Tried pairing with my mobile phone, which worked well in absence of other networks. And then? OI.Share has an Add Geotag function, but how do you use it? Selected it and was told that this will take a long time , but after about 30 seconds it seemed to be happy. Clearly that can't have anything to do with the photos I'm about to take, and I can't take them with the camera until I disconnect from the phone.
Shopping in Ballarat
Into Ballarat this morning for various things. First to Dorevitch for a blood test, which was something of a record: 4½ minutes from entering the facility to leaving it again. In other places I can wait up to an hour. Then dropped in to JB HiFi to look for mice, of which they had very few. While I was there, also looked for stereo amplifiers, which weren't much different from what they have on their web site. But I found out why: Stereo is an old, worn-out magic word: nowadays it's called 5.1 , and the amplifiers are, if anything, less expensive: Still, more than I want to pay, especially since the user interface to most modern amplifiers is less than easy to use.
X config insights
I really don't want to untangle the can of worms that is the X radeon driver, but I feel I should. The first question: according to the documentation, the driver should be installed automatically. Clearly the documentation is insufficient, but is there more? It proves that the X port is a metaport: it just ensures that numerous subports (some of them themselves metaports) are installed. From /usr/ports/x11/xorg/Makefile (almost all of it): RUN_DEPENDS+= xorg-apps>0:x11/xorg-apps \ xorg-libraries>0:x11/xorg-libraries \ xorg-fonts>0:x11-fonts/xorg-fonts \ xorg-drivers>0:x11-drivers/xorg-drivers OK, clearly I need xorg-drivers.
Google location services, revisited
While I was trying to find out why Officeworks thought I was in Traralgon, I received a strange popup: Edit work address . Why work address? What does that have to do with work? Checking showed that it thought I was in Ballarat, in fact not far from where Google Location Services put me the week before last. Could that be part of the problem? In any case, for the first time I've found a way to tell the system where I am (something that I ranted about, and others didn't understand, last time).
ANZ security
We recently received new ATM cards, complete with an almost non-removable sticker saying that they first needed to be activated. I could do that online, so I braved the ANZ web site and did so for mine. Then it offered me the option of activating Yvonne's card too. OK, did that. All over and done with. Except that the card didn't work. It seems that their validation is broken. OK, try again. But this time I got the message: We are unable to activate your card online To activate an ANZ Credit Card or ANZ Everyday Visa Debit Card, please call 1800 652 033.
X on teevee, continued
So the motherboard graphics on the new teevee is an "RS880 [Radeon HD 4200]", so presumably I can use an ATI driver to run it at natural resolution. Where do I start? Yesterday I established that there's no obvious counterpart to x11/nvidia-driver, so off to read the manual. Yes, they're supported. The difference between the two is worth mentioning: AMD® Radeon 2D and 3D acceleration is supported on Radeon cards up to and including the HD6000 series. Driver name: radeon NVIDIA Several NVIDIA drivers are available in the x11 category of the Ports Collection.
Mouse pain
Yvonne and I have been using cheap wireless mice for the last three years, but it seems that they're gradually passing their use-by dates. Mine has taken to producing spurious clicks, resulting (usually) in copying of unintended text to the cut buffer. Today Yvonne's started producing button 9 events when any button was clicked. Time for replacements. But what? OfficeWorks has a large selectionI bought these mice therebut an absolutely appalling web site. After checking my location with Google Location Services, which thinks I'm in Ballarat (another story), it decided that I'm in Traralgon, 300 km away. More to the point, though, there is no information about the mice, just photos, prices and random other details: JB HiFi is just as bad.
Blast from the past
While upgrading the ports on teevee, I saw: pilot-link: 0.12.5_2,1 -> 0.12.5_3,1 That's doubly amazing. First, Pilot link is a program for communicating with Palm Pilots, and I haven't used one of them for decades (the last reference was 5 September 2001, nearly 16 years ago). So this port has been slipping by with every upgrade since then. The other thing is: why has there been an upgrade? Do people still use this stuff? No, it highlights one of the biggest issues with modern software, shared libraries: r444463 | sunpoet | 2017-06-27 23:46:53 +1000 (Tue, 27 Jun 2017) | 11 lines Update devel/readline to 7.0 patch 3 - Bump PORTREVISION for shlib change Changes: https://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/php/chet/readline/CHANGES https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2016-09/msg00107.html https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-readline/2017-01/msg00002.html Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D11172 PR: 219947 Exp-run by: antoine ...
Half-hearted system configuration
Did very little work towards configuring teevee today. Tried to build a new world and kernel, but it died with obscure error messages. It wasn't until I was looking for something else that I found this in /var/log/messages: Jul 2 13:34:06 teevee kernel: pid 2986 (c++), uid 0, was killed: out of swap space Jul 2 13:41:08 teevee kernel: pid 2975 (c++), uid 0, was killed: out of swap space And that wasn't surprising: I didn't have an entry for swap in /etc/fstab. And X? Am I really limited to the VESA drivers?
Towards a new teevee
Yesterday's issues with old TV series made one thing more important: bring tiwi, my TV computer, up to date. For reasons that I don't understand, the sound of some YouTube videos isn't reproduced correctly when I download the videos. Yes, I could try to find the cause and fix it, but it's an old, slow machine, the currently installed system is well over a year old: FreeBSD tiwi.lemis.com 10.2-STABLE FreeBSD 10.2-STABLE #0 r290972: Thu Feb 4 14:13:56 AEDT 2016 [email protected]:/usr/obj/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/10/sys/GENERIC amd64 In these modern times, that's bad: it's too old for the Ports Collection.
Newtonian mechanics?
Yvonne has surprised me by taking a liking to the The Big Bang Theory TV series, apparently because the character Sheldon Cooper reminds her of me. I don't know whether I should be flattered. Yesterday we watched a series in which Sheldon tries to explain physics to Penny, the straight girl. In fact, it was Newtonian Mechanics. And clearly Sheldon didn't explain it in a way that a non-techie would understand. But that left me wondering. Clearly I understand Newtonian mechanics well, but what are the laws? How are they stated? The only one I could remember was For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction .
Public key expired
Message from Peter Jeremy to a FreeBSD mailing list today, which my MUA flagged: gpg: Note: This key has expired! Primary key fingerprint: D8CE A5F2 F7C8 78E0 0297 8B94 1D92 14A2 699F 8CB2 Subkey fingerprint: EEB2 986C 3067 1E74 E65C 227E 16A5 97A0 E4A2 0B34 OK, I can tell him on IRC, so I did. But it seems that he had renewed it. Why didn't I find that? It seems that simply adding a key to a keyring isn't enough: you need to keep it up to date: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/14) ~ 5 -> gpg --refresh-keys (much detailed output) gpg: key F00FB887: "Peter Jeremy <[email protected]>" 1 new user ID gpg: key F00FB887: "Peter Jeremy <[email protected]>" 8 new signatures gpg: key 699F8CB2: "Peter Jeremy (preferred) ...
Disk upgrade done
My mammoth disk data copy finally finished this morning at 10:10, after 19 hours, 40 minutes: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/7) ~ 48 -> df -i /Photos/ /Newphotos/ Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on /dev/ada3p1 3,814,382 3,773,827 2,411 100% 1,186,781 994,209 54% /Photos /dev/ada2p1 7,629,565 3,786,672 3,766,596 50% 1,186,237 2,057,409 37% /Newphotos That's an average speed of about 53 MB/s, less than I expected: I had seen rates sustained over several seconds of up to 140 MB/s, but then slower rates too.
Integrating the new disk
What should the new disk look like? That's obvious, at least to me: like the old one, but twice the size. Back through my old diary entries to see how I've handled that 3½ years ago, when I replaced a 2 TB disk with the current 4 TB disk. First I need to blow away the old MBR partition table and create a GPT table. But that didn't work: it couldn't find anything to destroy. It seems that this disk, not being a consumer product, had nothing on it at all, so all I needed to do was to create the GPT table.
New disk at last
High time to finally install the new photo disk in eureka: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/7) ~ 46 -> df /Photos/ Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/ada3p1 3,814,382 3,773,827 2,411 100% /Photos Shutting down the system took a whilea number of processes didn't top of their own free willbut at the end I got the comforting All buffers synced , and the system turned off, after almost exactly 90 days. It was a sight to see: I suppose it makes sense to modify machines from time to ...
More location strangenesses
Yesterday's map of my location seemed straightforward enough, apart from the four yellow stars representing various previous attempts on the part of Google Maps to guess my location (the red pin is the correct location): But of course I can copy the URL of the location from the URL bar: https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/37%C2%B048'00.6%22S%2b143%C2%B045'04.4%22E/@-37.8001667,143.7490282,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x0!8m2!3d-37.8001667!4d143.7512222. And sure enough, that gives me the same page, slightly offset: But what's that address?
Time for the new disk
While processing my house photos today, ran into an unexpected error: /Photos: write failed, filesystem is full Yes, the disk is nearly full, but there were still about 5 GB left250 times the capacity of my first ST-225 disk 30 years ago. It seems that my conversion scripts are putting the temporary files on /Photos instead of /photowork (an SSD). Time to fix that. In the meantime, removed some junk and gained another 10 GB, enough for the while. ACM only downloads articles once.
Copying photos in the Modern age
Doing my comparisons required getting them off the camera, of course. For the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II, that's simple. Or is it? The methods provided by the camera manufacturer and are so complicated that I've had to write my own script to read them in. Still, even without that it wouldn't be that difficult. Connect the camera to computer, by USB cable because the app is so appalling, specify the path name of the files, and copy them. This is roughly what I had to do with the AMPS-214: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/60) ~ 103 -> mount -t msdos /dev/da4 /mnt === root@eureka (/dev/pts/60) ~ 105 -> cd /mnt/Photos/ === root@eureka (/dev/pts/60) /mnt/Photos 107 -> cp -p IMG0000* ~grog/Photos/20170616 === root@eureka (/dev/pts/60) /mnt/Photos 108 -> cd === root@eureka (/dev/pts/60) ~ 109 -> umount /mnt Total ...
New thermometer
My new infrared thermometer arrived today. The specs are identical with the old one, but it's much fasterand it consistently shows 1° higher than the old one for most surfaces. But in the deep freeze, for example, it shows up to 10° lower. Which is right? Maybe both of them? To be investigated. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
More AMPS-214 investigations
I took some comparison photos with Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II, Samsung I-9100 and the ONIX AMPS-214 yesterday evening, but they weren't very comparable, so I tried again today. I did a first summary in yesterday's article, but there's more. Clearly the dynamic range of the AMPS-214 phone is severely limited. But it does offer exposure compensation. Tried a compensation of 2 EV either way, with results more surprising than useful. Here the same scene taken with + 2EV, no compensation, and -2 EV Somehow both are offset very much towards dark .
Worst ever phone camera
Yvonne went shopping yesterday. She had mentioned that there were other sprouts available than bean sprouts, so I suggested she took a photo with her phone camera. That was the easy part. How do I get the photos out of the phone? The phone in question is an ONIX AMPS-214, as it calls itself internally. It's not exactly a smart phone: in fact, that's why we bought it. The fact that it had a camera was completely irrelevant: it had a keyboard. Today was the first time we used the camera, and it took some difficulty to find out how to get the images off the phone.
Worst ever phone camera
Yvonne went shopping yesterday. She had mentioned that there were other sprouts available than bean sprouts, so I suggested she took a photo with her phone camera. That was the easy part. How do I get the photos out of the phone? The phone in question is an ONIX AMPS-214, as it calls itself internally. It's not exactly a smart phone: in fact, that's why we bought it. The fact that it had a camera was completely irrelevant: it had a keyboard. Today was the first time we used the camera, and it took some difficulty to find out how to get the images off the phone.
Buying beer online
One of the more interesting things about the web is that it can help me track special offers from retailers. I've been keeping an eye on Dan Murphy's web site for a while, and the price differences for beer can be over 30%. Currently I'm running low on beer, and Dan Murphy is running high on prices. How about an alternative? That's not hard to find: BWS. Took a look, and they had Becks Beer on special for $50 a slab, instead of a more usual $65. OK, I can take that. Just sign up and buy it. After half an hour, I gave up.
System vs. machine, continued
For some reason Andy Farkas was not happy with Tuesday's musings over the words machine and systems . Reading between the lines, he expects a machine to contain lots of moving parts, something that the original word never implied. From OED again, the original definition (first attested in 1545) was: A structure regarded as functioning as an independent body, without mechanical involvement. A non-mechenical machine reminds me of an animal without a soul (Latin animum), but who cares? For some reason Andy didn't like my quotations, and came up with his own, from the 1978 book digital DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS HANDBOOK : This book was written and edited on DIGITAL Word Processing Systems (WPS) ...
DxO responds
I had more or less given up getting any serious support from DxO, but today I got a response: The crash seems related to a communication issue between dopcor.exe (in charge of image processing) and OpticsPro. It may be that an anti-virus software or a firewall application is blocking or slowing down the communication between those 2 apps, leading to an error. Can you please try disabling any of these (or adding exceptions for OpticsPro.exe and DopCor.exe) ? If such a software is not a possible track,, we would like to get a HijackThis report to investigate further.
Language creep
Seen on IRC today: * andyf has a difficulty with groggyhimself describing computer "systems" as machines Why? The OED doesn't have any difficulty. From machne, n. IV. 6: c. Used contextually for the particular kind of machine which the speaker or writer intends, as: a sewing machine; a printing machine or mechanical printing press; a shearing-machine (Austral.
More Samba fun
Why can't I mount network shares with the new version of Samba? Everything seems right. OK, back to take a look. I couldn't mount \\eureso\eurekahome (/home from eureso's point of view) on euroa (Microsoft Windows 7). It just hung, Cancel and scratch head. No, first look at the list of shares: It's there (drive Z:). Why was it hanging? I'll never understand Microsoft. OK, next Windows 10.
Touching up old photos
My thoughts about John Terpstra made me consider when we last saw each other. That was 13 years ago, shortly before he emigrated to the USA. But the last photos I had were at the AUUG annual conference in 2 September 2002, nearly 15 years ago: That's John at the end of the table. The other people should be recognizable. It's not much of a photo. It was taken with a Canon Ixus v, and to get it that good I had to play around a bit with my photo enhancing software.
eureso: (only) one step forward
While testing eureso, made one positive discovery: rdesktop now works with Microsoft Windows 10. Now if only the rest would be as easy. So why haven't I got Samba working on eureso yet? Partly it's distaste, mixed with difficulty understanding Microsoft networking. The documentation I'm using is chapter 25 of The Complete FreeBSD , because it contains exactly what I need. But that's over 14 years old, and Samba has changed since then. OK, what about the FreeBSD Handbook? That's more up to date, but some of the content makes assumptions about how Samba is installed, and they don't seem to match.
Hugin 2017 again
What caused my Hugin to crash yesterday? The missing GLX version suggests a library problem. And I have a machine that runs correctly. so the obvious thing to do is to compare what happens. First with ktrace. Surprise, surprise! No mention of GLX anywhere. OK, has nobody else had this problem? Yes, many, and it seems to be an X issue. That shouldn't be surprising: I missed a line in the vomit that is the output of any Hugin run: Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0". That wasn't surprising once I checked what GLX is.
eureso: Unexpected problems
Today I was supposed to be testing Samba on eureso, but things turned out differently. Yesterday I built the latest version of Hugin, so I had to test it. Not on eureka, of course: I need a functional version there. So I tried it on eureso. The results weren't quite what I expected. As usual, got lots of junk on the screen. Most is the stuff that goes into a modern equivalent of /dev/null when programs are started from a window manager. In my experience, GNOME-based is particularly noisy in this respect. (hugin:41729): Gtk-CRITICAL **: IA__gtk_widget_set_size_request: assertion 'height >= -1' failed (hugin:41729): Gtk-CRITICAL **: IA__gtk_widget_set_size_request: assertion 'height >= -1' failed Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0".
Copying files in the modern age
One of the most primitive operations in computing is copying files. It's understandable that there should be more general protocols for networks, and in fact one of the first services on the ARPANET was the file transfer protocol, FTP, first defined on 16 April 1971 in RFC 114. With that you can copy anything anywhere, assuming that you have permission. But that's too simple. Or maybe too clunky: in a local network, the people at Berkeley decided they wanted something with semantics more like the Unix cp command. and 4.2BSD introduced rcp. But that should have been enough for anybody, right?
eureso: next day
Today I should have been setting up Samba on eureso, but I couldn't bear the thought of yet more Microsoft, so I tried out X instead. Surprise, surprise: it Just Worked. About the only issue was that Virtualbox wants to capture the mouse cursor, something that scared me in the past: once captured, you can't leave the Vbox window until you release it again with R-ctrl, something not marked on my keyboard (it's a f symbol instead). But once I crossed that hurdle, all was plain sailing. ACM only downloads articles once.
New Hugin
Hugin 2017.0.0 rc1 is available. Time to build it. In the past I've had issues with a dependency on autopano_sift_c, apparently a question of the naming: for reasons I don't understand, the port was given the name autopano-sift-C, and it appeared to conflict with autopano-sift-c elsewhere. Still, there's a simple solution: it's obsolete, so just remove the dependency altogether. All went well until installation. And then I ran into the issue that the pkg-plist didn't match reality. How do I build a new pkg-plist? In the past I did it manually, but surely there must be a way to do it.
Bloody eBay again!
After my extreme annoyance with eBay last month, I made a decision never to sell anything on eBay again, so there was no reason to add payment arrangements after changing the account to to AUD. Maybe not for me. But eBay found a way. In my mail this morning: Date: Fri, 9 Jun 2017 17:16:22 +0200 From: eBay Global Collections <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: FRIENDLY REMINDER: PAYMENT AND UPDATED INFO NEEDED DON???T LOSE YOUR ABILITY TO BUY, SELL AND EARN $ ON EBAY Please pay your eBay Seller fees Your eBay Seller Fees of AUD 7.40 on your auctions account are due by your invoice due date.
New eureka, at a snail's pace
I'm still dragging my heels about upgrading eureka, but the clock is ticking: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/32) ~ 11 -> df /Photos Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/ada2p1 3,814,382 3,761,397 14,841 100% /Photos How about just sucking it and see? No, bad idea. Let's get the individual subsystems working properly on eureso first. Today I did the web server, which proved to be more of an issue than I expected. For reasons that don't make very much sense, FreeBSD's Apache port puts the root of the web tree in /usr/local/www, which is on the root file system in my scheme of things.
DxO: We don't care about EXIF
It's been a month since I entered a relatively straightforward bug report against DxO Optics Pro : the program ignores Makernotes information in the EXIF data and identifies my Leica DG Vario-Elmarit 12-60 mm f/2.8-4 as Zuiko Digital ED 12-60 mm f/2.8-4.0 SWD, apparently because the focal length and aperture ranges are the same. The progress of this ticket has shown DxO from their very worst side: incompetent support personnel, incorrect diagnosis , lack of escalation procedures, and finally a response from development that completely ignores the issue: Our development team stated that since your equipment is not supported, there is nothing we can do for you at the moment.
Camera suppliers revisited
I've been quite impressed with the pricing efficiency of eGlobal, but they're not the only game in town. Another one that I hadn't investigated is DWI. Went looking today: they offer the M.Zuiko Digital ED 8mm f/1.8 Fisheye PRO for $920, while eGlobal wants $899. It wasn't until I mentioned this on the M43 Australia group that somebody pointed out that eGlobal always charge $19 (at least) shipping per item, while DWI includes it in the price. That still makes them $2 more expensive, but it doesn't have to stay that way. And it's good to have a choice. ACM only downloads articles once.
Devsummit, 16 years later
BSDCan is currently running in Ottawa, for the 14th time. Ollivier Robert and others posted photos of the developer session ( Devsummit ). It's been 11 years since I participated in any conference, coincidentally BSDCan. The very first devsummit wasn't at a BSD conference at all, but at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference in June 2001. I took similar photos of individuals then, with the images conveniently named after the nicks of the Times have changed, of course, and the image quality has improved enormously. But what gets me is that, after 16 years, I can recognize a majority of the players in the 2001 Dev Summit (as I spelt it at the time).
Preparing the next eureka
Another day half-heartedly configuring the next eureka. Originally I had intended to switch over today, but there's no pressure, and I would really like to be able to get it right so that future upgrades go smoothly. But then I've been saying that for over 15 years. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
No Optus
Callum Gibson is considering connecting to the Australian National Broadband Network. His current supplier of all things telecommunications is Optus, so he went looking for their offerings. What he found was not very informative: The fastest connection mentioned there was 25 Mb/s. What about the upstream speed? What about the NBN 50 Mb/s and 100 Mb/s speeds? They must be on a different page. If they are, they've done a good job hiding them. This really seems to be the only information they provide you.
eBay: 20 years, and still not there
I've had plenty of reason to complain about eBay recently, but they're delivering even more. Wikipedia tells me that they were founded on 21 September 1995, but apart from my personal gripes, I continually find indications that they don't have their act together. One thing they do do well in my experience: if you have an issue with an item you purchased, they usually solve it pretty quickly. Yesterday I finally gave up negotiating with the seller of the toy copy stand that I received last month (he wanted to give a discount, but not a refund), and asked eBay to step in.
Ashampoo backup: really broken?
Revisiting Ashampoo backup while writing yesterday's diary, it seemed strange that it should really have been that excruciatingly slow. So I tried again from the downloaded image. It uses the Microsoft install framework, and sure enough, it popped up immediately. But after selecting Install , it took 2½ minutes before anything happened. Installation took a normal enough time (about 30 seconds). Then I pressed Finish and got this window: As the appearances suggest, it wasn't ready for interaction yet. Kept an eye on it for a while.
Alternatives to Microsoft backup
Microsoft isn't the only company to supply backup software. Ashampoo, a manufacturer of ad-ware, keeps reminding me that they, too, have a backup, most recently this morning. OK, we can give it a try. The usual Microsoft installation, and then... nothing. No evidence that it had been installed at all. Tried again. This time it installed, at a snail's pace. And when I tried to run, it kept me waiting for minutes between displaying a window and accepting input. After about 5 minutes I gave up and removed it. I can't imagine that this is typical, but it certainly makes it less interesting, especially since they want money for it.
Debugging, Microsoft style
Unexpected error message on dischord today: OK, I now know about eventvwr, so off to look for the logs. I couldn't find them. Wouldn't it be nice if they had included a path name? Off to ask Google instead, and came up with this page. It's fascinating for a number of reasons: it's from Microsoft, it only shows part of the exchange, requiring another click to complete the view.
eureka upgrade
I've been running a virtual machine eureso.lemis.com for some time now, with the intention of making it the next eureka. Now I have received a new 8 TB disk for my photos, so I need to shut down the machine to install it. Time to upgrade? What do I need to do? At the very least update the /etc hierarchy and move everything to the alternative boot partition. Boot partition? With MBR partitioning I had two partitions, typically /dev/ad0s1a and /dev/ad0s1e, and I set the boot loader to choose one or the other. But how does that work with GPT partitioning?
Trump trumped by smart phone
Nobody can say that I have admiration or sympathy for Donald Trump. Until today. Unlike me, he uses smart phones to send his innumerable Tweets. But like me, it seems, he has difficulty with the appalling user interface. I'm still wondering how his keyboard managed to produce covfefe, but clearly it was an enemy act. ACM only downloads articles once.
Tidying up Microsoft disks
CJ Ellis round this afternoon for the first time in ten months. He had more problems with his computer, but this time he had taken my advice and left the computer at home after starting TeamViewer. And of course the computer had gone to sleep. CJ back home, gave his computer the boot, and I took a look. Disk full to the gunwhales. OK, there's some program somewhere, isn't there? Found it in multiple places in a now-you-see-me, now-you-don't manner. The most reliable seems to be Control Panel Administrative Tools Free up disk space. It went off searching, came back and told me that it could recover a whopping 70 MB, asked for an admin password, and then started off all over again.
Ports upgrade pain, yet again
I'm preparing to upgrade eureka by way of eureso. Part of the process is to keep eureso up to date with the latest version of FreeBSD, currently 11.1-PRERELEASE, and upgrading ports. Keeping the base system up to date is straightforward, but we're still not there with ports. The last upgrade was two weeks ago, and I saw: The following 87 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked): New packages to be INSTALLED: ... Installed packages to be UPGRADED: ... The process will require 27 MiB more space. 838 MiB to be downloaded.
Documenting shopping centres
Finding our way around the shopping centre in Melton got me wondering: why did we have to ask the bloke at the shoe repair stand where Woolworths was? Every shopping centre I know has one, and it should be by the entrance. And how about that, there is one there: To get a photo that good, I had to hold my phone up above my head and point down; otherwise the reflections made it unreadable, and that's probably why I missed it. Clearly a modern setup, with touch screen requiring a secret handshake.
Shopping in Melton
Today was shopping day, and just round the corner from where we inspected the lounge room furniture is a big shopping centre. It's not easy to find out the name, nor even the entrancebig Woolworths and ALDI signs are visible from a distance, but when you get closer, you discover that there's no entrance there. Here courtesy of Google Maps: We had to look at where the cars were parked to decide that the entrance was to the west. But where are the shops?
More computer history
I've started looking at a course on HTML programming. One of the exercises was to go to http://www.archive.org/ and check for the earliest occurrence of www.google.com. Answer: 11 November 1998. That seems late, but then, I didn't find out about Google for some time after starting to use the web. When was lemis.com first crawled? 26 May 1998, nearly 6 months before Google. And I also found an old version of my home page. That in itself isn't special: it was dated 7 February 1998, and RCS logs tell me that this was revision 1.6: revision 1.6 date: 1998/02/07 04:29:32; author: grog; state: Exp; lines: +51 -26 Updated PGP key, removed references to move.
Refining event logs
More DxO Optics Pro crashes today. More event logs. How can I limit them? Played around a bit and found: After right clicking on Applications , instead of Save all events , select Create Custom View . Set the Logged entry to Last hour (the minimum; I have no idea how DxO expects you to select 10 minutes either way), and leave everything else at defaults: Press OK and give the view a name: ...
Image stabilization results: still no conclusion
I still haven't finished yesterday's image stabilization comparisons. First I need to establish which were taken with which kind of image stabilization. A look at the EXIF data shows: Image Stabilization : On, Mode 1 Image Stabilization : On, Mode 4 It seems that Mode 1 is lens stabilization (why?) , and Mode 4 is in-body stabilization (IBIS). So I hacked my EXIF display function and checked. Yes, nice. But that was for photos taken with the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II and other OM-D photos.
Windows 10 revisited
despair runs Microsoft Windows 10, one of the reasons it has been powered down so long. I had forgotten the pain, not all of which is Microsoft's fault. I still can't use Samba because of changes in the protocolsomething that I will try again when I upgrade eureka, probably this weekand rdesktop still doesn't work, though now it hangs rather than crashes. And once again I'm left marvelling at the way Microsoft keeps changing its user interface. At the very least it's an admission that the old one was suboptimal. Other things suggest that even the latest version of Windows 10 is surprisingly buggy.
despair: no hope?
I still have a license for DxO Optics Pro version 10, and so I could install it on further machines. But where do I find the installation file? I'm running version 11 on my current machines, and that's all I can find on the web, or on my machines. But then there's despair, my Microsoft Windows 10 box, which I haven't used for months. What's on the disk? Turned it on, and the fan went wild. No other reaction, and it stayed that way. Funny. It worked last time I used it. Tried removing all non-essential components, including disk, half the memory (added later) and all connections to the outside world.
More DxO failure
Chris Bahlo has a free copy of DxO Optics Pro version 9, and she told me that it just says error when she tries to use it. Clearly a user error, not made more difficult by the user interface. So I suggested she came along and we looked at it. She came this afternoon, and we looked. It just says error when you try to use it. It had worked in the past, but then she removed some software that (she thought) wasn't needed, so that seems a likely culprit. In this case, maybe reinstall really would be the best choice, but it seems that she's being subject to an involuntary upgrade to Windows 10 next week, so we'll put it off to that.
More DxO breakage
It's been nearly 3 weeks since I reported a problem in DxO Optics Pro (ticket 118199): the conversion program DopCor.exe crashes at random. The quality of the responses I have received so far have exceeded my worst expectations. Firstly I was asked to reinstall the packagesomething that doesn't match the random nature of the problem. And to make matters worse, they required that I do it with Microsoft Internet Explorer . Why? Because it's more reliable. Comparison of the MD5 checksum didn't convince them. Finally, after a week, I was given instructions on how to supply information to them. So I waited for the next occurrence of the bug, which had clearly been scared away by the instructions.
Upgrading Olympus firmware
I've ranted frequently in the past about the appalling method that Olympus use to update camera and lens firmware. You must have a computer with a pre-installed operating system , also either Microsoft or Apple. And you need to have the camera powered on during the entire download operation. And the update program is flaky to the point of unusability. That's probably the background to their requirement of a pre-installed operating system : that's what they tested it with, and it has enough bugs that there's no way to be sure that it will work in the general case. But why write a program at all?
Online education again
I've pretty much stopped doing online courses, but recently I found a couple that looked interesting: Introduction to Music Theory, something that I did half a century ago, but which might do with refreshing. But the course! It seems to be aimed at the John Lennons of the 21st century, people who enjoy pop music but don't know anything about the background. It was completely unscientific, and it turned me off completely. Still, that's only one course. Then there's the succinctly titled Science & Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science (part 2) (I didn't find out where part 1 went).
Understanding modern disks
My photo disk is filling up again: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/49) ~ 68 -> df -i /Photos Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on /dev/ada2p1 3,814,382 3,730,286 45,952 99% 1,175,738 1,005,252 54% /Photos Time for a new disk, at least 8 TB . But what? The backup disks I have are SMR, terrible on writes. But what I see offered are surveillance disks and NAS disks. I don't have a NAS system, though my NFS accessibility makes it look like that.
eBay failure 1
I'm a real cheapskate, and until proof of the contrary my main selection criterion when buying something is the price. My new Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II uses a USB-C cable, something that I haven't had before. So I ordered one on eBay for the princely sum of $1. It was advertised for some Huawei device, but who cares? A cable is a cable, right? It took so long to arrive that I requested a refund. Not much response from the seller, so I asked eBay to moderate. Unlike my serious issues with their behaviour towards casual sellers, their response was immediate: they refunded the money.
Ports pain
Recently I've been getting error messages from the automated builds of Hugin, so I set up a new virtual machine to build it in. What a pain! My port may be broken, but it's not alone. Spent much of the day building literally hundreds of ports (my guess is about 160 by the end of the day) and running into various problems. Finally texinfo broke hard, and I gave up and installed the package, which still failed because of help2man, whatever that may be. Another (tiny) package to install. There should be a way to tell port builds to install dependencies as packages.
Hugin broken again!
Received mail from the FreeBSD ports machines today: the Hugin build is broken. Something to do with GLEW, whatever that is (it claims to be the OpenGL Extension Wrangler Library , but I've never seen a need to wrangle any kind of extension). OK, remove Hugin and GLEW and build it from scratch. Works fine. Do I have an environment issue? I did this on eureso, which, as the name suggests, is a future eureka. Time for a build VM, so spent some time setting that up. ACM only downloads articles once.
Dead thermometer
I've had an infrared thermometer for a few years now, and in the course of time it has accumulated a fair amount of grime, to which function the plastic surface seems particularly conducive. Today I tried cleaning at least the display. Here the result afterwards: But even the slightest bit of moisture was too much. After cleaning it, I turned it on and it showed random error displays. Some moisture must have got in between the display and the frame. With luck, it'll be OK again when it dries out, but how long will that take?
Improbable stories
Seen on IRC: a rejection letter for a novel. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Kitchen archaeology
Last night I cooked Sauerkraut, for which I needed 2.5 g juniper berries. And that was all I had. The jar is finally empty. What does finally mean? Nowadays I write the date, and where appropriate the use-by date, on the label: And yes, it's typical that the spices have passed their use-by date. I always put them in sealed glass jars, and they keep well. But this didn't have a date: Looking back, though, it's clear that I've been through several iterations of label.
WannaCry: Heads must roll
Woke up to the news that Microsoft boxen round the world had been hit by a ransomware attack. Could it happen to my computers? No way! When I got up, found more information, later summarized in this CERT report: it was a known vulnerability that had been fixed a couple of months ago, and it relied on network accessibility. Yes, I use network facilities with my Microsoft boxen, but they're hidden behind NAT and a firewall. And I don't run email on them. So yes, it didn't happen to my computers, for all the above reasons. And of course ransomware relies on lack of backups, something that hasn't happened to me since long before Windows came in to existence, though it did give me cause to consider whether the default weekly backup is frequent enough, and I've changed it to daily to match my real computers.
Extreme macros
Kev Russell has offered me a Zhongyi Mitakon 20mm f/2 4.5x Super Macro lens at a good price: Do I want to bite? Not at the moment, I think. But it's worth thinking about. The few images I've seen (not from Kev) haven't been convincing. What's the depth of field? The first thing to do is change my viewpoint on distance. Typical depth of field programs measure based on subject distance, but that's not even stated in this lens, just a magnification of (only!) 4× to 4.5×. Time to update my depth of field program.
Baked beans revisited
I've been eating baked beans for breakfast for some time now, and it's time to cook a new batch. It's clear that I need some kind of pulse to go with the meat, but somehow baked beans seem too British (though they're really US American). There are so many good Indian bean and (especially) lentil dishes. Can't I adapt some of that? The real question is how that goes with bacon and eggs. Today I started with Julie Sahni's Classic Indian Vegetarian Cookery , which was rather disappointing: it's over 450 pages long, but the only reference was in the overview on page 43, a single paragraph on Rajma dal.
DxO superstitions
Since the most recent update, I've been having random crashes stopped working while processing my photos with DxO Optics Pro . While I was entering the other bug report, I reported this one too, asking what information they needed. The result blew my mind: Thank you for writing. Let's try re-downloading and reinstalling the program to see if this resolves the issue for you. Please use the instructions below and please be sure to follow every step carefully. Please download and install the program from the link below. We have just verified that this link is working properly, and that the file downloaded successfully installs the program.
DxO EXIF problems
Processing my first images with the Vario-Elmarit 12-60 brought a surprise from DxO Optics Pro : Huh? That's a Leica, not an Olympus. Yes, focal length and aperture are the same, but that's not a way to identify the lens, even if it's unknown: Makernotes tag 0x201 contains a code that identifies the lens, and if it's not known (like the Vario-Elmar), exiftool reports the code: 0x0201 Lens Type : Unknown (2 30 10) Time for a bug report, which DxO keep confidential.
Vario-Elmarit 12-60: first impressions
Unpacked and took a look at my new Leica DG Vario-Elmarit 12-60 mm f/2.8-4 this morning, including the obligatory first test photo: That was taken hand-held at ¼ s, and it's acceptably sharp. So why the new lens? It's a 12-60 mm f/2.8-4 zoom, and I already have an Olympus lens with those parameters. There's even reason to believe that it might be better; certainly a comparison of the maximum aperture is interesting: Looking at the raw data, it's not clear how much of this shows real differences in the optics, and how much is inaccurate reporting in the EXIF data.
eBay: on hold
eBay has responded with lots of stuff requiring investigation, but one that seems particularly dubious is that they can't stop booking from my credit card. It appears that they did so, as well. In Germany, at any rate, this would be illegal. I'll wait and see what happens, and then put in a formal complaint. ACM only downloads articles once.
Accurate weighing
Making some nasi lemak (literally just the rice) today. The recipe calls for 800 g rice, and when it's done I freeze it in portions. But how big should the portions be? In the past I have decided on a weight round 140 g, but that's very unlikely to be an integral quotient of the total weight. Wouldn't it be better to weigh the pots and use that information to determine the total weight after cooking? Did that, and came up with a weight of 2160 g total. Deducting 10 for the daun pandan left me with 15 pots of 144S g each.
Olympus firmware update
The Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II has been on the market for nearly 6 months now, and already we have the second firmware update. And what a whopper: 87 MB! ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
eBay pain, continued
So why is eBay charging me so much money for last month, and why can't I find a detailed invoice? Their chat is still broken, so selected please call me on the web page. Quite quickly I got a call with the typical telemarketeer ploy of a long delayin this case, nearly 30 secondsafter which I heard a recorded message When Valued Customer is on the line, please press 1 . Yes, literally Valued Customer , and I don't recall them mentioning eBay. Then Please continue to hold . Another 2 minutes, and I was connected with Mark (or was that Marc?) . I told him of my issues, and he picked on the easiest one: why couldn't I log in to eBay?
eBay, the next sting
After modifying my remaining eBay listing, got another password reset: We have reason to believe that your eBay account has been used fraudulently without your permission. Weve reset your eBay password. Any unauthorized activity, such as buying or selling, has been canceled and any associated fees have been credited to your account. Any listings that we removed are included toward the end of this email. We assure you that your financial information is securely stored on a server and cannot be seen by anyone.
Wi-Fi on E-M10 Mark II
At my request, Chris Bahlo brought her Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark II with her in the evening to try out the wireless control from a smart phone (OI.Share), about which I most recently grumbled a week ago. Apart from the fact that it might be interesting for her, I was interested to see how well she got on with it. Surprise, surprise. It worked well. Even the problems that I've always had with networking didn't occur. And she's quite happy with the app, and has an application for it, taking photos of herself in the riding arena when she's alone. So why doesn't it work for me?
eBay: One problem too many
I've had a surprising number of problems selling my lenses on eBay: eBay finds reason to believe that my account has been compromised, but doesn't give any reasons. Instead I just get my password reset. They change their password regulations from time to time without telling, so I have trouble logging in. They don't tell in advance what the password requirements are, so it's a matter of trial and error.
Focus stacking again
There's been some discussion about macro photography on the M43 Australia Facebook group, with the interesting discovery that a large number of people do it hand-held. The moderator, Kev Russell, seems to have hands of steel: he takes surprisingly good macro photos, and he recently published a photo taken hand-held for 60 seconds. I'm talking about equipment, and people don't believe me, even saying that focus rails are a problem with focus stacking; I'd think exactly the opposite. By chance my Hibiscus rosa-sinensis bush has produced another flower, so it seemed to be time to take some more photos: Once again nothing to be proud of.
E-M1 Mark II problem solved
I've been chasing the case of the lost WiFi emblem for some days now, and after the last exchange I wasn't expecting anything more. But today I got: When you turn off the touchscreen via J1 menu setting, it actually removed the WIFI icon. If you have done this deliberately, you can still deactivate the touchscreen by using the icon on the left hand side of the live view touchscreen, which will keep the WIFI icon active. How about that!
eBay pain, continued
Off to the post office to post the EC-20 teleconverter to France. It went relatively smoothly until I asked where the tracking number was. Sorry, no tracking number with this service, said Tim, who handled the transaction. I pointed out that the web site had claimed that there was tracking, and that that was very important to me. He scanned the item, it was accepted, and he said Ah, there must be one after all, it's there , pointing to a number on the receipt.
Selling on eBay, continued
Another of my lenses has sold, this time the EC-20 teleconverter, interestingly enough to France. He even paid the postage in advance. Was it correct? Off to look at the Australia Post web site. At the top there's a link Parcels & Mail with submenu Sending overseas , which leads you to a Calculate postage & delivery times which conveniently defaults to within Australia , though the image of the Arc de Triomphe and Tour Eiffel suggest the country (if not the mentality) I was looking for.
eBay: Where's my item?
For some reason I have a significant number of items I bought on eBay that are taking forever to come. None of them are important: USB cable, flash shoe cover, USB hub... USB hub? It no longer shows anywhere. I received a package nearly two months ago, but it was the wrong article. I had asked for a replacement, and they confirmed that they had sent it. But the first article arrived within 3 weeks, and now it has been nearly another 7 weeks. Where is it? It doesn't show on my eBay pages either. Not under purchased . Not under three different categories of problem items.
Android on Intel
I've decided I really don't like Android, but I have to live with it. In the course of the day came up with this page describing how to install Android on Intel. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Identifying plants
Jamie Fraser pointed me today to a YouTube video about an Android app for identifying plants. Two of my hot buttons, But after some searching, came up with this link, which might be useful. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Olympus photo software
Olympus provides lots of software of various kinds, ranging from camera firmware to processing software to remote control software. Where's there a summary? The only place I know (now) is my own Olympus photo software summary. And that's still a work in progress. In the process, it's interesting to note that http://www.olympus-imaging.com/ is homeless: no home page, and any attempt to access it will result in a 403 error. A medal for that webmaster! ACM only downloads articles once.
Selling lenses again
Another lens sold, the Zuiko Digital ED 70-300mm f/4.0-5.6. By coincidence, I got it 9 years ago today. First fun was printing the shipping label. When I had finished the web form (and had my money deducted), no label arrived. eMail? No. Tried reprinting a couple of times. Each time it looked as if it would work, but nothing came out of the printer. Printer problem? Printed a packing slip with no trouble, but the next attempt to print the label failed too. Finally I discovered that the page was too polite to send the document to the printer without my explicit request, and had stored multiple copies in ~/Downloads.
Crash! Crash! Crash!
I had barely got up when Yvonne asked me to see what was wrong with dischord, the Microsoft box we use for photo processing. Dead! I discover I had connected it to an unprotected power outlet, and the power indicator showed that it wasn't powered on: for reasons I didn't investigate in time, it didn't come back up after the power outage. Connected it to the UPS and it came up happily, and it shouldn't happen again. Next thing: check what's going on on IRC. Disconnected from the proxy. Can't reconnect. Off the net? No, a ping to www worked. Did my bip process die?
AusPost: invalid tracking number!
So Yvonne had posted the M.Zuiko 12-40 mm f/2.8 Pro lens, so I had to inform the buyer of the tracking number, 601 13322922 096. < !-- 60113322922096 --> Had it been processed correctly? Australia Post told me: What's that nonsense? The normal nonsense: Australia Post issues tracking numbers with spaces in them, but their web site is modern, and it treats spaces as delimiters. In a world where people put spaces in file names to confuse parsers, it's really puzzling that web designers go to the opposite extremes in accepting identifiers and sums of money (try entering $1,234,500 in just about any site asking for sums of money).
Free security book
Now that I'm using Microsoft far more than I really want to, it's probably time to subscribe to some of the more technical forums. I've found a couple of useful tips at HowtoGeek, so I subscribed. Today I received a special offer: Download Computer Security Handbook, 6th Edition ($130 Value) FREE For a Limited Time . OK, what's behind that? Probably not much. So I signed up, which required one of the most complicated forms I've seen in a long while: Even if I were still working, how could I fill that out?
Astrophotography
Saw some impressive images on Facebook today, made with Deepskystacker. Looks like another can of worms to open. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
My reference to bell peppers
Mail today with a familiar looking text: I was searching the web for information on bell peppers and saw your great post here: http://narrawin.lemis.com/grog/diary-may2016.php I noticed you mentioned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_pepper in your post, and just wanted to give you a heads up that I recently wrote a blog post you might like. It's a detailed, up-to-date 7,000 word guide on 15 health benefits of bell peppers according to science, and includes 5 delicious bell pepper recipes. Bell peppers?
Lens: bought!
My new Leica DG Vario-Elmar 100-400mm f/4.0-6.3 is on its wayfrom Hong Kong. They don't mention anything about having to pay GST (only that it's not in the prices), but hopefully there will be none. In the meantime, though, I need a lens to replace the M.Zuiko 12-40 mm f/2.8 Pro . Not a difficult choice: I had already pretty much settled on the Leica DG Vario-Elmarit 12-60 mm f/2.8-4. But DxO Optics Pro still doesn't support it, and I had expected to have some time before buying it. No such luck . So off to eGlobaL again, the purchase made a little easier by the fact that they now have most of my details on file.
What software update?
On the whole I'm positively impressed by euroa, my new Lenovo ThinkPad T430. But it's still a Microsoft space machine, and it shows: What are they? They're not telling. It seems that they're Lenovo updates, not Microsoft updates. Lenovo, you could tell people what you're doing to their computers! ACM only downloads articles once.
Selling lenses
Taking photos of my lenses and listing them took up a significant proportion of the day. It's a good thing I'm not charging for my time, or it might not have been worth selling some of them. And in the process I examined the lenses more closely than I have for some time, making a disturbing discovery in the process: That appears to be a separation of the elements inside the lens (the Zuiko Digital ED 70-300mm f/4.0-5.6). Damn.
Buying a lens: the pain
So I've decided to buy a Leica DG Vario-Elmar 100-400mm f/4.0-6.3, called LEICA DG VARIO-ELMAR 100-400mm / F4.0-6.3 ASPH. / POWER O.I.S. in Australia and LUMIX G LEICA DG VARIO-ELMAR Lens, 100-400mm, F4.0-6.3 ASPH. (which also claims Power I.O.S ) in the USA. Probably the singularly unevocative name H-RS100400E begins to make sense. While researching, I was asked to fill out a survey about my web site experience on the US web site. In fact, it wasn't too bad, modulo the uncertainty about the image stabilization. But the survey had its own surprise: Australia is so unknown that it's not even an option on the list!
Fake URLs
Today I became aware of a new way to fake URLs: use Unicode. For example, https://www.xn--80ak6aa92e.com leads to a site whose URL displays as https://www.0@@Ï5.com/. It takes a lot of looking to realize that the 0 is Cyrillic 0 (0x430), not Latin a (0x61). The worrying thing is that it's really difficult to protect yourself against this stuff. The description at the link describes some of the issues. ACM only downloads articles once.
Android tablet recovered
Several months ago my Android tablet died. The battery wasn't charging, and it seems that that caused some failure requiring a complete tablet reset. And after that it was a brick. But then some months later, with the next Android pain, I found a way to restart the tablet without entering Android. It required use of the Start button, something that the tablet doesn't have, and also the volume controls. Messed around with the power and volume buttons, not helped by the glacial response times, and finally got into something that, without further ado, reformatted the flash memory and brought back a virgin Android system.
Internet's next victim
Two identical paper mail letters today, from ANZ bank: they're closing their Sebastopol branch due to lack of interest ( Internet banking being the stated culprit). Another sign of the times. Time to write a signs of the times page. I suppose we'll get by relatively well as long as there's an ATM nearby. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Tying up pain phones
Modern computer technology continues to amuse me. I suppose I shouldn't be so critical; in the Good Old Days, the idea of referring to the tangible parts of computers as hardware was mildly amusing (we also referred to musical instruments like that), and software even more so. But what's funny about smart (painful) phones? And why tie them up? From the OED: tether v. 3. To fasten or bind by conditions or circumstances; to bind so as to detain. In any case, Daniel Nebdal read yesterday's article on the subject, and offered: Just to save you some of the pain I've had with this: Bluetooth tethering is, like all things bluetooth, a neverending source of frustrations.
Tethering?
One problem with my new laptop is that it doesn't have phone functionality, including networking over mobile telephone services. But then there's this new buzzword, tethering , which seems to imply connecting mobile phones to laptops, a sort of special-case network. Off to Google for android tether bluetooth and came up with many hits, all for much more recent versions. Finally I found this one related (relatively closely) to my phone. Followed through, and sure enough, it worked exactly as described, ending with the following, carefully programmed to go away before you can read it: No comment, but as far as I can tell the phone automatically turns off Bluetooth access after a short timeout.
More Microsoft space pain
More attempts today to integrate euroa, my Microsoft-based ThinkPad, into my network. After my failure to get anything useful out of Bitvise (a name which, I have decided, implies a vice rather than a Germanified wisdom), tried another one, freesshd. Like so many of these things, it doesn't come with adequate documentation. But together they just didn't work. There seems to be only the program FreeSSHd.exe, which on first start creates new keys (without asking), and allows a selection of the kind of authentication that it will accept. And then it started, spawning dozens of processes that wouldn't go away even when, in frustration, I removed it from the system.
ssh for Microsoft
In principle I want to be able to remap the keys on euroa, my physical laptop. But there's a warning that it may brick the machine if I accidentally remap keys that I need to use the machine. That can't happen on FreeBSD, because the key map isn't loaded until multiuser mode. But presumably there's an alternative: remote access to the machine. Can rdesktop do it? Hard to say: it does seem to apply some keyboard mapping. Can ssh do it? Probably, since it doesn't simulate the keyboard. PuTTY is the canonical implementation of ssh for Microsoft, and I've worked around its strangenesses in the past.
X on Microsoft
One of the really nice things about X is that it's a networked system. One solution for my X display on euboea might be to not run an X server on it at all, but on euroa, the host system, running Microsoft. Went looking and found xming and (maybe) VcXsrv, for which I found looping links and very little documentation. Downloaded xming and installed it. The setup menu offered me an empty server or an xterm, so I chose the latter. Fired up X, error message: xterm doesn't exist. OK, I can download it, but somehow I'm losing interest. One thing that did work was swapping the Fn and Ctrl keys on the laptop.
Revisiting OzForex
I've been thinking of reducing my international currency fees for over two years now, but today I got mail about the matter: Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2017 02:59:31 +0000 From: Brandon Garcia <[email protected]> To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Subject: Greg's diary & OFX AU I'm getting in touch because we recently re-branded from OzForex to OFX and we want to ensure the information on your website is updated so that it does not negatively affect user experience. We have found that some pages on your website Greg's diary is linking to our outdated website, so we kindly ask that the links are updated on this page: http://lemis.com/grog/diary-aug2014.php "He recommends Oz Forex," http://www.ozforex.com.au/ Change to: https://www.ofx.com/en-au/ "This page claims in a rather obfuscatory way that they give the best rates:" http://www.ozforex.com.au/personal/transfer-money Change to: https://www.ofx.com/en-au/send-money/ "But yes, this page describes exactly my scenario."
X on euboea
I really hadn't intended to do much more with my laptop euroa and euboea, but somehow it didn't turn out that way. In principle things are working, though I don't dare try to switch from wired to wireless networking, but I couldn't get X to display larger than 1024×768. Went looking and discovered, as expected, that it uses the vesa driver, which has always appeared to be limited to this resolution. But looking at the Xorg.log, it seems that the limitation was the (implicit) horizontal sync setting. In a VM that's meaningless anyway, so I set horizontal sync max to 200 kHz and added a 1600×900 mode to the xorg.conf.
eu*a: enough
As planned, changed the DNS entries for euboea and eureso today. That worked, though there are indications that the problem isn't as simple. But it's just too much pain. One day I may try again and see if I can get any further. On the other hand, revisiting X on euboea Just Worked, though I was limited to a resolution of 1024x768. The LCD screen on euroa is 1600x900, and it would be nice to be able to fill that. But I've had enough for the while. ACM only downloads articles once.
Finding system names
Mail from Marco Pérez today: There may be an easy way to find Australian place names matching eu.*a. Try http://overpass-turbo.eu/, which is a front-end to the OpenStreetmap database. Pasting the following code in the editor and clicking "Run" (top left) should do the trick. [out:csv(place,name,::lat,::lon,"is_in:state")]; area["name:en"="Australia"]; node(area)[place~".*"][name~"^Eu.*a$"]; out; If you omit the first line you can even show the places on a map. Two buttons (top right) allow you to switch between the "Map" and the "Data" view.
euroa, day 3
By yesterday evening I had most things working on euroa, my new laptop. The only things remaining were automatic switching of network interfaces and running X on the VM. The X issues appear to be an additional port, emulators/virtualbox-ose-additions, which should be easy enough to handle, but it wasn't as important as the network connectivity, so I looked at that first. The real issue was that the ThinkVantage Tools , in this case Access Connections , wouldn't let me set static IP addresses with interface fallback, so I needed to update dhcpd to serve the same address. Does that even work? Looked at the man page, not the clearest document I've seen, and it took me a while to work out how to set it.
Network fallback
euroa has three network interfaces: Ethernet, good for normal desktop use, 802.11 wireless, good for most of the rest of the time, and Bluetooth, which so far appears to be of no use at all. Is it maybe useful for tethering to a mobile phone? That would be useful, since the machine doesn't have any mobile phone connectivity. Normally the machine is on my desk in the office, but I want to be able to wander round the house and use it elsewhere. And that should be transparent: except for the network link (to the same network), everything should remain the same.
FreeBSD on VBox on Microsoft
First VBox. Why does it only offer 32 bit clients? Off to Google and found this page, which looked very relevant: a ThinkPad with recently installed SSD, just like euroa. Went through that and discovered that he was running Microsoft Windows 8.1, and that the corresponding settings don't exist on my Windows 7 Professional. But after finally managing to enter the BIOS (in the end, I think it's F2), I discovered that virtualization had been disabled. Enabled that, and all was well. But why? Don't you need virtualization for 32 bit clients? And why didn't VBox tell me? Next, copy the virtual disk for eureso and enable it.
More laptop fun
Yesterday's installation of euroa went surprisingly smoothly, but of course it's not done yet. In particular I have two items that I have never done before: a FreeBSD guest on a VirtualBox host on Microsoft Windows , and a way of keeping the same IP address for the Microsoft machine when moving between wired Ethernet and wireless 802.11. ACM only downloads articles once.
Welcome euroa
Australia Post updated its tracking again today. Now it's in Wendouree (they got the sequence the wrong way round): Or is it? That's only part of the picture: It did ultimately update the tracking, showing that I picked it up at Napoleon after another miraculous transportation: Into town to pick up the laptop and the dog bath that I left at the Ballarat Pump Shop last week.
System names revisited
I have more or less decided on the system names euroa (Microsoft) and euboea (FreeBSD) for my new laptop, but it would be nice to find an Australian place name matching eu.*a instead of euboea. Discussing the matter after dinner, we didn't come to much in the way of results (I've already had eucla), but I did mention the existence of /usr/share/dict/web2 on FreeBSD. Checked on Chris' Apple. Yes, it's there too, and a partial output showed: $ grep ^eu.*a$ /usr/share/dict/web2 euphoria euthanasia Now wouldn't that be a good choice for FreeBSD and Microsoft respectively?
Unmounting disks, Microsoft style
Chris Bahlo gave me a Microsoft-formatted disk to copy some data for her, so plugged it into dischord and copied the data. OK, how do I umount it? Must be some right-button menu. But I couldn't find it. As expected, umount is spelt eject in Microsoft, but of course there's no program called EJECT. Off to Google, which showed that this is a problem, but that there should, indeed, be an eject item in the right mouse menu. Why wasn't it there? I didn't have time to look. We had lost power, and it seemed like a good idea to shut down the machine anyway, so that's what I did.
Where's my laptop?, part 4
Checking the tracking for my laptop, I find the interesting information from Australia Post: Current Status: In transit Processed through Australia Post facility 8:30pm Fri 7 Apr Sunshine West, VIC And that's the only tracking entry! Somehow on Monday it disappeared from Fastway's tracking system and materialized four days later in Australia Post's system and 800 km away without any indication how, where or when.
Your Microsoft box threatened!
While doing some photo processing on dischord, my Microsoft box, found this unsolicited popup: I didn't ask for that. Where did it come from? It seems to have correctly identified itself as a threat. But should I allow it to try to remove itself? ACM only downloads articles once.
Your Apple disabled!
After resetting my iPhone prior to shipment, received a typically stupid email: Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2017 03:16:39 +0000 (GMT) From: Find My iPhone To: [email protected] Subject: Find My iPhone has been disabled on Greg 's iPhone Find My iPhone has been disabled on Greg 's iPhone With Find My iPhone disabled, this device can no longer be located, placed in lost mode, or remotely erased using icloud.com/find or the Find My iPhone iOS app.
eBay labels: the truth
To the post office to post the iPhone. No, Australia post does not provide a satchel. The label states 500g satchel , but I have to provide it myself: further proof that the eBay documentation is inadequate. Fortunately I had put the items in a small box to take them to the post office, so I was able to stick the label on that and send it with no further problems. But yet another POLA violation. ACM only downloads articles once.
You have funds!
Another mail message from PayPal today: From [email protected] Fri Apr 7 00:40:05 2017 Date: Thu, 06 Apr 2017 07:38:14 -0700 To: Greg Lehey <[email protected]> From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> The funds from this eBay payment are now available. Check your Transaction Details ( https://www.paypal.com/myaccount/transaction/details/mumble ) for more information. And yes, the spaces round the parentheses are original, presumably to indicated that this message really came from PayPal. So: we have three different statements from PayPal.
Living in the Internet age
Interesting article in the Washington Post today: another US retailer bites the dust. But it's not unknown, and it's not the first. Companies like Macy's and J. C. Penney are also affected. The reason is clear: online shopping. Three years ago I wrote an essay on the subject, in which I wrote: Most purchases will occur on-line, and the few remaining shops will mainly exist to order and supply goods available on the Internet. The exceptions will be fresh goods such as food and some services where a view of the items in advance is desired, such as some clothes.
eBay fraud attempt
I suspect that one thing that helped me sell my iPhone was the buyer in Ipoh, who didn't seem quite kosher. Today he confirmed my opinion. At 11:40 I got the message: I will need your paypal email to make the payment. Wrong! Firstly, it's not correct procedure. And secondly the item was sold 17 hours previously. Time to report to eBay. But how? Their web people haven't thought of that. In the end I had yet another phone call, where they were certainly interested, and did something about it. But that sort of thing happens all the time.
Where's my laptop?
So my laptop was sent by Fastway on Monday. It should be here by now. What does the tracking show? Three days and no update? Time to call them up. Submit online enquiry? I suppose I could try that, but it wanted me to fill out no less than 25 fields, including stuff like mobile phone numbers and address of sender. Far too much trouble. So let's call them up. There's a Courier locator on their web site: No list, of course, and if there had been, it would have had only one entry.
Events, eBay style
How do I send the iPhone? eBay have a number of shipping options, as usual not very well documented. It seems that the obvious one is the pre-paid satchel. Does that really cover all costs? There's nothing that gives me that warm, fuzzy feeling. But it does say that the costs are covered, so I selected 500 g satchel . OK, $7.35, about the same price as an Australia Post satchel, and it did say that the postage cost was covered. So I printed one out, and got a message confirming the fact. Looked at the item status. Shipped! Nonsense! How can they think that printing the label equates to shipping?
PayPal communication
While messing around on the PayPal web site, found a reply to the message I sent six weeks ago, pointing out that they hadn't deducted any money from my account. Did they call me? Of course not. Did they send email? No. Instead what I got was a message accessible only from their web site: From: stkana4-ANZ Questions regarding bank reversals 26/02/2017 at 4:05 pm Thanks for contacting us. Based on your selection, the following FAQs may assist you faster than we can: A. Why did my bank return the random deposits?
PayPal pain again?
It really annoyed me that PayPal wants to keep my money for 21 days. The reasons didn't make sense: This could be that you are [sic] still yet to meet eBay's selling and PayPal's risk standards . What does could mean? If they don't know for sure, they shouldn't withhold funds. And yet ? I've been an eBay customer since 3 July 1999 and a PayPal customer since 13 December 2001. And I've sold things before without this nonsense. Fought my way through the PayPal web site to https://www.paypal.com/au/selfhelp/contact/call to get a contact code, and spoke to Eson (if I got the spelling right), another non-native English speaker who appears to have learnt American English from an audio course with 1940s quality audio, and thus grated to a point that I could barely understand her.
Selling iPhones
Question about the iPhone I have on sale today: I'm interested in your item, so I will offer you AU $320.00, including shipping cost, make payment via paypal and then send it to Malaysia within 4 to 6 days. Thanks and best regards. What sounds fishy about that? I don't know, but something does. Maybe: why does he want this particular iPhone when he can get it cheaper in Malaysia? But the price offered was $35 more than my Buy it Now price, and it would cost me about $28 to send it, so the answer is a clear: Yes, I can do this.
eureso will find
A number of system installations are looming: now that I have given up on MythTV, the machine is going begging, and the obvious thing to do is to use it to replace tiwi, since it has more much-needed CPU power. But the system on tiwi is over a year old, and there are some ports conflicts. So I should first install a newer version on the new machine. Then eureka (25 November 2015) and lagoon (8 July 2016) are also in need of updating. And then there's my new laptop, which claims to have been sent last Friday but in fact was sent yesterday evening, and about which Fastway knows no more.
Android: New POLA
Now that the iPhone is on its way out, I'm left with the old Samsung GT-I9100T (Galaxy S2?) . And as I rantcommented last week, the interface is really strange. Why does the camera go away when I swipe the screen? Ah, I don't know what swipe means. Well, somebody doesn't. I've already commented on the OEDs descriptions. But of course all this stuff comes from US English. What's their dictionary? Webster. According to Google, No other dictionary matches M-W's accuracy and scholarship in defining word meanings. Our pronunciation help, synonyms, usage and grammar tips set the ... , though their site doesn't make this claim, possibly hidden by broken rendering.
Selling on eBay: the pain
After a lot of consideration, I've ordered a second-hand ThinkPad T430, which cost me $295. Time to sell my iPhone. Took a few photos and off to eBay to sell it. In the past I've had much pain fighting their postage specifications, which invariably put in the incorrect sums, requiring me to go to the equally emetic Australia Post website, so this time decided that it was just plain simpler to offer free postage within Australia. On the positive side, they now have estimates of what the item should bring, at least in the case of the iPhone: $285. That's nearly what the laptop cost.
Goodbye TV
No German news on TV today! Whose fault is that? It comes from SBS, with a charter for multiculturalism, broadcasts news programmes in many languages, as long as there's nothing more important, like football at the other end of the (English-speaking) world. So I've come to accept that I don't get any news on Sundays. But today was Saturday, and they should have broadcast at least the first half of the Der Tag programme (they don't seem to have noticed that the programme was recently extended from 30 to 60 minutes). So I checked; they did. But my MythTV box with the stupid name greg-GA-MA785GT-UD3H didn't record it.
100 best things to do in Germany
Mail from Jen Miller today: Dear Editor, I was searching the web for information on Germany and saw your great post here: http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-feb2017.php. I noticed you mentioned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany in your post, and just wanted to give you a heads up that I recently wrote a blog post you might like. Itâ¬"s a detailed, up-to-date 7,000 word guide on the 100 best things to do in Germany and is packed with detailed tips and advice.
DxO cannot start
After restarting dischord, I wanted to run DxO Optics Pro : that's about the only thing I use it for. And I got an error message, one that I've seen before, something like DxO Optics Pro is unable to start: this is usually becase DirectX 9 is not installed . Did I have disk corruption after all? No, it's just fake news. The real issue was that the system was very busy after startup, and something timed out. And instead of checking, the error routine just jumped to conclusions. Sloppy programming. ACM only downloads articles once.
Recovering despair
despair, my Microsoft box, is usually hibernated, and it recovers completely from power failures while hibernated (one advantage of Microsoft). But it seems that I had forgotten to hibernate it last night, and it failed badly on recovery: it wanted Startup Repair . What's that? It claimed to be able to do it by itself, so I let it go. Something like 5 minutes, apparently without disk access. And then it rebooted, and all was well. I suppose that's good news, but I'd feel more comfortable understanding what it did and what the risks are. ACM only downloads articles once.
Power out!
Into the office this morning, pressed on the keyboard to wake the computer, and ... nothing. On further examination, everything was dead. Another power failure? No, I had already washed, requiring water from the pump, and that ran fine. But the office UPS was dead. Component failure? Turned it on again and things came backfor a while. Then it died again. OK, connect the computer to the power point for the UPS in the shed. Also dead. But the lights were working, and they ran off the same UPS. Into the garage. Two circuit breakers had tripped: one for normal power (the one that fed the office UPS), and the fourth of the four from the in-shed UPS.
Smart phones: enough!
I've been fighting smart phones for nearly five years now, and I still hate them. But they're the big success story of the last decade. If I'm one of the few people who dislike them, the obvious conclusion is that the problem is with me. So I've been trying again and again to find a use for them. And again and again I fail. I think that it's because I've been round computers too long, and I expect them to do what I want, rather than having to put up with reimposed limitations that I have worked around decades ago. 2½ years ago I considered the pros and cons of Android, in this case compared to a Microsoft Windows tablet.
Toy computers: enough!
What did that QR code on the Hibiscus label really say? According to the POS terminal, it was HTTP://GOO.GL/3P4sP. Is that correct? Took my not-so-trusty Samsung GT-I9100T smart phone and tried again. When I press the power button, it shows the camera: But first I need to steal swipe (in other words, wipe) the screen. And then I see this: No camera to be seen!
Weather station
Rain today, sooner than expected. What did my weather station show? 0.3 mm (one increment). That seemed less than observed. And then it changed its mind. 0 mm. Another look at the database: mysql> select date, time, outside_temp, rain from observations where rain <> 0; +------------+----------+--------------+------+ | date | time | outside_temp | rain | +------------+----------+--------------+------+ | 2017-03-29 | 19:17:05 | 10.9 | 0.3 | | 2017-03-29 | 19:18:07 | 10.8 | -0.3 | | 2017-03-29 | 20:25:48 | 10.1 | 0.3 | | 2017-03-29 | 20:26:49 | 10.1 | -0.3 | | 2017-03-29 | 20:40:08 | 10.1 | 0.3 | | 2017-03-29 | 20:41:09 | 10.1 | -0.3 | +------------+----------+--------------+------+ ...
Replacing the rain gauge
A month ago I discovered that the rain gauge in my new weather station wasn't working. OK, contact the vendor seller and get him to send a replacement. That happened, but there were some details that I didn't like. Left the replacement, right the original: The new gauge is clearly an older model (note the missing spirit level in the top), and it's second hand: the difference in colour is due to sunlight, and the dirt in the bucket mechanism speaks for itself.
Research Unix 8th, 9th and 10th editions available
Good news on the Unix Heritage Society mailing list today: the later editions of Research Unix (8th, 9th and 10th editions) are now available under relatively liberal conditions: Statement Regarding Research Unix Editions 8, 9, and 10 Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc. ( ALU-USA ), on behalf of itself and Nokia Bell Laboratories agrees, to the extent of its ability to do so, that it will not assert its copyright rights with respect to any non-commercial copying, distribution, performance, display or creation of derivative works of Research Unix® Editions 8, 9, and 10.
GPS navigators revisited
Of course I used my GPS navigator to get to Garvoc, and it got us there. Chris Bahlo was second-guessing with her mobile phone and Google Maps, which suggested a very different way. But total time was about 1¼ hours. On the way back, we asked Nele, who suggested a different way. Total time was (now more carefully measured) 1 hour, 18 minutes, not different enough to give one way or the other the advantage. But the real problem was that I really have no idea how we went: there's just no overview. I had thought that we had gone down the Princes Highway from Camperdown to Laang, but on the way back we went through Terang, on that road, and I was sure we didn't go there on the way to Nele's.
Facebook: cooling down?
A couple of years ago, the local Facebook groups were full of activity, as I have commented over the years. But it seems to be cooling down lately. In the past if there were a fire or a car accident, the Facebook group would be full of it, including lots of inaccurate and inappropriate informaation. But on the way to Garvoc, Chris Bahlo was talking about indications she had seen of an accident involving a school bus about 4 weeks ago. Silence. But clearly something had happened: Did the passengers survive?
Network problems
In the course of the day had a number of intermittent problems with network connections, initially between tiwi (TV computer, in the lounge room) and eureka (main machine). Why? Typically it's a switch, and I have two between the machines. The one in the pantry has given me trouble before, so I power cycled it, to no avail. The switch in the office seemed to be working, but it had slipped back from its position between monitors 1 and 2, probably thanks to Rani. When I pulled it forward, things worked. Aha! Poor connection? But it failed again later, and no amount of further jiggling helped.
New backup disk
Yvonne back from shopping with a new photo backup disk. The 4 TB disk, one of two that I bought a little over 3 years ago, is already nearly full. So once again we bought an 8 TB disk. Last June we bought the first one, for $348. Now the same model is old, and they're selling it at Officeworks for $329. How do I format it? That (amongst other things) is what this diary is for. And since I've been there before, started of tarring and extracting the entire /Photos file system to it. Last time it took 3½ days, but since then there's more data.
25 years of BSD
Seen in my calendar today: Mar 19 Greg installs BSD/386 0.3.1, 1992 Twenty-five years! I suppose it's an indication of the robustness of the platform that I have changed very little in my desktop environment since then. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
DxO for Chris
Now that Chris Bahlo has her new Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark II, she can do with software for it. Yes, she has Photoshop, but geometry correction in Adobe Camera Raw is a little haphazard, and coincidentally DxO Optics Pro version 9 is available for free (current version is 11). A good thing about DxO is that you can get up-to-date correction modules for older versions too. So I went looking, and discovered that the offer had expired at the end of last month. So what does it do if I apply for an activation key now? It works. Chris was coming over here anyway, so she brought her (Microsoft) laptop, and we downloaded both Windows and Apple versions before they changed their minds, and confirmed that she could activate the former.
Olympus configuration save files
The Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II has a useful new feature: it can save the camera configuration, and does so when upgrading firmware. Time to investigate in more detail. The first thing to note is that it only works for the E-M1 Mark II: if I try with the E-M1 Mark I, I get this information: Isn't that helpful? No, it's singularly useless. What is the Olympus homepage ?
USB 3.0 for all
The second-last of the accessories for my new Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II arrived today: a USB 3.0 hub. Not quite the way I expected (images courtesy of seller): What I had ordered looks like this: Missing three ports! That can be sorted out, of course, but in the meantime I can play with it. But where are the USB 3.0 ports on the motherboard? The connectors are usually blue, but not in this case.
Focus merging: finally!
Yesterday I took two photos of the cats in the garage, each with one cat in focus: How do I get them both in focus? Clearly a task for FOCUS Projects. Tried that and, surprise, surprise (really), it worked! Well, mainly: once again I find that it had changed the gradation, and Piccola's face is somewhat dark: Still, an indication that the stuff isn't completely useless.
How high is that tower?
A while back Chris Bahlo sent me the URL of a rather puzzling topographic display system for radio tower coverage. You enter your location (say, 29 Stones Road Dereel), a distance (say 25 km), click on Run Enquiry , and it shows what communication towers are in the area. You can then click on Elevation Profile against one of them and get an graphic of the terrain and signal path: OK, there's land (Enfield State Forest) in the way, so this won't work. But it's not what I'm looking for.
NBN satellite performance
Call early this morning from Mark Hofmaier in Beulah, asking about National Broadband Network satellite: he had read some online document of mine and extracted a phone number. It seems that he transferred to SkyMuster" from mobile broadband, and he's very dissatisfied with the performance. How credible is this information? He's not a technical person, but if the performance difference hits him, then it's significant. Of course it's not necessarily NBN's fault: it could be his RSP (Bordernet). It's interesting enough that I'd be interested in seeing how he gets on. Left him with instructions to run Speedtest and confront the RSP with the results if they're bad (< 60% download speed, < 2 Mb/s upload, > 1 s latency).
Snapchat: anathema
So they've floated Snapchat, thus proving that I have no idea about social media. All my life I've been keeping records, and maintaining data integrity and uptime. And here's a company that wants to make money with data that self-destructs. What am I missing? ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
More high-resolution photos
The attempts at high-resolution photos over the last few days have been less than satisfactory. But today I got results that are more than acceptable. Here a comparison with my best results from yesterday: What's the difference? The method. The first was taken with in-camera high resolution mode. The second (all 300 MP of it at full size) was stitched from about 35 images taken at normal resolution with the Zuiko Digital ED 35-100mm f/2.0 set to 100 mm focal length.
More high resolution investigations
More investigation of high-resolution mode again today, still without any conclusion. The Ashampoo error message is one indication of the problem: there are no 80 MP sensors out there, at least not for normal sized cameras. It seems that the largest sensor on a full-frame camera is the Canon EOS 5DS, with 50 MP. But that review doesn't mention dirty things like real-world image resolution and sharpnessafter all, that depends more on the lens than on the sensor. So I looked at the DxO test results for four-thirds. The sharpest lens on the E-M1 Mark II was the Panasonic Leica DG Nocticron 42.5mm F1.2 ASPH Panasonic Leica DG Nocticron 42.5mm f/1.2 ASPH withwait for it16 MP!
PayPal timeout
My message to PayPal on Monday promised a response within 24 hours. After about 60 hours, I still have no answer, and I'm no longer expecting one. The money was deducted from my credit card account on Monday, though I don't know whether that was a result of my message or not. But once again it shows an amazing amount of incompetence. ACM only downloads articles once.
E-M1 Mark II high resolution mode
I took a few photos with the high resolution mode of my new Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II a couple of days ago, but then discovered that, although the camera was set to store only raw images, it stored only JPEG images. To get it to store raw images (as well), I needed to tell it all over again. And there seems to be no way to prevent it from storing JPEGs as well. To quote the instructions (page 49, at the top): Choose from JPEG (50M F or 25M F) and JPEG+RAW modes.
Emacs on Multics
Seen on the Unix Heritage Society mailing list today: an interesting document about Emacs on Multics. Do I care about Multics? Not overly, but this is one of the most comprehensive documents I've seen written about Emacs before 1980. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Networking with E-M1 Mark II
Another thing to check was whether Olympus has improved the wireless networking capability. No. This time I was completely unable to connect to my iPhone. That's probably me losing my way on the stepping stones, not the camera. It worked on the Samsung phone after the usual pain. When will they get it right? ACM only downloads articles once.
PayPal deductions
After last week's débacle with PayPal, I've been keeping an eye on the transaction. On Thursday, I got an email telling me that my account was negative, and that I should do something about it. But the account showed that was balanced, and there was no evidence that the money had been deducted from any of my bank accounts. And that's the way it was until today, so I sent them a message via their internal system pointing out the issue and asking them to contact me. The say that they'll take up to 24 hours to respond, so I'll wait for that.
Wireless remote control
Reading the online instructions for the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II (the toy guide only has an invalid pointer), found that the camera has a dedicated input for a shutter remote control, something that sounds financially suboptimal. It requires a dedicated remote control from Olympus, the RM-CB2 Remote Cable, with the information that it is a mini-plug type (2.5¦) . I suppose that means a 2.5 mm phone plug. That's very plausible. On closer examination, that's the connector to my remote control: So all I need is a short cable with 2.5 mm connector at each end.
Receiving calls with an iPhone
I've had difficulty receiving calls with my iPhone in the past, so on the way into Ballarat today I asked Yvonne to call me on the phone (in my pocket). Diverted to voice mail. It worked later when we got into town. Why? There are numerous valid reasons, but I'll have to research them. Wasn't life simple before smart phones? ACM only downloads articles once.
StarTrack? Cosmic implosion
I have established that my camera made it to Ballarat sometime yesterday, so tried once again to find out where it was. Another attempt to track it failed with another 64 bit random error number. Can this be the interface from eBay? If so, of course, it should be able to recover, but the system is clearly badly written. So I went straight to https://startrack.com.au/ and entered 5ZQ7580. Bingo! In passing, it's worth admiring how they mutilated the tracking number: And it's delivered!
Rearranging monitors
Finally received a dual-link DVI cable for my monitors, after the abortive attempt two weeks ago. It cost 3 times as much, but it looks right, and yes, it works. Spent far too much time reconfiguring X for the new setup (exchange screens 2 and 3). There's really something strange about the configuration for server 1, and I still don't have it right, though it's more a cosmetic issue than anything else. ACM only downloads articles once.
Where's my camera?
My camera comes with a tracking number, of course, and eBay will get the status for you. Some of the time. What I got was: Error Please contact the StarTrack Service Desk on 1800 028 361 and quote reference # 585ff7b324518e2a. 64 bits hexadecimal! Was it maybe a transient error? Hard to say: I tried twice more and got: Please contact the StarTrack Service Desk on 1800 028 361 and quote reference # cd6fba3c201d8e57. Please contact the StarTrack Service Desk on 1800 028 361 and quote reference # f153a59e694e2866.
PayPal problems again
First thing this morning, checked my bank balance: -$1,964.44! Despite my efforts, PayPal had deducted from my bank accountand the bank had honoured the charge! What do do? I had my virtual paper trail, but it's good to be in a position of strength, so I first called Consumer Affairs Victoria on 1300 55 81 81 and spoke to Greg, who told me they weren't responsible for this kind of issue: that's the Financial Ombudsman on 1300 780 808. Another 1300 number, one of the most expensive I can call. Asked him for a landline number and was given 1800 367 287.
Random file system corruption?
Turned on tiwi, our TV machine today, to watch the news. Somehow my shell didn't read in its configuration. It's a symlink to an NFS mounted file system, and from time to time I've had difficulty mounting them. So I went looking at the net. No problems. What I saw puzzled me: -rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 0 26 Jan 12:27 .bashrc Huh? How did that happen? This was only a couple of hours prior to the discovery.
Internet relocation
Into the office this morning to discover that I was off the net. Or was I? No, I was on the net. No, I was off the net. What was going on? We had had a scheduled outage shortly after midnight, and it turned out that ICMP was working, and TCP wasn't. Further investigation showed that they had changed my IP address! OK, that's normal enough, but Aussie Broadband doesn't (or didn't) do that. In the 3½ years I've been with them, this is the first unannounced change. And interestingly, the new address is in a /10 network space, so probably this was related to an increase in subscribers.
Full Google Maps, finally!
Some months back I found an easy workaround to persuade Google Maps to go into full map mode on my machine. But it seems that Google has fixed this bug : it no longer works. Why do they go to such trouble to ensure that people running FreeBSD do not have access to full maps? It would be easy to assume that they're doing it deliberately, which I would see as an abuse of their position of market dominance. I don't know if that's illegal in Australia; it definitely is in Europe, and I wonder how long it will be before the EU authorities get at them for that.
How to integrate a camera into a network
We have a Begonia in the lounge room with small white flowers which point downwards: How do you get a photo of the flowers? From below, of course: And how do you compose and focus? There are two choices: grovel on the ground or use a smart phone with OI.Share: After trying both, it's clear that grovelling on the ground is the easier solution.
Don't trust that site!
Fired up my Mac OS VM today to check something, and along came iTunes to annoy me. But this time it got hoist by its own petard: How did they manage that? ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
iPhone hang?
Yesterday I tried to make a phone call with my iPhone. The call timed out, repeatedly and on different numbers. No error message, no sound at all (I never spoke a word). Tried calling it from Yvonne's phone. This number is not reachable . But it showed a signal, and when I checked later I still had credit. So why didn't it work? Back home, looked at the device again. It still claimed to have signal, in my office, where there is none. The Samsung GT-I9100T correctly showed no signal. So I rebooted the Apple. Now it, too, showed no signal. But when I tried to make a call, it tried anyway, and then returned to the dial display with no comment whatsoever.
New members for the Dereel Camera Crew
The Dereel Camera Crew is a Facebook group. Admittedly, it's not very bigcurrently only 10 membersbut Facebook does what it can to help: All of these people are members of the FreeBSD project. I don't even know where most of them live. I think Doug lives in the United Kingdom, Jordan lives in California, and Alfred lives in New York City. And I have no idea where the other two live, but probably also in the USA.
DxO: prize-winning documentation
At the end of November last year I submitted a ticket against DxO Optics Pro : it didn't handle the new version of DxO ViewPoint as I expected, and I couldn't find the manual, just a collection of badly linked web pages that I can't brute-force search. Where's the PDF version? The ticket was a nightmare, showing the inappropiateness of the system. But I kept getting referred back to http://help-op11.dxo.com/en/home and http://help-vp3.dxo.com/en/home/, the pages with the web-based information: But it also came up with some information about one of the features, which showed up a bug in the software.
BSD: What could have been
Unix is coming on 48 years old. It's hard to think that more than half of that time elapsed since the first free Unix derivates (and Linux) came on the scene. The time from about 1990 to 1996 was significant, and in the end Linux won the battle, at least partially because of the fighting between the various Unix camps. A number of old farts discuss things on The Unix Heritage Society mailing list, and in the past few days a couple of interesting ones have gone by. It seems that Larry McVoy crusaded for open sourcing SunOS 4 back in 1993, as this proposal shows.
Re-fetching POP mail from gmail
A few days ago I received mail from Don Melton explaining how to re-fetch mail from gmail with POP3. Go to settings and select Forwarding and POP/IMAP , then Enable POP for all mail (even mail that's already been downloaded) . Save and download. It really seems that gmail doesn't honour whatever is behind fetchmail's -a flag: it works the same either way. And once it has downloaded, it silently resets the flag: That suggests poor adherence to the standards, but at least it's a workaround. And it's less disruptive than running IMAP.
; DROP TABLE COMPANIES;: for real
Last month I noted an unusual entry in a British company register: I had thought it a bug in their software. But no, Bruce Schneier has established that it's a real company. I wonder how long that will last. ACM only downloads articles once.
Trump: Tracking twits
One of the more interesting things about Donald Trump is his use of Twitter to express himself. Time to follow him? Signed in to Twitter for the first time since 30 March 2011, when I wrote: Back for the first itme in years. Nothing appears to have improved. And yes, I couldn't find a way to fix the typo. Following Trump was easy enough. And he shows reverse chronological listing up to perfection. Here an example posted 12 hours ago , probably round 0:00 UTC on 8 January: both countries will, perhaps, work together to solve some of the many great and pressing problems and issues of the WORLD!
Installing Mac OS X Sierra
It's clear that Jordan Hubbard is no longer with Apple: the new releases of Mac OS X are no longer named after cats. But they have maintained the practice of referring to releases by name rather than number. It seems that the most recent release is 10.12, better known as Sierra , and it seems it's available online for free. Is this legal? It's hosted on Google, so I assume that either it is, or everybody's turned a blind eye. Spent some time installing it on VirtualBox, according to these instructions, clearly Microsoft-oriented. The first issue was downloading the images, in my case from https://goo.gl/DZTaKi.
Peaceful Saturday evening
Preparing dinner took correspondingly long, and in the middle of it the microwave oven died. It still heated, but the irritatingly loud fan got so quiet that it almost stopped. It was barely two years old, but it annoyed me running its fan when not necessary, so it was a mixed blessing. But it meant that dinner started late. After dinner into the office to investigate something I had noticed earlier: the UPS was turning its fan on. Checked the status. Output voltage 211 V. That seemed low. How do I switch the display? Other button? BAD idea. That was the power button, and unlike every desktop UPS I have ever seen, this one has no delay built in to it.
Mutt with IMAP
I still have a few messages on gmail that I can't transfer sanely: they're marked read for POP3 purposes, and gmail doesn't honour the download all flag, so I can't download them, and any attempt to forward them both mutilates them and is also painful in the extreme. Jashank Jeremy suggested IMAP, but following the recipe didn't give me what I want. So today I had another attack, looking at the manual, which seems somewhat out of date: Polling for new mail on an IMAP server can cause noticeable delays. So, you'll want to carefully tune the $mail_check and $timeout variables.
More mobile phone pain
While in town, discovered that somebody had called me on my old mobile phone number no less than 4 times in the last few days, including leaving a message. Deferred that until I got back home, where I discovered that with ALDImobile I can only access messages from the phone, and I was out of range. Still, while I was there, I wanted to check on my data usage. The good news is that it's now measured in granules of 1 kB (or KB, as they prefer to call it). The bad news is that it took me 10 minutes to log in.
NBN for Chris Bahlo
Round July 2015, when she moved in to her new house, Chris Bahlo applied for an National Broadband Network connection. Failure: not enough signal. But ten months later I spoke to the installers again, and they can now fit masts up to 3 m high. That might just be enough to make the difference for Chris, about whom the NBN is ambivalent anyway, as this extract from the rollout map shows: The correct address is 302 Rokewood Junction Road, the house and buildings in the lower part of the map, but NBN chose 276, the Yeardley house.
Ethernet connector: 45 minutes
Now that I have my network relay board working, it's time to put it in place in the shed. When we built the house we had network cables laid to every room, and also the shed. But for some reason we didn't have the one in the shed terminated: there was just a roll of Cat 5 cable there. Not a problem. I've terminated network cables before. All I need is a connector and a crimping tool. Last time I borrowed one from Chris BahloYeardley. But since then she has changed her name and lost the tool. So I bought one and some connectors in late November.
Understanding MythTV hangs
Yesterday's hang on my MythTV box was accompanied by a lot of log messages. What do they mean? And what should I have seen at the beginning of a recording? Went looking today, and found: Jan 3 10:29:00 greg-GA-MA785GT-UD3H mythbackend: mythbackend[789]: I Scheduler scheduler.cpp:2267 (HandleReschedule) Reschedule requested for PLACE PrepareToRecord Jan 3 10:29:00 greg-GA-MA785GT-UD3H mythbackend: mythbackend[789]: I Scheduler scheduler.cpp:2380 (HandleReschedule) Scheduled 22 items in 0.0 = 0.00 match + 0.00 check + 0.02 place Jan 3 10:29:30 greg-GA-MA785GT-UD3H mythbackend: mythbackend[789]: I Scheduler mythdbcon.cpp:422 (PurgeIdleConnections) New DB connection, total: 12 Jan 3 10:29:30 greg-GA-MA785GT-UD3H mythbackend: mythbackend[789]: I TVRecEvent tv_rec.cpp:1610 (HandlePendingRecordings) TVRec[1]: ASK_RECORDING 1 29 0 0 Jan 3 10:30:00 greg-GA-MA785GT-UD3H mythbackend: mythbackend[789]: I TVRecEvent tv_rec.cpp:1073 (HandleStateChange) TVRec[1]: Changing from None to RecordingOnly Jan 3 10:30:00 greg-GA-MA785GT-UD3H mythbackend: mythbackend[789]: I TVRecEvent tv_rec.cpp:3563 (TuningCheckForHWChange) TVRec[1]: HW Tuner: 1->1 Jan 3 10:30:00 greg-GA-MA785GT-UD3H mythbackend: mythbackend[789]: ...
More MythTV pain
greg-GA-MA785GT-UD3H, my amazingly named MythTV box, has been a continual source of frustration, almost to the point that I don't record anything any more. One exception is the almost daily news programme from Deutsche Welle, who have managed to obfuscate their web site to a degree that not only can I not listen to the programme on line, I can't even decide whether they intend the programme to be available or not. But in the last two days the recording failed. Why? Again, some kind of digital constipation. Took a look at the log files and found, in /var/log/mythtv/mythbackend.log Jan 2 10:20:13 greg-GA-MA785GT-UD3H mythbackend: mythbackend[793]: N Expire autoexpire.cpp:264 (CalcParams) AutoExpire: CalcParams(): Max required Free Space: 0.0 GB w/freq: 15 min Jan 2 10:20:13 greg-GA-MA785GT-UD3H mythbackend: mythbackend[793]: N Expire autoexpire.cpp:641 (SendDeleteMessages) Expiring 457 MB for 1034 at 2016-10-04T06:30:00Z => "Talking Language" Jan ...
More iPhone fun
A couple of messages from Eddie Purcell today. It seems that the iPhone can make clicking sounds when you take photos. But it's not in a settings menu: there's a physical switch on the side of the phone which mutes most sounds (but not the phone), and it was set to mute . After turning it on, it clicks as expected. He also recommended TomTom GO Mobile as a GPS app for the iPhone. Tried downloading that, and it certainly does some things well. It costs money, but I get the first 75 km free, a much better idea than the first week: I installed iGO on my Android phone two weeks ago, and though I haven't actually used it, the trial period is over.
No mail!
Came into the office this morning to discover that I had received no mail since yesterday evening. What's the problem there? === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/29) ~ 92 -> fetchmail fetchmail: No mail for [email protected] at pop.gmail.com But looking directly at gmail.com showed something like 150 messages. Why weren't they sent? After a while I found part of the cause: Jan 2 09:54:27 eureka kernel: pid 5038 (cleanup), uid 125 inumber 4494489 on /: filesystem full That proved to be due to a reconfiguration that had moved the /dump disk and file system from eureka to lagoon.
Finding things on Google Maps
We're currently watching an Austrian TV series, Der Bergdoktor , inspired by the British series Doc Martin , even down to the name of the hero (Gruber Martin). Unlike the British series, the doctors use modern equipment and methods. Like the British series, it has beautiful scenery, centred round Ellmau in Tirol. And of course I wanted to take a closer look. Problem: like in Germany, Google Street View is greatly restricted in Austria, and there are only panoramas in different places. After clicking on a few at random, I was suddenly attacked by an itch in my back. But I clicked on something, which turned out to be a panoramic view (even pointing in the right direction) of the doctor's house in the film.
Relay board: finally!
It's been over a month since I got my network-connected relay board, here an image from the vendor: It arrived without any documentation at all, and all my attempts to find out how the thing works have proved less than sufficient. But back at the beginning of last month, I received a message from Daniel Nebdal, who sent a number of links, most of which I knew. But one (a sales page for a Different Quality 8 Channel Relay) included a feedback tab with texts like this, clearly mechanically translated (in this case from Russian): It's, device is working, no documentation on it get to me has not yet succeeded.
Mobile phone cameras and timekeeping
I've had timepieces for as long as I can remember. Some time in mid-1957 my parents gave me a new watch with a sweep second hand. My previous watch had a separate small dial for the second hand. But that's nearly 60 years ago. Today my digital watch was going about 10 seconds fast at the first of the all-important midnights, as Chris confirmed from her Samsung Galaxy S7. That's presumably network synchronized. OK, let's use it to set my watch. But it only showed hours and minutes. Twenty minutes of searching later we came to the conclusion that the standard clocks on both Android and iPhone don't have the ability to display seconds.
technology, opinion
I still don't have any documentation for the relay board I bought over a month ago, and the seller only responds when I prod him. The last exchange was particularly useless. He pointed me to a web page, which rendered: It's not only Western web sites that forget their character encoding. Set for Simplified Chinese, it came out as OK, clearly they're trying to send me a file called SKU367002.rar.
Apple spam
Message today: Dear Customer, Your Apple ID ([email protected]) was used to sign in to iMessage If you have not recently set up an iPhone with your Apple ID, then you should change your Apple ID password. Learn More. Yes, I've seen and grumbled about this sort of thing in the past, in particular the lack of detail. This one was worse than most. But for some reason gmail had classified it as spam.
More sprinkler work
Spent some time looking at the garden sprinklers today, not helped by the lack of a sprinkler controllermaybe. After much messing around, discovered the problem with circuit 1: the solenoid on the solenoid valve was open circuit. How can that come? Of all the unreliable parts in the system, you'd think that it was the most reliable. Hopefully I can get a replacement that doesn't require me to replace the entire valve. ACM only downloads articles once.
UK company search
Once again I'm reminded of xkcd: ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Gratuitous GUI changes
I've grumbled so frequently about the way commercial GUI software keeps changing its interface on every release. Sometimes I think that the GUI change is the only real difference. And once again xkcd has said it for me: ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Yet another mobile phone comparison
Chris Bahlo here in the evening with her Samsung Galaxy Note 7, which the EXIF data calls a SM-G930F. DxOMark doesn't seem to have tested it, but the presumably similar Galaxy S7 edge gets 88 points, only one point shy of the top mark, and it seems to have the same camera. So of course I had to get her try the camera with my test shots. The comparison wasn't as good as it could have been because of the different lighting situation. The indoor photo is much better, but then there was about three times as much light. Here Apple, Samsung Galaxy 7 and Olympus; the Samsung I9100 isn't close to the same league: ...
Google Maps accuracy
The trip to Ballarat also gave me the first real test of my GPS location web page code, as the photos above show. Interestingly it seems that just about all the photos show me further east than I really was, though the latitude is variable. Here today's photos with the strange routes (by foot) that Google Maps makes from the actual location to the claimed location (the latter with the red pin): ...
Olympus geotagging: almost useless
My camera has a feature : Wireless shooting , just add smart phone. And with that I can add geotagging. I've already commented about how much of a pain it is to use OI.Share, but now I have the added interest of geotagging, so out into the garden to take a photo. The good news: it works. The bad news: it is such a pain that it's hardly worth it: First you set up the 802.11 connection: turn on camera, touch WiFi , start the OI.Share app, select connect as like as not (this after initial setup), then select remote control .
More smart phone and GPS stuff
Yesterday's camera comparisons had a number of issues that I could improve on, as well as many that I can't, for example the choice of phones. There are plenty of sites that address the latter, such as DxOMark, which ranks mobile phone cameras. Currently the top of the line is the Google Pixel, with 86 points. The worst is the Apple iPhone 4, with 50 points. Second last, with 57 points, is my Samsung, and my iPhone 5S comes in with 76 points (at the time of the review, it seems, in second place). That's consistent with my experience. In particular, of the Samsung they say the product was also plagued by strong color shading. Still, there are things I can do to improve my own measurements.
Reading [MP]TP file systems
Transferring images from a smart phone to a computer is a pain! FreeBSD doesn't seem to recognize the iPhone, and I can't use toys like gphoto2 to read them in. So off to the web to see what people have done in the past. This thread and this one describe pain trying to use sysutils/fusefs-ifuse, but this one talks about using usbmuxd, apparently from the same site. That sounded like a good idea, so I tried: === root@stable (/dev/pts/0) /usr/src 4 -> mailme pkg install usbmuxd Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue... FreeBSD repository is up-to-date. All repositories are up-to-date.
GPS position info from phone cameras
After yesterday's playing around, it seemed reasonable to look for EXIF data related to GPS position. Out to take some photos with the iPhone, and after remembering how to download the images, discovered a plethora of EXIF data relating to position: GPS Altitude : 350.2 m Above Sea Level GPS Altitude Ref : Above Sea Level GPS Date Stamp : 2016:12:25 GPS Date/Time : 2016:12:25 07:14:05Z GPS Dest Bearing : 218.0777385 GPS Dest Bearing Ref : True North GPS Horizontal Positioning Error: 30 m GPS Img Direction : 218.0777385 ...
Potential panorama viewer software?
While trawling the web came across this page, which promises interesting functionality. I haven't looked at it in detail yet. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
GPS coordinates in photos?
Juha Kupiainen posted a photo today of a landscape somewhat obscured by a motorbike: He had taken it with his iPhone, and he wondered where it was. I thought that's one of the reasons why these phones had GPS receivers. But no, after lots of poring through the EXIF data, we couldn't find any. Maybe the receiver was turned off? Out to play with my iPhone, something I've been meaning to do for a while. With the GPS receiver turned on, I got this display: So clearly it stores location data somewhere.
Navigation and location
Talking with Chris Bahlo after dinner. She came up with other issues about the way to Lethbridge. It seems that the road between Dereel and Mount Mercer is a roller coaster, and the road from Mount Mercer to Shelford is a gradual incline. Neither is of interest when going by car (which is why I had to think about the first stretch), but when towing a horse float (trailer), it makes a big difference. So she prefers the somewhat longer way via Rokewood, which has one climb on the way back to Dereel, but is otherwise relatively horizontal. And Google Maps?
Garden sprinklers
I still don't have my relay board working correctly, but I can't wait: today the temperature hit 35°, and there's more of same forecast. The garden needs watering. So I hacked something together to run the relays manually: That showed a number of unexpected problems. Apart from the hoses, which are still blowing apart at the joints, there were a number of badly mounted drippers, like this one: And a couple of the drippers themselves had blown apart, with spectacular results: ...
More relay board fun
The weather is getting hottertoday we had a maximum temperature of 34°, and the toy sprinkler controller is not working correctly. It's high time I got my new Ethernet-connected relay board working. I've located a program called RelayNet.exe, but the name is the only thing I recognize. It's in Chinese, and the display is only partially intelligible: Clearly the values on the left are IP address and (TCP) port number. But what does the rest mean?
Navigation and Android repairs
Going to town gave me another opportunity of testing some navigation apps, made necessary because Chris had taken my navigator to Lethbridge with her. For various reasons, it was not a success: iGO was a dead loss: it hung displaying the lie Starting... . That was funny, because it worked normally the last time I tried it. Some time later it occurred to me that I had moved it from device memory to the SD card.
Getting to the vet
The vet hospital is in Lethbridge, not a place I was even able to place accurately (it's between Ballarat and Bannockburn on the Midland Highway). How do we get there? With the aid of a GPS navigator, of course. I've been fighting navigation software for years, but in this case I just set up a route with my trusty el-cheapo navigator. Looking at Google Maps was instructive, though. Many of my friends on IRC think that it's good enough. Even Google puts in a disclaimer that the system is in beta, and well they may. It seems that the best way there is really via Mount Mercer and Shelford.
Finally! Display smart phone on external monitor
While trawling through web pages on Android, I came across this one (their bold text): The Screen Mirroring feature lets you wirelessly beam your photos, videos, presentations, or even your video games to your big screen. Sounds excellent. Butt then you read on and discover: You can connect to any HDTV using the AllShare Cast Wireless Hub for TV models earlier than 2013 (F Series), or you can connect directly to a supported Samsung Smart TV (newer models).
Mere mobile phone GPS apps
On several occasions I have compared the navigation apps available for mobile phones with the software on my el-cheapo GPS navigator, almost invariably unfavourably. But the same software, iGO, is available for Samsung phones (only). Tried downloading it today. It's really difficult to use it outside a car: in the house there's no GPS coverage, and outside it's too bright. But it seems to work quite similarly to the way it does on the dedicated navigator. It's free, but the maps costabout $27 for Australia. That might even be worth it, but the question is whether the phone version offers anything that the standalone version doesn't.
Block Pirate Bay
The Australian Federal Court has ruled that Australian ISPs must block access to The Pirate Bay. On the face of it, that makes sense. The Pirate Bay assists copyright infringement. And the Federal Court rules that the copyright owners should come up with the funding for blocking it. But does it really makes sense? A number of things suggest that it doesn't: What is copyright? Is it still a valid concept in its 20th century invocation? At the moment I have a choice when watching films for: free-to-air TV or download the video.
Reviving Galaxy S2
Finally found time to re-flash the Samsung GT-I9100T. I've been planning it for a week, but finally I had all the pieces together and the time for something to go wrong. I followed this page, which could do with some improvement, but basically is correct. Here's the procedure: Download Odin3 and maybe the Samsung Galaxy S2 USB driver. The latter URL points to rapidgator.net, which I strongly recommend avoiding, but I haven't found (or needed to find) an alternative site.
Repairing mobile phones
On Saturday Chris Bahlo brought me another mobile phone, her last Samsung. It failed on her watch: it seems that the charging circuitry failed. It's a considerably better one than the GT-I9100T that I'm trying to re-flash, but clearly replacing parts is beyond my ability. So I looked up repair places, and came up with no less than two of them, iAdrenalin and Ballarat iPhones. Despite the name, both of them also do Samsung, and they're both located at 4 Vine Street, which is a residential address and the reason for my search described above. Along to take a look. As expected, one man (David), two companies, though the card he gave me was for Ballarat iPhones.
GPS on iPhone
Today I had to go to Ballarat for yet another doctor's appointment. Time to try out GPS apps on the iPhone. I found one last week before I reset it to factory defaults, but I've forgotten what it was called. How do I find it again? Impossible. In fact, finding anything on this tiny screen is impossible. How can I access the App Store from a real computer? You'd think Apple would have a method, since they sell real computers too. But they seem to have identity issues between the App Store and iTunes, and the best I could find was this page.
Updating MythTV
Yet another pain is MythTV, which has been so painful that I haven't done anything about it in months. But one issue is that it currently saves the recordings as MPEG transport streams, which don't have correct elapsed time information. My attempts to run it manually failed with some obscure error hidden deep in some disinterested library. So today I ran mythtv-setup to try to get it to run automatically after recording. I'm not convinced I was successful, but after that the backend was catatonic. How to stop? There's a program called mythshutdown, so I ran that. It shut down the computer into a catatonic state, and I had to press the Big Red Button.
Updating Android firmware, yet again
So now I have the firmware for my Samsung GT-I9100T. All I need to do is transfer it to the phone, and I have the instructions for that. But that includes downloading a USB driver and an upgrade program. The instructions refer to an Odin3_v3.07 Flasher too/ and a Samsung Galaxy S2 USB driver, both ultimately leading to rapidgator.net, which I am leaning to hate with a passion. Downloading the driver gave me continual advertising popups that obscured what I was trying to do, and at one point it claimed that my Captcha had expired, and I had to wait 60 minutes.
Updating iPhone firmware, again
I only upgraded the firmware on my iPhone last week, not surprising in view of the fact that I had just got it. And today I was asked again. Is this a coincidence, or do they bring out weekly updates? As before, the update was successful, but I had to enter my password again! Why? No idea. At first I thought it had deleted the fingerprints, but they're still there. And once again I had to go through far too many setup functions again before I could use it. And once again indications of access restrictions: So they have deliberately restricted access.
Copying: a non-word
Copying files from my iPhone to my computer was suboptimal at best: send them round the world and back again. But Edwin Groothuis and Daniel O'Connor gave me another suggestion: it seems that if you plug the USB cable into a Microsoft or Apple computer, it just shows up as a file system. OK, but let's try FreeBSD first. Dec 18 09:53:00 eureka kernel: ugen0.4: <Apple Inc.> at usbus0 Dec 18 09:53:00 eureka root: Unknown USB device: vendor 0x05ac product 0x12a8 bus uhub3 That's not exactly an out-of-box success, though I'm surprised that the system doesn't recognize the device.
iPhone image quality
Once I got the images, I put them through my normal work flow, using DxO Optics Pro , which knew all about the camera , and did image correction, showing it to be one of the few lenses I know with pincushion distortion. Here the original and as processed: In fact, the images are surprisingly good. The lighting of the scene is quite complicated, and I suspect that Apple is doing quite a bit of processing internally.
Your mail ID has been used!
Using Gmail for sending my photos (why did I need to log in? Why, did I need to log in?) brought another of these silly messages from Google: What earthly use is that? Last week I ranted about the lack of useful information in a warning about this kind of login. Now, at any rate, they haven't included useless information: they have included no information whatsoever, just a bit of advertising. What use is that?
Android? iOS?
Peter Jeremy has bought one of the ALDI Android tablets that I bought last month. He's actually less happy with it than I was, for completely unrelated reasons: it seems it's really slow, and the battery has a very limited life. Maybe there is an issue with the batteries: after all, I returned mine because it wouldn't charge at all, though at the time I blamed it on Instagram. But speed? Somehow not a thing that I have noticed one way or another with portable devices. And it's not as if he's playing games or similar: just launching an app, it seems, is too slow.
iPhone: success!
Two days ago I went through a bizarre method of authentication to register the SIM card for my iPhone: they were to deduct a small sum from my credit card, and I was to use this sum as evidence that I exist (or at least that I am an entity having access to my bank statements). That went ahead, and the system acknowledged that it had debited something from my credit card. But my bank didn't want to know. Plenty of other transactions, but nothing from ALDI. After two days, finally called them up and spoke to a human, who was able to complete the transaction.
Android: next firmware attempt
The firmware download for my Samsung GT-I9100T finally completed, but I still wasn't really happy. What is it? It's not the official release for Australia. More searching, and I found something that looked more plausible. The link took me to another file on rapidgator.net, along with the silly Captchas and slow download, but at least it looked more convincing. Another day of waiting, made easier by all the other things I had to do. ACM only downloads articles once.
ALDI SIM registration
I went out and spent big on a new SIM card for the iPhone 5S: $5 for ALDI's best. And once again I had fun trying to access their appalling web site. I have had an account with them for several years (how long? They don't keep track of the years, so it's hard to tell from there, but it seems that I've had fun in the past in June 2014 and a few months back). On the second occasion I had to reset my password, because they had changed the rules and my current password no longer worked, and they would not tell me the rules they required to limit the difficulty of a brute-force attack.
TeamViewer for iOS
And then I thought of another option for less painful keyboard access: TeamViewer is available for the iPhone. I've used it in the past for access to other systems. It seems a little silly to send all the traffic between keyboard and display round the world and back, but hey, we're modern. So I installed TeamViewer. The good news: it works. The bad news: it's upside-down. It reduces my 2510×1390 dischord window to the 800×480 or whatever of the iPhone, requiring many gestures to scroll the screen. What an amazing idea. The gesture I chose is not for publication. ACM only downloads articles once.
Phone pain: iOS
So I'm stuck with the iPhone 5S, at least for the moment. I might as well try it out in more detail. I had already reset everything, so I set it up again, which was not quite as painful as last time. This time I read some of the stuff that I skipped last time, including touch ID. And how about that, with my fingerprint I can bypass all this emetic password entry! It took me a while to realize that I needed to hold the finger over the Home button (the unmarked button at the bottom), and that I really needed a thumbprint and not the print of my index finger).
Phone pain: Android
So it seems that it is possible to download a firmware image to the Samsung GT-I9100T. I just need to find an image. OK, off for a search, which came up with a lot of useless information, but also some promising ones. http://www.sammobile.com/firmwares/ looked promising, and found the apparently correct firmware after an amazing amount of suppressed advertising and a Captcha to end all Captchas: It requires not one, but two steps, and the first time round I got it wrong. And then I had to put up with one of these silly download screens: free download at 15 kB/s, or fast download for 10 ¬.
Reinstalling Android firmware
A little more investigation of how to recover the Samsung GT-I9100T today. It seems that they have a maintenance tool, Kies that runs on Microsoft and communicates with the phone via 802.11 or USB. So I installed that and tried it out. Not the most convincing program I've seen: it didn't detect the phone set to recovery mode, and offered a Troubleshoot connection error function which required the phone to be disconnected! It ran and found no error (nor, for that matter, anything else). I had at least expected it to want the phone to be reconnected at some point, but no, that won't be necessary, thank you.
Nobody wants an iPhone
Helen Miller along this morning to pick up the iPhone. Looked at it and said It's an iPhone 5S . Yes, as advertised. But not what she had expected: she thought it was a iPhone 6S. She already has a 5S, so she doesn't need it. Damn! I only bought the thing with the safety net of being able to sell it to her if I didn't want it. What do I do now? Take it back to Carol? Sell it on eBay? For the moment I'll give it another try. ACM only downloads articles once.
Your System has been blocked
When I got home, Yvonne called me to a problem on her machine: What's that? The browser displayed the URL http://get.infinityitservices.net Called up the number (which was an Australian free call) and was connected to somebody who, as usual, didn't understand what was going on. He was fully locked in to the Microsoft mentality, asked me to press the Broken windows key and R (I think) and was surprised when nothing happened. Then he wanted me to download a Microsoft executable and run it, but this screen wouldn't take no (or Cancel) for an answer: it kept opening a new tab with the same URL and the same messages, and my browser was effectively dead.
Repairing mobile phones
In the last few days I've tried various things to repair the Samsung GT-I9100T using the recovery functions I found the other day: So far I have tried the wipe functions, without success. But there are two Apply update functions there, either from ADB (what's that? Obsolete debugger?) or external storage, whatever that may mean. Went looking on the web and found little reliable information, just pages like this, but it seems that the ADB is an Android Debug Bridge. It seems not to be a piece of hardware, but so far I haven't found any description detailed enough to be able to use it.
Do I need an iPhone?
Today's playing around with the iPhone made me step back and think: why do I need an iPhone? Why, do I need an iPhone? Apart from all the pain it causes, the display is so minuscule that it's not worth using for many purposes. Tried reading a Wikipedia page on it, which conveniently folded and hid data to make things not too painful. But I wouldn't use that format except in an emergency. I've already grumbled at length about the keyboard . And another size-related issue is that I have to hold it much closer. The monitors on my desk top are between 70 and 80 cm away.
A keyboard for an iPhone
By far the worst thing about this iPhone is the appalling touch-screen keyboard. Yes, Android phones have something similar, but for some reason many (most) Apple apps are stuck in portrait mode, giving me a keyboard rather less than double the width of my thumb. At least on Android, most apps will let you turn the thing on its side, at least doubling the width. In addition, the keyboard is a typical toy with separate shift keys for numerics and capitals. On Android I used the Hackers Keyboard, which made things marginally less painful. Is it available for Apple? It was, but it seems to no longer be supported.
OI.Share revisited
So, finally I had the phone vaguely functional. Download a couple of apps, first OI.Share. Getting it to work was the usual pain, mainly not the fault of Apple. To get it to run you first need to disconnect from the network, and OI.Share doesn't do this automatically. Neither do the instructions help. You need to go to the Settings menu and select the camera as network. After that, OI.Share worked as well as it has ever donenot very. ACM only downloads articles once.
iPhone pain, day 2 of 2
Yesterday my attempts to set up my iPhone 5S created a maximum amount of pain in less than an hour. But I learnt from that and followed the explanation, signing up for the App Store via a normal web session. That was easier, but not much. The signup seemed to be a collection of (from my perspective) worst practice for web forms: First, it set rules for passwords. Mine (Excruc1at2ng) was accepted, but why must I have upper case, lower case, and digits?
Mobile phones: small choice in rotten apples
At the Camera Crew meeting people started talking about mobile phones. It occurred to me that maybe somebody had an old one to get rid of, so I asked. Yes, indeed, Carol Moyse had a iPhone 5S that she no longer needed, and offered it to me for $200. Almost before I could answer, Helen Miller said I'll take it . But I had first choice, and it seemed all the better because Helen would take it if I didn't like it. So up to Carol's place a little later, in the process recognizing the house: I was there three years ago helping her diagnose a failed ADSL2 modem .
Google is watching you
Mail from Google today: Your Google Account [email protected] was just used to sign in from Firefox on Windows. Windows Saturday, December 10, 2016 9:06 AM (Australian Eastern Daylight Time) Ballarat VIC, Australia* Firefox*Don't recognize this activity?* Review your recently used devices <URL> Why are we sending this? We take security very seriously and we want to keep you in the loop on important actions in your account. We were unable to determine whether you have used this browser or device with your account before.
Android pain, day 3
The good thing about my Android pain of the last couple of days is that the Android tablet failed and got returned to ALDI. End of pain. Well, no. Today the replacement battery arrived for Chris Bahlo's Samsung GT-I9100T mobile phone, also known (but not on the phone itself) as Galaxy S2. It wasn't quite clear what to do with it, since I needed to be authorized to open the package, and I needed to take unspecified static electricity precautions: Unlike the claim on the eBay page, it wasn't an aftermarket battery after all, or if so, it was a very good copy of the original: ...
Android rant, day 2
Not surprisingly, people on IRC disagreed with yesterday's second rant. Firstly, people claimed that PTP does show directory structure. So I tried. It worked yesterday, but today I got: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/5) ~/Photos/20161206 364 -> gphoto2 --list-files *** Error (-52: 'Could not find the requested device on the USB port') *** For debugging messages, please use the --debug option. Debugging messages may help finding a solution to your problem. If you intend to send any error or debug messages to the gphoto developer mailing list , please run gphoto2 as follows: env LANG=C gphoto2 --debug --debug-logfile=my-logfile.txt --list-files After a couple of other attempts, tried that and got lots of output, ending in: 0.019349 gp_abilities_list_detect_usb(2): Auto-detecting USB cameras...
Instagram kills Android tablet
Overnight I had a problem with my new Android tablet: it wouldn't charge. In the evening it was at 39% charge, and after being powered off and charged overnight, it was up to 44%. It claimed to be charging, but the lightning flash symbol near the battery display was absent. What caused that? My guess is a combination of poor design and poor quality. The charger connection is on the right-hand side, and I've already had an ALDI tablet die because of poor contact from not one, but two connectors.
The pain of modern software, part 2
I was just about calming down when, also on IRC, Andy Snow mentioned that his father (retired software engineer, 70 years old, so pretty much the same demographic as myself) has just got a new smart phone. Curious, I asked what he thought of it. Not much, but Andy is sure that he will get to like it when he sees all the nice things he can do with it, including sending photos. My own experience with sending photos has been one of intense pain, so I carried on the discussion. Like most people, Andy is doomed to moving around a lot, so having something to play with while he's on the move makes senseI use my Android tablet for the same purpose, for example in doctor's waiting rooms.
The pain of modern software, part 1
Somehow I spent most of the day today fighting modern software. I've ranted about this before countless times, but far from going away, the problem gets worse. The first issue was one of the basic problems of graphics software, at least the way it is currently implemented: all programs get started from the same environment. In X it's the Window manager; other environments seem to be so amorphous that I can't say what part starts them. In either case, the concept of working directory is lost. So programs like firefox note the last used directory and offer it again. I'll use firefox as the example here, but it's by no means unusual in its behaviour.
Backup disk woes
A couple of days ago /dump, the 2 GB external backup disk that I use for other machines on the local network, somehow went offline. Power cycling it and reconnecting it showed no errors, and GEOM created device nodes /dev/da2 and /dev/da2p1, but the system couldn't make any sense of the latter node. Damaged? Today I tried it out on lagoon, Yvonne's machine. No qdifficulty recognizing it. Since lagoon is one of the machines that back up to it, it made sense to leave it there. And since I had missed the level 0 dump at the beginning of the month, decided to repeat it.
More relay board fun
Spent some time looking for documentation and code for my relay board, with insufficient success. There's a download page with various software, partially in source form (C#). Some of it was clearly unsuitedNTP server, for examplesome was in Microsoft executable format, and others again required registration. But I couldn't find any registration. In the end, found three packages that looked like they might make sense, but none of them had much source code.
Mobile phones and batteries
Maybe because of the way I talked about it the other day, my mobile phone has decided to die in the way that most do: the battery won't recharge. After a couple of days on charge, it has enough charge to boot up, present the message Low battery shutdown , and do just that. Should I replace the battery? It's not a mainstream phone, so even if I could find one, it would probably cost more than the phone is worth. So I'll keep the phone in case Yvonne's identical phone gets damaged, in which case we could use the battery from that phone.
Talking to the relay board
Yesterday I got as far as seeing evidence of my relay board on the LAN: it was trying to talk to 192.168.1.1, and wouldn't talk to anybody else. So I changed the alias on eureka's em0 interface, and sure enough, I could talk to it. First, I needed to log in, but fortunately this page tells me the details: user admin, password 12345678. After that, I got an encouraging screen: So at least I got a possibility of an English interface, where I was able to set more sane IP addresses.
Identity theft: the proof
Found in my spam folder today: From: Card SafeGuard RFID Bloc. Re: Your identity can be hacked - Your identity can be hacked Your identity could be stolen To stop all Ads follow Un_sub_scribe extended/ TD /may /mercer /090 /sizes /Lemon /russia /accepts' Barclays /plastic /s /Ha /dogg's / From: [email protected] Re:Viagra,Cialis,Levitra - http://bit.ly/2bI7Hpp ACM only downloads articles once.
Second guessing Ethernet relay board
Finally got round to connecting up my Ethernet relay board to the network. It was wise to wait until I had some time. How would a generic board with no instructions connect to an unknown network? That's what DHCP is for. Of course, there's the question how normal users can then know the IP address of the device, but I wasn't too worried about that at the moment. I just connected it up and checked with arp: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/41) ~ 1 -> arp -a radiation-tower.aussiebb.net (180.150.4.1) at 10:f3:11:e9:9f:01 on xl0 expires in 884 seconds [ethernet] aussie-gw.lemis.com (180.150.4.222) at 00:50:da:cf:07:35 on xl0 permanent [ethernet] dischord.lemis.com (192.109.197.169) at 8c:89:a5:7a:a7:bf on em0 expires in 1183 seconds [ethernet] eureka.lemis.com (192.109.197.137) at bc:5f:f4:c9:9b:bf on em0 permanent [ethernet] officephone.lemis.com (192.109.197.226) at 00:25:9b:6e:34:36 on em0 expires in 869 seconds [ethernet] lagoon.lemis.com (192.109.197.134) at 00:1f:d0:20:4e:7f on em0 expires ...
Ethernet relay card
My complaint to the eBay seller of the Ethernet relay card, asking for documentation, didn't bring much in the way of a result: Please don't worry,I have submit your question to the product department,they will reply us in 1-2 working days. Could you kindly contact us after 2 working day?We will try our best to solve the problem. I can see that's going to be a dead end.
Recovering dumb phone videos
So yesterday I managed to sideload Yvonne's video from her dumb phone to my new Android tablet. Uploading it to a real computer was no more pain than usual, though the image quality is appalling: There are a couple of reasons there. First, it wasn't taken well, but the rolling shutter effect is amazing. But then we never bought the phones for such purposes. If Yvonne had had her camera with her, she could have got reasonable quality images. But what about the USB interface on the phone?
scammer.lemis.com
After my scammer experience on Tuesday, I noted a button to report abuse to logmein123.com, so reported that, along with the code, which might help. And I got a reply: Thank you for contacting LogMeIn Customer Care, and for sharing the recent experience you had with a third party using our LogMeIn Rescue product. We encourage anyone who believes that someone is using LogMeIn software maliciously to report it, as we investigate each claim filed. We take abuse of our software very seriously and would appreciate collecting more information from you in efforts to identify who was attempting to initiate that Rescue session.
Modern file transfer
Yvonne back from shopping having scraped somebody's car in the car park. It seems that her car sustained most of the damage, conveniently limited to a single panel: The owner of the other car showed up and showed her how to take video with her phone, for which I admire her (the owner of the other car). We deliberately don't have smart phones because of the interface, and we've never used the photographic capabilities of our phones.
Sprinkler controller arrives
The Ethernet-connected relay board that I ordered a couple of weeks ago has now arrived. No power supplythat was almost to be expected from the descriptionbut absolutely no instructions!. That must be a new low. Hopefully I'll be able to make sense of the markings on the circuit board. Found a suitable power supply (I hope): the board has a marking 12 VDC , but no information about the current required. The description above says 7-24V DC , again with no current spec. My power supply delivers 1 A, which will hopefully be sufficient. I should find time tomorrow to look at it.
Your IP address is compromised!
Call from James Watson of Telstra today to tell me that my computer was in danger. I had a bit of time, so I strung him along. First, of all, he wanted to know whether I was running Windows , Mac OS or Linux, to which I honestly answered No , and volunteered that I was running FreeBSD. What? I repeated a couple of times, and he decided to call his team leader, who introduced himself as Stephen. He told me the same spiel, but didn't ask about what operating system. Instead he asked me to open a browser and go to Google to find support.me.
Copying files with Microsoft
A while back I recorded a film from SBS TV for Chris Bahlo. She gave Yvonne a USB stick to put it on, but unfortunately it was too small. So I tried it again today with a spare 8 GB SD card. I didn't expect what I saw: I've seen that beforeI think with Chris' USB stickbut at the time I attributed it to lack of space. This time I had lots of space. It took a while to discover that the real issue is that the file was larger than 4 GB, the maximum that FAT-32 file systems can handle.
Microsoft programs take over
A while back I bought some hooks for the kitchen. They came with the usual instructions in 3 point font. Reading them, I found an apparently unrelated reference to a Microsoft program: What's that? It proved to be a naked URL: http://www.command.com/ is the base URL of their web site, though of course they have to redirect you immediately. ACM only downloads articles once.
GIMP 2.9
So finally I have a machine to run GIMP 2.9. How do I get it? There are instructions here, and they work. GIMP has developed a singularly ugly new appearance, but it seems to work, and unlike far too many programs nowadays, it doesn't have any issues running over the net (apart from a slowness which I expect wouldn't otherwise be there). Finally I can start to recover my photos. ACM only downloads articles once.
Preparing for GIMP 2.9
Where do I go to get the latest version of GIMP? The right thing to do would be to port it, but I couldn't be bothered. Instead I went looking for precompiled versions for Linux. No, don't have them, but try your distro. OK, I have a Linux box running, with the stupid and immutable system name greg-GA-MA785GT-UD3H, but that's (barely) running MythTV, and I don't want to break it. But I had a virtual machine called eucla, which had Ubuntu 14.04. It seems I never completely installed it: the Ethernet card was set up to talk to the wrong interface on the host machine (and thus take me off the net).
Making friends with Android, again
I had to to to the doctor today, a typical time for using my Android tablet (in the waiting room). Spent some time uploading documentation, in the process discovering that AirDroid has completely changed its behaviour, and it uploaded the files (apparently to /sdcard0), where I couldn't find them any more. Somehow Android has completed the destruction of file system hierarchies started by Microsoft and Apple. OK, I still need something to display them with, and that's clearly Acrobat Reader. The good news is that it instantly found the documents, though it's not clear whether this was luck or design. Acroread has changed its interface too, and it took me something like 10 minutes to discover how to get it to display a page at a time.
Photo restoration continued
Yesterday's search for photo restoration software was held up by my registration for a second Facebook user. The email finally arrived this morning at 8:00, after 17 hours! What held it up? Manual checks for validity? NSA vetting? Who knows? So off I went to the Softonic web site, where I ran into many false leads trying to download other software that I didn't want. Sorry, people, you've just lost my trust. Who knows how good the software is? I no longer want to find out. Another lead was Fotor, which I downloaded, but at first sight it seemed to do nothing useful.
Photo restoration software
I'm working on some photos that I took on 5 August 1969. They need a lot of work to improve them. DxO Optics Pro helps up to a point, but somehow nothing seems to help recovering gradations, particularly in green. Then I have COLOR projects 4 , which, like all the PROJECTS software I bought, seems to offer nothing worthwhile. I tried that a couple of months ago and failed. It's really special effects software, not something that I can use for fixing colour casts. In general, the money I spent on PROJECTS software has proved to be a complete waste. So I went looking for photo recovery software .
$90 Android tablet
I've been doing a lot of macro photography lately, and one of the issues is the viewfinder. Clearly the one on the camera is seldom in a place where I can access it easily, and the LCD screen is not really ideal for careful focusing. If my Android tablet hadn't died, I could try Olympus' appalling OI.Share. But as it happens, ALDI has a special at the moment, a 10" Android tablet for only $90, so while in town, I picked one up. What can you expect for that price? Not even a charger, just a USB cable to connect to (and charge from) a computer.
NBN: not communicating
Yesterday I pondered over the meaning of the status lights on the NTD, but today things were different again: only amber. So it looks as if the signal strength is deteriorating. Posts on Facebook show that I'm not the only one to notice that. At the moment, that's not an issue, but how is this going to continue? Amber, amber/red, red, nothing? Is NBN monitoring the situation? You'd expect them to, and maybe they're in the process of replacing a defective transmitter module: there are three antennae on each tower, and if something relating to one of them has failed, then they can fall back to another until they replace it.
Understanding the NTD display
My NTD is still showing alternate amber and green signal status: What does that mean? It took a lot of differential reading the documentation and the markings on the NTD to come to a potentially meaningful conclusion: the signal strength LEDs do show progressive signal strength. One LED means low signal strength. Two LEDs mean medium (acceptable) signal. Three LEDs mean good signal. But in addition, the one LED is red, two LEDs are amber, and three LEDs are green.
Firefox bloat
Yvonne complained that her system was slow, particularly firefox. That's nothing unusual, but I wasn't prepared for what top(1) showed me: last pid: 77440; load averages: 0.51, 0.63, 0.79 up 20+21:20:14 17:17:53 72 processes: 1 running, 71 sleeping CPU: 3.7% user, 0.0% nice, 0.6% system, 0.0% interrupt, 95.7% idle Mem: 523M Active, 3358M Inact, 1129M Wired, 469M Cache, 806M Buf, 2444M Free Swap: 20G Total, 91M Used, 20G Free PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND 60584 yvonne 54 20 0 26491M 1533M select 0 226:21 36.38% firefox 1275 yvonne 1 20 0 957M 74324K select 1 107:32 0.00% Xorg 26 GB memory size!
Another Google Maps failure
Used Google Maps to show me the distance from here to Rokewood Junction. But it doens't know where it is either: Rokewood Junction is the road junction at the extreme south-west of that map, as the name of the road leading there indicates. How did Google Maps place it in the middle of nowhere? ACM only downloads articles once.
NTD status docco: found
More searching the web for documentation for the NTD today, and finally I was successful. Not on the National Broadband Network web site, of course, but on boombroadband.com.au, apparently an RSP. The document clearly comes from nbn", but I can't find it on their site. Here's the description of the signal strength LEDs: In reality, they look like this: Based on the markings, any sane person would assume that the LEDs light from left to right with increasing signal strength.
Nonstandard nbn installation
A number of people in Dereel have problems connecting to the National Broadband Network because of the lie of the land, trees, etc., including at least one property in Stones Road. While looking for status LED information, found this page by an antenna company with the descriptive name Telco . But what they offer looks interesting, and next time somebody has a problem, I'll point them to it. ACM only downloads articles once.
Off the net
Lorraine doesn't have an Internet connection, so Yvonne wanted to show her some of the caricatures of Trump that she had found. But then she came to me and said we're off the net . How would she know? It could be a firefox hang or anything in the local network. But she was right. We went off the net at 11:25, and didn't come back until 13:46, only to go off again for another 6 minutes at 13:53. When it did come back, the status indicators on the NTD were not normal: at irregular intervals the left two status LEDs flashed amber (should be green; the status LED is a primitive signal strength indicator).
Counting in the time of the web
I have a number of saved searches on eBay for which I get graphic, incomplete, badly rendered and often misspelt emails every day. The number of entries displayed is limited to 12 and the text is broken almost beyond recognition. They made some changes recently. The good news is that they have discovered that the singular of matches is match , and not matche (presumably because they know that the singular of lenses is lense ). But that's about the only improvement. The limit of 12 entries is still there, and the rendering, at least on firefox under FreeBSD, is completely broken: But the one I don't understand here is that there are 5 matches, and it only shows two of them.
Investigating medical records
Now I have my medical records, it's time to scan them in. There were over 60 pages of them! First the notes made by the doctors, conveniently in reverse chronological order, then the pathology results in chronological order. Neither set had page breaks, making it very difficult to understand. Somehow I begin to understand how a new doctor can come to incorrect conclusions after reading them, especially as some of the information about me is just plain incorrect (no allergies, never smoked). How can we do it better? A few months ago I made a table of various blood test results.
More Hugin debugging
I consider myself relatively proficient at debugging code I have never seen before. But somehow Hugin has me beat. The problem, as I have identified it so far, is that the configuration variable tempDir (which, as the name suggests, is the name of a directory for storing temporary files) somehow ends up as the path for searching for executables. As I said, shades of firefox. So an obvious approach to searching for it would be to find where the configuration file gets read in. The file is called ~/.hugin, so I can brute force search the source tree for that. And it's not mentioned!
Hugin bug: identified
More examination of the Hugin bug today. It's quite simple, in fact: I have seen it before, but on that occasion I ran into the combined problem of C++ and poor problem reporting. This time I was able to establish that the real problem is that Hugin uses the temporary file path as the executable pathshades of firefox: 39331 hugin CALL execve(0x81b60d380,0x81b605fd0,0x81b007000) 39331 hugin NAMI "/home/var/tmp/icpfind" 39331 hugin RET execve -1 errno 2 No such file or directory But where does it set it?
A bug in Hugin!
A problem report in the mail today: Hugin crashes. For once I had time to look at it, and in the course of the day made quite good progress. It seems that Hugin's way of saying can't find control point detector is: /usr/local/include/wx-3.0/wx/strvararg.h(456): assert "(argtype & (wxFormatStringSpecifier<T>::value)) == argtype" failed in wxArgNormalizer(): format specifier doesn't match argument type It's high time that Hugin saves its log files. By the end of the day it was looking like a configuration problem, and (fortunately) not a FreeBSD port issue.
New sprinkler controller
My current sprinkler controller is suboptimal. It is difficult to use, even more difficult to reprogram, and it seems to have a problemafter only 1½ yearsthat interrupts the flow at random. Twelve years ago in Wantadilla I had a relay board connected to an old computer, and a program and cron job to go with it. Why can't I do that again? For one thing, I don't want a computer running all the time just for that. But what about an Ethernet-connected relay board? Do they exist? A quick search on eBay shows: Yes. Accordinng to the description, 8 Channel Relay Network IP Relay Web Relay Dual Control Ethernet RJ45 interface Ethernet ...
No news today
Recording the Deutsche Welle news is always touch and go: just about any excuse is good enough for the Special Broadcasting Service to forget its charter and broadcast football games from obscure places at the other end of the world. And today it didn't record either. What came instead? Nothing. It was in the programme listings, at any rate. So what happened? Was the football game cancelled, and they updated the EPG too late for greg-GA-MA785GT-UD3H (the immutable name of what should be called ceeveear) to notice? There was no mention in the log files that it had even tried to record the programme.
Old Datamation humour
Decades ago I read a surprising amount of humorous material in Datamation, almost certainly the April 1975 edition. I made (pre-Xerox) photocopies of some of them, but I have since lost them, and all I have is this page, part of the content of which Josh Paetzel recently quoted (and attributed to me) on Facebook: K is the a kludge that you say You require to avoid some delay But that interim fix Forms a habit that sticks And you'll find that it's in there to stay.
Debugging chromium
I'm not the only person to have problems with chromium (correct name, but the executable is called chrome) version 52. Last week I entered a bug report and had it almost immediately closed as a duplicate of this report. And that one has been open since 22 August, without any action. I don't know how to interpret this: you'd think that something as important as a web browser would get better attention. On IRC today, Callum Gibson told me that he had no problems with exactly the same release. On his suggestion, I created a new user, logged on as he, and started chrome.
File, folder or directory?
Mail from Bartosz Fabianowski today, wondering why I, of all people, should refer to folders in an article yesterday. But that was in connection with email, and there the term makes sense. And its meaning is distinct from either file or directory: MUAs typically store messages either in files (Mbox) or directories (Maildir), though I suppose many products in the Microsoft space now store them in databases. In each case, though, the usage folder applies. Yet another reason not to apply it to directories. ACM only downloads articles once.
A clever head
Mail from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung today: Wir danken Ihnen für den großen Zuspruch. Leider sind unsere IT Server zusammen gebrochen. Unsere IT Experten haben das Problem gelöst- Sie können das Abo jetzt wieder bestellen. For once, Google Translate does a reasonable job of translation of the original intent: We thank you for your great support. Unfortunately, our IT servers have collapsed. Our IT experts have solved the problem - you can now order the subscription again.
Private email server: good or bad?
One recurring theme in the current United States of America election campaign is Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server. Three months ago I commented on the matter. But I still don't understand: I also run a private mail server (in fact, at least 3 of them). But in my language a mail server is a Mail Transfer Agent, something like a post office: mail is only stored there until it can be delivered. And indeed, Wikipedia agrees with me: A mail server is a computer that serves as an electronic post office for email.
Pharmaceutical web sites
What concentration is the Bromhexine hydrochloride in the tablets I bought? Off to the Boehringer Ingelheim web site to take a look. It has a feature I haven't seen before: the country localization page shows pretty (and useless) emblems with a stylized map and a that goes as far as the Czech Republic: Then you have to click and wait several seconds for the next page. If you live in remote places like the United Kingdom or the United States of America, you have to click four times, taking about half a minute in all.
Suspicious rcfile
I automatically file a copy of all incoming mail in ~/Mail/backup, and quite frequently refer to the folder after deleting the primary copy of a message. So it was today. But the last saved message was yesterday at 14:20, 20 hours before. What went wrong? Looking in ~/Mail/procmailerr, I saw lots of: procmail: Suspicious rcfile "/home/grog/.procmailrc" procmail: Couldn't read "/home/grog/.procmailrc" What does that mean? Took a look at the file, and it looked perfectly normal. No reason to not be able to read it. Neither it nor the procmail executable had changed in months.
Still more MythTV agony
What happened to this mornings Deutsche Welle news? For some reason, it didn't get recorded. Usually that's an indication that something much more important has come up, like a football game in Uraguay. But no, today it was broadcast, it just didn't get recorded. And when I tried to schedule another recording, the system just hung. OK, rebootafter all, Ubuntu emulates Microsoftand then the recordings were already scheduled. But what went wrong? That's a problem I've never had before. But that reminded me that I was still planning to retry a Mythbuntu installation on /dev/sda1. The intention was to set the IP address and system name as it was supposed to remain.
Next day of MythTV pain
My current status is that MythTV is running on a machine called greg-GA-MA785GT-UD3H, and I can record up to four programmes at a time. Done? Hardly: Clearly the system name (and DHCP served IP address) is Just Plain Stupid. It should be called ceeveear.lemis.com, which has a public IP address. To use NFS, my personal user ID should be the same as the IDs on other systems in the network.
MythTV: First success
So yesterday's issue with MythTV was a MySQL configuration issue? Dug through the bug report, which offered at least two alternative solutions, and chose the correct one: --- /etc/mysql/conf.d/mythtv.cnf~ 2016-10-03 16:56:56.682980378 +1100 +++ /etc/mysql/conf.d/mythtv.cnf 2016-10-04 13:49:21.424379549 +1100 @@ -1,3 +1,4 @@ [mysqld] #bind-address=:: max_connections=100 +sql_mode=NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION After that, oh wonder, MythWeb worked! Done! After only 9 days! Well, not quite. I still need: Finish configuring the system, including system name, IP address, file systems and my user ID.
Lost: Emacs bindings
Decades ago, my first experience with firefox was anything but positive. Since then I've learnt to live with it, but it seems to continually try to annoy me. On the very first occasion, I discovered that it had replaced the standard X key bindings with, as I said at the time, something Microsoft-like . At the time I found a way round the problem, but after today's upgrade it stopped working. What's wrong this time? Sometimes I despair. Twenty years of web browsers, twelve years of multimedia software, and they continually conspire to make life hard. But this time I found a firefox addon to do the job for me, firemacs.
MythTV pain, the fourth
I've been trying for a week to install a new version of MythTV, so far without success: On 26 September I installed LinHES. It proved difficult to find a version of shepherd to match, the machine seemed to be continually accessing the disk, and I had difficulties with MythWeb that seemed to depend on how I accessed it.
Package upgrade: the pain
So I am finally forced to upgrade firefox on eureka. I've been reluctant; the package system is much better now, but there seems to be a maze of twisty little interdependencies, all different. Every time I have tried to upgrade firefox, it has tried to remove Emacs. Not an option. So how about rebuilding from source? Started thatnot for the first timeand not for the first time and into endless pain: all the packages that needed removal before I could build the new version. The worst seems to be rust, which bills itself as an open-source systems programming language that runs blazingly fast... .
External editor for firefox
A week or so ago the It's All Text addon to firefox stopped working. Why? It seems that the developer uploaded a corrupt version to the web site. Why should that stop the locally installed version working? Because. My best guess is that automatic updates are so clever that they first remove the old version, then check if the new one works.. I waited a while, sent a message to the developer, which remains unanswered, and went out looking for an alternative. What I want is a way to get a sane editor (Emacs) to edit text fields in firefox. Surprisingly, there are very few.
Identifying motherboards
Yesterday I commented on the strange system name that Ubuntu thought out for my new ceeveear system, apparently the model number of the motherboard. Peter Jeremy also came out with an explanation of how to find the number: it seems that the BIOS provides it. With FreeBSD I can get it with: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/8) ~ 44 -> kenv | grep smbios.planar smbios.planar.maker="ASRock" smbios.planar.product="Z87 Pro4" smbios.planar.serial="E80-37011700126" smbios.planar.version=" " That was on eureka, and it looks like some kind of sysctl, but it isn't.
Ubuntu system names
I had puzzled over the strange default system name that Ubuntu gave to my computer: greg-GA-MA785GT-UD. Peter Jeremy came out with an explanation: it appears to include the model number of the motherboard! Apart from the question about how it found the name, what earthly use is that? It would make (marginally) more sense to describe the appearance of the box. I never cease to be amazed. ACM only downloads articles once.
Next day of MythTV pain
On rather half-heartedly with my Ubuntu installation today. Over the course of time I discovered that the base Ubuntu installation is missing a lot more than just MythTV. Here's a first cut at what needs to be done to get the thing working: apt install emacs nfs-server rwho rwhod openssh-server mailutils mutt On the positive side, Emacs on Mythbuntu used the clipboard for the top of the kill ring, which greatly irritated me.
Another day of multimedia pain
Yesterday's installation of Mythbuntu was a complete letdown, and by the end of the day I still had what is almost certainly like a downright bug in Mythweb. The code in question is: $Settings['database'] = array('name' => t('Database'), 'choices' => array('settings' => t('Database Health'), ), 'default' => 'settings', ); Clearly t() is a function to translate messages, but it wasn't ...
Comfort
I like things to be comfortable. I'm sure that goes for most of us, but other people seem to be able to put up with more discomfort than I do. How else can you explain the proliferation of painful interfaces to computers? Ildikó spent a lot of her time here peering into her (normal-sized) mobile telephone. At Dan Murphy's ( We beat all competitors' prices ) today I tried to get the online price for the beer I bought, and told the sales person that I had received a better price in an email. His answer can you show me your phone? . And in the afternoon my pain with Mythbuntu was compounded by the sitting position.
MythTV: 8 years, no improvement
As planned, started installing Mythbuntu today. I wasn't prepared for what happened. One thing was clear: I had dedicated the entire disk to LinHES, so that had to go. But once the install DVD had finished an almost interminable boot process with completely blank screen, it came with an option to install Ubuntu alongside it: What on earth does that mean? Which divider? And what does that mean? Tried selecting the dotted line at the bottom, but all I got was a broken window: It wasn't until I processed the photos that I saw a dotted line between the two sections: ...
Your web site has a broken link
Message from Skye MacInnes, a web designer who is responsible for Rays Outdoors: it seems that they have completely redesigned the web site, and a link I put to there 7 years ago is now broken. Full marks to Skye for follow-up. (S)he also gave me a replacement URL, ending in a 7 digit number which sounds like it's predestined to die in due course. But looking at the situation, there are a number of things wrong: There is a second broken URL, http://www.raysoutdoors.com.au/listing/24/BBQ's, which also doesn't resolve.
Why LinHES?
More playing around with LinHES today. Blew the cobwebs out of ceeveear and put it in the correct place, connected to the TV antenna, and tried setup. It started up with an amazing amount of disk activity, and I couldn't start an xtermapparently I was too impatient, and gave up after only one minute. I get the impression it was emulating Microsoft activity after startup. And I couldn't put an xterm on tiwi: xterm: Xt error: Can't open display: tiwi It turns out that the network configuration wasn't complete.
More TV recording pain
Yesterday I established that my TV could record programmes to a USB stick. This morning I still didn't have ceeveear up and running, so I recorded the German News on the USB stick. And how about that, directly behind that, at 11:00, came the first debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. That seemed worthwhile looking at it, so I let the recording continue (helped by the fact that I don't know how to stop it). Some time later, while it was still recording, but after the end of the programme, I started watching it.
Goodbye KnoppMyth, hello LinHES
Finally I had time to recover the disk on cvr2. Found a new, larger disk, inserted it and an old FreeBSD disk into the machine, and booted FreeBSD. First removed the partition table with gpart, and then I was then able to copy the disk with dd. All over, including 250 GB of data transfer, in under 90 minutes. Booting wasn't so easy: after booting from the new disk, mounting the root file system failed. That's quite common under these circumstances, but the message (preceded by a trace) was new: Failed to recover EFIs on filesystem: sda1 That's from XFS, something I don't really know too well, but it appears to be some log corruption.
cvr2 dead
Recoding a recording on cvr2.lemis.com today, and in the middle got an error message: I/O error . What's that? Disk full? df told me nothing: it hung. So did everything else. It looked like a disk error. Connected a keyboard, but couldn't switch to the console, so I had to reboot. Nothing in /var/log/messages, apart from some silly --- MARK --- messages. Nothing in /var/log/syslog apart from some misspelt messages from cron. OK, it seemed to be working again. But only for an hour or so. This time I took a look at the console. Nothing. Why is Linux so lacking in error reporting?
Full Google Maps, an easier way
A couple of months ago I found a way to trick Google Maps into switching to Full mode, even though I wasn't using its anointed hardware and software. But it was somewhat clumsy, and in general I didn't bother. But today, also by chance, I found a much easier way, at least for firefox: Display something in Street View . Close the tab or window. Select History/Recently closed Tabs. Presto! Select YES.
Making friends with kdenlive
I had a video clip from 17 April 1969 which I wanted to put into the diary for the day. My last experience with kdenlive didn't get me very far, but I had to do something. Today I tried again. Once again it asked me for setup details, which I thought were for the first time only. But for whatever reason it asks for them every time, with a series of 6 windows with Next buttons in different positions, clearly designed to irritate. Then I read the documentation again. Thank God it's there! It wouldn't have made any sense at all without it.
Ports upgrade
Encouraged (for some reason) by the installation of kdenlive, it occurred to me that it was probably time to upgrade other ports, notably the browsers that had just crashed. Started off with chromium: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/10) ~ 137 -> pkg upgrade chromium The following 55 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked): Installed packages to be REMOVED: vips-8.2.2 cups-image-2.0.3_2 cups-client-2.0.3_2 inkscape-0.91_6 nip2-8.2 New packages to be INSTALLED: cups: 2.1.4 Installed packages to be UPGRADED: chromium: 48.0.2564.97 -> 52.0.2743.116 ...
Understanding kdenlive
After finally installing kdenlive, time to run it. And sure enough, it popped up an introduction window: Followed that and got: Sigh. Maybe not the current version? Off to the web site to find out, but it's one of those sites that don't even tell you what it is, let alone what the latest version. At https://kdenlive.org/about/ there's a section History . Well, a heading; there's no content.
Video editing revisited
I have a large number of old 8 mm ciné films that my father took between 1956 and about 1980, now copied onto VHS tape, where suddenly there were only two E-180 tapes, both not full. Some time ago I copied one of them to DVD, and it looks like a good time to dissect the individual clips, which are very short: the old Standard 8 mm film only lasted 4 minutes, and it was very expensive. So a video editor. But which one? I've been here before. Once again I tried Project X, and once again I couldn't work out how to use it.
Hugin bugs
Michael Havens has sent several messages to the Hugin mailing list recently describing the problems that he has had with Hugin, and I've tried answering some of them. His most recent message: I got 34 images and when I first load the images everything seems cool but when I click align I get an error <below>. Then I click continue and it says that none of my images have control points and that I need to put them in manually. Any ideas as to what's wrong? ASSERT INFO: /usr/include/wx-3.0/wx/strvararg.h(451): assert "(argtype & (wxFormatStringSpecifier::value)) == argtype" failed in wxArgNormalizer(): format specifier ...
Increase speed limits!
Bill Tilley, a Victorian MLA of whom I had never heard, has started a survey (really a vote) on speed limits on Victorian freeways (only). Clearly a thing of which I am in favour, and I replied accordingly: See http://www.lemis.com/grog/Rant/speeding.php. Speed limits have been imposed for the primary intention of reducing traffic accidents. As official documents quoted there indicate, this intention has not been met: depsite lower traffic volumes, road accidents in Victoria are higher than in Germany, where there is no general speed limit. Clearly the underlying assumption is to blame.
Slow day
Another slow day with nothing much to report. I suppose as I get older there will be more of them. I had intended to take my monthly garden photos, but the weather wasn't up to it. Spent some time watching the Marc Levoy videos, in the process noting that teevee can't render WebM sound correctly, while eureka has no trouble. What's the issue there? ACM only downloads articles once.
We-can-improve-your-web-side
Spam is a way of life, of course, and a reasonable amount comes from people who want to improve my web site, even if it isn't mine. This particular one strikes me for a number of reasons: From: Oliver Hodges | Page Port Pty Ltd <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Subject: www.freebsd.org My name is Oliver and I am-Digital-Marketing-Manager. I recently browsed through your business-website-and wanted to highlight some key points for consideration. I am sure I can help your-website-rank on-Search-Engines-a lot easier. I have compiled a-website-audit-which lists all the areas that your-website- needs improvement in.
Levoy's depth of field explained
I'm continuing with Marc Levoy's photography course. It's interesting, but the production is still an issue, and by lecture 4 (which has other sound quality issues) he's only just getting round to repeating questions posed (inaudibly) during the lecture. The course so far (currently handling lenses) is really quite technical, and I'm learning quite a bit. But he has come back to depth of field, an issue that had occupied me a couple of days ago, and it seems that he's making some quick and dirty assumptions, notably that the conjugate of the circle of confusion is small relative to the aperture: The size of the cognate is proportional to the magnification.
Thou shalt not KILL
Came across this on IRC today: ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Old Kuala Lumpur, Facebook style
The photos that I licensed to Telekom Malaysia have now been published on Facebook, as part of a photo montage: It almost looks as if they took the versions I supplied before fixing them up. But maybe that's part of the impression they want to make. ACM only downloads articles once.
Marc Levoy's depth of field calculation
I'm continuing watching Marc Levoy's photo course, and as I suspected the tone issues were much improved in the second lecture. For the fun of it, put his formula into my depth of field program for comparison. Parts of it are excellent. In most cases it comes out with as good as exactly the same values. But sometimes it doesn't. For example, for a 35 mm lens at f/11 and a focus distance of 12 m, using a circle of confusion of 8 ¼m, my program gives: Subject Focal plane Magnification Exposure Near Far Depth of distance (m) distance (mm) comp (EV) limit (m) limit (m) field (m) 12.00 ...
GPS navigation accuracy
I've ranted in the past about the accuracy of my GPS maps. In particular there's a good route home from the west of Ballarat, via Bowens Road. Even Google Maps gets it almost correct. Here's the relevant part of the journey. Coming south there's a turn south-east into Bells Road, then back south west into Sebastopol-Smythesdale Road and almost immediately south into Bowens Road: Google Maps doesn't like Bowens Road, so it takes me to the next parallel road, Tom Jones Road, adding about 700 m to the journey. But compared to its normal inaccuracy, that's almost acceptable.
More photo software
I'm still looking for a photo software package that I can use to recover my slides. Today I came across Lightzone and installed it. Like all software, it requires getting used to, and it has a less than average awareness of directory structures, but there seem to be a number of knobs that I can use, and possibly it's worthwhile. ACM only downloads articles once.
Fixing HDR4 Projects gaudiness
I still haven't found a way to persuade HDR Projects 4 to produce images that aren't ridiculously gaudy. I can alter each individual image, but the whole idea is to batch process the images, and the save preset function doesn't seem to include the corrections. Today I tried a different approach: I first convert the raw images to TIFF with DxO Optics Pro . Today I set saturation down by 30 points (whatever that may mean in absolute terms) and processed that. It seems to be an improvement, though it's not that obvious looking at direct comparisons. I'll have to keep an eye on the matter.
The right language for the job
My recent work on old photos makes it clear that I need to have images that aren't listed on the pages. For example, the image 19650803/small/Norm-1.jpeg has moved to 19650804/small/Norm-1.jpeg, and I've renamed 19640828/small/KL-8.jpeg to the more descriptive 19640828/small/Bank-Negara-Malaysia.jpeg. But I can't just remove the old names, because search engines keep looking for them. On the other hand, I don't want these names to show up on the page. Each page has an associated file photolist.php (for hysterical raisins, since they're just a list of the file names and dimensions) which I use to build the page. My current idea is to add a further data column to flag those images that shouldn't be displayed.
The advantage of laptops over tablets
I've been ranting for years about the disadvantages of mobile phones and tablets compared to laptops (or are they notebooks now): the biggest is clearly the lack of a usable keyboard. But it seems that Lenovo has leveled the playing field: they've introduced a new laptop with versatile touch panel keyboard. What an idea! It seems that young users, clearly uneducated, are used to touch screens, so this is a natural. This article sums it up: Officially its called the Halo Keyboard, and if youve ever tried to quickly type on a tablets software keyboard than youll be familiar with the experience.
Still more photo recovery
I'm not making much headway with my photo recovery, though I'm learning a lot as I go. Spent a lot of time today trying to make sense of these two photos: They're still not good. There seems to be no green at all in the first image, and nothing that I could do would help. The green slider on various software had no effect. It really seems as if all green is missing from the image.
More slide scanning pain
On with my slide scanning today, though I'm not sure it's a good idea. Spent most of the day looking at the slides taken on 28 April 1967, in the Bay of Bengal near the Nicobar Islands. I'm really not happy with the results: The colours are all wrong! I noticed this a couple of days ago with the images taken on 19 June 1983, but here I couldn't find any way to improve them.
More photo processing stuff
Lots more image scans today, in the process improving my EXIF creation script. I've let myself in for a lot of work. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Factors: enough!
A month ago I started doing some factorizations of large numbers. The last number I tried was 1235443534534543534435425454254254554254325542543254325524524543254325425243543, and it kept the machine busy for quite some time. In fact, today, after a month, it was still going strong: USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND grog 2282 100.0 0.0 16484 3680 38 R+ 27Jul16 44835:12.87 /usr/games/factor 123544353... That's 44835 minutes of CPU time (1868 hours, or 31 days). That's enough, and I pulled the plug.
Getting to the bottom of scanning
Did some more playing with the crop rectangles on the Home mode previews, and was able to move them around or diminish them, but not to enlarge them: Reading the reference guide, however, was illuminating. It seems that there is a way to remove the crop: just click on the Delete Marquee button. And sure enough, it's gone, and I can scan the entire area of the slide (which it recognizes correctly). Only: this only works in toy Home mode, which of course is far too simple to understand 16 ( 48 ) bit pixel depths.
Still more photo processing
Gradually I'm coming to terms with scanning the old photos, and about the only issue I still have is the excessive cropping, which I haven't been able to fix. Found a reference guide for both the scanner and the software, conveniently in multi-page, hard to navigate HTML, but at least it contains some information. Not, unfortunately, information on how to change the crop. About the only thing I discovered is that while the Home settings display the crop (and confirm that it's too small), I can't change it: It did, however, tell me that some of the buttons in the Adjustments section create additional windows that modify the function.
EXIF creation script: done?
More playing around with my script for entering EXIF data into the scanned photos today, and got something relatively useful. Clearly there's material for much more playing around here. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Still more scanning and processing
Why does my scanner no longer show thumbnails in professional mode? If it's a setting, maybe the old Microsoft reinstall trick will work. And maybe it won't. And maybe I'll just lose all scanner functionality. A safer bet would be to try it on a second machine. Did a bit of digging and found the disc for dxo.lemis.com, the predecessor of dischord, running Microsoft Windows Vista. And how about that, it worked normally. So it seems most likely that the problem was some interference from SilverFast. I'll leave it the way it is for the time being, until I decide whether I want to use SilverFast or not.
Breakfasts of the world
Quora is a strange site. People ask questions, anybody can answer them, including myself. But many questions are just plain silly, and there are very qualified people who answer many of them, so I seldom bother. Recently there was a question on the Zika virus. A good answer came from a certain Hillary Clinton (slamming the Republican party for not doing more). And another asked what kind of vice-president Tim Kaine would make. Answer came from Tim Kaine. So clearly it's not completely irrelevant. But by coincidence I found, a while back, a breakfasts of the world post. There's some interesting stuff in there, and of course some stuff that I'd never think of touching (typically overly sweet and processed US food), but a surprising number of suggestions of the kind I've been looking for for some time.
Goodbye Android
My Android tablet is not even 3 years old, but it has become almost impossible to charge it: both power inputs make such poor contact that it's hard to tell whether it's charging or not, not in the slightest helped by the fact that the device takes about 20 seconds to show any reaction when a charger is connected. Over the past few days it seems to be suffering from a further issue, possibly dead battery: while connected to the charger it would intermittently display the logo (the first thing it does when starting to charge), and then turn off again. Today I moved it from my desk to my battery charge area on the other wall, and tried to turn it on.
Failed panorama
I had to take photos of yesterday's picture hanging, of course. The first idea was a panorama taken from the middle of the (circular) table in the middle of the room. How do you mount the camera? It has to be placed on top of the table, of course. But with the panorama bracket my real tripod is about 85 cm high, probably too high for the view I wanted. So I mounted it on a toy tripod I bought years ago. There's a carousel ( lazy Susan ) in the middle of the table, so I used that as a rotator. The results were underwhelming: Yes, of course I can crop the table surface, and I did: ...
File upload: no go
My file upload web page works, sort of, at least for me. Today we tried it in earnest, and one limitation became evident immediately: only one file at a time. Possibly there's a solution for that, but there was worse to come: it just failed silently. Select a file, press submit, and no response, not even the debug output that should have appeared. How do you debug that? One thing is clear: not during the presentation. Paul suggested using Dropbox instead, which sounded like complete overkill to move relatively large quantities of data 10 metres across the local network. But he signed me up anyway, and we waited for a confirmation message.
Camera Crew meeting
The monthly Dereel Camera Crew meeting took place this afternoon at my place, where I presented my raw processing presentation. It's not a big group, but I was expecting more than the two people who came (Carol Ann Moyse and Paul Shire). Paul, a professional photographer, was particularly interested, as he should be, and had lots of questions. How well did I address things? I'm not sure. It seems that the illustrations of how pixels work really was worthwhile. as were the underexposure examples. But Paul knew how to fix the underexposed image with Photoshop It'll only take me 10 seconds . Five minutes later he came up with an image which really did lighten up the shade area and keep the skies from burning out.
Uploading data via web site
On Saturday the Dereel Camera Crew are coming to learn about raw image processing. I'm asking them to bring some sample images with them. And how do we upload them? Loading photos from cameras using commodity operating systems is such a pain that I don't want to get started. So I'll ask them to bring a laptop and upload the images themselves. And how? CIFS? NFS? FTP? The modern way is to use a web page. How do you do that? Simpler than it seems, apparently. This page on W3schools popped up first, but it's clearly based on this php.net page.
More census crash background
It's becoming clearer and clearer that the Census crash had nothing to do with FreeBSD. And it's not becoming much clearer what the real reasons were. But this tweet (a screenshot, of course, because you can't say anything useful on Twitter) seems to offer a plausible description. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
More unintelligible error messages
While working on the server overload issue, discovered a number of these messages: pid 63711 (httpd), uid 80, was killed: out of swap space pid 63932 (httpd), uid 80, was killed: out of swap space swap zone ok swap zone exhausted, increase kern.maxswzone I've never seen that before. I wasn't out of swap spaceI was only using about 35%. Took a look and found: === root@www (/dev/pts/0) /usr/local/etc/apache24 89 -> sysctl kern.maxswzone kern.maxswzone: 0 That looks like a default value, the same as I have on my other machines.
Server overload
For some reason I forget, I wanted to look at something on the external server www.lemis.com today. And once again, as a couple of weeks ago, the system was swapping its little heart out. This time things looked different, though: there were up to 100 httpd processes running, apparently all doing something useful. But this machine only has 1 GB of memory, and the swapping just completely overloaded it. OK, there are parameters to limit the number of concurrent servers. What are they again? Once I had a good understanding of Apache, but that was decades ago. Looking in http.conf, found: # Limit on total number of servers running, ...
Census web site down, but no data corruption
Yesterday was census day in Australia, and it seems the majority of the population chose to perform it on line. And then came the catastrophe: Hackers ! They had to close down the site, and as of a day later, it's still down. Typical Microsoft vulnerabilities, right? Went off to find details and gloat. But I wasn't prepared for what I saw: FreeBSD? Is that our fault? Sent off a message to the developers to discuss it, and in the meantime tried to find more details.
25 years of web sites
Coincidentally with the 71st anniversary of Little Boy, and almost coincidentally with the 50th anniversary of my acquisition of my oldest camera, it seems that today was also the 25th anniversary of the first web site. How time flies! ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
New radio
The radio that I ordered at the end of June has finally arrivedwasn't posted until 13 July. It must have the distinction of being the only device I have with both instructions and inscriptions only in Chinese. I worked out how to use it as a radio, but there are other functions that will take time to decipher. At least I can use it for the original purpose, to trace faults in the electric fence. ACM only downloads articles once.
HDR fun, yet again
On Tuesday I finally managed to get a better image from HDR Projects 4, and to save the profile. That related to images with extreme dynamic range. How would that work with the relatively simple scenario of my house photos? Started with that profile and played around a while. And how about that, finally something better! Here are the results for last weekend, first the out-of-box HDR Projects results, then those with enblend, and finally today's results: Today's do look the best, though arguably they're still too gaudy.
Full Google Maps!
Since Google Maps has downgraded to the New Look, it has refused to give me Full Google Maps . Why? It's not saying; the link just gives generics, not specifics to my installation. Sometimes I wonder if it's worth it: it seems so much worse than it used to be that I'm wondering if it's not deliberate. Today, however, the unexpected happened. Looking for contact numbers on the PPT web site, I found an embedded map with an incorrect location: OK, follow the link at the bottom, and I got an unexpected message: OK, nothing I'd like better (well, within context).
Factor: a week and counting
Last week I started running /usr/games/factor on a 78 digit number. It got as far as the first four factors (3 19 83 4259) and then got stuck in a loop looking for the next. It's still going a week later: USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND grog 2282 100.0 0.0 16484 3680 38 R+ 27Jul16 10117:06.11 /usr/games/factor 123544353453454353443542545425425455425 Interestingly, the time 10117 minutes corresponds to 7.026 days, almost exactly the time it has been running.
Understanding HDR, yet again
I'm writing a presentation about raw imaging processing for the Dereel Camera Crew. That's not really necessary: a demonstration would be good enough. But I have a desire to express things as well as possible, and as usual it's a lot of work. Where do you start? Not with raw images, that's for sure. First you need to understand the background, and that's where I'm (currently) starting: the presentation has been through several restructures, and I'm probably not done yet. Clearly the one area where raw images beat the hell out of JPEGs is recovering underexposed images. Here's an image which was roughly 4 EV underexposed: And here it is recovered from JPEG and from raw: ...
More focus stacking
Our Schlumbergera is flowering, another pretty flower with enough third dimension to challenge macro lenses. Took a few photos, both with in-camera processing ( focus stacking ) and postprocessing stacking ( focus bracketing ). The results weren't too bad: But there are still issues with the external software, Focus Projects 3 professional , which I used for the first image. Enlarging the image shows considerable bleed: I haven't seen that with the in-camera processing, like the second image.
CJ's software problems
Call from CJ Ellis today: his Google Chrome no longer worked. How do you diagnose that? In the end he came over with the box and I plugged it in here. Boot up: Windows did not shut down properly . OK, boot up and recover, holding a lecture on proper shutdown techniques while I was at it. And then fired up Chrome, which worked as well as could be expected under the circumstances. All a matter of performance and patience, the lack of which was probably the cause of the problem in the first place. When I shut the machine down again, CJ complained that it took such a long time.
New DxO
Another update to DxO Optics Pro today, requiring a reboot to remind me that this is the Microsoft space. After restarting, I got an apparently benign error message: EntityMemberChanged or EntityComplexMemberChanged was called without first calling EntityMemberChanging or EntityComplexMemberChanging on the same change tracker with the same property name. For information about properly reporting changes, see the Entity Framework documentation. Now isn't that an interesting and intuitive message to the end user? Looks like a debug message that broke out. What does it mean? Race condition? I suppose I should send in a bug report and watch them mishandle it.
Photos: camera or smart phone?
Photos from smart phones can be very good, and Chris Bahlo has pretty much stopped using her real camera in favour of photos from her phone. Yesterday she brought me a USB stick with the photos she took two weeks ago, while I was trying to get distorted photos of sleeping dogs: The first problem with the USB stick was that I couldn't read it. fdisk showed: Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1 Information from DOS bootblock is: The data for partition 1 is: sysid 114 (0x72),(unknown) start 778135908, size 1141509631 (557377 Meg), flag 6f The data for partition 2 is: sysid 101 (0x65),(Novell Netware/386 3.xx) start 168689522, size 1936028240 (945326 Meg), flag 69 The data for partition 3 ...
Factorizing, continued
My factor program is still running, since Wednesday. USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND grog 2282 99.0 0.0 16484 3680 38 R+ Wed01pm 5576:56.10 /usr/games/factor 123544353453454353443542545 I suppose this is the kind of thing that the supercomputers of the 1970's just couldn't run: they wouldn't stay up long enough. ACM only downloads articles once.
Factorizing, continued
The factorizing that I started on Wednesday continues: grog 2282 100.0 0.0 16484 4084 38 R+ Wed01pm 4152:10.37 /usr/games/factor 123544353453454353443542545 I should be able to estimate how long it will take, but I can't be bothered. I'll just observe. ACM only downloads articles once.
Still more HDR issues
House photo day today, and I still haven't got my routine settled since I started using HDR Projects 4. Today I decided to use TIFF intermediate images, but things didn't turn out as well as I had hoped. Here a comparison between the HDR Projects version and my normal processing, first HDR Projects: Apart from the brighter colours, the shadow detail is all but gone in the Projects version.
Web server down!
Into the office this morning and tried to sync something to our external web server. Timeout. Strange: my periodic pings got through with no difficulty. But when I pressed Return on one of the ssh windows connected to the server, nothing happenedfor a minute or so, after which it reacted. Time to finally connect the VNC console. That showed the machine swapping heavily. Wouldn't it be nice to know what was causing that? But named was at the top of the top list, and it seemed somewhat bloated: === root@www (/dev/pts/0) ~ 11 -> ps up2395 USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND root 2395 0.0 2.9 103124 14544 - SLs 28May15 347:48.17 named It had been running for 14 months, probably time to relieve it.
factor performance
Half a century ago I get a new 28 mm wide-angle lens, with the serial number 1364964, which I factorized to 16².7².8². Unfortunately, I was wrong. In those days, I would have done the calculation by hand. Now we have computers, and it's easy to see: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/28) ~ 22 -> /usr/games/factor 1364964 1364964: 2 2 3 17 6691 My original calculation would have taken at least a minute or two, but this was instantaneous (in fact, time(1) reported about 1 ms, the limit of its resolution).
The limits of Hugin
Message from Paul Christopher Greene on the Hugin mailing list today: Hugin looks amazing but we've had a lot of trouble getting it to run / use it properly. We have a simple 2 image warp we need done (one image to match the other) so we can composite them together manually in Photoshop. OK, sounds just like what I wrote up here. Contacted him and got two images that really weren't ideal for aligning: taken from two different places, with different focal lengths.
Bang! You're dead!
Last week in a discussion on the TUHS mailing list, Norman Wilson bewailed the demise of bang paths. What? I was so happy to be rid of UUCP and all that went with it. Norman said that he had last used them in 1990. I was sure that I had used them more recently than that, and indeed the last message was sent to sing.tandem.com!grog on 4 July 1995. A discussion with Jerry Dunham, who wrote: Yes, it appears to be for real, but perhaps (if you'd believe Micro- soft) a bit overstated.
BSD is dead
For the first time in at least a month, Pedro Guffini broke out of the underlying spam noise on the FreeBSD-chat mailing list with a post about Larry McVoy and BitKeeper. Digging up ancient (and not very pleasant) history? No, he had a more philosophical question, which I missed. What I saw was a quote from Github that seemed wrong: The BitKeeper history needs to be written up but the short version is that it happened because Larry wanted to help Linux not turn into a bunch of splintered factions like 386BSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD, etc.
House photos with TIFF
I still haven't completely come to terms with my new house photo methodology using HDR Projects 4. Today it occurred to me that I should really be doing all this processing with TIFF intermediates, and not JPEG. That was more difficult than I thought, mainly due to assumptions made in my scripts. But one thing didn't work as expected: the images had no EXIF data. After a lot of looking around, I couldn't find a way to get HDR Projects to put the EXIF data into the output filesneither with TIFF nor with JPEG. And my diary entries show that I had noted this problem in the past, but not a solution.
Hugin on Fedora, revisited
Finally got round to loading the latest beta of Hugin from the Fedora site. Their firefox is set up to automatically start their graphical software installer, whatever it's called, and it seemed to start nicely. But when I tried to install the package I had downloaded, I got a modern, small, unresizeable window that told me that I was missing a dependency, hugin-base. This seems to be Bruno Postle's choice: for some reason he had split the distribution into two packages, hugin-base-2016.2.0-0.0.20160719hg.fc24.x86_64.rpm and hugin-2016.2.0-0.0.20160719hg.fc24.x86_64.rpm. Both are almost identical in size, and both appear to be needed to use the package. OK, installed -base.
Debugging the Hugin/Linux problem
Gathered up my courage today and made another attempt at getting Hugin to work with Linux. Yesterday I had established that the images I took on Saturday didn't align at all. Hugin had decided that each was taken with a different lens. Those specific images had been assembled to HDR tone-mapped images by HDR Projects 4, with which I have still not come to terms. How about the alternatives merged with enblend? It worked! So what's different about the HDR Projects images? They're gaudier, of course, but that shouldn't interest the control point detector. EXIF issues? Ran exiftool against them and compared the output.
Hugin under Linux
Finally got round to running Hugin under Linux (Fedora 24). That, too, is irritating. First I needed to mount the NFS file systems, of course; at least Fedora, unlike Ubuntu, supplies NFS support out of the box. But of course the user IDs were different, and grog on twister (the name that the machine assigned itself before discarding my IP specifications and reverting to DHCP) proved to be benno on eureka. And of course my clever scripts didn't work because various programs were missing. But finally I got it: It doesn't take a trained eye to see that something is seriously wrong here.
Whose computer is it?
Yesterday I gave up on trying Hugin on Linux (Fedora 24) because it was too irritating. Came back today and found the machine telling me that I had lots of software updates, and would I like to reboot? Huh? First I need to download the updates. Ah, no, the system thought of that and did it for me, without asking. That's really irritating. OK, now I have more free traffic than I know what to do with, but it hasn't always been like that, and even today many people have separate allowances for on and off peak, and this is an obvious choice for off-peak traffic.
Don't make me uncomfortable!
I've been using Unix and X on the desktop for over 25 years now. It took me several years to get my system set up the way I wanted it, but since about 1995over 20 yearsI've had essentially the same environment, despite well-meaning marketeers who know that I would like it better their way. Why? Yes, of course, if you change the user interface, you may be able to sell more hardware and software. But it seems that things are getting more and more restrictive. In particular, running X applications over the network is becoming painful, and changing programs around make life unnecessarily difficult.
Hugin regression and Linux
I sent a message about my errors with Hugin rc1 to the Hugin forum yesterday, but didn't get any reply. OK, how do I check whether the errors only occur on FreeBSD? I can't build on Microsoft, I don't have a real Linux box, and running Hugin on a VM is more pain than I can imagine. OK, let's install Linux on a real machine. Bruno Postle posted that he had built packages for Fedora, so it seemed a good start. Installing Fedora was interesting. It's not exactly the first time, but it seems that Linux distributors try to emulate Microsoft by making the user interface different for every release.
Hugin 2016.2.0-rc1
While doing my photo processing, decided to install the latest version of Hugin, 2016.2.0-rc1. It built nicely, but there were strangenesses, and at first I thought the strange colour rendering was one of them. But it certainly complains a lot when starting up: (hugin:99873): Gtk-WARNING **: gtk_widget_size_allocate(): attempt to allocate widget with width 0 and height -28 (hugin:99873): Gtk-WARNING **: gtk_widget_size_allocate(): attempt to allocate widget with width -5 and height 18 (hugin:99873): Gtk-CRITICAL **: IA__gtk_widget_set_size_request: assertion 'height >= -1' failed (hugin:99873): Gtk-CRITICAL **: IA__gtk_widget_set_size_request: assertion 'height >= -1' failed (hugin:99873): Gtk-CRITICAL **: IA__gtk_widget_set_size_request: assertion 'height >= -1' failed (hugin:99873): Gtk-WARNING **: gtk_widget_size_allocate(): attempt to allocate widget with width 146 and height -28 (hugin:99873): Gtk-WARNING **: gtk_widget_size_allocate(): attempt to allocate widget with width 370 and height -28 (hugin:99873): Gtk-CRITICAL **: IA__gtk_widget_set_size_request: assertion 'height >= -1' failed (hugin:99873): Gtk-WARNING **: gtk_widget_size_allocate(): attempt to ...
Understanding font rendering
Yesterday I took some photos of a display on the TV screen where black text was interspersed with lighter pixels: This gave rise to some discussion on IRC. Why wasn't it black? X server? Graphics card? TV monitor? Tried again again on the same hardware and server today, and came up with these images: The first is from an xterm, the second a link on firefox, and the third a recovery text from firefox.
Raw processing software
Somehow I'm finding RawTherapee to be a steep learning curve. And surely the camera manufacturers all provide their own software. Everybody else in the Camera Crew uses either Nikon or Canon, so went for them. Yes, it seems that the software comes with the camera in each case. Nikon has a program called ViewNI-i, which looks quite straightforward. Canon has a product called Digital Photo Professional, and they make you jump through hoops to get it. First you need to choose a camera model. That would imply that if you had multiple Canon cameras, you would need a separate installation for each camera, though of course that's incorrect.
New motherboard for tiwi
tiwi.lemis.com, my TV display computer, has the slowest processor of all my computers, an AMD Sempron 145 with a CPUmark of 802. It's struggling with the newer, more bloated web browsers. And I have a motherboard lying around with an Athlon X2 II 4450e, rated at 1865. All I needed was to change the motherboard. And somehow that took me a long while to do. What if something goes wrong? I'll be without a TV. But how hard can it be? About the only real issue was that I didn't have the manual for the motherboard (which proved to be virtually identical to the old one).
Raw image processing
Spent much of the day working on my presentation of raw image processing , which is looking more and more like an image optimization presentation. Raw images are only part of the equation, and they're not even really necessary. The biggest question is: which software? I use DxO Optics Pro , but it's not without its faults, and it costs money. RawTherapee is free, and the results look good, but so far I have had trouble getting it to do exactly what I want it to do. Yes, there's a manual, and I've been working my way through it, but it's a lot of work.
Computer music and CSIRAC
Chris Bahlo sent me a URL from which I was able to extract this video: I'm not sure I believe that this equipment is really creating the music, but it gave me the opportunity to look for something better. Clearly we really want classical music, something like this: At least the sound quality suggests that this is really generated by the printer. And in the process I discovered an interesting video about CSIRAC: This may have the distinction of being the first machine to ever have generated music.
More lens profile investigations
Yesterday I found lens profiles for some of my lenses via the Lens Profile Downloader. But there's a second source, via the Adobe DNG converter. Are they the same? Fought my way through the mess that is the Microsoft directory hierarchy and found nearly 300 MB of profiles, over 1520 individual ones. And none of them were for Olympus lenses! There were a total of 49 profiles for third-party lenses to fit Olympus, but none at all for Olympus' own lenses. That reminded me of something: I've been there before while considering Lightroom, and it was one of several reasons I decided against Lightroom.
ALDI mobile pain
While in town, tried to ring Yvonne. But I had a message on my phone: my credit has run out. Why wasn't I told? Maybe they were too polite. Back home, I went to the web site and tried to log in. According to my notes, the login was really my 6 digit account number, and the password was BrokenSite. But the login screen wanted a Mobile Number , presumably meaning the calling number of the mobile phone. Didn't work. Put in the account number instead. Still didn't work. How do I fix it? Tried to call them up, once I found the well-hidden phone number.
Clear error messages
As if I didn't have enough fun with browsers, Chrom* also died on me. When I tried to restart it, I got: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/18) /Photos/Tools 27 -> chrome [27830:440427520:0710/181026:ERROR:process_singleton_posix.cc(964)] Failed to create socket directory. [27830:440427520:0710/181026:ERROR:chrome_browser_main.cc(1344)] Failed to create a ProcessSingleton for your profile directory. This means that running multiple instances would start multiple browser processes rather than opening a new window in the existing process. Aborting now to avoid profile corruption. It was repeatable. What does that mean? Didn't have time to look for it then, so fired up a firefox instead.
Clear error messages
As if I didn't have enough fun with browsers, Chrom* also died on me. When I tried to restart it, I got: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/18) /Photos/Tools 27 -> chrome [27830:440427520:0710/181026:ERROR:process_singleton_posix.cc(964)] Failed to create socket directory. [27830:440427520:0710/181026:ERROR:chrome_browser_main.cc(1344)] Failed to create a ProcessSingleton for your profile directory. This means that running multiple instances would start multiple browser processes rather than opening a new window in the existing process. Aborting now to avoid profile corruption. It was repeatable. What does that mean? Didn't have time to look for it then, so fired up a firefox instead.
Browser update: sting in the tail
One of the things I did while trying to recover the browser configuration on tiwi was to rename the ~/.mozilla directory and restart firefox. It didn't help. But by accident I first renamed the corresponding directory on eureka, where I had four browser instances running. No worries, quickly rename it back before I do anything with those browsers. It didn't help. They all crashed, and when I restarted, the new instance overwrote everything that they had ever known. Complete restore of the directory from backups needed. Yes, it was my fault. But somehow the error recovery was not very appropriate. ACM only downloads articles once.
Politicians and private mail servers
Nobody can have missed the fuss that people in the USA are making about Hillary Clinton's private mail server. But what does it really mean? Why should a private mail server be a security threat in itself? What is the approved network topography for sending classified emails? Are they encrypted? Who has the keys? Are they allowed to use mobile devices to send the mail, for example? Are they allowed to keep private copies on their servers PC's? Who has access to the official mail servers? Edward Snowden's successors perhaps? There are so many questions that need to be answered before we can have any idea how much of a security breach it might have been.
tiwi upgrade: still not done
In the evening, sat down to watch the (recorded) news on tiwi. /usr/local/lib/libGL.so.1: Undefined symbol "_nv016glcore" Damn! I had just fixed that yesterday. Why was it back? Nothing had changed. More messing around, not in the best of moods, and in the end reinstated the current version of libGL. And how about that, everything worked! I still have no idea what happened, but it seems that the problem was not directly related to my hacked version of mplayer, nor to the version of libGL. But what was it? And is it now gone? ACM only downloads articles once.
Formatting SD cards with Microsoft
Paul Shires had asked us to bring the photos we took last time with us for our meeting today. OK, put them on an SD card. I had one lying around, but it was formatted with NTFS, and photo cards should be FAT. Reformat. mformat wouldn't do it because it wanted to know cylinders, tracks and things. And Microsoft Windows wouldn't do it; the only options were NTFS and exFAT, whatever that may be. I tried it but ended up with a non-FAT format. Did I do something wrong, or can Microsoft no longer format vanilla FAT file systems? ACM only downloads articles once.
Web browser woes
The problem with mplayer wasn't the only issue I had with tiwi. Trying to watch Al Jazeera News and discovered I couldn't set full screen. Why not? YouTube had some helpful hints. For firefox I need to go to about:permissions. But that doesn't work. What about Chrom*? It has instructions for that too. And again they fail early. I finally found a page that told me that the permissions could be set, but they no longer have any effect. What's Google for? Off to search, and found many suggestions and videos, all either wrong or not applicable. I couldn't find out how to fix it.
Port upgrade: the sting in the tail
Yesterday's package upgrade on stable went well, so today while Yvonne was away, I upgraded her machine lagoon and our TV computer tiwi. Yvonne had no problems, but it was a different matter with tiwi. I have a special version of mplayer which got overwritten. OK, no worries, copy the version from eureka. But that has old, worn-out libraries. So I had to build it on tiwi. But how? Last time I had lots of fun, and I wrote down quite a bit of detail. But not enough. As a result, I ran into many of the same traps. Here's how I ended up, though the method could do with improvement: In /home/grog/src/ports/mplayer-export-2015-12-19/, run genpatch.
Spamassassin: past use-by date?
Six years ago I noted that SpamAssassin was not really up to date any more. But I fixed that problem, and left it as the third step in my spam filtration system. First I reject certain domains, then I filter it through Gmail, and then I filter it again locally with SpamAssassin. I'm expecting a message from Karl Schaefer, but it hasn't arrived. It wasn't in the the spamassassin folder either. And neither was there any spam that I could see. Some spam still does get through, but SpamAssassin didn't catch it. Instead it filters about 3 or 4 false positives per day, including this one: From: [email protected] Subject: State Library card renewal notice (Final Notice) Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2016 01:00:13 +1000 X-Spam-Flag: YES Content preview: Dear Greg, Thank you for being a registered card holder with the State ...
Package upgrade
The new FreeBSD pkgng system is getting much better, but it's still not perfect. As a result, my packages are getting more and more behind. Upgrading isn't difficult: === root@stable (/dev/pts/4) /home/grog 1 -> mailme pkg upgrade The following 1 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked): Installed packages to be UPGRADED: pkg: 1.7.2 -> 1.8.7 2 MiB to be downloaded. Proceed with this action? [y/N]: y It seems that every time I do an upgrade, I first have to upgrade pkg. This time I have clearly missed no fewer than 7 intermediate updates.
Why I hate Android, revisited
It's been over four years since I bought my first Android tablet. It was a great disappointment, and I returned it to ALDI. A year later I tried again, particularly since it was becoming apparent that I could use one to control the camera that I was going to buy. But I still couldn't make friends with it. I've ranted about this repeatedly in the past, and after six months I came up with a summary of my problems, and six months later I compared it with the Microsoft offeringto Microsoft's advantage! In the meantime I hardly use it at all.
Backup: finished!
After about 3½ days, the first run of my backup is finally finished. In the meantime, of course, more data has been added, and so I needed to run a normal backup again. To my surprise, it ran in about normal time. Maybe things aren't that bad after all. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Microsoft Windows 10, continued pain
Into the office this morning. My remote desktop session with despair, the machine I was upgrading to Microsoft Windows 10, had closed. On investigation it seems that it had finally completed the upgrade, and without so much as a by your leave , had rebooted. It was now asking me to accept default settings for things I've never heard of and which it didn't volunteer. About the only thing that struck me was the formatting of the page: Clearly a modern operating system.
Upgrading to Windows 10, try 3
Sooner or later I'm going to have to upgrade my Microsoft boxes from the current Windows 7, and it seems that the free upgrade (and hopefully the irritating reminders) will run out at the end of next month. So dragged out the old disk for despair.lemis.com, which I haven't used in 6 months, and started an upgrade. Not only did it take foreverall afternoon, without being finishedbut it maxed out one CPU while doing that, and the percentage complete display incremented more and more slowly. By evening it had reached 99% and been there for an hour or so. ACM only downloads articles once.
Backup: progress?
Into the office this morning to see how the backup of my /Photos disk was progressing. Not as bad as I had feared: after 16 hours of backing up, the disk contained about 910 GB of data, an average speed of round 16 MB/s. Not spectacular, but acceptable. In a couple of days' time it should be finished. Then I'll have to see how long the incremental backups take. ACM only downloads articles once.
Backup disk hell
So what to do about a new backup disk? Clearly I need more capacity. My current /Photos file system (and thus my backup disk) are at 3.2 TB in size, and it's clear that in some months we'll pass the 4 TB mark. eBay shows that there are disks with up to 8 TB on the market, and starting at $360 the prices are actually (marginally) cheaper per TB than the 4 TB drives. But is eBay the best choice? Checked with Staticice and found, to my surprise, that Harvey Norman offered the same drive for $348, and that they were in stock in Ballarat.
Disk problems
I keep two backups of my photo disk on USB-attached disks, using rsync. One is always at Chris Bahlo's place, and the other usually here. Today I started a backup before breakfast to give to Yvonne to take to Chris and exchange with the other. But after breakfast things weren't nearly finished. Normally it takes 15 to 20 minutes, but over half an hour had elapsed, and it was still only part way through. Disk problems? No error messages in the log files. ps showed three rsync processes, two of them waiting on select, the third on biord (Block I/O read).
Taming HDR Projects
House photo day again today. I've been using the following work flow to make HDR images and stitch them into panoramas: Take three images of each view at 3 EV intervals. Convert them to JPEG and give them names that reflect their relationship to the panorama. For this I run two scripts via make. The first, mkmakejpeg.php, converts a file multishot into another format, Makehouse, which is the same as the Makejpeg file that I use for normal photos.
Ashampoo Snap deciphered
Ashampoo support have responded as I expected to my problems with Ashampoo Snap 8: not at all. So off looking for an alternative, and came up with FreeOCR. Despite appearances, it runs on Microsoft, and I haven't found a FreeBSD version. The good news: it works. The less good news: it really has difficulties with my text, even after I told it that it was in German. Callum Gibson also commented on my problems with Snap 8 and suggested that I try copy-and-paste. Yes, I had tried that, and it didn't work: after all, the instructions do say that it copies the output to the clipboard.
Ashampoo OCR: how?
Some months ago I bought another Ashampoo product, Snap 8, a glorified screen shot recorder with OCR functionality. The price, normally round $60, had been reduced to $10 ( $9.99 ), so I bought it for the OCR functionality, despite the extreme complexity of operation. Today, for the first time, I tried using it to convert the text from Das Gesicht des Krieges . With a bit of fiddling around I got it to recognize the text surprisingly well, better than most OCR programs I've seen. But how do I save the text? I still don't know. I'm continually amazed by the complexity of user friendly software.
Identity theft on Facebook
Facebook friend request in the mail today from Randall Stewart, a member of the FreeBSD project. OK, no problem (except that I barely use Facebook), but I checked anyway. Only three mutual friends? OK, I don't know him well, so maybe. And almost immediately he tried to message me. I only noticed because the text on the browser icon changed. Maybe I should have replied and invited him to our IRC channel, but I had other things to do. Then he posted on Facebook: So I just was notified by friends that someone has copied my photo and is pretending to be me.
More DxO support pain
So now I have two support requests out with DxO. True to my past experience, they're not making much progress. The first came back with: This could be the way your wife's account is configured. There may be a setting that is interfering with the program. Or, it could be another program or process running in your wife's account. Guilty as charged! Yvonne had another process running! And I was logged in at the same time! All these funny Microsoft ideas that can only cause trouble!
Another DxO crash
While processing the Wotan photos: What's that? Time for another bug report, though the last one hasn't had an answer after over a week. Is it worth it? ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Breakin!
Message from Google today. Somebody had just logged in as me! Hi Greg, Your Google Account [email protected] was just used to sign in from Firefox . Details: Monday, June 13, 2016 10:48 AM (Australian Eastern Standard Time) Ballarat VIC, Australia* Firefox*Don't recognize this activity?* Review your recently used devices <URL> now. Somebody in Ballarat! That's just down the road. Why didn't they give me any details with which I could catch the perpetrator? IP address would be good. Or maybe the kind of device he was using. In fact, this well-intended message is as good as useless. All I have is a vague location (Ballarat has a population of about 100,000).
Understanding DNS
Margaret Swan has purchased a domain name with the handy, easy-to-type name lyrebirdtruffles.com.au, and of course Chris Bahlo is creating the web site. But what about the name servers? Clearly ns1.lemis.com will be one server, but the others I use are personal favours from friends, and I don't want to ask them to host DNS for commercial sites. On the other hand, the domain registrar offers DNS hosting, if I could only find out how. Ideally you'd want them to be a slave server, but how do you tell them that? In fact, how do you hand it a zone file?
Memory use of photo software
I don't usually shut down dischord, my Microsoft box; long years of a horror of rebooting are behind that. Instead I hibernate it. Today I woke it up after yesterday's work and took a look at the Task Manager. 11.3 GB resident memory. OK, we have 16 GB, but in FreeBSD that would at least be marked as inactive. Where did it come from? Shut down one program after another and saw: Action Program Memory 11.3 ...
Focus stacking perfected?
My Hibiscus rosa-sinensis has produced another flower, time to make another attempt at focus stacking. Last time I had unsharp areas, notably the stamens, which I attributed to the relatively large focus step (5). This time I chose 1, the smallest, along with 40 increments. On the way, ran into some other problems. The first time round I had forgotten to turn off exposure bracketing, and somehow the camera didn't notice that I had two different, conflicting bracketing modes set. HDR won, and I ended up with three images with which I can't do anything. After turning HDR bracketing off, it still didn't work.
HDR Projects 4 elements: more insights
House photo day again today, a good opportunity to compare the results of my current HDR scripts and HDR Projects 4 elements. In the meantime, I received a reply from FRANZIS support to my request to Ashampoo support, not answering my question about how to access the files in \c\Program Files (x86)\Franzis\HDR projects 4 elements\translations, nor how to modify the automatic selection of the files, only pointing to the broken link to the manual that I had discovered yesterday. That's all the more interesting because I had written the request in German, and the reply was in German, but the documentation link pointed at a file called HDR_projects_4_elements_english.pdf.
YouTube errors interpreted
Last month I commented about silly error messages from YouTube: Today I found out what it meant: We can't play the commercials before this video, so we'll do our best to confuse you . My youtube() PHP function bypasses the commercial (their feature, not mine), so I can use that instead. Now to write a generic page around it. ACM only downloads articles once.
More HDR software
Gradually I'm using more proprietary photo software. Focus Projects 3 professional from FRANZIS Verlag produces far superior results than my attempts with enfuse. So now I use DxO Optics Pro , Ashampoo® Photo Optimizer 6 and in some cases Focus Projects. They're not the only ones I've looked at, though. Today I got a special offer for HDR Projects 4 elements, for only $19.99. A few months ago I had tried HDR Projects 4 Pro and ultimately didn't continue with it because of the baroque interface. But that's pretty much the same interface that I'm getting to know for Focus Projects 3 professional , and the price for this version is much lower.
GIMP: FOO
For yesterday's diary entry I needed a couple of cropped images that matched as much as possible. For this sort of thing I usually use xv, which is small, fast, older than some people in the FreeBSD project, and relatively lacking in features. In this case I decided it wouldn't do quite what I wanted, in particular there's no easy way to specify the exact size of the crop rectangle (300×225, to match my web page displays). So I chose GIMP, which is big, bloated and overloaded with features. Still, cropping was fairly straightforwarduntil I tried to save the file. It suggested the file name Hibiscus-1.xcf.
DxO 11: faster after all
I took all the Hibiscus photos without flash, mainly out of concern that the flowers might move during a nearly 3 minute exposure (40 images × 4 seconds recharge time for flash). And as a result I ended up taking the images at 29°/640 ISO, enough to warrant PRIME noise reduction. And how about that, it managed the 43 images in 23 minutes, 32 seconds, about 33 seconds per image. That is, indeed, faster than before (a little over 60 seconds per image). I'm sure there's more optimization to be done. On the other hand, finally got a reply from DxO Support about Yvonne's problems running the new version.
More focus stacking
Yesterday's focus stacking experiments showed progress, but also that my stack wasn't complete: no image had a sharp representation of the furthest parts of the flower. OK, we can do more than 20 steps. 40, maybe? It would be really nice to be able to calculate the number of images needed. As it was, it proved that I was far off the mark: I had set step increment 5, and with about 20 images it had reached infinity. Merging them could have been better. Here the complete stack of the second try, and then those images needed to get the flower alone sharp: It's interesting to note that the image shape is marginally different.
Live panoramas, retried
Until I upgraded eureka, I used SaladoPlayer to produce animated panoramas like these, but after the upgrade it no longer worked. And it seems that the site has gone away (want the domain name? Bring money). What's the alternative? Asked on the Hugin mailing list and got a couple of suggestions: Panellum, Pano2VR (only 99 ¬) and Marzipano. Took a brief look at Panellum, watched my eyes go funny. Looked at Marzipano. Eyes went funny again. But then I saw a reference to the Marzipano Tool, which does all the hard work for you. And sure enough, it produced a usable browseable panorama quite quickly.
Focus stacking try two.
Now that I have more memory in dischord, I can get back and look at the focus stacking work I started last month. On that occasion I had to stop because of memory concerns. Now I have the memory, and looking at the Task Manager shows that I did the right thing by buying 16 GB instead of 8 GB: it immediately used up 10 GB of memory, making it one of the most memory-hungry programs I have ever seen. And the results? Here are two images. On the left the original, on the right the results from Focus Projects Professional: ...
New RAM for old
Yvonne back from shopping today with 80 GB of memory: 16 GB of DIMMs for dischord and a 64 GB microSDHC card, which must bring the weight of data down to a new low. It weighs 160 mg, so 1 byte would weigh 2.5 pg. And clearly Andy Tanenbaum's old adage is out of date. Assuming a load of 480 kg (3 million cards or 192 PB), Yvonne could reach a bandwidth of 4 Pb/s driving her station wagon to Chris Bahlo's round the corner, conveniently exactly 384 seconds away. I'm impressed. The DIMMs look genuine: I even managed to find a data sheet for the parts, containing the information: ...
DxO Viewer Pro 11
DxO finally got round to informing me of the new release of DxO Optics Pro on Saturday, but it got classified as spam. Why? Who knows? Gmail does, maybe, but they're not telling. And yes, the current price is a special valid until the end of the month. Should I upgrade? Probably, but not because of the claimed improvements. The claim is that their noise reduction system ( PRIME ) is now a new version of PRIME that is better and faster than ever. In version 10, on dischord (an Intel Core i5-2400, CPUMark 5827) it takes about one minute to process a single image.
Hugin 2016.2.0 beta
Hugin 2016.2.0 beta has been released. Today tried upgrading the FreeBSD port. Not as simple as it seems: .../hugin-2016.2.0/src/hugin1/ptbatcher/FindPanoDialog.cpp:444:25: error: cannot initialize a variable of type 'int' with an rvalue of type 'void' int newItem = m_list_pano->Insert(m_panos[selectedPano + 1]->GetItemString(m_start_dir), selectedPano + 1); How I hate messages like that! It's clearly telling me that m_list_pano->Insert() returns void. But what type is it? m_list_pano isn't even defined in that file! Where is it? Where's my TAGS file? Ah, need to build it.
How old are you?
Preparing for dinner tonight, Yvonne sent me a link to a recipe on Buzzfeed. I hardly bother with recipes on the web; so few of them seem worthwhile. This one wasn't too bad, but not what I was looking for. But in the noise around the recipe I saw a link Can We Guess Your Exact Age With These Food Questions?. That's so stupid that I had to try it. Basically it was a test of my (almost non-existent) fast food preferences. Which pizza? Which burrito? Which doughnut (no option to say I don't like doughnuts , and no plain doughnut)? Only one sane choice: how do you like your steak cooked? .
DxO up to date?
Lately I've been subscribing to the RSS feed of 43rumors, mainly to keep up to date with new photographic equipment. But today I got another article claiming that DxO had released a new version of DxO Optics Pro . If that were the case, I should have heard about it from DxO. Still, there's an easy enough way to checkjust ask the running program: That's clear and straightforward enough. And wrong. Going to my customer account, sure enough, there's a new version, and I can get it for a reasonable price.
DDR3 compatibility, day 4
Three days on and I still haven't made up my mind about new memory for dischord. Got an email from Tim Bishop, who pointed me at this site selling DRAM specifically for my machine. I suppose that's some kind of guarantee, but the site has a big problem: no 8 GB modules. More reading brought me to this page, really relating to MSI products. But this got me thinking: High density RAM is usually very slow anyway and are typically lower Binned chips too hence they are slow and tend to have a very bad compatibility rate!
DDR3 compatibility, day 3
Mail from Adam Kranzel today about DDR3 RAM compatibility. He pointed at this page, which describes high density and low density RAM configurations. I had found many more. This one explains the difference: All low density 1GB modules are made with 16 chips (8 chips on each side) using 64Mx8 device. All high density 1GB modules are made with 16 chips (8 chips on each side) using 128Mx4 device. 1 GB? Who uses 1 GB DIMMs any more? And there's the clue.
Buying software: Fritz fliegt wieder
Finally decided to buy the photo stacking software that I discussed a couple of days ago. The good news: since I'm not in Europe, I don't pay German Value-added tax (currently 19%) so instead of 69 ¬ I only had to pay 57,98 ¬. And while paying I saw this: That should be translated as After confirming your order, you will be transferred to a protected web site, where you can enter your credit card details . But there's a typo in the text: protected is geschützt , and not geschätzt , which means valued .
DDR3 RAM compatibility
So does dischord require special RAM? All the cheap offers on eBay are AMD Only , and dischord runs Intel. But what's the difference? Spent some time investigating. dischord is a Lenovo Thinkcentre M71E 3132A8M, and there's a support page for it with numerous links, including to manuals. It took a while to discover that nearly all the links are dead, pointing back to the page itself. No mention of any RAM compatibility issues. Still, a good basis for further investigation. ACM only downloads articles once.
Upgrading dischord
Clearly dischord needs more memory. It's also been a while since I last did a software update on it. So tried again today and was offered: If I do nothing, it installs Windows 10 on the machine and leaves me dead in the water. What an insult! For some reason didn't continue then. When I came back and tried again, it spent several hours checking for updates. Why does it take so long? It finally came back with a list shortly before dinner.
More focus stacking software
Special offer from FRANZIS Verlag today: photo stacking software for only half of the normally surprisingly high price, 69 ¬ instead of 129 ¬. Of course, the price outside Europe is $129 US, corresponding to 116 ¬. With considerable difficulty (their web site seemed to have gone to sleep) found a test version and downloaded it. Somehow I have difficulty coming to terms with graphical interface software, even where, like here, it makes sense. The web site points to two demonstration video clips: But it was very small, and I couldn't full-screen it.
The next mass murderer?
We're used to the occasional flame that still goes through the FreeBSD mailing lists, but today I saw one that really worried me. Here a couple of excerpts: You could pay for me to visit you. If you are right, then there is no reason for you to worry. If you are wrong, then you will have no idea what I may or may not do to you. You are not bullet proof nor are you stab proof. I am excellent with crossbows and bows and arrows.
NBN satellite: doesn't pass muster
Phone call from Barbara Hammond in Fairhaven today. She had read my Why you don't want NBN satellite page, which was really intended for people in Dereel. It seems that she is currently connected to the net via ADSL, and she has now been informed by the National Broadband Network that the Sky Muster" satellite is available. Most of Fairhaven is earmarked for FTTN, but it seems that her location is just outside the limits. And now she's concerned that she will lose her ADSL. Should she be concerned? Yes, most definitely. She uses a lot of data. She doesn't know exactly, but it looks as if she is paying TPG $80 a month, which would match the 300 GB Off-Net package.
DoS?
Seen on IRC this morning: <callum> Hmm, I'm getting no response from www.lemis.com <chuzz> Isn't it wwww.lemis.com? ;) <pez> www.lemis.com not working for me That can't be right. www is my external web server, and it's a model of stability. But it was. ping worked fine, but the ssh I had to the system didn't respond. Neither did a page load attempt. How do I access the console on the machine? I've almost never needed to, and it took me quite a while to find out how.
Revisiting OpenBSD and NetBSD
Glenn Mawby was asking some questions regarding proxies on IRC today. He's running OpenBSD, which could differ from FreeBSD in that respect. But I don't have an OpenBSD box any morein fact, it has been over 6 years. Now I have virtual machines, so it's trivial to create one and run OpenBSD on it. Downloaded the install CD and set it up. It asked all the right questions about the network, and then set up to partition the disk. 9 partitions! What a way to improve your chances of filling one up. Tried the (bare-bones) partition editor to create a single root file system, which appeared to work, but for some reason I ended up with an unbootable system.
More notwork pain
More hung network switches today, this time with the added fun of a hung NFS connection on cvr2, which meant that I couldn't access it from outside: the ssh hung, and in the end it seemed easier to reboot. So what's causing the problems? One thing I didn't consider yesterday was the switch in my office. Played around with that, mainly to verify the model, and sure enough, I lost some network connectivity. Loose connection? That might explain why the problems occurred when I was in the office, and why it affected multiple systems. It doesn't explain why the problem went away after power cycling the other switches.
... with worn-out tools
Rudyard Kipling's If is a poem that has always impressed me. Now that I'm getting older, one of the line pairs that particularly impress me is: Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build em up with worn-out tools: Somehow I'm reminded of that while trying to debug MythTV. Decades ago I wrote documentation about how to use gdb to debug normal programs and kernel problems. They came across very well. But they have atrophied.
Remembering svn chcekout
There are a number of open PRs on calendar(1) in the FreeBSD bug database, and also in my inbox. Time to finally do something about them before the first one turns 5 years old. Checked the how to repeat for PR 168785. I couldn't repeat it. Fixed? Check the log for /usr/src/usr.bin/calendar/calendar.c. This file is not under version control . Huh? Further investigation showed that once again the svn metadata were corrupt. This is happening far too often, though this time it could be due to the crash I had yesterday. How do I check out a working copy? It's in the Committer's Guide, which for some reason is difficult to find on the FreeBSD web site.
Local Network Problems
I was hardly out of bed and into the office this morning when Yvonne came and asked me if we had network problems. No, I didn't, but it seemed that she did: no communication from lagoon to eureka, on the other side of the house. What's the cause? No obvious problems on either lagoon or eureka. Switch? For some reason, switches seem to hang relatively frequently. Power cycled it, and it worked again. While wondering whether it was worth replacing the switch, discovered I couldn't communicate with teevee. But that's on another switch. My house wiring has a total of four switches: Main switch, in the pantry: 8 port 1000 Mb/s HP ProCurve 1800-8G, connecting to each of the rooms in ...
More MythTV debugging
So what's the cause of the problems I've been seeing with MythTV? I had assumed that it was related to the spurious DiSEqCDevTree warning, but after Tuesday's debug session that seems to be a red herring. So what would be an appropriate way to catch it? There are long delays before it comes back pretending there hasn't been a failure. Doesn't ktrace have an option to look at the times? No. It's in kdump, and there are two of them: elapsed time (-E) and relative time (-R). Chose the latter. After running the card detect function, I had a dump file about 180 MB in size!
Power fail recovery
I'm still running UFS with conventional soft updates. That seems to be a good choice for a system with reliable power: the system itself almost never crashes, and recovery, though slow, is infrequent. But since my RCD problems started, I have had to run fsck far more often than expected. I've adapted: even if the power fails in the middle of the night, reboot immediately so that the system will be up and running by the time I wake up. And my photo file system, nearly 4 TB in size, doesn't get mounted automatically. Thus it was today, but things still didn't work out.
The bikeshed that just growed
One of my morning activities is to check mail and spam. Gmail does quite a good job of detecting spambetter than I've been able to do myselfbut it's not perfect, and in particular messages to the FreeBSD mailing lists frequently get classified as spam. Today I had one, sent to the freebsd-current mailing list by Greg Quinlan. Why? Why is this message in Spam? It has a from address in yahoo.com but has failed yahoo.com's required tests for authentication. Learn more By gmail standards that's clear. So I replied to him and told him so.
NBN installation, for real
Over to Chris Rogers today to see how the National Broadband Network installation went. In fact, I didn't need to: they quickly established that he had adequate signal (-91 dB, comfortably above the -97 dB cutoff limit). But I wanted to talk to the installers about other similar cases. That proved to be useful. The installers were Mike and Jordan, who had been here last December to replace the hardware. Got a few new pointers: The term for the link, or maybe the antenna on the tower, is PCIno idea what that stands for.
Firefox: can't display plain text
Playing around with some old web pages today, I discovered: What? Since when do you need a helper application for plain text? firefox is a behemoth process over 2 GB in size, and it wants help displaying text, and that from another program at least as big as itself? It didn't even give me the option to display it directly. PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND 47180 grog 61 20 0 2111M 1564M uwait 3 86:18 4.79% firefox Further investigation, with the help of a number of people on IRC, showed a number of strangenesses.
Debugging MythTV
Finally got round to looking at the problems with MythTV today. It's really painful. Started by looking for the origin of the message that had been produced: 2016-05-17 14:23:36.228780 W DiSEqCDevTree: No device tree for cardid 4 That proved to be in mythtv-ad97d24/mythtv/libs/libmythtv/diseqc.cpp. Set a breakpoint on it and got a 35 level stack backtrace: #0 DiSEqCDevTree::Load (this=0x7fffffffb388, cardid=32767) at diseqc.cpp:328 #1 0x00000008027c7294 in DVBConfigurationGroup::Load (this=0x818ef4f00) at videosource.cpp:3859 #2 0x00000008027c7485 in non-virtual thunk to DVBConfigurationGroup::Load() (this=0x818ef4f50) at videosource.cpp:3866 #3 0x00000008046fbee3 in ConfigurationGroup::Load (this=0x81c3c0400) at mythconfiggroups.cpp:91 ...
NBN installation again
Phone call from Chris Rogers, who had got my number from Carolyn Everett. He's planning to have National Broadband Network fixed wireless installed tomorrow, and he's on the edge of the coverage maps between Dereel and Corindhap. He was concerned that he might be told he had no coverage, and asked me to come along in case there were any issues. ACM only downloads articles once.
Finally! Debug MythTV
I've spent most of the week fighting the Ports Collection trying to build a debug version of MythTV. I had the idea of installing the dependencies by first the package and then removing it again, but it didn't work. There were still large ports missing (can you spell Qt?) , and I ended up having to install the packages individually. And at least one port wouldn't build. This is all too fragile. But finally I got it built, and was able to run mythtv-setup with a debugger. All I needed was time to go through the sources, and today wasn't the day for that.
More MythTV fun
On somewhat half-heartedly with my MythTV build today. There must be a way to install all the dependencies as packages, rather than building them. But I didn't find an easy way. One Perl module included no less than 96 other dependencies, and that was the easy part. In the end I simply installed the MythTV package and then removed it again. And forgot to continue. ACM only downloads articles once.
Evil Google revisited
Peter Jeremy took me to task for my comments on Google: I have no problems cutting/copying from docs.google.com with normal mouse operations. I suspect whatever browser you accessed the documentation from is busted. But no, it happens on multiple browsers, at least firefox, Chromium and Opera. With Chromium, when I press Ctrl-C, I get: Sorry, that's unpardonable. X provides the functionality out of the box.
More MythTV pain
On with my mythbuntu experiments today. Back to remembering how to install NFS and ssh on Linux. Surprise, surprise! They were already there. All I needed was to mount /eureka/home and copy my ssh stuff. Then I was able to move the machine to the lounge room, connect the tuner and run mythtv-setup. Somehow things didn't work right. Following the instructions, I should have selected Scan for channels in the Input connect... menu.
Google: don't be evil!
The mythbuntu documentation isn't their own; it's on docs.google.com. It's conveniently set up to break X conventions. I can't copy text! I can mark it, but it doesn't get copied. When I right-click on the selection, I get: What braindeath is that? Microsoft, of course. And it doesn't work! Presumably Google is relying on their assumptions about the underlying window manager functionality. And for some reason it captures Ctrl-W too, so I can't close the window with the mouse. One more annoyance with Google.
Mythbuntu revisited
Why is MythTV pretending that my DVB-T tuner is a satellite tuner? One way to find out is to risk all kinds of physical and mental pain. Another would be to try a standard, out-of-the-box installation such as Mythbuntu (now mythbuntu, it seems) or KnoppMyth. My previous experiences with them were painful, too, but who knows what they're like now? Oh. No KnoppMyth any more. Now it's LinHES, an abbreviation that is intuitively recognizable. Which do I try? Last time round I settled on Mythbuntu, so that's what I tried first. First impressions: it looks a lot smoother. And the installation instructions point to this page about installing from a USB stick.
More free bandwidth!
Mail from Aussie Broadband today. Because I'm a loyal customer (how do you define that?) , they're giving me more traffic for the same price, 500 GB instead of 300 GB. That won't cost them anything: I'm not using my current allowance. I'm paying $60 a month, so this represents a price of $0.12 per GB. How things have changed since I got my first Internet connection in March 1992! Then I was paying 0.45 DM ($0.356 at today's exchange rate) per kilobyte! That corresponds to $356,000 per GB. So since then the data cost has gone down by 99.99996623%. So: how much traffic do I get for the next step down?
ENIAC circuitry
Yesterday Diomidis Spinellis published a blog entry relating to a book he has been reading, ENIAC in Action . In particular, he had tracked down one of the valves used in the circuitry, a 7AK7 pentode. Somehow that designation looks Just Plain Wrong. One of the most common ways of naming valves of those days was, as here, a number, letters and number. The first number was the heater voltage, the letters were used for differentiation from other similar valves, and the second number was the number of external connections. So this valve should have a heater voltage of 7 V and also have 7 connections (heater, cathode, 3 grids and anode; the heater has two connections).
X crashes hard
One of the alternatives for Al Jazeera is their own streaming service. By comparison, it has a number of disadvantages. By far the biggest is that there's no way to position the stream, though you can pause it. But that means starting at exactly the right time and waiting through things like weather forecasts for the Americas. By contrast, the YouTube version can be positioned back up to 2 hours. Today I was watching anyway when something happened that I have never seen before. First, the browser display froze. Then the X display went blankonly the one on which the browser was running (:0.1).
Streaming multimedia issues
Some months ago, SBS stopped daily broadcasts of news from Al Jazeera. That's a pity, because it's the only English-language news service that isn't tied to the viewpoint of a particular Western country. But I found a streaming service on YouTube: It's designated BETA , and for good reason. There seem to be significant issues with streaming, including various repeatable image reproduction problems such as image becoming unsharp and tearing. I can backspace and find exactly the same problem in the same place, so it doesn't seem to be related to my connection.
Men's shed computer
Doug Braddy came by this afternoon to pick up his computer. Clearly he wasn't in a hurryit's been nearly a month. Over with him to the Men's shed and connected it up. They already have an Internet connection (National Broadband Network with Aussie Broadband), and they had taken the preconfigured router option, so I really didn't have much more to do than to plug the machine in, confirm that it couldn't recover from power failure during hibernation, and that the mouse was completely lame. Fortunately they had a new wireless mouse, and that, too, worked out of the box. Most of the time was spent waiting for Doug to find a power strip.
Men's shed computer
Doug Braddy came by this afternoon to pick up his computer. Clearly he wasn't in a hurryit's been nearly a month. Over with him to the Men's shed and connected it up. They already have an Internet connection (National Broadband Network with Aussie Broadband), and they had taken the preconfigured router option, so I really didn't have much more to do than to plug the machine in, confirm that it couldn't recover from power failure during hibernation, and that the mouse was completely lame. Fortunately they had a new wireless mouse, and that, too, worked out of the box. Most of the time was spent waiting for Doug to find a power strip.
Auspost but no email
When I took my camera to the post office yesterday, they promised me that it would be in Sydney by this morning, and that I would receive email. Given that it took them nearly a week last time, I wasn't convinced. No email this morning. OK, where is it? Tracking number into the online tracker: Warning: fopen(/home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/Photos/20160503/photolist.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /usr/home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/php/includes/onephoto.php on line 1155 Can't open /home/grog/www.lemis.com/grog/Photos/20160503/photolist.php: Delivered! And then awaiting collection! How can that be? The wonders of reverse chronological listing! But where was my email?
NBN Satellite: Salvation!
Julie Donaghy posted a reference to this article on Facebook today: The National Broadband Networks new Sky Muster satellite is now operational. So? It seems that there are enough people waiting for it, not understanding the issues. The alternative would be to put a fixed wireless antenna on a tower. That would cost money, of course, but satellite connections are more expensive, so it could make itself paid. Time for an explanation page. ACM only downloads articles once.
Disabling DiSEqC
More investigation of the DiSEqC on tiwi today. There's really nothing to explain why MythTV should want to apply a satellite protocol to a DVB-T tuner. Looking in the database brought some enlightenment: the capturecard table includes a field dvb_diseqc. And in my database, there were two entries for the single capture card. The difference? Only the dvb_diseqc field. In one record it was set to NULL, in the other to 0. OK, I can play around with that.
MythTV pain, next installment
Yesterday Hans Petter suggested using w_scan to check the functionality of the tuner. I've tried it before, with no useful results. But it seems that it really is better now: the (now obligatory) -c option specifies the country. It went off and spent 10 minutes producing copious output: === root@tiwi (/dev/pts/4) ~ 8 -> w_scan -c au w_scan version 20120415 (compiled for DVB API 5.10) using settings for AUSTRALIA DVB aerial DVB-T AU ... 571500: (time: 02:28) (time: 02:30) signal ok: QAM_AUTO f = 571500 kHz I999B7C999D999T999G999Y999 new transponder: (QAM_64 f = 184500 kHz I999B7C23D0T8G8Y0) 0x405A 571625: (time: 02:44) (time: 02:45) signal ok: QAM_AUTO f = 571625 kHz I999B7C999D999T999G999Y999 ...
GPS navigator breakage
Yesterday I complained about the inaccuracies of Google Maps when searching for the nursing homes. Today I used my GPS navigator. It found the address without difficulties, and it didn't do silly things like going via Buninyong. But the route details! It took us on a zig-zag path round East Ballarat, and a few hundred metres before arrival wanted us to turn left into private property. OK, we were only a few hundred metres from Victoria Street, so continued there. It decided to take us down the frontage roadthe wrong direction down a one-way street. Ignored that too and turned right onto Victoria Street, so that Kenny St was on the right.
Google Maps: from bad to worse
So I've agreed with Kath Philips to meet at the Geoffrey Cutter Centre tomorrow at 13:00. Where's that? The Web tells me Kenny Street, Windsor Gardens, East Ballarat. But when I put that into Google Maps, it takes me to the Eureka Village Hostel in Balmoral Drive. Why? By not quite complete coincidence, that was the last place I looked at before I searched for the Geoffrey Cutter Centre, and it looked for all the world like it hadn't accepted the new input. With the aid of people on IRC, investigated the issue. It seems that Google Maps doesn't know about Windsor Gardens.
MythTV: Next experiment
I really need to get MythTV working on tiwi, but it's like pulling teeth. It's a good thing I keep notes. First step was to connect the USB tuner to the antenna, which was about 2 m away from the computer. OK, I must have a USB extension cable somewhere. And I did, but the one I found was 5 m long, on the borderline of the acceptable. Found two more 4.5 m long, so tried one of them: Apr 27 12:22:30 tiwi kernel: usb_alloc_device: set address 2 failed (USB_ERR_IOERROR, ignored) Apr 27 12:22:31 tiwi kernel: usbd_setup_device_desc: getting device descriptor at addr 2 failed, USB_ERR_IOERROR I suppose ignoring fatal errors is modern, but was this ...
Everybody loves Facebook
Vanda talked about communication during one of her presentations, noting particularly the Facebook page. But then she said that she didn't respond to PMs (whatever that may be), and that to communicate with her we should send email. No arguments from me, modulo the fact that she uses Microsoft Outlook , which confuses the hell out of users when it sees a digital signature. But Vanda has found out about that, and will no longer be confused. What surprised me, though, was that the other participants all said they didn't like Facebook either! More an unpleasant utility than something they enjoyed. Once again I'm left wondering how social media will evolve.
Goodbye MSY?
Vanda did her presentations using a laptop, with corresponding sound quality. She expressed an intention to buy external speakers. As it happened, we were just round the corner from MSY, a cheap computer components supplier I used to use until they completely blocked a valid return, though availability of advertised components was also an issue. Round to take a look during the tea break. Shut. OK, that's not that unusual on a Sunday. But they're shut all day Saturday too! They're only open from 10:30 to 17:30 on weekdays. I suppose other people have also decided that they're not worth the trouble.
Big Pond bug: Worked around
While lying awake in bed last night, I thought over some of the links to the BigPond mail issue. This one contains the information: A client suddenly can no longer send emails to any Bigpond addresses (anyone else is fine - have checked that they are not blacklisted anywhere). After investigation, we found that if we removed their web site url from their signature, it will send to Bigpond just fine. So BigPond is deliberately blocking texts if suspect (for them) URLs are present in the mail.
BigPond: what I have learnt
The encounter with BigPond technical support has something Daliesque about it. But during the over four hours I tried to resolve the problem, I have come up with some hypotheses about what their terminology really means: Corporate email: one that doesn't have a well-known commercial domain name such as @yahoo.com or @gmail.com. Thus @lemis.com and @freebsd.org would be corporate emails. ISP: The entity that runs the originating MTA.
BigPond breakage: enough is enough!
More rejected mail from BigPond today: This is the mail system at host www.lemis.com. I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below. <[email protected]>: host extmail.bigpond.com[61.9.168.122] said: 552 5.2.0 jeSz1s00h1sUVRc01eT0gw Suspected spam message rejected. IB704 (in reply to end of DATA command) I've seen this before, and I've tried repeatedly to find a human on their so-called technical support line, all in vain. The last time was 9 months ago. Time to try again?
Still more Hugin port pain
More investigation of the Hugin port again today. Checked everything, and all seemed well, but pkg still doesn't want to install all the dependencies. About the only thing that showed up was the message: pkg: hugin has a missing dependency: autopano-sift-C New packages to be INSTALLED: hugin: 2016.0.0_2 p5-Image-ExifTool: 10.10 vigra: 1.11.0 hdf5: 1.8.15_1 fftw3-float: 3.3.3_2 Why is that? The Makefile already contains the definition: AUTOPANOSIFTC_RUN_DEPENDS= autopano:graphics/autopano-sift-c Ah, but that's with a small C.
More HTML5 pain
I've complained in the past about problems using HTML5 to display videos, and I've found ways to revert to flash. But I forgot to document them! My latest install on eureka uses HTML5 because it has the power to do so. But there are still downsides in using HTML5, notably the lack of nagivability. How do I get back to flash again? Once, it seems, it was enough to go to about:config and set media.webm.enabled to false, as this (unnecessary) video shows. The instructions are in the comments. Unfortunately, that no longer works. The real solution appears to be this firefox addon.
Preventing Windows hibernation
Mail from Daniel Nebdal today: As a short workaround to windows 7 hibernating when you least want it to: If you press Win/Meta + X , the "mobility center" should pop up. From memory, the rightmost item on the lower row is "presentation mode". Turn that on, and it won't even suspend the monitor until you disable it again. I think it's meant for really long presentations, but as long as it works etc. In fact I had simply turned off hibernation in the Control Panel, but it's good to remember tricks like this one.
Hugin dependencies: still not working
So now the FreeBSD ports system has had time to build a new Hugin package, so tried reinstalling it. Sure enough, the package at http://pkg.freebsd.org/freebsd:10:x86:64/latest/All/ is now portrevision 2. And it still doesn't install the dependencies. It looks like this still could be my problem, but clear error checking from pkg would help immensely. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Microsoft pain: over
Came into the office this morning to find that the Men's Shed computer hadn't finished installing updates: How did that happen? All that was running was the Task Manager and the Windows Update. Stopped that and wasn't able to install the updates: an update was in progress. How do I get past that? Not only did rebooting not help, it wasn't possible: shutdown hung trying to install those updates that had been downloaded. And I couldn't power down either, because the power button was set to Sleep .
More fun with Microsoft
Spent some time looking at Doug Braddy's computer today. To my surprise, found an original Microsoft disk for Windows 7 Home Premium (is that a prize or a price?) , so installed that. Why is Microsoft so slow, and why is there so much disk activity at startup? In this case, it seems that 2 GB memory is pretty minimal for Windows 7, and it was swapping its little heart out. But the most interesting thing was Internet Explorer 's reaction to my attempt to download firefox: That's amazing.
Computer for the Men's shed
While I was at the photo meeting, Doug Braddy from the Dereel Men's Shed came over and asked me to come and visit him afterwards. It's the first time I've been in the new shed, but for some reason I didn't take any photos. What he wanted was: the shed had received a donation of a ThinkCentre with a 2.13 GHz Core 2 6400 (Passmark 1299), 2 GB memory and Microsoft Windows XP. No keyboard, no mouse. And he wanted a more modern Windows on it. OK, modulo license key I can do that, though when I took it with me, it wasn't clear what the configuration was, nor whether it could handle Windows 7 in a timely manner.
Fixing Hugin package
My mail to the ports mailing list about the Hugin port bore some fruit. Don Lewis discovered, with the help of Yet Another Makefile target (check-plist) that the pkg-plist file contained errors. How could that be? I used some other recommended method to build it. But he had also verified that, at least for him, that after rectifying this problem and building a new package, it installed all the dependencies. So at least pkg was not behaving correctly. First let's see if the package does now work. ACM only downloads articles once.
More ports pain
A couple of days ago I received mail from Carlos Cartola Carvalho telling me that the Hugin package was missing dependencies. Of course I had checked that long ago (partially after tripping over my own missing dependencies). But I had built from source, and Cartola had installed the binary package. So I tried it, and how about that, he's right: it didn't install the dependencies. I had discussed the matter with Edwin Groothuis, who told me of a make target I hadn't heard of: === root@stable (/dev/pts/1) /usr/ports/graphics/hugin 6 -> make run-depends-list /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/accessibility/atk /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/databases/sqlite3 /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/devel/boost-libs /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/devel/desktop-file-utils /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/devel/gettext-runtime /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/devel/glib20 /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/devel/gmake /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/OpenEXR /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/autopano-sift-c /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/enblend /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/exiv2 /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/freeglut /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/gdk-pixbuf2 /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/glew /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/gtk-update-icon-cache /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/ilmbase /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/jpeg-turbo /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/lcms2 /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/libpano13 /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/p5-Image-ExifTool /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/panomatic /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/png /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/tiff /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/vigra /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/lang/python27 /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/math/fftw3 /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/misc/shared-mime-info /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/x11-toolkits/pango /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/x11-toolkits/wxgtk28 And those include the ones that are missing.
Still more subversion problems
Rainer Hurling has trouble with Vigra since I tried to update it to the latest version (1.11.0). Time to try for myself. But now I have VMs, it's time to migrate stable to a VM. That's simple enough: follow the HOWTO. And then build a new world, now that FreeBSD 10.3 has been released. The buildworld failed with missing definitions. I've seen that before: corrupted working copy of the Subversion repository. Another checkout? Simple. And yes, exactly the same kind of corruption that I had seen before, including files that had been updated before the branch point for stable/10: -__FBSDID("$FreeBSD: stable/10/sys/fs/cd9660/cd9660_iconv.c 120492 2003-09-26 20:26:25Z fjoe $"); +__FBSDID("$FreeBSD: stable/10/sys/fs/cd9660/cd9660_iconv.c 166639 2007-02-11 13:54:25Z rodrigc $"); How can that happen?
Another Jim Lannen event
Woke up at blank this morning. No power. Another bloody power failure? No, another bloody Jim Lannen event: RCD tripped, UPS drained. And that in the middle of my monthly complete backup, which takes 10 hours! I also lost the last half of a TV recording. What a pain it is to keep power up in this household! That gave me a chance to repeat the backup, of course. Just backing up my own home directory showed me how much CPU goes into compression: That wasn't the end of the backup.
Still more Microsoft pain
On with my attempts to mount remote CIFS file systems on damnation, my Microsoft Windows 10 VM, today. I hardly made any headway. What I did learn: It's not a file system, it's a share . Yes, I knew that, I just think it another silly term. You can start a shell by hitting Window key-R and entering CMD, the new name of COMMAND.COM COMMAND.EXE. Well, Window key-R is the new, simpler way to call up the run windowif you don't have any other programs with names starting with R.
Daily ports pain
I've now managed to build Vigra on current, my FreeBSD-CURRENT box. Time to commit? What can it break? Decided to build Hugin first. More dependencies, more build failures: configure: error: in `/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/science/hdf5/work/hdf5-1.8.15-patch1': configure: error: C++ preprocessor "/lib/cpp" fails sanity check Somehow things are all far too difficult. ACM only downloads articles once.
More Microsoft pain
So yesterday my attempt to activate Microsoft Windows 10 failed with an activation service that was down. I tried again today. Same result. And while fighting my way through the maze of twisty little menus, all different, I found: How did that happen? And how can I track what license key I used? I'm not exactly a big Microsoft user, but I have a number of different activation keys which I can (apparently) use again to activate Microsoft on new machines. What happens if I choose the wrong one?
Phantom logins
Strange messages in the daily security mail from lagoon.lemis.com this morning: lagoon.lemis.com login failures: Mar 30 00:00:33 stable-amd64 sshd[61196]: Invalid user backup from 61.142.106.34 Mar 30 00:00:33 stable-amd64 sshd[61196]: input_userauth_request: invalid user backup [preauth] ... Mar 30 02:47:16 stable-amd64 login: 1 LOGIN FAILURE FROM 113.89.143.218 In all there were over 2,800 messages! But how could this happen? stable-amd64 was a test box whose name I retired on 7 January 2015: revision 1.129 date: 2015/01/06 23:11:45; author: grog; state: Exp; lines: +3 -3 Rename stable-amd64 to stable.
And now for something completely different
Enough Vigra frustration for one day. How about Microsoft Windows 10 to round it off? I had installed it on a VM somewhere, and contrary to my expectations it still wanted me to activate it. How do you do that on a VM? Finally found an old, retired activation key and typed it in: Can't they do anything right? ACM only downloads articles once.
More ports pain
A while back Rainer Hurling sent me mail with some issues relating to the Vigra port. I sent him some patches, but didn't hear back from him, so time to try building it again on FreeBSD -CURRENT. It was like pulling teeth. I did this on my VM current.lemis.com, which I have deliberately kept as bare-bones as possible. That meant building all the dependencies first. But many of them wouldn't build because they were missing dependencies! cmake failed for reasons I forget. When I tried to install the package, that failed too: # pkg install cmake ...
More ports pain
A while back Rainer Hurling sent me mail with some issues relating to the Vigra port. I sent him some patches, but didn't hear back from him, so time to try building it again on FreeBSD -CURRENT. It was like pulling teeth. I did this on my VM current.lemis.com, which I have deliberately kept as bare-bones as possible. That meant building all the dependencies first. But many of them wouldn't build because they were missing dependencies! cmake failed for reasons I forget. When I tried to install the package, that failed too: # pkg install cmake ...
Subversion subverted?
More investigation of my build failures today. Simply recreating all files didn't help. How about a complete new working copy? Tried that and was amazed: there were dozens of differences. Why? svn info showed nothing of interest. In particular, the repository root and UUID were the same. And the contents? 60 MB of differences! === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/19) /src/FreeBSD/svn 79 -> diff -wur head-2 head 2>&1 > svn-diffs === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/19) /src/FreeBSD/svn 80 -> l svn-diffs -rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 60,039,508 26 Mar 10:42 svn-diffs Strangely some of them seem to be positively ancient. Here head is the new checkout, while head-2 is the old one: --- head-2/sys/boot/sparc64/boot1/_start.s 2016-03-26 08:42:17.953474000 +1100 +++ head/sys/boot/sparc64/boot1/_start.s 2016-03-26 09:42:42.604479000 +1100 @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@ -/* $FreeBSD: head/sys/boot/sparc64/boot1/_start.s 125717 2004-02-11 21:17:04Z ru $ */ +/* $FreeBSD: head/sys/boot/sparc64/boot1/_start.s 93311 2002-03-28 02:41:52Z obrien $ */ ...
Upgrading test boxes
Now that I have resolved my difficulties with VirtualBox, the next step was to upgrade current to the present day. Not an issue: I may not have been keeping a FreeBSD CURRENT system up to date, but I do have a cron job which keeps an up-to-date copy of the source repository. So all I needed was: # cd /usr/src # make buildworld But it failed, repeatedly: /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/head/lib/clang/libllvmmipsdesc/../../../contrib/llvm/../../lib/clang/include/llvm/IR/Intrinsics.gen:2:10: fatal error: 'Intrinsics.inc.h' file not found Problems with the repository or problems with the snapshot?
VirtualBox again
Why am I going to all this trouble to set up physical test boxes? Because I've had difficulties with VirtualBox, mainly. But that should be soluble, and so I had another attempt today. This diary helps, and I noted that it was less than 2 months since my last attempt. But I didn't read it as carefully as I should have: Off to find out from Google, but I couldn't access the Internet: the link wasn't working. Nothing obvious: the interface looked right, routing looked right, but there was no traffic.
Making dental appointments
After my dental appointment, I needed make an appointment for a checkup in about 6 months' time. No worries, they'll send me an SMS. Sorry, don't do SMS. OK, they'll send dead tree mail. And Email? Already dead? ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
More ports pain
I have now committed the latest version of Hugin to the FreeBSD ports tree. And again I've run into problems: new dependencies that I should have known, and for some reason it doesn't build on FreeBSD 9.3: cd /wrkdirs/usr/ports/graphics/hugin-2016/work/hugin-2016.0.0/src/tools && /usr/local/bin/g++48 -DGLEW_STATIC -DHUGIN_HSI -I/wrkdirs/usr/ports/graphics/hugin-2016/work/hugin-2016.0.0/src -I/wrkdirs/usr/ports/graphics/hugin-2016/work/hugin-2016.0.0/src/hugin_base-I/wrkdirs/usr/ports/graphics/hugin-2016/work/hugin-2016.0.0/src/celeste -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/local/include/OpenEXR -I/wrkdirs/usr/ports/graphics/hugin-2016/work/hugin-2016.0.0/src/foreign -I/usr/local/include/python2.7 -O2 -pipe -Wl,-rpath=/usr/local/lib/gcc48 -fno-strict-aliasing-Wl,-rpath=/usr/local/lib/gcc48 --std=c++11 -O2 -pipe -Wl,-rpath=/usr/local/lib/gcc48 -fno-strict-aliasing -Wl,-rpath=/usr/local/lib/gcc48 -fopenmp -o CMakeFiles/pto_var.dir/ParseExp.cpp.o -c /wrkdirs/usr/ports/graphics/hugin-2016/work/hugin-2016.0.0/src/tools/ParseExp.cpp/wrkdirs/usr/ports/graphics/hugin-2016/work/hugin-2016.0.0/src/tools/ParseExp.cpp: In function 'bool Parser::ConvertToRPN(const string&, const ConstantMap&, std::queue<Parser::RPNTokens::TokenBase*>&)': /wrkdirs/usr/ports/graphics/hugin-2016/work/hugin-2016.0.0/src/tools/ParseExp.cpp:371:23: error: 'stod' is not a member of 'std' val = std::stod(expression.substr(pos), &index); How I hate C++!
Power interruptions: enough is enough
Round 14:50 this afternoon the office UPS started beeping. Out into the garage, and sure enough (thanks, Jim Lannen) the RCD had tripped, the sixth time this year. Turned it on and all was well. Well, almost. My ATA showed an error indication. No worries, that's why I have a spare. Connected it up. It worked, but I discovered that I hadn't configured it as well as I had thought. So: ATA or power supply? Connected the old ATA to the new power supply, and sure enough, it worked. So the power supply died round the time of the power issue.
Shopping in the Internet era
Two years ago I wrote an essay on The Internet in 2034. Surprise, surprise, 10% of the time has gone by already. There I wrote: Most purchases will occur on-line, and the few remaining shops will mainly exist to order and supply goods available on the Internet. The exceptions will be fresh goods such as food and some services where a view of the items in advance is desired, such as some clothes. This will also have a profound effect on the economy: many companies, notably shops and mall owners, will go bankrupt.
Ports install hell
So tiwi's MySQL installation is broken, possibly beyond repair. Since I don't need any of the data in the database, it seemed easier to remove and reinstall it. Tried that today: === root@tiwi (/dev/pts/6) /var/db 21 -> pkg install mysql57-server The following 3 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked): New packages to be INSTALLED: mysql57-server: 5.7.10_3 mysql57-client: 5.7.10_4 mysql56-client: 5.6.27 Huh? Those numbers are a representation of the version number (5.6 or 5.7). Why should the server version 5.7 install two different clients, one for a different release?
tiwi installation, continued
Yesterday's attempt to install the tuner in tiwi ended with database issues. Before attending to them, considered the cheap and easy approach described on the webcamd page: # # The following command will display webcam contents from /dev/video0 # by default. # pwcview OK, tried that: === grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/2) ~ 1 -> pwcview Failed to access webcam: No such file or directory *********************************************************** Make sure you have connected your webcam to the root hub or to a USB 1.1 hub, also check your dmesg for any errors.
Old file systems
Warren Toomey sent out a message to the Unix heritage society today asking for examples of file systems in the late 1960s. I knew one: the Master File Directory of the Univac 1108. The last time I used it was some time in September 1974, and I don't recall very much about it. But the Programmers Reference Manual is available online, and it contains a description of the MFD, starting on page 333 of the scanunfortunately from such a completely different perspective that it's hard to compare. But Warren's question was whether it was customary to keep the file names separate from other file metadata (inodes in Unix parlance), and it seems that that wasn't the case.
Power failure recovery
Recovering from power failures is getting easier now that I have so much practice. When I came in this morning, eureka was mainly up and running. But I couldn't access my local web cache. Once again it turned out that this was a DHCP issue: after a power outage, dhclient overwrites /etc/resolv.conf with data from the remote DHCP server, not what I want, and in this case it resulted in the external view of my DNS, not the same as the local view served by the local name server. To fix it I needed to check out my local version again and restart squid.
Finally! The tuner!
I've been waiting for a USB tuner for tiwi since the beginning of the year. The first one I ordered never materialized, and I ordered a second one on 12 February. It has taken until now for it to arrive! Off to Napoleons to pick it up. Surprise, surprise! Wrong connector! When I ordered the original tuner, I went to some lengths to ensure it had a 75© antenna connector. But when I ordered the replacement, I forgot, and it has an MCX connector. That's not the end of the world, but it means Yet Another Delay while I get the adapter.
Towards understanding Olympus Maker Notes
Somehow software has become so complicated nowadays that you can't just hack away and incrementally create something: first you need a library a stack of twisty little libraries, all different, and you have to learn how to use them. My experience with libexif a couple of days ago didn't exactly fill me with confidence. How does it relate to yesterday's view of the structures? What I really want is something that doesn't try to understand and interpret too much of the data, just present it in vaguely dissected form. Enter my up-and-coming program exifdump, not exactly the only program of that name.
Tracing the exiftime bug
What caused the error messages from my exiftime script that I saw a couple of days ago? Today Yvonne borrowed my camera (after over 5 weeks her own camera still isn't back from repairs), and I put a couple of debug lines in the script. But it ran without problems. Later I took my own photos and the problem occurred again. Why? Does exiftime hate me? Ran wh, another little script that extends which to show all possible executables, and found: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/27) ~/Photos/20160314 1078 -> wh exiftime 263011 -r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 47824 6 Mar 10:33 /usr/local/bin/exiftime 1910037 -r-xr-xr-x 1 grog lemis 448 7 Jul 2012 /Photos/Tools/exiftime Clearly the second one is my script.
EXIF data: finally an overview
Further searching for the format of EXIF data has finally paid off, probably because it wasn't what I was looking for. I was looking for a description of TIFF format and came up with this page, which contains this illustration: And that's exactly the kind of diagram I'm looking for. Further investigation shows that there's also a similar page for JPEG, and that mentioned APP0 but not APP1. OK, we're making progress, so went looking for jpeg app1 file format and came up with this page, which looks like it will finally give the overview I've been looking for.
EXIF: where's the Big Picture?
Spent a lot more time looking at processing EXIF data. There's lots of documentation of the individual components, though not all details (for example, what are the other components of the entries I looked at yesterday?) . But given a file, how do I dissect the structure? Wikipedia tells me that JPEG images store the data in APP1, segment marker 0xffe1, and TIFF images store it in a sub-IFD with the TIFF Private Tag 0x8825.
Strange exifcopy bug
As if I didn't have real problems understanding EXIF, today I got these messages when copying photos from the camera: mcopy -pm C:/dcim/100OLYMP/P3126248.ORF /photowork/P3126248.ORF exiftime: doesn't appear to be a JPEG file; searching for start of image exiftime: skipped spurious bytes in JPEG exiftime: start of image not found The first line is the command to copy the file from the camera, and exiftime is a script that sets the timestamps for the files once they have been read in.
Analysing Olympus MakerNotes
Spent a little time analysing the Olympus MakerNotes for one of my Hibiscus photos. exiftool renders the parts of interest like this: 0x0300 Zoom Step Count : 0 0x0301 Focus Step Count : 9481 0x0303 Focus Step Infinity : 1348 0x0304 Focus Step Near : 18597 0x0305 Focus Distance : 0.285 m 0x0308 AF Point : Left (or n/a) And that's all in the range 0x300 to 0x3ff.
More EXIF investigations
Before I can do much more with my investigation of Olympus focus stacking, I need to establish if I can get more accurate focus information from the EXIF Maker Notes. First step was to look through the many alternatives to exiftool to see if they do any better. Tried exif, exiv2 and exiftags, all of which produced very little output and nothing at all about focus distance. My guess is that they don't analyse the Maker Notes. exifprobe does show some of the Maker Notes, but there's no mention of focus distance there either. OK, how difficult can it be to go through the EXIF data manually?
Still more focus stacking
Still more playing around with focus stacking today. Peter Jeremy asked why I took the photos from such a distance; that's clearly because they're big flowers, the lens has a ridiculously long focal length, and I want to get the whole flowers in the image. But clearly I can take photos of parts of the flower too. To do that, I needed flash, and fortunately the camera is prepared to wait for the flash to recharge (with the rather strange sequence 1, 2 or 4 seconds and more, but not the 3 I really need): Once again there seems to be little difference between these two images, though one was taken with a step size of 3, the other with a step ...
Focus stacking, continued
Yesterday's experiments with focus stacking left a number of questions open. The first one was the influence of focus step setting. But when I turned on the camera and fought my way down the menus, it showed a step setting of 3, not 1. After a bit of messing around (and taking unintended single shots), I discovered that the menu system really requires me to press the OK button after making a setting. Otherwise the displayed value just goes away again. And that meant that my comparisons yesterday were in fact taken with the same focus step setting. So I took two sets of the same image, one at f/4 and the other at f/8, both with step size 10: Yes, ...
Desired program #16 not found in PAT: solved
Yesterday I discovered duplicate channel number entries in my mythconverg.channel table, and suspected that, along with a bug in MythTV, might explain my inability to record certain programmes. Today took another look. Sure enough, there were many: mysql> SELECT chanid, channum, sourceid, name, finetune, recpriority, visible, useonairguide, mplexid, serviceid FROM channel where mplexid = 1 ORDER BY channum; +--------+---------+----------+--------------------+----------+---------+---------------+---------+-----------+ | chanid | channum | sourceid | name | finetune | visible | useonairguide | mplexid | serviceid | +--------+---------+----------+--------------------+----------+---------+---------------+---------+-----------+ | 2008 | 8 | 2 | WIN Western Vic | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | | ...
Chasing down TV reception issues
So what's wrong with cvr2 that it can't receive GEM any more? It can't be the tuner or the frequency, because there are five programmes that I am interested in (visible = 1) on this specific frequency (mplexid, i.e. multiplexer ID): mysql> SELECT chanid, channum, callsign, serviceid FROM channel WHERE mplexid = 1 AND visible = 1 ORDER BY channum; +--------+---------+--------------------+-----------+ | chanid | channum | callsign | serviceid | +--------+---------+--------------------+-----------+ | 2203 | 80 | WIN Western Vic HD | 1938 | | 2081 | 81 | WIN Western Vic | 1924 | | 2204 | 82 | GEM Western Vic | 1926 | | 2083 | 83 ...
More MythTV pain
There has been another reshuffle of the terrestial TV channels, with the result that a number of programmes didn't record. Time to run another mythtv-setup. But this time it didn't work: there were no error messages, but the window didn't display. More X breakage? No --listen-tcp, maybe? No, it's not that simple, but the only way I could get it to display was to connect cvr2 (the MythTV machine) to the TV and display it on its own X server, made more complicated by things like GNOME. And when I did, I couldn't navigate the screens properly. Finally I got my rescan done, but the old channel numbers were still there, and the only way I could tell them apart was because mythtv-setup is too polite to set the finetune attribute, so the new ones all had it set to NULL.
More Microsoft strangenesses
When firing up dischord to check the iview issues, it was, as so often, flat out doing something with the disk. Looking at the Task Manager showed some surprises: No, the representation 1,075... is no surprise. That's modern. But what's this MATLAB stuff? I don't use it, though it seems I have something of that nature on the machine. But it appears to only be an installer. So why is this thing messing around there? And what's ZPSAutoUpdate.exe? How I wish I understood this mess.
Using iview
Discussion on IRC yesterday: it seems there's a new series of The Doctor Blake Mysteries on ABC TV. It's set in Ballarat, and 3 years ago I tried to watch it, hampered at the time by abysmal TV reception. So I tried it with iview, ABC's web service. At the time I was refused because iview knows that I'm not in Australia. Yesterday I tried again: Now isn't that helpful? I sent a comment to ABC, and was surprised to get a response.
New port: no issues?
Finally got round to committing a new FreeBSD port, graphics/hugin-2016, with the latest release candidate for Hugin. Went without a hitch. I was just saying (on IRC) I wonder what will go wrong now when I got a mail message, sent fully 2 minutes after the commit message: Looks like it was not repocopied, may I ask why? Well, the answer is that I didn't know it should have been. There's nothing about it in the Porter's Handbook. No, it seems, I should have been looking in the Committer's Guide, a document that I didn't even know existed, and which isn't referenced in the Porter's Handbook.
eBay studio flash puzzles
Somehow product searches on eBay are non-deterministic. A couple of days ago I found a 150 J studio flash for about $65. Then yesterday I couldn't find it any more. Today I went looking and found it againnot a new one, but the same one I saw 2 days ago. And now, writing up this article, I can't find it again. Then, of course, there's the pricing, which seems completely random. The seller estores_au offers two Godox units: a 160 J Mini Pioneer for $89.99, or a 120 J Mini Pioneer for $90.88. What's the difference? If you look at the photos they provide, nothing.
Spam: Blödmann!
More malicious spam today, with a twist: From: Fermin Lynn <[email protected]> To: bloedmann <[email protected]> Subject: Invoice 26885012 Dear bloedmann, Please review theattached copy of your Invoice (number: IN26885012) for an amount of $549.42. [-- Attachment #2: invoice_copy_26885012.zip --] [-- Type: application/zip, Encoding: base64, Size: 3.0K --] Blödmann is a German term of abuse which http://dict.leo.org/ende/ translates as buffoon, imbecile, goon, twerp, wally, dimwit, git, dweeb or dumbass. How did I get it? My choice of email address. In my virtual file I find: # www.serif.com [email protected] [email protected] I don't recall why I used that particular name, but it probably reflects on the company web site.
More rechargeable battery issues
The batteries in Yvonne's mouse are discharged, as indicated by a warning light (!) . No problem. That's why we have rechargeables (NiMH). But lately, mainly out of interest, I've been measuring the voltages after discharge. In this case it was 2 AAA batteries. One was down to 1.062 V, which was really low. But the other was reading -0.062V! OK, it's clear that unbalanced batteries can cause the weakest to fail, but a negative voltage? In addition, these were almost new. But you can't return rechargeable batteries, even if they don't meet ALDI's stringent quality standards. More generally, though, my measurements show that a battery pair never discharges equally.
20 years of CFBSD
Diary entry for today: Feb 24 "Installing and running FreeBSD" submitted for publication, 1996 That was the first edition of what was to become The Complete FreeBSD . Twenty years! Time flies when you're having fun. I tried to find a machine-readable version, but it seems that it's gone. I have everything in RCS, but the build system was baroque and fragile, and the likelihood of being able to build it now is pretty remote. ACM only downloads articles once.
What price an IP address?
IPv6 has been around for nearly 20 years, and in the early days we thought that it would quickly displace IPv4. But it hasn't. Most ISPs still don't support it, and though I could use it in my house network, I don't, mainly because of an overly pedantic concern about efficiency (IPv6 headers are considerably larger than IPv4 headers). Now that the IPv4 address space is depleted, a market has arisen for IP addresses. Today I received a mail message offering to buy my excess IP addresses for the princely sum of $3 each, independent of quantity. I'm not interested, but it got me thinking: how much is an IPv4 address worth?
Build problems
Ran a fairly normal system build on stable today. Or at least, I thought so. And then things began to hang, repeatedly. Looking at the ps output on a repeat attempt, I saw: === grog@stable (/dev/pts/2) ~ 20 -> ps wlt1 UID PID PPID CPU PRI NI VSZ RSS MWCHAN STAT TT TIME COMMAND 0 55691 36392 0 20 0 12368 1944 piperd I+ 1 0:00.10 tee -a Make.log 0 55694 55690 0 26 0 12372 1948 wait I+ 1 0:00.00 /usr/bin/time -l make kernel -DNOCLEAN 0 55695 55694 0 52 0 9116 888 wait I+ 1 0:00.00 make kernel -DNOCLEAN 0 55700 55695 0 52 0 9116 1468 wait I+ 1 0:00.01 make -m ...
Understanding XCompose
One of the lesser-known features of X is the Compose key. Press it and then enter specific key combinations, and it will generate characters not directly available on the keyboard. For example, with my US-style keyboard I can generate the Greek letter with the combination *L, or ¦ with the combination X06a7. In general all UTF-8 characters can be generated by entering X and the 4 digit hex code, though clearly the other method is easierif you know the combination. But how do I know the combinations? Five years ago, a certain Pmarin sent me details, along with a link to a table which proved to be not completely accurate.
Bushfire, day 3
Mail from Daniel Nebdal today, pointing out that there is an explanation for the symbols on the emergency services web site. What I saw was only the tip of the iceberg: there are a total of 50 of them! Some, like Aircraft Accident , Animal Plague and Plant Health , are unlikely, but Advice and All Clear are notand they use the same symbol for both: height="41" width="50" />, which I had thought meant Information . And what's an animal plague, anyway? There's already a separate symbol for Animal Health .
Bushfire, day 2
The bushfire may have been relatively harmless, but it took the crews a long time to contain it. How long? That depends. 24 hours after the fire was reported, the CFA and the Department of Environment, Land, Water & Planning still had different views of what was going on: None of the details match! Not even whether the fire is under control or not! The status was like that for most of the day.
Another bushfire
Another bushfire reported this afternoon, about 5 km ESE of here. The good news: nobody in Dereel was in danger. How did I find out? From Facebook, of course. If I had a SIM in my tablet and mobile phone coverage, I could run an App on the tablet. But what a way to communicate! The emergency services explicitly do not offer an email notification service. OK, we know the URL for the bushfire web site. It's http://www.cfa.vic.gov.au/incidents/incident_summary.htm or maybe http://www.dse.vic.gov.au/DSE/nrenfoe.nsf/LinkView/519C51D981DAE41FCA257257000A5163DC25C965BDA0CAF5CA2573B400013504, and I ranted about it 7 years ago. Oh. No. It's gone, and it's clearly not important enough for them to include a redirect.
Windows 93%
Andy Farkas posted this link. Somehow it addresses some of my prejudices. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Air conditioner bugs
Our air conditioner works relatively well, especially compared to our last installation. In particular, the temperature regulation is good. But the control unit has a number of strangenesses that lead to the conclusion that the programmers didn't really consider all possibilities: You can set the temperature in up to 8 zones (effectively rooms), each with its own control unit. We have installed all 8. But the temperature setting range is limited to 4°.
HTML authentication revisited
Discussion on IRC today about yesterday's HTML authentication system. Andy Snow commented: selective htaccess probably wouldn't have been any more lines of code, but probably would have needd more reading of docs :) Well, yes, guilty as charged. I shouldn't be reinventing the wheel. So I (later) read the documentation. As I feared, it doesn't really address my issue. I want to allow access to multiple images without authentication; I only want to enable access to the others for certain people, and I don't want to advertise the fact.
Hacking security
Over the years I have written my own scripts to display my photos on the web. Compared to commercially available scripts, they have the advantage that I can modify them to suit my tastes, including displaying with more images and less clutter. They also allow me to include photos on other web pages, such as this diary, using the same interface. But now Yvonne had a dilemma: she has been training a horse who shall be not only nameless, but also invisible. And of course she has taken a lot of photos, which she wants to share with Chris Bahlo and the owner, but nobody else.
Tracing the ATA issue
My traces of the communication between ATA and eureka showed perfectly normal traffic followed by a reboot. But that was based on the IP address, and the reboot reason was specified was Using last good known IP and reboot after 30 minutes , that might not be enough. The dropouts continued, so I started another trace, this time looking for traffic related to the MAC address. And sure enough, that showed more information: 08:55:53.018742 bc:5f:f4:c9:9b:bf (oui Unknown) > 00:25:9b:6e:34:36 (oui Unknown), ethertype IPv4 (0x0800), length 495: sip.hostedphonesystem.net.au.sip > officephone.lemis.com.sip: SIP, length: 453 08:55:53.046585 bc:5f:f4:c9:9b:bf (oui Unknown) > 00:25:9b:6e:34:36 (oui Unknown), ethertype IPv4 (0x0800), length 495: sip.hostedphonesystem.net.au.sip > officephone.lemis.com.sip-tls: SIP, length: 453 08:56:04.211877 00:25:9b:6e:34:36 (oui Unknown) > Broadcast, ethertype IPv4 (0x0800), length 342: 0.0.0.0.bootpc > 255.255.255.255.bootps: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from 00:25:9b:6e:34:36 (oui Unknown), length 300 (9 more omitted) 09:00:10.489436 00:25:9b:6e:34:36 (oui Unknown) > Broadcast, ...
Fixing the audio issues
Another problem with tiwi's audio today, this time playing a video. Again the message Audio device got stuck! , and couldn't get rid of it. Did a bit of googling and found this page, which suggests: === root@tiwi (/dev/pts/5) /home/grog 6 -> sysctl dev.hdac.0.polling=1 dev.hdac.0.polling: 0 -> 1 That works. But it's not a solution. It's a workaround, and the real issue seems to be that the device stops interrupting. Why? Do I care? ACM only downloads articles once.
NBN reception towers
Had a chat with Kevin of Aussie Broadband today about erecting towers to connect to the National Broadband Network wireless service. He wasn't able to do anything himself, but he had a couple of good idea. It seems that the NBN will accept a tower, but to get to the people who handle that you need some persistence. The big issue remains the height of the tower, of course. Make it 300 m high and you won't have a problem, except with the cost and the appearance. Clearly you don't want it any higher than necessary, and to find out what's necessary you need to measure signal strength.
More multimedia pain
In the evening, listening to radio on tiwi, with the screen powered down, when suddenly there was a loud hum and then nothing. Turned the screen on and saw: Audio device got stuck! Audio device got stuck! Audio device got stuck! Exit before end: file position -1 MPlayer interrupted by signal 11 in module: key_events ... I've seen the crash before, but what's the Audio device got stuck! ? In particular, it stayed stuck. Didn't have time to investigate then, and simply rebooted the machine, after which it worked again. But why are all these problems occurring now?
Yet another hardware failure
When I went to Ballarat I took my Android tablet with me to try once again to get a sensible navigation application. In vain: the choice of route is still terrible. Going north along Peel St to the destination a few hundred metres ahead, it turned me right along Curtis St, past Bakery Hill, left into Humffray St and left again into Mair St: And of course I can no longer link to a Google Map, because my software isn't leet enough for them.
More hardware failure?
While preparing Yvonne's camera for shipment, noted a couple of LEDs that were out when they should be on: Line 1 and Line 2 on my ATA. Discovered I couldn't communicate with it at all: it seemed to have failed. They're not expensiveunder $30but where do I get an ATA in a hurry? Most are supplied, at elevated prices, by VoIP providers. MyNetFone offers an SPA122 for $69.95 and another $12.95 for postage, for example. And they seem to be remarkably unreliable. So quickly ordered another PAP2T. Power cycled the box, started a trace and found, after a lot of failed ARP requests: 10:30:21.839411 ARP, Request who-has officephone.lemis.com tell eureka.lemis.com, length 28 10:30:22.841399 ARP, Request who-has officephone.lemis.com tell eureka.lemis.com, length 28 10:32:37.089384 ARP, Request who-has officephone.lemis.com tell officephone.lemis.com, length 46 10:32:37.340780 ARP, Request who-has officephone.lemis.com tell officephone.lemis.com, length 46 10:32:37.343440 ARP, ...
NBN for the depressed
Anita Maynard asked on Facebook today about getting NBN in her location, which is in a depression. Ended up going over to take a look there, and discovered that her husband Ken is the bloke who bought our pizza oven last year. Fortunately he's happy with it. It seems that the National Broadband Network has been there a couple of times and established that he could get a signal if they found a way to mount the antenna about 10 m higher. Not really an issue, especially since Ken is good at that sort of thing, so he would build his own tower.
Still more TV pain
Checking last night's recordings, discovered that cvr2 hung again. It was recording at the time, so I have an exact time when it happened: 2016-02-06 21:14:23.703343663. Unfortunately I don't have as good a time for the say before, but it was also some time after 21:00. About the only thing in /var/log/messages at least gives me a rough idea: Feb 5 20:58:57 cvr2 -- MARK -- Feb 5 21:18:57 cvr2 -- MARK -- Feb 6 10:12:31 cvr2 syslogd 1.5.0#2ubuntu6: restart. So it must have been some time between 21:18 and 21;29. What's causing it?
TV computer issues
Checking on yesterday's TV recording, discovered that cvr2, the recording machine, was down. It seems that it just hung some time after 21:00. And it seems that Linux machines are particularly laconic when it comes to logging. Why did it die? No idea. It came back up again with no difficulties. Hopefully a one-off occurrence. As if that wasn't enough, had more trouble with tiwi. X came up in 1024×768 mode again. Why? An examination of the Xorg.0.log file was interesting: it didn't find any EDID data at all.
Intel graphics: not the solution
Left tiwi running overnight, mainly by accident. And today the display of a firefox browser was corrupted, apparently a font issue that I couldn't fix by changing tabs back and forth. Somehow the on-chip graphics just aren't up to an HD display. Maybe I should put the disk back in the old teevee machine until I can sort things out. ACM only downloads articles once.
Configuring aspell
Since a recent upgrade to Emacs my spell corrector hasn't been working, claiming that no dictionary was selected. If I tried to select one (ispell-change-directory), it claimed that the selected dictionary (british) didn't exist. Googling didn't help: this otherwise helpful article told me to do exactly what I was doing. Exceptionally, the normal documentation didn't go into intimate details of installation. Why couldn't I select a dictionary? Finally I tried pkg: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/27) ~ 165 -> pkg info | grep spell aspell-0.60.6.1_5 Spelling checker with better suggestion logic than ispell de-aspell-20030222.1_1 Aspell German dictionary hunspell-1.3.3 Improved spell-checker for Hungarian and other languages ispell-3.3.02_5 An interactive spelling checker for multiple languages ...
tiwi: done!
More work on tiwi today. Yesterday it was mainly working, but I had to check audio, ensure that it boots up cleanly, and move it to the lounge room. And clearly I needed to move the videos on teevee across to tiwi. Nothing very complicated, but lots of non-obvious details. Syncing the videos was the most time-consuming. I had already done so last month, but since then new videos have arrived, of course. I used rsync last time, but didn't mention it in my diary. That's a mistake: every time I use rsync for something like this, I have a couple of false starts while I sort out options and whether path names should end in a /.
mplayer: Finally!
I finished yesterday with the recognition that my issues with mplayer were related either to specific hardware or specific software. Which? Today I started by putting the disk from stable into the new tiwi machine and trying in that configuration. It worked. So it's not the hardware. Which software? I guessed something in /usr/local. The base systems are the same, so after replacing the original disks in their machines, I copied the entire /usr hierarchy from stable to tiwi (as /spool/usr), then rebooted and symlinked /spool/usr to /usr. And sure enough, that worked too. So all I needed was to put the hierarchy in the correct place and I was done.
More fun with telemarketeers
Eighteen months ago I described a trick to upset telemarketeers. What I've heard since then is that it had an immediate reaction from telemarketeer management. The drones have been instructed to never, never change the configuration of their phones on instruction over the phone. Today I heard of another hack: a robot that recognizes spam calls and automatically handles them. This story in particular amused me. How do you recognize spam calls in advance? The caller ID may give some clue, as the link describes. That's applicable to the USA, but here we get different things. Today I got a call from 0380801590, which, however, appears to be a valid number.
Fixing video issues
By the end of yesterday I had at least three remaining issues with tiwi: display resolution, lack of video with mplayer, and lack of lirc support. Spent today addressing them. The resolution issue was straightforward enough, just a mode line in the xorg.conf file. But the lack of display kept me going all day. First question: is this a problem with mplayer or X? That's easy to check: display the output of a known good mplayer on tiwi:0, and display the output of my new mplayer, running on tiwi, on a display on eureka. But the first part didn't work. The X server wasn't listening on TCP port x11.
Finishing the mplayer mods
I've been procrastinating in applying my patches to mplayer, but it's gradually time to do something. And once I had found what looked like the most recent patches, actually applying them wasn't that bad. And it worked! About the only modification I needed to make was to remove a rather unsuccessful attempt to measure time in files captured from an MPEG Transport Stream: /* * grog, 2008/10/16 07:15:42 * Calculate the elapsed time for a file. We need this if we have * copied transport streams with nonsensical elapsed time values. */ double demuxer_calc_elapsed_time (demuxer_t *demuxer) { double get_time_ans; sh_video_t *sh_video = demuxer->video->sh; sh_audio_t *sh_audio = demuxer->audio->sh; if (sh_video && sh_video->i_bps) get_time_ans = (double) (demuxer->filepos - demuxer->movi_start) / sh_video->i_bps; else if (sh_audio && sh_audio->i_bps) get_time_ans = (double) (demuxer->filepos - demuxer->movi_start) / sh_audio->i_bps; else get_time_ans=0; return get_time_ans; } ...
Online concert bookings
So we've decided to go to the Kammerphilarmonie Köln concert on Friday. How do we get tickets? There are plenty of sites that sell them at different prices, or I can call up Her Majesty's Theatre and book them over the phone. The price is the same as on their web site. My prejudices against broken web sites suggest that the phone is the better choice. But that's chickening out, so I braved the web site. My prejudices were confirmed. I had to register with the site with full address, email and password, and it didn't want to acccept my address: If these sites insist on checking the address, they should at least have the most up-to-date list of addresses.
Upgrading ports: the pitfalls
The new pkg system for FreeBSD is finally usable, and I've been upgrading my ports like that for some time. But there are still issues: it installs pre-built packages, so it can't respect individual options. After upgrading eureka recently I've had a number of issues. First, my xterms have grown icons again. It's been less than two months since I found out how to hack the source to get rid of them, but the update put them back. Next, mutt developed black spots. That's a bug feature of mutt when compiled the default way using ncurses: it's obviously intended to display in reverse video (white on black), and some of the arrows have a black background no matter what the correct background colour is.
Firefox: new record?
I've already commented on the extreme power hunger of firefox. At the time I considered my machine to be about 60 times the speed of a CDC 7600 supercomputer from the 1970s. Since then I have replaced my machine with one 4 times as fast, so when I look at this I'm looking at the equivalent of 250,000 odd minutes of CDC 7600 CPU time. PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND 12236 grog 76 22 0 20950M 1949M uwait 1 18.2H 19.24% firefox That's about 6 months, probably longer than any 7600 ever stayed upthe average uptime was less than a day.
More VirtualBox issues
Why does Virtualbox kill my network? My previous assumption was that it was interfering with DHCP, but today I ran traceroute and confirmed that the external network link was still runningonly the traffic wasn't getting through. Firewall? Somehow, yes. If I allowed all traffic across the link, the problem didn't occur, though others did, since the firewall rules also handle NAT. Spent quite some time trying to get my head around it, without success. In particular, the exact sequence was not repeatable. Sometimes I just needed to stop the virtual machine to get normal connectivity back. In other cases it didn't happen until I stopped the VirtualBox process, and in others it didn't happen until some time later.
Panoramas over the years
Yesterday I committed enblend version 4.1.3. And almost immediately got an automated response telling me that 4.1.4 was available. Coincidence? No. I had made the changes to the port months ago, and was overtaken by other things. In the meantime 4.1.4 was released, some months ago. Reading the release notes shows that this change was significant in a number of ways. The notes go back all the way to 2004 in reverse chronological sequence, and they got me thinking. How much better is enblend now than when I started using it? That proved to be 7½ years ago, and the results I got at the time really didn't look good: A bit of playing around with my current system looks a lot better: ...
Local modifications to ports
I've been hacking on mplayer for over 10 years now, and I'm currently having fun merging the patches to the current version. Last month I made a start, but soon ran into trouble. Made more progress today: it compiled and ran, but my changes didn't work. More searching, and I discovered I had a multitude of versions there, including at least one complete set of patches. For the one file cfg-mplayer.h I had 14 copies and 9 RCS control files. Which is the correct one? They're dated from 3 July 2005 to 22 August 2011. The best guess would be the last, but I'm still not convinced.
VirtualBox progress
More playing around with VirtualBox today. Downloaded and installed a FreeBSD image, which worked out of the box. With that I was able to confirm that host-only networking works, but of course it requires its own network. And bridged mode networking does work after all; presumably my previous issues were due to the lack of the vboxnet0 interface on the host. So I was able to fire up echuca (the Ubuntu box) and install the virtualbox-guest-dkms package. Rebooted as instructed, tried to change the resolution and... nothing. No change. Where do I go from here? I have other irons in the fire, so I tended to them.
VirtualBox revisited
I'm having difficulties with Hugin 2016.0.0 Beta 1 on FreeBSD. Who's to blame? My port, or Hugin? To find out I need to fire up a Linux version, but I don't have a spare machine. Time to reinstate my VirtualBox installation, which I haven't used for two years, since installing a new kernel on the new eureka. How do you do that again? Found lots of old diary entries, of course, but they're more a blow-by-blow description. Time for a HOWTO. Started up as root, probably a bad idea. And it didn't find my old VMs. How did that go again? Climbed through the menus and found the VM path: /root/Virtualbox VMs.
Hugin 2016 beta
More work on the new Hugin beta today. First I had to fix the current port, for which a bug report is outstanding. And before I did that, I had to unbreak the enblend port. Surprisingly, all went very smoothly. After fixing the conflicts, both enblend and Hugin Just Ran. On to look at the beta version. First, where's the tarball? According to the announcement: It can be downloaded at sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/hugin/files/hugin/hugin-2016.0/hugin-2016.0.0_beta1.tar.bz2/download OK, how does that compare with the old one? Not much similarity. After a number of failed attempts, discovered that this URL was only for downloading via a web browser, and that the real URL was http://sourceforge.net/projects/hugin/files/hugin/hugin-2016.0/hugin-2016.0.0_beta1.tar.bz2without the /download component.
Getting lircd running
Back to setting up lirc today. I've already established that the location of the configuration files has changed. Put the correct file in there, started lircd, and... nothing. The daemon didn't even complain when I disconnected the (USB) receiver. It did read the configuration file, though, so it must have been something else. Looking on teevee, discovered that I started the daemon manually with undocumented parameters: /usr/local/sbin/lircd -n --driver=dvico --device=/dev/uhid0 That (finally) worked. OK, the --driver and --device parameters are there, but not dvico, nor any other driver name.
Google Translate: better than dissociated-press
There's a game for Emacs called dissociated-press. It takes a text region and rearranges the words. It's marginally amusing, but it wears off quickly. But the idea of putting the text through the same mill over and over is interesting, so I tried the same technique with Google Translate, using the diary entry I ranted about on Friday, translating back and forth until I got equilibrium: But then there is the text itself: Finally, the package that was sent from Perth in the past week in dignity came Napoleon.
Updating the Hugin port
Hugin 2016.0.0 beta has been released (what does the second .0 mean? I've never seen any other value). Time to start adapting the FreeBSD port. First run make clean on the old port. But it failed while cleaning the enblend dependency. It seems I had a conflict in the Makefile. How did that happen? I maintain enblend too, and I can't recall breaking it. Further investigation showed that the MAINTAINER line in the Makefile, once sacred, is now meaningless. Since I last made any changes, there have been no fewer than 21 commits by other people, many of them sweeping through multiple ports, and none of whom informed me.
Google Translate improvements
I have a link Translate this page at the head of all my diaries. By default it translates into French for people I know who find even Google Translate's results useful. But today I tried it in German.. The results are amazing! This is a calendar, but Mar has been translated as Beschädigen (damage), and May has been translated as Kann (can). It's barely possible to understand the lack of context that could lead to this kind of translation. But this one boggles belief: Donnerstag, 21.
HDR Projects 4 Pro
Special offer in the mail today: HDR Projects 4 Pro for a price that I can't refuse. Or can I? I do a lot of HDR processing with align_image_stack and enfuse. It has the advantage that it's fast, and that everything is done automatically. It has the disadvantage that everything is done automatically. HDR Projects is a Microsoft space program, of course, but it offers some interesting features, as this video shows: There's also a German version here, made with a less grating voice.
Retiring old PRs
The FreeBSD problem reporting system has been around forever. Some years back we moved from GNATS to bugzilla, but we've ensured that all old reports are kept for posterity (or just for resolution). One of the latter was one I entered 10 years ago. The FreeBSD web site had become modern and rendered terribly. Things have improved since then, so it was time to put this PR to bed. ACM only downloads articles once.
tiwi setup: lircd
Instead, took a look at lircd. That had started last time round and shown no reaction to the remote control. Back to look at what I did last time round, which was inconclusive. But clearly I needed the files /etc/lircd.conf and /etc/lircrc, so copied them from teevee. Start again. No error indication, no function. It didn't even notice when I disconnected the (USB) receiver. And when I restarted lircd, it didn't access /etc/lircd.conf. OK, RTFM time: FILES The config file for lircd is located in /etc/lirc/lircd.conf. Isn't that nice, moving the files elsewhere?
tiwi setup: MythWeb
Spent some time trying to configure MythWeb today. First that required getting Apache24 up and running. These version numbers in file names are getting more and more on my nerves. The only real change I needed to make to the configuration file was: -DocumentRoot "/usr/local/www/apache24/data" -<Directory "/usr/local/www/apache24/data"> +DocumentRoot "/usr/local/www/data" +<Directory "/usr/local/www/data"> Then looking at /usr/local/www/mythweb/INSTALL: =========== 3.0 Experts =========== If you are not an expert, please skip to section 4.0. Experts, the following commands should be enough for you to figure out what's going on: cp -r mythweb/* /var/www/html/ Clearly the port has forgotten to change the path name, which appears to be a Linuxism.
More tiwi installation?
My work on installing MythTV on tiwi has stalled waiting for a tuner. What can I do in the meantime? At least MythWeb, which is one of the best arguments in favour of MythTV. It's been nearly 9 years since I first installed it, and of course things have changed. Do I have copies on eureka? === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/9) ~ 213 -> locate -i /mythweb|less /home/OLD-STUFF/ports/www/mythweb /home/OLD-STUFF/ports/www/mythweb/CVS ... /home/src/CVS/FreeBSD/ncvs/ports/www/mythweb /home/src/CVS/FreeBSD/ncvs/ports/www/mythweb/Attic /home/src/CVS/FreeBSD/ncvs/ports/www/mythweb/Attic/Makefile,v That's the old CVS based ports tree, one really old, and the other old, but between the two the port was deleted ( put in the attic ).
Daily Microsoft pain
Yvonne took 187 photos today, and the processing showed the typical Microsoft slowdown (memory leaks?) . Time for a reboot. And, of course, when the system came back up, she had the dreaded read-only photo file system. More cursing, but the biggest discovery seems to be that the symptoms are non-deterministic. When I tried to select Properties for the file system, it took me to the Control Panel / System page. Only after I disconnected and reconnected the file system did it take me to the correct page, where it still couldn't do anything useful. As if that wasn't enough, the keyboard went haywire.
Investigating vlc
I had too many other things to do today to worry about MythTV, but some time ago I had promised Jürgen Lock that I would try vlc. Did that today. And? It's hard to say. No multimedia software is well documented, and vlc appears to be no exception. But it worked out of the box, something that other stuff doesn't do. The question that I have is whether it can do everything I want. I haven't found a way to save the position in a stream, something that's very important to me. But maybe the save playlist function does just that.
Keyboard evolution
Somehow I'm still not happy with keyboards. For nearly 25 years I used the same Northgate Omnikey keyboard: I've since replaced it with a Sun 7 keyboard, but I'm still having difficulties. How do you position your right hand? Conventional (in other words typewriter age) wisdom is that you place your fingers above the J, K, L and ; keys, and cover the H key with your forefinger. But that leaves a large number of keys to the right. OK, move one space to the key next to ;, whatever that may be, but on the Sun that still leaves two keys unaccounted for, including Return.
dischord pain
So why can't Yvonne write to her CIFS file system from dischord any more? Spent a lot of time investigating today. Clearly the first step is to check what the real permissions are, as this post suggests. But all is well there: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/9) ~ 89 -> getfacl /Photos # file: /Photos # owner: grog # group: wheel user::rwx group::rwx other::rwx === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/9) ~ 90 -> ls -ld /Photos/ drwxrwxrwx 29 grog wheel 1,024 16 Jan 09:03 /Photos/ Clearly it has something to do with Yvonneagainso tried connecting with my credentials.
More Microsoft pain
So finally I have my CIFS file systems so that they don't require re-entry of passwords every time I boot dischord. And then Yvonne came to me and said she couldn't process her photos. Further investigation showed that she didn't have write access to the file system. Why not? I still have no idea. Lots of messing around showed that from the FreeBSD/Samba side all was OK, but somehow Microsoft (which reports the remote file system as NTFS ) didn't want to know. How I hate Microsoft! ACM only downloads articles once.
More tiwi pain
On with my software installation for tiwi, the new multimedia machine. Yesterday I stopped with not being able to run mythtv-setup. Tried it today. It didn't fail: it told me that it couldn't access the database that I created yesterday. Further investigation showed that the port had removed MySQL client and server version 5.5, but I didn't notice that it only installed the client for 5.6. On the other hand, it didn't stop mysqld_safe, so I was able to create the database. After this morning's outage, of course, it was no longer present. That's particularly strange when you look into /usr/ports/multimedia/mythtv/Makefile and read: MYSQL_RUN_DEPENDS= mysqld_safe:${PORTSDIR}/databases/mysql${MYSQL_VER}-server But that's another day's head-scratching.
Power failure recovery
Rebooting eureka had some strange side effects. Yvonne came in in the afternoon telling me that she could no longer access the network. She meant firefox, of course, and sure enough, it hung trying to access the home page, and then claimed that it couldn't access 180.150.4.128. I recognize that address: it used to be the address of my external interface to the world while at Kleins Road. What's looking for that? Tried other browsers. Worked. Works from my machine. External sites were accessible from Yvonne's firefox. Wrong proxy settings? cache.lemis.com, port 8080. cache is a CNAME for eureka, so that's not an issue, and anyway, it only affected the home page.
Power failure recovery
Rebooting eureka had some strange side effects. Yvonne came in in the afternoon telling me that she could no longer access the network. She meant firefox, of course, and sure enough, it hung trying to access the home page, and then claimed that it couldn't access 180.150.4.128. I recognize that address: it used to be the address of my external interface to the world while at Kleins Road. What's looking for that? Tried other browsers. Worked. Works from my machine. External sites were accessible from Yvonne's firefox. Wrong proxy settings? cache.lemis.com, port 8080. cache is a CNAME for eureka, so that's not an issue, and anyway, it only affected the home page.
Hello tiwi
The new disk has arrived, so started on what I fear will be a slow, painful path to replacing teevee (FreeBSD display machine) and cvr2 (Linux recording machine) with a single machine that I've decided to call tiwi (pronounced as German). Every time I've tried something like this in the past, it has been really painful: On 18 September 2004 I made my first attempts, still with analogue tuners. This was the first teevee. It took me until 4 June 2005 to get the tuner working, using xawtv running on FreeBSD.
Fixing Ashampoo
I've had a lot of issues with Ashampoo® Photo Optimizer 6, and I've complained rather vehemently about the lack of support. But in the last week that has changed. It's still not clear what the problem was, but messing around with administrator privilege drove it into hiding. But there's still more, and now I have a total of four different tickets. I'm also getting mail from the same person about the same issue (I think) both in English and German. How do I sort that mess out? ACM only downloads articles once.
Spider: found
I suspected that the Huntsman I found a few days ago was on his last legs (though they were all still there). Today I found what might be his remains: I hope his demise is not a comment on the reading material. ACM only downloads articles once.
Olympus focus stacking
I've had the firmware release 4 for my Olympus OM-D E-M1 for over a month now, and with one exception I haven't tried out the focus stacking feature. Since I'm considering buying the only macro lens that supports it properly, it's high time to investigate. The stacking is somewhat primitive, and of course the documentation is almost non-existent. There are two options. In each case you take multiple images, starting at the closest position, and changing focus by a specific increment for each subsequent image. The images are taken with the new electronic shutter feature, which (undocumented) has a total exposure time of 1/13 s, like a very slow focal plane shutter.
Olympus Viewer 3 revisited
I've tried Olympus Viewer several times over the years, and I've never found it to be much use. About the only use I can find is to correct for distortion for lenses that DxO Optics Pro doesn't support. Over two years ago I used it to correct the distortion of the Olympus Zuiko Digital 18-180mm f/3.5-6.3 that I had at the time. It took me another 6 weeks to find out how to save 16 bit TIFF. It offered the choice of EXIF TIFF (8 bit only) or TIFF (8 or 16 bit, with choice of EXIF data if you want it).
Zoner Photo Stud...
Spent most of the day playing around with photographic software and techniques. It's tiring. First up was a free copy of what may be called Zoner Photo Studio 17, but the windows can't be bothered to say so, and it's too much of a mouthful for Microsoft, which calls it Zoner Photo Stud... . It's the previous release, thus presumably the fact that I didn't have to pay for it. What can it do? It's hard to say, since it doesn't say. Firing it up brings up a series of windows that remind me considerably of DxO Optics Pro , and they're relatively intuitive to navigate.
Old computers for sale
Andy Farkas is having trouble with an old MSCP disk in his VAXstation. Well, I can't help there, and if the disk is really toast, it could be difficult to replace. But I do have a MicroVAX II, and it has two disks: Not that I want to use it, but it seems a shame to scrap it. So Andy will take it, he says. He lives near Bundaberg, only 2000 odd km away.
Ashampoo: Fixed !
Another message from Ashampoo support today: maybe a problem with access right's - If you do a right mouse click on the programs icon > Run as Administrator, does it work that way? Interesting idea. Both the users for which it worked had administrator privileges. OK, let's first give Yvonne administrator privileges and see what happens. Crash. But only once, and after that it worked. I've seen that before, too. So what was the issue? Buggy software, of course. You don't crash on a permissions issue, you report the problem. And why should she need admin privileges anyway?
GPS navigator evolution
Over the years I've done a lot of ranting about the quality of GPS navigators. But today I saw one that put things in perspective. It's built in to Melinda's Toyota Land Cruiser, and it is appallingly bad. The car isn't that old, but it makes it clear how quickly navigators age. Probably the biggest pain is that it has an ABC keyboard. Given that everybody uses computers nowadays, this was a poor choice. And though I complain about the user interface of modern navigation software, I've got to admit that, up to a point, it has improved. It took us 15 minutes to input the route back home.
Debugging, Microsoft style
Finally I have a response from Ashampoo support about the crashes in Ashampoo® Photo Optimizer 6. Edit the registry: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Ashampoo\Ashampoo Photo Optimizer] Why should that help? I had already established that the registry had been cleaned a couple of weeks ago, and I had reported that to Ashampoo. Took another look. Yes, after reinstallation the entries had been added, and there were a number, including the one that this patch was supposed to install: Applied the patch anyway, and of course it made no difference.
No change?
A while back I was asked to sign a petition about the National Broadband Network on change.org. To do so I had to sign up, but since then I've been bombarded with requests to sign up for all sorts of hair-brained schemes. Time to unsubscribe. But how? There are no links. After much searching I found an explanation. With a link? Of course not, just an explanation of where to go. Went there, and it didn't look anything like the description. I got the distinct impression that they didn't want me to unsubscribe. OK, if that's the way they want it, I have a simpler option.
More graphics investigation
Why is X support for Intel graphics chips so bad? Why, is X support for Intel graphics chips so bad? I recall it being so in the past, and my current experience (nothing over 1024×768) is in accordance, but the same chips work well under Microsoft. Went looking in /var/log/Xorg.0.log and found no mention of the monitor That rang a bell: this monitor is on the el-cheapo USB KVM that I bought a couple of months ago. I had already established that it doesn't communicate EDID information. But for exactly that reason I have a copy of the EDID on file, and that's what I use for eureka, which also accesses the monitor by the KVM.
Display cards for new teevee
Gradually I'm getting the pieces together for the new teevee. I have the box, and disk and tuners are on the way. But the on-board graphics chip is from Intel, and for some reason X can't drive it with the required 1920×1080 resolution. And even if it could, there's no suitable acceleration. I had expected this, and I've been planning to install a cheap nVidia card. But choosing graphics cards is a pain, and I've been dragging my feet. Finally today I got round to looking for one. What criteria? The only one I really had was that there should be no fan.
Working around Ashampoo breakage
It's been nearly 2 weeks since I reported problems with Ashampoo® Photo Optimizer 6, and so far I've had no response. To be fair, it is over the Christmas break, but I need to run it for Yvonne. I've established that it somehow depends on the user, so one option would be to delete user yvonne and start all over again. Another would be to get her to run it as a different user. That's easy enough to kludge: --- photoopt 2015/11/20 02:17:12 1.29 +++ photoopt 2016/01/03 21:48:41 @@ -19,6 +19,9 @@ if [ "$OPTDIR" = "" ]; then OPTDIR=/Photos/Ashampoo-`whoami` fi +if [ `whoami` = "yvonne" ]; then + rdesktop -u root -p Braindeath -a 16 -T "rdesktop dischord" -g 1870x1030+0 dischord & +fi OLDDIR=`pwd` # current (source) directory Why not just delete ...
Codes of conduct
It's no secret that I don't like the concept of a code of conduct. With the current noise about Randi Harper leaving the project, there are renewed calls to do something about the state of the FreeBSD Code of Conduct, which is perceived as being out of date. This clearly implies that good behaviour evolves. Maybe it does to a certain point, but that just makes it all the more silly to enshrine it in a document. Summarizing (originally on IRC), I see two reasons that speak against a code of conduct: They're mechanical.
Preparing for teeveeNG
I've been planning to replace both teevee (TV display machine) and cvr2 (recording machine, running MythTV on Linux) with a single machine running FreeBSD. I have the machine, a new disk is on the way. Now I need a tuner. What's wrong with the old ones? Not supported, and they're full-height PCI. But nowadays USB tuners are a dime a dozen. Well, maybe not quite, but they're cheap. The question is, will they work with FreeBSD? One of them suggests that it will: 13. Support all systems(up to WIN8.1) except MAC, LINUX The most important thing is the tuner chipset, and many people don't bother to specify that.
Suspend and resume with FreeBSD
Somehow it grates that I can suspend the state of my Microsoft boxes to RAM and then wake them up with a magic package over the net, but I can't do that with my FreeBSD boxen. It used to work, in the Good Old Days before ACPIon many occasions I was able suspend my laptop, fly intercontinentally and resume. On a couple of occasions the joy was lessened by the discovery that I had a file system at the other end of the world mounted via NFS. But with the advent of ACPI, I couldn't get it to work any more.
FreeBSD core team problems
I really don't like Facebook, but from time to time people refer to me, and then I get an informative mail message with a link. This seems to be the only way to I know get a reference to a Facebook post. In this case, Josh Paetzel referred to something that I apparently said to him decades ago: Greg Lehey told me two decades ago I was a part of the "second generation of BSD users" who wanted to get things done with BSD, not hack on BSD. Documentation was written for the latter group.
Perspective conversion with Hugin
I take a lot of photos with my fisheye lens, mainly for stitching with Hugin. As discussed yesterday, the results aren't fisheye projections. But how do I convert a projection? Hugin does this easily enough if it's handling a panorama. But the Assistant refuses to stitch if there's only one image. But you don't have to use the Assistant to stitch; the Stitcher doesn't care how many images there are, so you can use the assistant to display the image, manipulate it, and then go to the Stitcher to produce the result. Just pay attention to the size. In this example, the original image has a resolution of 4608×3456, and the converted trans mercator image has only 768×462: ...
Shame on PayPal!
In the past I've complainedwith justificationabout ANZ Bank's non-existent amazingly lax online security practices. But it seems that they're not the only offenders: this story shows that PayPal can do just as well. ANZ wants to know secrets like date of birth and address, while PayPal, being in the USA, wants the last 4 digits of the social security number and a random credit card account. And in either case, you can ring up and say that you have forgotten your password, and they'll reset it for you. What help high-tech protection when it's not the line of least resistance? ACM only downloads articles once.
Security, Microsoft style
After creating the user root on dischord, went to give him a passwword. No, wait, don't do that, says Microsoft: You are creating a password for root. If you do this, root will lose all EFS-encrypted files, personal certificates and stored passwords for web sites or notwork resources. To avoid losing data in the future, ask root to make a password reset floppy disk. Floppy disk! I'm amazed! For reference, this is Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (or, as the Germans would say, das Letzte ).
Ashampoo, next try
So yesterday Ashampoo's Photo Optimizer 6 and UnInstallu were not able to recover whatever the problem was. But there are other deinstallers around there, including Revo Uninstaller Pro , which I had used, ultimately with a measure of success, last September. Tried again, and how about that, it found a reference deep in the registry: Removed that, and a couple of other odds and ends, but still not the short cut on the task bar. This time, however, it didn't start the program. So far, so good.
Removing Ashampoo
Yvonne has been processing her photos with essentially the same tools as I use. The only exception has been the optimize step, where I work around the limitations of Ashampoo® Photo Optimizer 6 to (generally) improve the images. But my last attempt to set it up for her ended in disaster: the program crashed at start, presumably due to hidden configuration information that weathers a deinstall/reinstall cycle. My support request ended in the usual /dev/null. OK, how about removing it manually? But despite claims by relatively sane software such as Emacs and cygwin, I don't have access to directories like C:\Users\yvonne\AppData\Local\Appliction Data, where I suspect the data.
Origin of the term shell
Warren Toomey recently asked on the mailing list of the Unix Heritage Society: So what is the etymology of the word "shell"? I see that Multics has a shell. What the user interface in CTSS also called a shell? Interesting question. I have sources of a kind of CTSS (they're really listings), so I went looking. Difficult to find anything in unfamiliar (IBM 7090) assembler code, but the answer seemed to be no . And the Oxford English Dictionary states that it came from Multics.
Dumb search engines
Since moving to Stones Road, I haven't unpacked my CDs. When I do, I intend to copy them to disk so that I can access things more easily. But first I need to find a way to organize them. But today I wanted to play Bach's Christmas Oratorio. Simple: get it from the Naxos music library (free via the State Library of Victoria). So I typed in Bach Christmas Oratorio . The helpful engine: did you mean Beach Christmas Oratorio? . Surely these things can be tuned to be more context-sensitive. ACM only downloads articles once.
Firefox hang
Yvonne called me in to her office today to tell me that she couldn't start firefox: it claimed still to be running. We've seen that many times in the past, but not for a while. But sure enough, a process was still there, and kill -9 wouldn't get rid of it. ps -l showed it to be in T (stopped) state. What happened there? Puzzled a bit and, since Yvonne wasn't there, went off to do something else. Some time later I got the nightly cleanup mail from lagoon, Yvonne's computerabout 15 hours late. And then it twigged: yesterday I had mounted two teevee file systems on lagoon, and I had forgotten to umount them when I shut down teevee.
What does cron mean?
Everybody knows cron, of course, unless they're using Linux, when they might spell it anachron. But what does it mean? I had always assumed that it was related to the Ancient Greek word ÇÁ̽¿Â (chronos), but it seems that people have at various times expanded it to be an abbreviation of Command Run On Notice or Commands Run Over Night , both of which suggest that the authors have no idea of Ancient Greek. Both of these claims have found their way into Wikipedia. Doug McIlroy agreed, checked with Ken Thompson via Brian Kernighan, and updated the page. But it was private communication, so he didn't have a published reference, and the change was backed out within 11 minutes.
Upgrading mpayer
Nearly 9 years ago I hacked mplayer to do a number of things I wanted: better on-screen display, display times for Program Streams better, and save position on exit. And I've been using that version ever since. mplayer has evolved, of course, and now it's time to apply the changes. I kept the changes under RCS at the time, but I seem to have made a real mess of the matter. In particular, the base release doesn't seem to be related to the version that I patched. In addition, the original main file mplayer.c has spawned a number of header files, including (relevant to me) mp_osd.h and mp_core.h.
Ping times revisited
Why did I get such unreliable ping times the other day, even though I'm not experiencing other network problems? Clearly something to investigate further. Tried it with mtr and discovered: Worst case time 2.855 s! And best was 43 ms to the final destination. It would be nice to blame it on I'm too lame for reverse DNS 216.239.41.77, but even my own National Broadband Network link showed a worst time of 428 ms, and it had a higher average time than any of the intermediate hops.
A shampoo for Yvonne
Yvonne processes her photos basically the same way that I do. One exception is optimization with Ashampoo® Photo Optimizer 6, and it shows. So today I showed her how to use it. Not a complete success: the subsequent comparison scripts couldn't find any evidence of the old images. That's because they were stored on local disk, where the script couldn't find them. You can fix that. Well, I fixed it for myself in the past. When I tried today, this horrible interface wouldn't accept the location. In the end it crashed. But then, what do you expect from a Microsoft-space product?
Network ping times
For reasons I didn't really understand, some people on IRC today were comparing ping times to Google's name server google-public-dns-a.google.com., IPv4 address 8.8.8.8. OK, I can do that too: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/14) ~ 28 -> ping -c20 8.8.8.8 ... round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 38.503/51.678/62.721/5.839 ms That's reasonable. But they wanted it with full-size (1400 octet) packets. That looked very different: round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 40.133/185.440/437.621/117.997 ms round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 35.029/161.284/402.501/127.614 ms Why is that so slow?
Understanding processors
Over the past year or so I've noted that teevee, our (still) current TV display computer, and the old lagoon (Yvonne's computer) both had the same processor, a slower-than-molasses AMD Sempron 145 with a CPUmark of 800. Saw a request on Freecycle yesterday: somebody looking for an ATX power supply, with or without case. OK, I have old, mouldy but functional stuff lying around, so why not give him a complete computer? The person in question was Chris (surname still unknown), who was here earlier in the year. Checked and found that it was the old laogon. Fired it up mainly to check how much memory was in it (only 1 GB).
More Android pain
Time for our yearly Christmas letter, which kept me busy much of the day. Part of it, of course, is getting a photo with as many animals as possible. And that requires remote control. Once upon a time that was easy: my first two Olympus cameras had an infrared remote control (well, I had to buy the control, but they understood it). That was small and unobtrusive enough that I could use it and it was barely visible, like here in the 2012 letter: But then I got the new, modern Olympus OM-D E-M1, and clearly infrared is too old-fashioned for that.
Activate your Windows
Also on Thursday I was surprised when the disk from dischord (containing Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate ) cleanly migrated to a new machine. No comments or anything. But today I got a message: You must register your Windows today . OK, how do you do that? It seems that any time you have a question about Microsoft, you ask Google. The results contain a surprising amount of superstition and guesswork, but if you can weather that, it's generally easier than Microsoft's help. Of course, it only works if you really need to do it. If I recall correctly, it's Control Panel / Action Centre to find the message, then click on Activate online (or some such), and it's done!
Checking the teleconverter
Somehow I'm not convinced by the new EC-20 2× teleconverter. The photos taken with it don't give the impression of exceptional sharpness. One reason might be DxO Optics Pro : it happily converts photos taken with it and the Zuiko Digital ED 70-300mm F4.0-5.6as long as the total focal length is not greater than 300 mm. Beyond that, it claims not to have any suitable correction modules. That suggests that the software may be ignoring the teleconverter and not converting optimally as a result. But first I need a way of comparing things. The tele lens isn't that long, but the combination is long enough that I really need a (missing) tripod mount for the lens.
Yet another power failure!
Woke up at 5:15 this morning and looked at the clock. Nothing. Another bloody power failure! Damn Powercor! Then I looked at the door. Air conditioner was on, showing this irritating blue LED. No power failure. Into the garage. Yes, the RCD had tripped for no apparent reason. Damn Jim! The circuitry that's supposed to ensure that we don't have any interruptions has interrupted us again. Recovering wasn't overly difficult. I need to set eureka's BIOS so that it powers on immediately when power is restored; as it was, it waited for me to get up. Getting eureka up and running after a power failure is always a tricky business.
Hello damnation
To Napoleons to pick up my new computer, a ThinkCentre with an Intel Core i5-2400 CPU and Microsoft Windows 10. This was my first exposure to Windows 10, and it wasn't pleasant. I'm left with the feeling that they've gone and moved the paradigms even further from what makes sense, and replaced the familiar user interface with an unfamiliar one, at least skin deep. Underneath, if you know how to find them, things seem to be much the same, though they've gone and rearranged some things so that you can't find them any more. The paper clip is back: I'm Cortana.
Preparing for multimedia upgrade
I've bought Yet Another Microsoft box, also a used Lenovo ThinkCentre. It has an Intel Core i5-2400 CPU, running at 3.1 GHz, and currently rated with a CPU Mark of 5827, more than half the speed of eureka. Now I have: Machine Processor Clock CPUmark eureka Intel Core i7-4771 3.50 GHz ...
Another net outage!
Since changing all the hardware for my National Broadband Network service, I haven't had a further outageuntil today. But to make up for it, it was nearly 1½ hours: Start time End time Duration Badness from to (seconds) 1450098184 1450103337 5153 0.006 # 15 December 2015 00:03:04 15 December 2015 01:28:57 That's not the symptom of the outages I have been having, which are typically in the order of 60 seconds.
More sprinkler fun
One of the things that I hadn't expected was that I would be woken at 4:00 every morning when the sprinklers outside my bedroom window start. Still, that's not a big deal, and I should get used to it. But this morning I was woken again at 5:30 when they started again! Why? My guess is a software bug. The device has two programmes , each of which is launched at a certain time of the day. Or are they? Each sprinkler has an entry in each programme, but I have to specify the start times individually, which seems to be a funny way to do it.
RIP Jürgen Lock
One of the more frequent visitors to our IRC channel was Jürgen Lock, a FreeBSD committer whom I have known for nearly 20 years. In July he was diagnosed with advanced seminoma and was operated. He popped up on IRC shortly after that, but since 4 August we haven't heard anything more of him. Peter Jeremy asked on an internal FreeBSD list, but didn't get any reply. Jürgen was in many ways a very private person. We have a map of the locations of the participants on IRC, but Jürgen didn't want to have his location known. Instead, we put him on a tour of Germany, and currently he's in the Händel-Haus in Halle an der Saale.
Fixing Salado problems
Spent some time today trying to get SaladoPlayer to work on the new eureka, ultimately without success. The obvious first step was to check if there's a new version. No, I didn't find one. In fact, just about every link I tried failed. There's a page on GitHub with a lot of links, all of them broken. The download page is on openpano.org, which returns 404 for all pages. Then there are linkes to panazona.com, which doesn't have any DNS. Spent some time looking for alternatives, but given the pain I went through getting SaladoPlayer to work the way I wanted, I'd rather fix that than change.
Browser redux
Over the last couple of weeks I've run into an amazing number of problems with web browsers. It's all the more amazing when you consider that the web browser has become the central piece of software for most people. Admittedly, I'm much more fussy than the average user, but silly things like text size must get on everybody's nerves. Chromium in particular seems to have regressed. There seems to be only one setting for text size, and it gives me smaller fixed-width than standard fonts, meaning that I can no longer display pages like this diary with usable font sizes. In addition, by default it displays images larger than their original size.
Java pain
For some years I've been using SaladoPlayer, a Java application, to animate panoramas. Lately I haven't had any to do, and today was the first time since I upgraded eureka. It didn't work. How I love these silly programs that produce their output in their own tiny window. In this case, it set off, displayed something, and then shut the window before I could read what it had had to say. How do I recover that? It's a log, but it's not a file. Ran ktrace to catch the output, but of course it was several megabytes, and I didn't know what to look for.
Why ld?
Modern programming toolchains have two main components: a translator (assembler or compiler), which produces object modules, and what is generally called a linker, linkage editor or similar. It joins them together to produce an executable program that can then be loaded into memory, a page at a time when required, by the kernel. But in UNIX, the linkage editor is called ld, which stands for load. How come? People have been discussing that on the Unix Heritage Society mailing list for the last few days. From my understanding, the name comes from historical evolution. In the early days the main tool was the compiler, which ran much faster than modern compilers in terms of processor instructions: it had to in order to complete in an acceptable time.
imake and modern compilers
I still haven't got Keith Packard's kgames working on FreeBSD. It was coming on nicely until I upgraded from release 9 to release 10. And then I got error messages like: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/33) /home/ports/x11/kgames/kgames-1.0 88 -> xmkmf mv -f Makefile Makefile.bak imake -DUseInstalled -I/usr/local/lib/X11/config In file included from Imakefile.c:15: In file included from /usr/local/lib/X11/config/Imake.tmpl:316: /usr/local/lib/X11/config/Imake.rules:1674:27: warning: empty character constant [-Winvalid-pp-token] for flag in ${MAKEFLAGS} '; do \ @@\ What went wrong there?
Who finds this diary interesting?
The RSS feed of my diary is syndicated on the ACM queue blog roll. Sometimes I think it doesn't fit there; the diary (and specifically not a blog ) is primarily for my own use, but I share. And the topics are sometimes boring enough that I explicitly exclude from from acmqueue. But today I heard from Kirk McKusick, who is on the ACM board. It seems that one of my articles is the all-time most popular posting, with 20,000 views per year. Considering it's nearly 3 years old, that surprises me. ACM only downloads articles once.
More mutt and firefox problems
Somehow my interface between mutt and firefox is still not right. To get it to work at all reliably, I needed to hack the mutt source. And then today, instead of the normal broken HTML display, I got: XML Parsing Error: not well-formed Location: file:///home/grog/mutt-eureka-yTle9kDR Line Number 152, Column 76: style="background-color:#eaf2f1; width: 10px;">FFFF</td> </td> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------^ The FFFF was in fact two 0xff bytes, but I can't put them in a web page without triggering the same error again.
NBN site visit
Mick and Jordan from some National Broadband Network contractor company arrived this afternoon for the planned site inspection. They were as puzzled as I had been, but we agreed that it probably helps to do the simple things first. So they replaced the NTD, the power supply and the ODU (outdoor unit, i.e. antenna). In the process I discover that they also refer to the NTD as IDU (indoor unit). Replacing the NTD requires registering the new NTD with Ericsson , presumably the part that actually manages the wireless network. That didn't go as smoothly as planned: they had apparently connected it to the wrong cell (antenna) on the tower, resulting in an error indication of red ODU lamp alternating with orange in the two leftmost signal strength indicators.
CJ's new computer
CJ has a new computer. He bought one last year, but it didn't have a printer. Recently he was given an old Dell machine with printer, and he wanted to know how to connect to the Internet, and how to move his files across. I asked him to bring the computers when he came, and I would see what I could do. So he showed up with only the new computer. It has a Pentium IV processor! And only 1 GB of memory. By contrast, his old computer has 2 GB of memory and a processor faster than mine . Mine (stable) is Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 with a CPUmark specification of (currently) 1501.
Selling lenses again
Christmas is on its way, a potentially good time to sell some of the camera lenses I've collected and then decided against over the past two years: the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital 14-42mm f3.5-5.6 II R that came with Yvonne's Olympus E-PM2, the Olympus BCL-1580 15 mm f/8 Body Cap Lens and the M.Zuiko Digital 17mm F2.8 Pancake: It took nearly 2 hours, first taking the photos, then putting them up on eBay.
Still more mutt pain
More investigation of my mutt issues today, without gaining much more understanding. In the end solved the missing file problem the easy way: --- handler.c~ 2015-12-04 14:39:52.352712000 +1100 +++ handler.c 2015-12-05 13:44:48.648690000 +1100 @@ -1419,8 +1419,8 @@ if (piped) safe_fclose (&fpin); - else - mutt_unlink (tempfile); +/* else + mutt_unlink (tempfile); XXX */ But I still have the issue that the OED word of the day displays incorrectly. That's mainly their fault: they supply the message only in HTML (don't get me started), and it's invalid: it doesn't specify the character encoding, which in fact is UTF-8.
Debugging mutt
With some messing around I managed to get urlview to work with mutt. But I still can't display HTML attachments correctly: it just shows me the plain HTML text. Couldn't find anything about that in the documentation, so ran some ktraces, which showed that mutt didn't even try to access mime.types or mailcap. Why not? According to the manual: In order to handle various MIME types that Mutt can not handle internally, Mutt parses a series of external configuration files to find an external handler. The default search string for these files is a colon delimited list set to ${HOME}/.mailcap:/usr/local/share/mutt/mailcap:/etc/mailcap:/etc/mailcap:/usr/etc/mailcap:/usr/local/etc/mailcap where $HOME is your home directory.
User-friendly error messages
Seen in Chromium today, after I entered an incorrect URL: This web page is not available DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN Isn't that amazing? It's been decades since web browsers did that. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
xterm icons: finally!
These funny xterm icons with truncated texts irritate me more than I expected. More investigation today, with something like a solution. In misc.c there's the code (abridged): */ void xtermLoadIcon(XtermWidget xw) { #ifdef HAVE_LIBXPM Display *dpy = XtDisplay(xw); ... #else (void) xw; #endif } Was it that HAVE_LIBXPM? Mutilated the name and tried again. Success! The image above with the truncated text is the old icon, and the text below is the new one. That's produced by the x11/xtset program. If I run the cursor over the graphical icon, it displays the entire text, but that doesn't help much.
Civil disobedience or malware?
A week or two ago I found a site that offered noise as a service to help reduce the effectiveness of data retention programmes. The idea is simple: in each page you add this line: <script src="//squawk.cc/squawk.js"></script> According to the page, Deploying this code will cause your web site visitors to make a single request to a random IP address, for every request that you serve with the script tag, in order to add noise to the logs being kept by Australian ISPs.
NBN error recovery
Call from Will at Aussie Broadband this afternoon. The National Broadband Network can't correlate my outage data with their logs, so they think it's a site issue. They want to come and investigate. OK, why not? I think it's a lack of monitoring on their part, but I could be wrong, and at least they're doing something. We made an appointment for Monday 13:00. I'll be interested to see what happens. In the meantime, the dropouts continue: Date Outages Duration Availability Date (seconds) 1449028336 1449028393 57 0.026 # 2 December 2015 14:52:16 2 December 2015 14:53:13 1449035540 1449035597 57 0.504 # 2 December 2015 16:52:20 2 December 2015 16:53:17 1449044086 1449044121 35 0.424 # 2 December 2015 19:14:46 2 December 2015 19:15:21 1449044692 1449044738 ...
New SDHC card
My new SDHC card for my camera has arrived. After spending quite a bit of time determining whether it was genuine, it seemed a good idea to investigate it more closely. The package looked just like in the advertisement. Only read speed specified: But hidden on the back side was an indication of the write speed: Why do they go to such lengths to hide it?
Removing xterm icons
Woke up with the realization that if the xterm icons include the BSD daemon, it must have been added in the port. Off to take a look, and sure enough, the Makefile contained: DISTFILES= ${DISTNAME}${EXTRACT_SUFX}:src1 \ bsd-xterm-icons-${ICONVERSION}${EXTRACT_SUFX}:src2 There was also a post-extract target that moved the files into place. Fine, remove the post-extract and try again. The BSD icons was gone, of course. But replaced by a generic X icon. I'm still no closer to being able to read the icon texts. ACM only downloads articles once.
Samba problems
Into the office this morning to quickly process yesterday's photos. No do: all of eureka's file systems were no longer accessible (via samba) from despair. Why? How can you tell? The only clue was that really nothing had changed since the last access except for having despair hibernate. Or maybe this entry in the log files: Dec 1 07:56:39 eureka smbd[99525]: [2015/12/01 07:56:39.274663, 0] ../source3/lib/messages.c:346(messaging_reinit) Dec 1 07:56:39 eureka smbd[99525]: messaging_dgm_init failed: Permission denied Dec 1 07:56:39 eureka smbd[99525]: [2015/12/01 07:56:39.281132, 0] ../source3/lib/util.c:480(reinit_after_fork) Dec 1 07:56:39 eureka smbd[99525]: messaging_reinit() failed: NT_STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED Dec 1 07:57:06 eureka smbd[99539]: [2015/12/01 07:57:06.728100, 0] ../lib/util/pidfile.c:153(pidfile_unlink) Dec 1 07:57:06 eureka smbd[99539]: Failed to delete pidfile /var/run/samba4/smbd.pid.
Unacceptable network performance
I've complained in the past about the reliability of my National Broadband Network connection. Since I started keeping logs 21 months ago we have had 205 outages! Today alone there were 9, and since 26 November 2015 there have been 16: Date Outages Duration Availability Date (seconds) 1448476513 1448476526 13 0.009 # 26 November 2015 05:35:13 26 November 2015 05:35:26 1448498696 1448498752 56 0.162 # 26 November 2015 11:44:56 26 November 2015 11:45:52 1448587783 1448587822 39 0.040 # 27 November 2015 12:29:43 27 November 2015 12:30:22 1448595997 1448596022 25 0.440 # 27 November 2015 14:46:37 27 November 2015 14:47:02 1448599962 1448600008 46 0.914 # 27 November 2015 15:52:42 27 November 2015 15:53:28 1448712959 1448712972 13 0.032 # 28 November 2015 23:15:59 ...
The daily upgrade issues
I'm still far from comfortable with my new FreeBSD installation. Addressed a few of the issues today, some with success. The first was this horrible highlight colour that now seems to be the Emacs default: There are lots of customization menus that have appeared in the past few decades, and I found one that seemed to imply highlighting the region (with the appropriate default). After running through a maze of twisty little menus, all different, found one that offered to change colours of the highlighted region.
SDHC Cards again
More investigation of SDHC cards for my camera. People really don't make it easy. The comparison page mentioned cards that I couldn't find, and the one that looked gooda SanDisk Extreme 90 MB/s card, doesn't appear on their card list. Google helped, though, and found this page on their site, apparently orphaned. Why do people make such a mess of their web sites? The card claims to do 40 MB/s writes, comfortably more than the 33 MB/s that the camera can manage, so I bought one of them. ACM only downloads articles once.
Migrating my database applications
One of the things that still didn't work were the database applications using MySQL Edit table. As I suspected, that was a matter of installing the php56-session and php56-mysql packages. I did that for Joomla! a couple of weeks ago, and complained at the time that the package didn't update /usr/local/etc/php/extensions.ini. So after installation, off to update that file. But this time the entries were there! The package hasn't been updated in the intervening time. What changed? After that, my applications workedsort of: Deprecated: mysql_connect(): The mysql extension is deprecated and will be removed in the future: use mysqli or PDO instead in /home/grog/public_html/php/MySQL_table_edit_0.3/mte/mte.php on line 174 I deprecate deprecation!
Aw, Snap!
Another message from Bartosz Fabianowski about Chrome. It seems that these Aw, Snap! messages are Chrome's way of saying SIGSEGV in renderer . And I should be able to go to chrome://crashes and see what happened. But all I get is: Crash reporting is disabled. Crash reporting is not available in Chromium. Still, running the browser from a shell shows that it's quite verbose on stdout (or is that stderr?) : Received signal 11 SEGV_MAPERR 000000000000 #0 0x0000008f798a <unknown> #1 0x000809d6db57 <unknown> #2 0x000809d6d24c <unknown> [end of stack trace] With a few symbols it might even give some useful output.
Which SD card?
One of the consequences of this new functionality on the Olympus OM-D E-M1 is that I need a faster SDHC card for the camera. But how much faster? The current card is a Sandisk Ultra class 10, marked 30 MB/s . There are others out there rated as fast as 95 MB/s. When does the camera become the limiting factor? Even 30 MB/s is a lot faster than the camera writes to the card. Further investigation revealed that the cards have speeds up to the rated limit. One issue is the camera, of course. But it seems that the write speed (important to me) is usually slower than read speed, sometimes much slower.
Mutt changes
Mutt doesn't seem to have changed much. It still writes lines with many trailing spaces. But === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/21) ~ 37 -> mutt Error in /home/grog/.muttrc, line 6: alternates: unknown variable source: errors in /home/grog/.muttrc Did some investigation and found this page, which explains that I need to make this change: -set alternates="greg.lehey@|gr... +alternates "greg.lehey@|gr... That's straightforward enough, though it's not clear why it was necessary. But what got me was the date of the message: 1 February 2004, nearly 12 years ago!
More X configuration
More playing around with my X configuration today. One of the remaining issues was that Hugin would not display the fast panorama preview on screen 1 of server 1 (which spreads a single display across all four screens). Tried again today. It still doesn't. But this time I looked in the log file: [240548.886] (WW) NVIDIA(1): The GPU driving screen 1 is incompatible with the rest of the [240548.886] (WW) NVIDIA(1): GPUs composing the desktop. OpenGL rendering will be [240548.886] (WW) NVIDIA(1): disabled on screen 1. OK, that's understandable.
Fixing chrome
Message from Bartosz Fabianowski, from whom I have already had input about the city centre of München. It seems that the Apps bookmark on the Chrome bookmarks bar can be disabled, but it's done via the context menu of the bar. Why did they do that? ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
System upgrade, day 3
Gradually eureka is settling down, though there's still work to be done, interrupted by the Real World. So far I've been highlighting difficulties, but there are some definite advantages as well. So far I haven't seen any of the USB issues that plagued me with the old version of eureka, though it's possible they're just hiding. And the X hangs on server 1 haven't reoccurred. And the other issues? Peter Jeremy tells me that you can suppress the enormous xterm icons with the option xterm -ai, or by setting activeIcon to false in the .Xdefaults file. And sure enough, that workedsort of.
Understanding python
I've had some exposure to python, but it still confuses me. It proves that Monday's fix for Hugin only works for python release 2; with release 3 I get: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/30) ~ 12 -> python2 -c "import string; from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print(s tring.replace (get_python_lib(1), \"/usr/local/\", \"\"))" lib/python2.7/site-packages === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/30) ~ 13 -> python3.2 -c "import string; from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print(string.replace (get_python_lib(1), \"/usr/local/\", \"\"))" Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'replace' It seems that they have replaced the obvious function string.replace() with a different module with sexier syntax, and I now need to write === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/30) ~ 14 -> python3.2 -c "from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print(get_python_lib(1).replace(\"/usr/local/\", \"\"))" lib/python3.4/site-packages ...
Ternary PIDs
Seen by coincidence today: === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/2) /spool/Videos 1 -> ps au|grep mpla grog 3111 0.0 3.0 259648 62064 3 S+ 5:41pm 0:32.06 /usr/local/bin/mplayer-old -a grog 3112 0.0 2.6 236432 52764 3 S+ 5:41pm 0:03.97 /usr/local/bin/mplayer-old -a grog 3211 0.0 1.8 187872 36160 4 S+ 6:41pm 0:16.13 mplayer -quiet http://stream. grog 3212 0.0 1.6 183776 32556 4 S+ 6:41pm 0:00.49 mplayer -quiet http://stream. ACM only downloads articles once.
More Radiation Tower angst
Peter Jeremy pointed me at another victim of the radiation tower conspiracy today. It's interesting to see how they report this stuff: no mention of relative radiation exposure. I assume that, like Wendy McClelland, they use mobile phones. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
System upgrade, day 2
On with the upgrade of eureka today, partially overtaken by other activities. First to the Samba configuration, which proved to be relatively straightforward: just followed the instructions in the network server chapter The Complete FreeBSD. It's nearly 20 years old, but it contains exactly what I need. In this case, in particular, I think I wrote it that way. Apart from that, various minor issues. Writing my diary gave me an error message for inserting a paragraph markup: incorrect number of parameters. It seems that somebody had created a function with the same name as the one I used: insert-section is a compiled Lisp function in `mule-diag.el'.
Upgrade: summary
So at the end of the day things were up and vaguely running. At least Yvonne saw no problems. But there's still a lot to be done: Complete the X configuration, including checking whether server 1 (single display over 4 screens) still works. Fix fvwm2 window moving. Reinstate Internet domain connections to X. Get rid of these enormous icons. Fix Emacs markup colours. Fix the BIND configuration. Get squid to work. Get urlview and mutt display of web pages on firefox to work.
Minor irritations
Apart from that, there are less important issues. I still need to get Keith Packard's card games to work, and I suppose it's time to rewrite the version of xearth that I wrote 20 years ago, and for which I have lost the source. In addition it seems that fortune has gone away. I recall some discussion on the mailing lists over the last few years. Some people felt that the fortunes were offensive to people of various religious convictions, so they were relegated to the ports. Or were they? I can't find fortune in the ports, though there are various data files for them, including: fortune-mod-bible-1.0_1 King James V Bible in fortune file format fortune-mod-epictetus-0.2 Quotes from Epictetus fortune-mod-psalms-1.0 Psalms from the Douai Bible in fortune file format ...
Samba
Gradually things had become bearable on eureka. And with a bit of NFS trickery I got the other FreeBSD machines happy with the new environment. despair, my main Microsoft machine, was another matter. Can't connect. Why not? Error 0xdeadbeef or some such. Looking at the samba configuration, I discovered that the new version has a new configuration file, /usr/local/etc/smb4.conf. How does it differ? I didn't bother to check, just hung the share definitions from /usr/local/etc/smb.conf at the bottom. And it seemed to work, but I still couldn't access the file systems. Password? What was the password? In the end chose a new one, but things still didn't work right.
Next was mail. Tried a fetchmail, as a precaution with the -a -k flags (get all, don't remove from upstream server). Yes, they came along, were piped into procmail, and disappeared, never to be seen again. Not even an error message in procmaillog. OK, no worries, we haven't really lost anything. Discovered that the options for starting postfix have changed. For years (decades?) the entry in /etc/rc.conf was: sendmail_enable="YES" Yes, that makes no sense, but that's the way it is. Now it's: procmail_enable="YES" And of course I needed all my old kludges; but the configuration files seem to have worked unchanged.
Web services
And of course httpd didn't start: httpd: Syntax error on line 104 of /usr/local/etc/apache22/httpd.conf: Cannot load /usr/local/libexec/apache22/libphp5.so into server: Cannot open "/usr/local/libexec/apache22/libphp5.so" Sigh. When will people recognize the difference between syntax and semantics? But why did I have Apache 2.2 in the first place? Installed version 2.4, along with the latest and greatest PHP, with relatively little difficulty; last week's Joomla installation was good practice. But nothing worked! Of course, it had installed a new configuration file, and I had to manually modify things to get back to where I had been before.
Emacs changes
I've been using Emacs in various forms for 35 years, and it has become like an extension of my fingers. Every change feels wrong. But when I fired it up, I got an error message: Warning (initialization): An error occurred while loading `/home/grog/.emacs': Invalid read syntax: ] To ensure normal operation, you should investigate and remove the cause of the error in your initialization file. Start Emacs with the `--debug-init' option to view a complete error backtrace. OK, let's try debug-init: Debugger entered--Lisp error: (invalid-read-syntax "]") eval-buffer(#<buffer *load*> nil "/home/grog/.emacs" nil t) ; Reading at buffer position 3128 load-with-code-conversion("/home/grog/.emacs" "/home/grog/.emacs" t t) Now isn't that handy to give a buffer position?
In a bind
I couldn't access the network! Well, I couldn't find anything on the local network, because named wasn't running: it's no longer part of the base system. On the other hand, dhcpd insisted on creating an /etc/resolv.conf, which I have to prevent by making it read-only. But in this case it was an advantage. I went looking: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/5) /usr/local/etc 78 -> pkg search named p5-Class-Accessor-Named-0.009_1 Better profiling output for Class::Accessor p5-Class-NamedParms-1.06_1 Lightweight named parameter handling system ... Nothing! Try again: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/5) /usr/local/etc 79 -> pkg search bind bind-tools-9.10.3_1 Command line tools from BIND: delv, dig, host, nslookup...
X configuration
X was my main concern. But we can always be optimistic. Booted the machine, logged in and entered === grog@eureka (/dev/vty0) ~ 4 -> startx It started! But only on one monitor, leaving 4 competing window managers to fight over it. In Xorg.0.log I found: VGA arbiter: cannot open kernel arbiter, no multi-card support What's that? Web searches were inconclusive. But then I was expecting problems. Run X -configure with more than the usual success, but it still only found two displays.
Upgrading eureka, finally
Much of the installation of eureka, my main computer, dates back to 7 years ago, though I upgraded the kernel when I changed the hardware barely 2 years ago. And since then I've been paving the way to hell with good intentions. Today I finally ran out of excuses. After all, everything had been tested, I had a new disk, so I could fall back to the old one if something went wrong. About the only issue was the X configuration, which has always been a problem. Things happened completely differently. I'll split this story up into individual subsystems, rather than make it chronological.
Google: Don't be evil!
Remember the browser wars? The late 1990s or so, when Netscape and Internet Exploder deliberately introduced incompatible features to lock their customers in? They're over, right? Not if you believe the Wikipedia page. In passing, it's interesting to note this web browser timeline: Today Peter Jeremy posted a URL. Why? Just some Star Wars Google search. But it seems I was using the wrong browser. With Chrome it showed an animation, though in no longer does. Google, your motto was don't be evil . So don't! It's bad enough that I can no longer use many features of Google Maps because my browser isn't leet enough.
Tackling cmake
So how do I fix the src/hugin_script_interface/CMakeLists.txt so that it doesn't create absolute path names for the Python files? Despite my aversion, went looking for the cmake documentation. What a disaster! It's just a list of man pages. From the invocation in the file, it's clear that it has some text editing capabilities: EXECUTE_PROCESS( COMMAND ${PYTHON_EXECUTABLE} -c "from distutils.sysconfig import get_python_lib; print(get_python_lib(1))" OUTPUT_VARIABLE pyinstalldir OUTPUT_STRIP_TRAILING_WHITESPACE) Clearly OUTPUT_STRIP_TRAILING_WHITESPACE is an editing feature.
More stuff from Kleins Road
It's only a little over a week until we settle the Kleins Road house, and there's still a lot of junk there that we need to get. Over today to pick up the last three computers: the Control Data 910, a microVax II, and an old MIPS R2000. They'll be offered on eBay for a ridiculously low price. But they're heavy. I got the Control Data into the car with no trouble, and the microVax is on wheels, so that wasn't an issue, but we couldn't lift it into the car.
The daily hugin build breakage
Still more Hugin build breakage! I'm really surpassing myself lately. Hugin depends on Vigra, but somehow the dependency wasn't in the Makefile. That's a little puzzling, since it's been there since long before my recent work; in fact, for nearly 11 years: r124104 | edwin | 2004-12-15 23:36:25 +1100 (Wed, 15 Dec 2004) | 14 lines New port: graphics/vigra - another program to mount panoramic images - also a dependency of hugin So why wasn't the dependency there?
USB KVM
For decades (well, about 16 years), I've used the same old passive KVM. It still works for VGA, but the mouse and keyboard connectors are obsolete: So I use it for VGA, and on those occasions where I need direct keyboard or mouse contact, I plug one in to the appropriate computer. But why? Active KVMs don't cost anything any more. Went out looking on eBay and found a likely looking one for $12.07 including postage.
Shells and POLA
Strange problems with shell scripts today. I set a variable, changed directory, and the variable changed! It took a while to find out what was going on: === root@stable (/dev/pts/0) /etc-eureka/RCS 180 -> j=* === root@stable (/dev/pts/0) /etc-eureka/RCS 181 -> echo $j XF86Config,v aliases,v crontab,v devd.conf,v devfs.conf,v dumpdates,v ethers,v exports,v fstab,v group,v hosts,v inetd.conf,v ... === root@stable (/dev/pts/0) /etc-eureka/RCS 182 -> cd .. === root@stable (/dev/pts/0) /etc-eureka 183 -> echo $j #rc.conf# RCS XF86Config aliases aliases.db amd.map apmd.conf auth.conf bluetooth crontab csh.cshrc csh.login csh.logout defaults ... Clearly the value of j is *, not the expansion of *.
Porting hugin: disaster
As planned, I committed the latest version of Hugin yesterday evening. Of course I had done all my normal tests, and all worked well. This morning I had a bug report from Stari Karp and a couple of automated build failures. Looking more carefully, I discovered that I had messed up my patch files: there were three old patches that were no longer needed, and they referenced files that no longer existed. OK, svn remove them and commit again. Another message from Stari Karp: now he got an error message that I've seen before: /usr/ports/graphics/hugin/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/tools/align_image_stack.cpp:196:38: error: reference to 'lock' is ambiguous hugin_omp::ScopedLock sl(lock); But I fixed that last month!
Back to ports again
Finally got round to committing my updated ports (graphics/libpano13 and graphics/hugin. It seems to have been two years since I last did anything. To be on the safe side, only committed libpano13 today; if nothing blows up, I can commit hugin tomorrow. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Understanding sensor dynamics
One of the biggest issues I have with digital photography is the limited dynamic range of the sensors. Current sensors have a pixel depth of 12 or 14 bits. The Olympus OM-D E-M1 only has 12 bits. Since they're linear, that corresponds roughly to 12 EV. The many photos I take bracketed 3 EV either way increase this to 18 EV, but it's not ideal. A lot of postprocesssing is required, and there's the danger of ghosting. So when I read this article about a new sensor with higher dynamic range, I was very interested. It has an increased dynamic range of 88 dB!
Repairing AVI files: the limits
My AVI file fix seemed to work. But the video ended early. It seems that it only works if the audio and video are OK. Otherwise I get things like: MEncoder SVN-r35933-snapshot-3.2 (C) 2000-2013 MPlayer Team success: format: 0 data: 0x0 - 0x6c08a536 libavformat version 54.63.104 (internal) AVI file format detected. [aviheader] Video stream found, -vid 0 [aviheader] Audio stream found, -aid 1 AVI: ODML: Building ODML index (2 superindexchunks). AVI: ODML: Broken (incomplete?) file detected. Will use traditional index. Generating Index: 1 % AVI: Generated index table for 5071 chunks! VIDEO: [XVID] 720x542 24bpp 29.970 fps 2335.2 kbps (285.1 kbyte/s) [V] filefmt:3 fourcc:0x44495658 size:720x542 fps:29.970 ftime:=0.0334 videocodec: framecopy (720x542 24bpp fourcc=44495658) audiocodec: framecopy (format=55 chans=2 rate=48000 bits=0 B/s=40000 sample-1) Writing header...
Gmail rejection
Strange message today: <[email protected]> (expanded from <root>): host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[74.125.28.26] said: 550-5.7.1 [208.86.226.86 12] Our system has detected that this message is 550-5.7.1 likely unsolicited mail. To reduce the amount of spam sent to Gmail, 550-5.7.1 this message has been blocked. Please visit 550 5.7.1 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/188131 for more information. i9si47983327bpq.207 - gsmtp (in reply to end of DATA command) The link didn't give me any opportunity to do something about the matter: it just told me the errors of my ways.
Joomla!: Done
More discussion of Joomla! on IRC today. As expected, it was a PHP issue. Jamie Fraser suggested adding this line to /usr/local/etc/php/extensions.ini (in this case creating it): extension=session.so Sure enough, I no longer got that error message. Instead I got: Fatal error: Call to undefined function simplexml_load_file() in /usr/local/www/joomla3/installation/application/web.php on line 262 OK, simplexml is another of the modules mentioned in /usr/ports/www/joomla3/Makefile. But what's the module called? No information in /usr/ports/www/simplexml/Makefile.
Joomla!: the pain
Today I had the task of getting MySQL and Joomla! to work on our web site. The first step was to gain access to the MySQL subsystem. I can't recall configuring itmaybe Chris did. One way or another, we don't have the root password. How do you get that back? Even Paul DuBois' books didn't help ( contact your administrator ). After a search found this page in the official documentationapparently only for Microsoft! But the instructions are fairly easy to translate: === root@www (/dev/pts/0) ~ 98 -> cat > /tmp/temppassword set password for 'root'@'localhost' = password ('Not the real password'); ^D === root@www (/dev/pts/0) ~ 99 -> mysqld --init-file=/tmp/tmppassword In the process came across this page, entitled Installing MySQL on FreeBSD .
Joomla!: How?
Chris Bahlo has had the idea of installing Joomla! on our external web server. Talking about it tonight: I had said use the package, that's what the Ports Collection is for . Some discussion. The package installs an amazing number of files, mainly in the /usr/local hierarchy: === grog@www (/dev/pts/2) /usr/ports/www/joomla3 4 -> wc -l pkg-plist 7650 pkg-plist And according to the official instructions, which are anything but clear ( Move the downloaded Joomla! installation package to the server. Use a FTP Client to transfer the Joomla!
Migrating subversion
I have a cron job that updates my local FreeBSD repositories every night. Well, almost every night: ====== Fri 13 Nov 2015 03:52:12 EST: Getting svn updates: /src/FreeBSD/svn/head ^[]1;Updating /src/FreeBSD/svn/head^G^[]2;Updating /src/FreeBSD/svn/head^GUpdating '.' : svn: E210002: Unable to connect to a repository at URL 'svn+ssh://svn.freebsd.org/base/head' svn: E210002: To better debug SSH connection problems, remove the -q option from 'ssh' in the [tunnels] section of your Subversion configuration file. svn: E210002: Network connection closed unexpectedly That's not the first time. Asked on IRC if other people were having problems, and got a completely different answer: change the repository.
Olympus firmware upgrade
Olympus has announced a firmware upgrade for the E-M1 long in advance of release. In the past I've had lots of difficulties with the updates. I suspect that their silly updater has some sensitivity to computer configuration, and it's not helped by just plain incorrect error messages. There's also a firmware update waiting for Yvonne's E-PM2 and the new M.Zuiko Digital ED 14-42mm f3.5-5.6 EZ lens, so I did a trial run with that. Experienced an issue that doesn't apply to many components: the firmware update extends and retracts the lens. I had the camera lens down, so this was particularly obvious.
Language evolution
Spent some time trawling web sites today for new amplifiers. It seems that the traditional HiFi setup no longer exists: amplifier at the centre, with tuners and media players as inputs, recording devices as inputs and outputs, and loudspeakers as outputs. JB HiFi is a typical Australian retailer, with a typically horrible web site. There I looked for loudspeaker: Hey, based on 'loudspeaker' we couldnt find exactly what you were searching for. Check out some suggested results below, or type in another search. It did find 7 hits: 4 Speakers (in the current political climate one would wonder whether they're selling Bronwyn Bishop cheaply), two PA Speakers, and a Wireless Audio, whatever that may be.
rsync problems again
A year ago I had issues with rsync to my external web site. For reasons that I still don't understand, the initial handshake (via ssh) would fail. I suspected a network issue, and was still trying to understand it when the system crashed due to hardware issues. And then the problem was gone. Until today. It's back! It must be something to do with sshd itself. Should I just restart it or try to debug the issue? ACM only downloads articles once.
More ANZ stupidity
Yvonne wanted to pay a bill this morning using ANZ's web ( Internet ) banking, and made the mistake of trying to add a payee who was already on the list. So it asked a security question , in this case What was the first street you lived on? . The correct answer was It's all in my diary , but she didn't know that, and made the mistake of trying to guess (and whose? Hers or mine?) . So the account was locked. Rang up and had to identify myself by a simple password.
Humanity's victories
The German Olympus forum has got rid of its old, functioning web site and replaced it with something running Drupal, offering lots of opportunities for overlapping text and bleeding boxes: I was reminded of an xkcd cartoon, and spent a whole lot of time looking for it before I finally found this, not on xkcd at all: ACM only downloads articles once.
technology, multimedia
More fun with multimedia today. After recording programmes from TV, I first recode them to convert them to and MPEG Program Stream, in the process discovering the quality of the recording. But today things ground to a halt round 47% of a specific recording: 2015-11-08 12:41:36.533 46.0% complete 2015-11-08 12:41:41.825 46.6% complete 2015-11-08 12:41:46.827 47.0% complete 2015-11-08 13:03:13.206 47.4% complete ^C^C What caused that? It was repeatable, and I've been having strange issues with recordings slowing down. I had thought it might be a problem with the disk on teevee, but smartctl had not revealed anything.
Fixing broken avi files
Recently I received a video in AVI format. I could play it with no problems, but I couldn't position. Broken index? Did some searching and found this page, a wonderful example of how to obfuscate computer code. Why do people enclose computer code in too-small (particularly too-narrow) boxes? It boils down to: pass it through mencoder with the -idx option and it will rebuild the index for you. Here's the function I use: # Rebuild avi index. # Usage: rebuild-index filename # filename will be replaced on success rebuild-index () { if mencoder -idx $1 -ovc copy -oac copy -o foo$$; then mv foo$$ $1 fi } ACM only downloads articles once.
teevee: grinding to a halt?
Somehow I still have performance problems with teevee, my TV display machine. Yes, it's not the fastest, but lately when I'm copying data across the net, it seems hardly to react at all. It only has a 100 Mb/s interfacethe last of our real machines not to have a gigabit interfaceso big file copies are limited to about 11 MB/s. But today I saw the speed dropping as low as 3 MB/s. cvr2, the source machine, showed that the copy stalled several times. What's the problem? pings showed that there were big differences in the response time, between about 140 ¼s and 6 ms.
Hugin under Linux
So finally I had a chance to run Hugin on a well-supported platform. It didn't crash. But the other issues were the same as on FreeBSD: the alignment of my test panorama was still wavy. But this time I tried the Straighten button of the Move tab. And it worked. The other is a now you see me, now you don't issue. After alignment, the fast preview window comes up with a text bleeding into the top right of the image: It's really ugly, but others seem to like it.
A new Linux machine
I still don't know how many of the anomalies I have found with the latest version of Hugin are due to my FreeBSD port. The attempts with Microsoft show that it's in much worse shape than my port, at least for me (mutual revulsion?) . So where does it run well? I've continually heard that the Apple port has its issues too. Linux is the way. But which distro? Asked on IRC, expecting to hear Debian or Red Hat or Ubuntu. But no, all four replies I got said Lubuntu. What's that? I've never heard of it? Seems it's a Lightweight Ubuntu.
Hugin on Microsoft: give up
Spent some more time trying to understand my problems running Hugin on Microsoft, without much success. It seems that the problems selecting files related to a setting in the Folders tab of the Control Panel: I have it set to select items with a single click. Hugin is the first program I know that has a problem with that. Most of the other problems remain, though. Hugin has always had two different interfaces, the Assistant and the individual steps. Since 2013.0.0 the Assistant has been part of the fast panorama preview window, which I suspect has had some kind of race condition for a long time.
Hugin fisheye problems: understood?
What's the difference between how Hugin handles fisheye images now (version 2015.0.0) and how it handled them in the past (version 2012.0.0)? It seems that there are two changes: Hugin now stores lens information in a database. In particular, this means that it stores the kind of lens and its own idea of the focal length of the lens. In the case of my Olympus Zuiko Digital ED 8 mm f/3.5 fisheye lens, this is roughly 7.7 mm.
Loss of Integrity
In 1989 Tandem Computers announced its first real Unix machine, named Integrity S2, a name that had such a resonance that Hewlett Packard still use it for their mission-critical servers. I was involved in the leadup to the announcement, and as a result received a tombstone , something of which our Micro Products Division in NonStop Drive, Austin TX was particularly fond: We (European Unix Technical Support, of which I was the manager) received one of the very first machines in late 1989. There's some mention in my ersatz diary for November 1989.
X clipboard
What's this clipboard nonsense? Some Microsoft invention? No, it seems that X has had it forever, but you need a special program (xclipboard) to access it. Looking at the appearance of the program (Athena widgets), it must be over 25 years old. And it Just Works. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Hugin: the next hurdle
More playing around with Hugin today. First question: how do I get it to reenable the fast panorama preview under Microsoft? Thomas Modes said hold down the control key and start Hugin . But how? There are at least four different ways: Click on the image on the root window (is that what Microsoft calls desktop ?) . With Crtl pressed, nothing at all happened. Start from a COMMAND.EXE window. This doesn't work either: when Ctrl is pressed, Return doesn't work.
More Hugin pain
More playing around with Hugin today. I had a number of issues: It seems that Hugin has a log facility: in the General tab in preferences, you can select Copy log messages to clipboard . What's a clipboard? I thought it was something Microsoft, but Hugin is predominantly Unix (Linux) oriented. That means X, and all X has is a cut buffer. And nothing arrived there. I later discovered that X does, indeed, have a clipboard facility.
Hosting an NBN fixed wireless tower
Call from somebody today who was in negotiation with the National Broadband Network to have a fixed wireless tower put on her property. It looks like a good idea for her: they pay $10,000 per year, and the area where it would go isn't much use for anything else. She has already given the contract to her solicitor to look at, but she's concerned about liability insurance. Surely the NBN would handle that? I'm puzzled. I think her biggest issue might be community backlash: she says that all the community is against the tower. But that doesn't make sense: why would the NBN want to erect a tower where nobody's interested?
New Hugin: first experiences
OK, Hugin has changed a lot in 3 years, not all for the better. I've already noted that the highlighting of individual images in the fast panorama preview went away, and that's one of the main reasons I'm still running an old version of Hugin. But today I had issues that I hadn't expected: I couldn't stitch at all. The interface has changed soeewhat, but the principle is the same. Use the Assistant tab, load the images, and let it align. But this time it didn't work: OK, go to the Control Points tab.
Finishing the Hugin port
More work on the Hugin port today, and finally got it finished. Well, almost. ===> Registering installation for hugin-2015.0.0_1 And it hung. Not network efficient, maybe? Came back some time later and it was still running: USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND root 58647 99.3 0.1 13448 5360 0 R+ 12:26pm 18:27.89 /usr/local/sbin/pkg-static register -i /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/stage -m /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/.metadir -f /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/.PLIST.mktmp It shouldn't take that long. Set a ktrace on it and found it looping: 58647 pkg-static RET read -1 errno 21 Is a directory 58647 pkg-static CALL read(0x4,0x7fffffff9b10,0x2000) 58647 pkg-static RET read -1 errno 21 Is a directory 58647 pkg-static CALL read(0x4,0x7fffffff9b10,0x2000) ...
Darktable revisited
I suspect Andy Snow is planning some photographic activity. Today he asked me on IRC about darktable. Yes, I've tried it in the past, but never got very far with it. The concept of film rolls and other silliness put me off. Time to try it again? Why not? === root@stable (/dev/pts/0) ~ 7 -> pkg install darktable Installed packages to be REMOVED: hugin-2013.0.0_7 New packages to be INSTALLED: darktable: 1.6.8_1 flickcurl: 1.26 Huh? Why does it want to remove Hugin? Tried building it from source, and that worked.
Subversion subverted
I maintain a couple of copies of the FreeBSD source tree (CURRENT and STABLE) on eureka. Every morning I run svn update to bring them up to date. Lately, however, I've been having build failures with STABLE. That can happen, of course, though it's not supposed to, but this had been continuing for several days, and nobody had complained on the mailing lists. Where's the problem? Tried building on another machine (lagoon instead of stable), but the problem remained. Finally I checked out a complete new STABLE tree and tried that. It built. So do I have a corrupt source tree? That's what svn up is supposed to avoid, isn't it?
my.gov pain
A message in the mail today: Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2015 12:09:33 +1100 From:<[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Subject: New Centrelink letter available online Reply-To: [email protected] Please DO NOT REPLY by email as this mailbox is not monitored. OK, I have a my.gov account. But what a pain it is to use! I've been there before and came to the conclusion that the service wasn't worth the ether it was printed on. On that occasion I was unable to turn off email because of technical problems (broken DNS lookup). Today the DNS lookup worked, but other technical problems stopped me: there's no provision for removing yourself.
Understanding C++
So I have this problem with Hugin where I run into ambiguous templates: [ 45%] Building CXX object src/tools/CMakeFiles/autooptimiser.dir/autooptimiser.cpp.o /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/tools/align_image_stack.cpp:196:38: error: reference to 'lock' is ambiguous hugin_omp::ScopedLock sl(lock); ^ /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/tools/align_image_stack.cpp:124:24: note: candidate found by name lookup is 'lock' static hugin_omp::Lock lock; ^ /usr/include/c++/v1/mutex:424:1: note: candidate found by name lookup is 'std::__1::lock' lock(_L0& __l0, _L1& __l1, _L2& __l2, _L3& ...__l3) ^ /usr/include/c++/v1/mutex:350:1: note: candidate found by name lookup is 'std::__1::lock' lock(_L0& __l0, _L1& __l1) ^ I've already established that the candidates are templates, and v1/mutex is unconditionally included with fstream.
Another NBN outage!
Most of my network outages seem to happen in the middle of the night, to a point where I often wonder if they're just unannounced maintenance. But lately they've been happening in the daytime: 15 October 2015 10:36:43, 18 October 2015 13:14:34, and now today at 13:39:40. In each case, I was able to observe that the ODU LED on the NTD was red. Last week I suspected that my actions had no effect. Today I had the time to confirm that: we were off the net for over three hours, and of course power cycling had no effect on the ODU LED.
The limits of wrapper scripts
Completed the transition to the new /home disk today with no problems beyond being off the air for an hour while I ran a last rsync. The next step is to bring the backup system stable up to date. Started a buildworld, which died almost immediately with an invalid .depend filewhich it had just created! It took quite a while to discover that the culprit was my compiler wrapper script, which echoed the invocation to stdout, in this case the .depend file. So while it's a useful trick to work around deficiencies in cmake, it's not completely transparent. ACM only downloads articles once.
Time for a disk replacement
I bought the current hardware for eureka nearly 2 years ago, but I still haven't upgrade the operating system. Most recently, compilation problems with Hugin have deferred the issue. But there are other pressures. Lately I've been getting: Oct 25 13:00:49 eureka kernel: (ada2:ahcich2:0:0:0): READ_FPDMA_QUEUED. ACB: 60 00 e2 9e d8 40 e6 00 00 01 00 00 Oct 25 13:00:49 eureka kernel: (ada2:ahcich2:0:0:0): CAM status: ATA Status Error Oct 25 13:00:49 eureka kernel: (ada2:ahcich2:0:0:0): ATA status: 41 (DRDY ERR), error: 40 (UNC ) Oct 25 13:00:49 eureka kernel: (ada2:ahcich2:0:0:0): RES: 41 40 f0 9e d8 00 e6 00 00 00 01 Oct 25 13:00:49 eureka kernel: (ada2:ahcich2:0:0:0): Error 5, Retries exhausted Oct 25 13:00:49 eureka kernel: g_vfs_done():ada2p1[READ(offset=1982953521152, length=131072)]error = 5 It seems to be only local, and so far it means lack of access ...
We don't need no complete texts
For some reason my message to the Hugin forum didn't arrive. More attachment stupidity? But it's run by the Google behemoth, so it should be able to accept mail from Gmail. What a pain Gmail is! It's good for filtering spam, but the user interface! After I enlarged the tiny window, I got: WHY do people have to truncate things like that? It's reaching epidemic proportions. ACM only downloads articles once.
Tandem/16 control panel
For my first home-made computer I built a console or control panel with which I could single-step the machine and monitor its activity. Older computers had these as a matter of course, but I don't know of any other for a Z80: During my time with Tandem Computers we had some reason to examine the Tandem/16 processor in more detail. By that time, production had stopped, and I was given one of the three control panels that manufacturing had built for the three factories (Cupertino CA, Reston VA, and Neufahrn BY).
C++ namespace hell
Spent a bit more time trying to understand the Hugin compilation problems. Finally got my wrapper scripts to output useful invocation lines, which, as I expected, were long: c++ -DHUGIN_HSI -O2 -pipe -fstack-protector -fno-strict-aliasing --std=c++11 -O2 -pipe -fstack-protector -fno-strict-aliasing -I/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src -I/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/hugin_base -I/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/celeste -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/local/include/OpenEXR -I/eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/foreign -I/usr/local/include/python2.7 -c /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/tools/align_image_stack.cpp Add a C -dD -E to that and I got the preprocessor outputall 10 MB of it: === root@stable (/dev/pts/1) /usr/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/tools 233 -> l cppout.cpp -rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 10,727,532 22 Oct 13:29 cppout.cpp === root@stable (/dev/pts/1) /usr/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/tools 234 -> wc -l cppout.cpp 282590 cppout.cpp How do you fight your way through that?
Programming language complexity
At university I discovered this wonderful new language, Algol. It was so much better than FORTRAN, and it was so easy to program. And then I discovered that the version we were using was Algol 60, codified (in the pre-Y2K days) in 1960. There was also an Algol 68, and although this was in 1970, no compiler was available for it for our university computer (an ICL System 4/50, a Spectra 70 copy). Why? Over the years I investigated the language, and looked for compilers for the computers with which I worked. None came. The language was too complicated. How times have changed!
Programming language complexity
25 years ago I wrote a B-tree storage system called Monkey in C++. At the time I saw it as being the logical development of C, as long as you ignored some of the more bizarre features. Since then I have returned to programming in C, mainly because that's what the environment required. 11 years ago I was required to backport Monkey to C. In the process I discovered that C++ had become even more bizarre, and the backporting brought insights that were hidden when I wrote in C++. The C version was slightly more verbose, but much clearer in intention.
Understanding convoluted error messages
While trying to port Hugin this morning, was presented with this error message: /usr/bin/sed -i.bak 's/-pthread;-D_THREAD_SAFE/-pthread -D_THREAD_SAFE/g' /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/hugin1/base_wx/CMakeFiles/huginbasewx.dir/flags.make /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/hugin1/hugin/CMakeFiles/hugin.dir/flags.make /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/hugin1/hugin/CMakeFiles/hugin.dir/link.txt /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/hugin1/nona_gui/CMakeFiles/nona_gui.dir/flags.make /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/hugin1/nona_gui/CMakeFiles/nona_gui.dir/link.txt /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/hugin1/ptbatcher/CMakeFiles/PTBatcher.dir/flags.make /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/hugin1/ptbatcher/CMakeFiles/PTBatcher.dir/link.txt /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/hugin1/ptbatcher/CMakeFiles/PTBatcherGUI.dir/flags.make /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/hugin1/ptbatcher/CMakeFiles/PTBatcherGUI.dir/link.txt /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/hugin1/stitch_project/CMakeFiles/hugin_stitch_project.dir/flags.make /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/hugin1/stitch_project/CMakeFiles/hugin_stitch_project.dir/link.txt sed: /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/hugin1/nona_gui/CMakeFiles/nona_gui.dir/flags.make: No such file or directory The original looks even worse, of course, with no line breaks whatsoever. What does that mean? Isn't it so much easier to replace the spaces with newline characters? /usr/bin/sed -i.bak 's/-pthread;-D_THREAD_SAFE/-pthread -D_THREAD_SAFE/g' /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/hugin1/base_wx/CMakeFiles/huginbasewx.dir/flags.make /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/hugin1/hugin/CMakeFiles/hugin.dir/flags.make /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/hugin1/hugin/CMakeFiles/hugin.dir/link.txt /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/hugin1/nona_gui/CMakeFiles/nona_gui.dir/flags.make /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/hugin1/nona_gui/CMakeFiles/nona_gui.dir/link.txt /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/hugin1/ptbatcher/CMakeFiles/PTBatcher.dir/flags.make /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/hugin1/ptbatcher/CMakeFiles/PTBatcher.dir/link.txt /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/hugin1/ptbatcher/CMakeFiles/PTBatcherGUI.dir/flags.make /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/hugin1/ptbatcher/CMakeFiles/PTBatcherGUI.dir/link.txt /eureka/home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin-2015.0.0/work/hugin-2015.0.0/src/hugin1/stitch_project/CMakeFi
Sourceforge: blast from the past
Went to the Hugin web site today. The response I got wasn't quite what I thought: Error 503 Service Unavailable Guru Meditation: XID: 223985111 Varnish cache server Where did that come from? As the code (Service Unavailable) suggests, it was transient. But the text takes me back decades. ACM only downloads articles once.
Sourceforge: blast from the past
Went to the Hugin web site today. The response I got wasn't quite what I thought: Error 503 Service Unavailable Guru Meditation: XID: 223985111 Varnish cache server Where did that come from? As the code (Service Unavailable) suggests, it was transient. But the text takes me back decades. ACM only downloads articles once.
Strange error message
In the afternoon Yvonne told me that her system had hung. In to find the X server displaying only a small white square on a black background. What's that? On the console these messages: What an incomprehensible mess. Instead of ###!!! and lots of square brackets, how about something that a script can parse easily, and information that tells you what produced it? Stopped and restarted the X server and things worked again. Looking through the web, it seems to be related to Adobe flash.
More porting
Why am I trying to resurrect Keith Packard's games? There are alternatives, such as xpat2. A much more important issue is to ensure that Hugin will still work when I update the system. OK, I have the latest port installed on stable. Tried it out. It ran, but the result of the alignment stage showed almost complete lack of alignment. What went wrong there? Further investigation showed that the problem only occurs with my fisheye lens, the Olympus Zuiko Digital ED 8 mm f/3.5. With the Zuiko Digital ED 9-18mm F4.0-5.6 things worked normally.
kgames revisited
After my porting attempts on Thursday, Callum Gibson reminded me that there are multiple ways to invoke imake. I've been there before, but it was 20 years ago: You don't normally run imake directly, since it needs a couple of pathname parameters: instead you have two possibilities: Run xmkmf, which is a one-line script that supplies the parameters to imake. Run make Makefile. This assumes that some kind of functional Makefile is already present in the package.
Off net again
My network reliability with the National Broadband Network is still not what you'd expect of a modern network. Another short dropout today while I was in the office, so I was able to confirm that the ODU LED was red. That's supposed to mean something wrong with the Outdoor Unit (NBNese for antenna ), but in the cases I've seen it had nothing to do with the antenna. Power cycled the NTD, taking the opportunity to connect it to the office UPS, and watched it gradually come up again. When all status lights were OK, tried a ping to the world. Nothing.
Things that go beep in the night
My UPS issues continue. There's increasing evidence that the UPS in my office is reacting to something on its input; on one occasion the lights in the hallway dimmed slightly when it beeped. Hopefully it's not the upstream UPS. Time to install some monitoring software, something that I haven't needed in over 20 years of using UPSs. ACM only downloads articles once.
Phone or camera?
Juha (or is that Matti?) Kupiainen went for a motorbike ride today with his mate Glenn. What does that have to do with me? He took some photos and published themas a directory with the original images. To look at them, you need to select each image separately. OK, this isn't Juha's fault: he can do it like that, which simply requires linking the directory into the web server, or he can put them on Flickr, like he did 8 years ago. But that requires lots of mouse-pushing, and you still don't have much control over the display format. So for the fun of it I created a quick and dirty web page that would display all the images.
UPS irritation
I have two UPSs in series. The big one (3 kVA) is in the shed. It runs all the low-power stuff in the house, mainly electronics and lighting. It also feeds the small one (1 kVA), which is there only for eureka, my main machine. I have never got round to installing any monitoring software: if the power fails for any length of time, there's currently not much we can do about it. Today, however, the second UPS was not feeling happy. On several occasions it beeped once and then stopped again. Why? Nothing else had any issues. The display went on, but it's on the floor, and by the time I looked down there was nothing to be seen.
Unexpected spam
Only a couple of days ago I commented on the number of languages in which I get spam. But today there was a new one: Indeed, I can't recall having received a message in Azerbaijani before. But this one wasn't one either: it an invoice from Citylink, the operator of Melbourne's tollways (which they call freeways, presumably because the term road toll has a completely different meaning here.
Porting again
Gradually I'm running out of excuses not to upgrade eureka to the latest and greatest FreeBSD. But there's still one: kgames, some card games that Keith Packard wrote decades ago. The code seems to have rotted, and I can't find any version that will build in a modern environment. OK, that's a question of porting, and when it comes to porting, I wrote the book. But the kind of porting described there is almost as old as the code. Still, got off to a start. First I need a Makefile. That's easy: run imake: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/6) /home/ports/x11/kgames/kgames-1.0 264 -> imake Imakefile.c:16: error: Imake.tmpl: No such file or directory imake: Exit code 1.
I blame it on Microsoft
Today I had to do something with despair, my Microsoft Windows 7 box. A popup: software updates installed, rebooting in 3 minutes. Why that? I had explicitly told it not to install anything by itself. But now I had a problem. Yes, remind me later buys me time, but it seems not much. And currently I didn't have a display on despair, nor even a cable to connect it to the KVM. Out into the shed to look for a cable. I really needed a second one for swamp, one of my test boxes. For some reason, I have hundreds of Ethernet cables, even AUI, but after much searching and reshuffling moving cartons, I only found one VGA cable.
20 years of The Complete FreeBSD
20 years ago today I had a visit from Jack Velte and friends of Walnut Creek CDROM. After dinner we did a bit of quick hacking and came up with what was to become The Complete FreeBSD . The book went through 5 editions, but it's completely out of date now. How times have changed! And how many things haven't! ACM only downloads articles once.
More phone problems
CJ Ellis has trouble with his phone again! Once again he can make calls out, but calls in get automatically diverted to voice mail. He asked me for help. I confirmed the behaviour, and suggested that he got MyNetFone to contact me for problem resolution, since he has difficulty understanding the people. Sometimes I do too: they asked him what kind of modem he had. Modem? What's that in a National Broadband Network system? All he has is an ATA. Sure enough, within minutes I got a call from Akbar of MyNetFone support, asking what the problem was with my phone (to which he referred as landline ).
Flaky software: don't do that, then
Yvonne spent most of another day processing her photos from last week. In the process she managed to trip over many misfeatures of my processing system that I had never seen before. Some of it has to do with the change of user, but mainly with the change of approach. It brings home how important it is to get other people to test the software that you write. I blame it all on her German-layout keyboard, which I can barely use. ACM only downloads articles once.
A day's work wasted
Yvonne has been working on her photo processing all week. Today she finished the work on the photos for 28 September, all 618 of them. Then she threw them away. Why? Not deliberately, of course. It's a misfeature in one of my scripts. I use two scripts to make life more bearable with DxO Optics Pro and Microsoft. The first, fordxo, links the images I want to process into a static directory, /Photos/00-grog or /Photos/00-yvonne. When processing is done, I use another script to move those images back that haven't already been processed. Why 00-<name>? It gets displayed at the top of the directory tree, so it's easier to find.
Revisiting X configurations
One of the results of Yvonne photo orgy is an incredible amount of processing. I store the photos on disk on eureka, and Yvonne accesses them by NFS. That's not ideal: some things, like making contact prints of video clips, require a lot of I/O, and over the net it's particularly slow. So why not log in oneureka? The simple answer is because my X configuration doesn't do it right. The fvwm2 menus look like this: + "eureka" Exec ssh -A eureka /usr/local/bin/xterm -name "xterm" -bg BlanchedAlmond -s -sl 2048 -sb -ls -j -rw -display lagoon:0.0 -geometry 100x65+53+0 -fn 9x15 -e /usr/local/bin/bash & That's an ssh started from the window manager, so it needs an ssh key to be loaded.
Raw conversion revisited
It's been over 4 years since I last compared raw image converters. I've learnt a lot since then, and on the whole I'm happy with DxO Optics Pro . But 3 days ago I had reason to examine things, and it took a while. I have now read the documentation for Raw Therapee. The first discovery was that it doesn't use lensfun, but instead profiles from Adobe Camera Raw, and you have to install them manually. In addition, the Adobe page states that only preliminary support is available for the Olympus OM-D E-M1, and newer models aren't mentioned at all. In general, the list looks about 2 years out of date.
Facebook: how can we best annoy you?
On one of my rare excursions into Facebook-land I was asked to participate in a survey. Opinionated as I am, I accepted. But all I got was a collection of postings, most as unrelated as these two: One's in Malay, though I can't understand enough to be sure of the topic: the Malays use a jargon that I can't decipher; neither can Google Translate. The other is in German about the cost of data retention. Do you prefer a fish or a bicycle?
Microsoft logoff
We've established that putting a Microsoft login session on ice isn't enough to free up the memory, so I'm currently logging off. Microsoft doesn't make it easy: It hangs there for something like 30 seconds. You'd think Microsoft's own products would behave. ACM only downloads articles once.
Olympus in-camera HDR revisited
We've had a bit of a discussion on the German Olympus forum about the likely benefits of focus stacking on the Olympus OM-D E-M1. This was before I wrote yesterday's article on the subject. My concerns about the usability of the out-of-camera focus stacking were based on my experience with the out-of-camera HDR functionality of the camera, which was really not very useful. But then Martin Wieprecht came up with an example, apparently from his book Die Große Reise ans andere Ende der Welt , that really did look good: So I tried again, looking through and out of my office.
Another FreeBSD VPS
While searching something completely unrelated, the following advertisement cropped up on my screen: As it says, it's from ARP Networks. The offer doesn't look bad, though nothing to entice me away from RootBSD, but it's nice to see other companies offering FreeBSD VPS. ACM only downloads articles once.
Photo processing and Microsoft memory management
More playing around with my PHP processing scripts today, and I think I have fixed all the bugs. Yvonne is still backed up to 26 September, and it looks like it will take her the rest of the week to process her thousands of photos and videos. And of course she's complaining about DxO Optics Pro Pushing the limits of your patience camera . In the past I have noticed big differences in processing speed, and sure enough, it was slow today too. It looked as if there were lots of hard page faults (which I presume means causing disk I/O). That's not so surprising given the relatively small memory of the machine.
Quadcopter
A few weeks back ALDI had a quadcopter (a camera drone) on special offer. I bought one and had intended to test it, but either I'm incapable or it is. According to the packaging (an important part of the documentation; it's the only place where they mention the resolution of the camera) it comes with propeller guards: But they're not there (the replacement propellers are). It contains a tiny camera on the underside: The remote control is one of the most amazing toys I've seen: ...
Still more S-100 boards
While unpacking cartons, found a couple more S-100 memory boards. One is the fourth Econoram board, similar to the ones I had already photographed, but I'm surprised that I hadn't missed the other one last time round, in particular because of the modifications on it: What's that for? Do I still have the circuit diagrams somewhere?
Fixing the contact print processing
One of the side effects of Yvonne's photo spree of the last few days is that my contact print scripts can't handle the sheer number of images. They're written as PHP web pages, and we were getting: Request-URI Too Large The requested URL's length exceeds the capacity limit for this server. Took a look at the code, and discovered: function docontacts ($desc, $dirdate, $imagelist) { $method = "get"; /* transfer method.
Returning the lens cap
Clearly the new lens cap is useless. Time to initiate a return. To make it easier, it makes sense to send a couple of photos, roughly like the ones above. Fought my way through this emetic eBay form, climbed down the directory trees, and tried to upload the first image. No go: OK, try again, as they suggest. Well, a change of language helps, doesn't it? Additional retries alternated between English and German, and there was no way to break out of the loop.
Yet Another New Disk
The new disk for lagoon arrived today. I suppose it's a sign of the times that a 1 TB disk is now pretty much the lower size limit, and this one was only half the thickness of the one it replaced. What partitions? I've been recommending a two file system approach since the first edition of Installing and Running FreeBSD in nearly 20 years ago. In 2003, I changed from / and /usr to / and /home, implicitly leaving /usr in the root file system. That makes a lot of sense: despite the name, /usr now contains mainly system files, while user files are in /home.
TPOCSA
For the past two months almost I've been trying to review The Practice of Cloud System Administration , by Thomas A. Limoncelli, Strata R. Chalup and Christina J. Hogan, for the The FreeBSD Journal. It hasn't been easy. Today was the deadline, and I'm glad I finally got something useful together. What's a cloud, anyway? A nebulous term. But the authors have addressed that in advance: you get a choice of two titles, and Designing and operating large distributed systems suits me far better. The difficulties don't reflect on the quality of the book, but because it comes from a perspective so different from my own.
Processing ridiculous numbers of photos
How do you process 600 raw images taken in low light? Using DxO Optics Pro , the answer is undoubtedly slowly . At ISO ratings up to 36°/3,200, you need the slower PRIME processing. Until a month or two back it took 4 minutes for dischord to process a single image, or 15 per hour. At that rate, it would take 40 hours to process the 600. And that's without the manual work, notably cropping. Since then, though, we have a newer, somewhat faster version of DxO, and a newer, somewhat faster machine, and now it only takes about 1S minutes per image, or only about 13 hours.
Where did my space go?
Yvonne continues to take lots of photos, and I've been processing them generically while she goes and takes more. Today there were 425 shots, making a total since Saturday of 1,638. Doubtless she'll make the 2,000 mark by the time the clinic ends tomorrow. How much space does that take up? Looking at the 16 GB memory card, it looks like almost all of it: === grog@stable (/dev/pts/0) /eureka/home/grog 3 -> mdir -s a: ... 425 files 5 539 585 350 bytes 376 274 944 bytes free But wait.
YouTube lost
I took a few short video clips of the Borzoi family reunion on Friday, but didn't get round to uploading them to YouTube until today. And suddenly all my old videos were gone! It seems that, without telling me, YouTube has changed my name. I logged in via my Google account, and should have had the nick grOOgle, but instead it logged me with my own name. That in itself is not a big deal, but it means I can no longer modify my old videos.
YouTube regained
The main reason for the computer rearrangement was so that Yvonne could watch YouTube again. Tried it. Didn't work. But I had played around with this YouTube flash plugin. How do I disable it? It seems that about:addons (care, one :, not two) takes you to the Add-ons manager. I've never seen that before. From there you select Plugins and you have the opportunity to activate or deactivate the plugins. Why not just go straight to about::plugins? That's a purely informative view, and you can't change anything there. After deactivating the YouTube flash plugin, I was able to view YouTube with normal HTML5.
Three days of despair
There were still a few things I needed to complete the basic installation on despair, notably printer and scanner. As warned in the HOWTO, Microsoft fails on both counts. Installing the scanner was interesting. After downloading the driver, I got this meaningless message: How can I know what this is? Only because there's only the one possibility. But in fact it turned out to be wrong. After installation, the system complained that the driver still wasn't installed.
More despair
Yesterday's installation of despair went relatively smoothly, at least partially because I don't run many programs on it. But how do I copy the configurations, notably of DxO Optics Pro ? I've had pain with that in the past, and I didn't want to go through it all over again. More investigation: apart from the Presets that I looked at last year, there are also Modules , descriptions of corrections for camera/lens pairs, and Workspaces , the contents of which aren't quite clear, so I tarred up the entire directory /Users/grog/AppData/Local/DxO_Labs/DxO OpticsPro 10 on dischord and copied those directories to despair. That was almost enough: there's also a file user.config in a directory with a name like Users/grog/AppData/Local/DxO_Labs/DXOOpticsPro.exe_StrongName_ukk25szwn2bgpjt3ra3fcszlyidqqavr/10.4.3.739, which suggests security through obscurity.
Chrome revisited
Comment from Peter Jeremy today: it is possible to get chromium to play nice with X window managers. My experiments yesterday omitted an important, undocumented detail: the settings won't completely take hold until you restart the browser. And they, yes, there's a normal window frame. In passing it's interesting to note that so many Microsoft-space windows don't have a title. You have to guess what they are based on other characteristics. And so many have their own decorations. Does that come from a time when Microsoft didn't provide window manager functionality? All in all, I'm amazed how primitive the windowing environment appears.
Confronting despair
As expected, the new computer arrived today, so in to Napoleons to pick it up. It's pretty much exactly what I expected, and looks very similar to swamp: That's despair on top. Inside the box, though, the difference in age is clear more by the specs than the appearance. Both boxen can be taken apart to a great extent without tools, though I have the feeling that the new one is flimsier.
Still more browser stuff
In principle, I've done what investigation I can of web browsers, but there are still a few things to follow up. Message from Rodolfo Gouveia pointing out that chromium has a settings option Use system title bar and borders . OK, ignoring the fact that it's confusing system with window manager , let's try it: And how about that, most of chromium's own decorations go away. Here's before and after: But it doesn't deliver.
Browser woes continued
I established a number of things about my browser issues yesterday, few of them pleasant. But there's another angle: until recently, there was no problem playing YouTube videos on this box. What has changed? I had noticed that we were no longer running npviewer.bin and guessed that it was displaying the clips with HTML5. Is that right? Is there a way to change it? Went searching and found this YouTube video, which I was able to view on eureka: It pointed me at a special plugin to use flash for YouTube (doesn't that say something about compatibility?)
Despair
As planned yesterday, got round to ordering a new machine for photo processing today. There are a lot of machines on eBay with similar specifications: Intel Core 2 processor, 4 GB memory, enough disk for it not to be an issue. But how fast are the processors? Compared a number of items and found: Item Processor CPUMark Memory Price 171852222019 Core 2 Quad Q9400 ...
Browser agony
Mail from Didier Legrand today, pointing me at this article on the FreeBSD forums. But it wasn't easy to look at: What's that? Went looking everywhere before I discovered that the problem was specific to this instance of firefox. chromium and other versions of firefox didn't have that problem, even though they all go through the same proxy. Another bug, it would seem, but this time with an old version. The article discussed firefox performance problems at length, and some people traced it to a compilation issue with audio/alsa-plugins.
Microsoft backup fail
I do a backup of dischord, my Microsoft box, every Sunday evening. Well, almost: I suppose that backups don't fit into the Microsoft mentality, but that is really bare-bones. Even the 32 bit hex error number (didn't they go out round 40 years ago?) , which you only get if you click show details , doesn't help. This page suggests it's due to misconfigured system files. If that's the case, why doesn't it say so? But searching for microsoft error code 0x8007013D brings only discussions, nothing at all from microsoft.com.
Guess your nationality, Facebook style
Somebody posted this URL on Facebook today. 15 questions or so, mainly technical or historical, and all very easy. Two of them were obviously US-centric: when the declaration of independence was signed (which declaration of independence?) , and in which hand the Statue of Liberty holds her torch. That was the only one I couldn't answer off the top of my head, and I assume that I got all the answers right. The result? Why Japanese? None of the other questions showed any national bias at all. And the original poster thought that the questionnaire itself came from Sweden. But then it wouldn't take for granted that some things are US American.
Browser pain revisited
Now that I have X running on stable, I can compare browser performance. Went to the same YouTube video that caused lagoon to hang. It didn't hang. But it used an inordinate amount of CPU time: PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND 2361 grog 64 20 0 829M 355M uwait 0 10:16 150.00% firefox 2323 root 1 4 0 131M 51104K RUN 1 1:10 13.87% Xorg And it stayed there, bouncing a bit between 120% and 150% CPU.
pkg: not there yet
While getting X running on stable, discovered that xearth wasn't installed. OK, that's trivial: === root@stable (/dev/pts/0) /etc/X11 14 -> pkg install xearth ... New packages to be INSTALLED: xearth: 1.2 jpeg-turbo: 1.4.1 Installed packages to be UPGRADED: wx28-gtk2: 2.8.12_5 -> 2.8.12_6 Proceed with this action? [y/N]: y Fetching xearth-1.2.txz: 100% 111 KiB 113.5kB/s 00:01 Fetching jpeg-turbo-1.4.1.txz: 100% 270 KiB 276.5kB/s 00:01 Fetching wx28-gtk2-2.8.12_6.txz: 100% 2 MiB 312.8kB/s 00:07 Conflicts with the existing packages have been found. The following 5 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked): Installed packages to be REMOVED: gnuplot-4.6.6_1 hugin-2013.0.0_6 audacity-2.1.0_4 xchm-1.23_2 New packages to be INSTALLED: xearth: 1.2 Proceed with this action?
X on stable
Why couldn't I run X on stable? In principle X should now start without any configuration file at all. Removed the badly designed configuration file, and there was no change: I had an old /etc/xorg.conf, and coincidentally it contained a 2 head configuration. Removed that, and X started with no problems. Did X -config get confused by it? Unfortunately, the problems aren't over. Switching to a different virtual terminal freezes the display. But at least I now have a way to compare the browser problems on lagoon. ACM only downloads articles once.
Understanding PHP error messages
The source of this diary includes a liberal spreading of PHP calls, like this present one: <?php pubdate ("2015-09-20T23:26:55+00:00"); ?> <?php texttopic ("co", "Understanding PHP error messages"); ?> <p> The source of this diary includes a liberal spreading of <?php href ("http://www.php.net/", "PHP"); ?> calls, like this present one: </p> <?php endtopic (); ?> So it's clear that there's a good possibility of getting errors, and the parser is always good for cryptic messages unrelated to the user's view of the syntax.
Revisiting OI.Share
Yesterday's selfies were greatly hampered by the lack of viewfinder. But there's a solution to that: use a smart phone or tablet and OI.Share. Tried that again today. What a pain these Android devices are! Tried to connect to the camera, and it failed. Why? It's far too sensitive of my feelings to upset me with the truth, so it said nothing. But the camera has been repaired since the last time I used it, so it seems reasonable to guess that the password has changed. How do you update the stored password? After 15 minutes messing around with the damn thing, I still couldn't find a way.
Configuring X
Another alternative for Yvonne is to give her stable, the machine that I use for software upgrades. But I've never run X on it: I just access it from eureka. Ran X -config and tried to run the resultant configuration file. It crashed. Further examination showed that it didn't recognize the (Intel) chip set, and it created a multi-headed configuration for a single-head chip and a single monitor. People, I've really been running X for over a quarter of a century, since April 1990. When I started using BSD not quite 24 years ago, I had some difficulties, which in those days didn't surprise me.
No Youtube!
Yvonne recently told me that she can no longer view YouTube on her machine. And it's been like that for a while, so I don't even know what could have caused it. Checked and confirmed that it didn't work. firefox started off using 400% CPU (quite a feat on a single processor machine), and apparently the system didn't have enough power to run it. Now I've seen this before, but it ran until recently. There was some talk on IRC a while back about firefox problems, but I was able to repeat the problem with chromium and Opera. Problems with npviewer.bin?
Blast from the past
Round 20 years ago, Microsoft discovered the Internet and embarked on a campaign to bend it to its own ideas. One of the innovations was the graphical mailer, preferably in HTML. We were young and foolish in those days and thought that we could teach people the errors of their ways. Thus I wrote a number of pages explaining to people how to configure and use their MUAs. They're completely out of date now, but I've left them there for historical interest. And today I got an error message: missing image in http://www.lemis.com/email/fixing-communicator.html (written in February 2000 by Wes Peters). I've fixed that, but reading the old documentation shows me how little has changed: just the names of the products.
Measuring air speeds
I still have a number of issues with JG King, including the extremely poor throughput of the range hood. The service people didn't even try to measure the throughput: they only checked whether it could hold A4 paper against the filter (result: 1 out of 3 filters managed it, and that was good enough for them). At the beginning of last month I ordered an anemometer on eBay, and it didn't arrive until yesterday evening. OK, let's measure the throughput. As discussed last month, the air flow through the air conditioner filter should be 2.5 m/s. Clearly it won't be even across the whole surface, so I divided each panel into 9 sections and measured the throughput at the centre of each section.
DxO memory leak?
DxO Optics Pro seems to get slower the longer you use it. I don't really understand Microsoft, but at least the Windows Task Manager produces some useful output. Today I took a look at memory usage: This starts when DxO was running but idle, and system memory use was round 6 GB. I stopped it (big step downwards, to about 3 GB), and then restarted it and allowed it to become idle again (4.4 GB). So has it really leaked 1.6 GB of memory?
Anatomy of a snipe
I'm looking for a new lens for Yvonne again. The standard 14-42 mm lens on her Olympus E-PM2 makes the camera too big to fit into a jacket pocket. I had previously rejected the M.ZUIKO DIGITAL ED 14-42mm f3.5-5.6 EZ because it had electric zoom. Instead, in succession I bought a 15 mm body cap lens with particularly bad optical properties, and later a M.Zuiko Digital 17mm F2.8 Pancake lens. They're both much smaller, but the 17 mm is of course not a zoom, and it still has the issue of the particularly fiddly lens cap. The 14-42 EZ comes with an optional automatic lens cap.
iTunes again?
My investigations of CD databases established what I knew years ago: the CDDB database format is poorly adapted to classical music. But I can't access Gracenote because it's commercial. On the other hand, programs like iTunes do have access, and I have an old, mouldy Apple PowerMac G4 lying around, and it has iTunes, of course. Spent some time connecting it upit seems it's been about 9 months since it was last powered onand rediscovered some of the nice, intuitive Apple features that I had happily forgotten. The display driver seems to ignore EDID, and the highest resolution I could get out of it was 1280×1024this on a 1920×1080 display, so the aspect ratio was terrible.
Updating ports, a year later
FreeBSD's new pkg facility has gradually settled down, and I can keep my ports up to date with minimum impact. But today we had a different issue: Chris Bahlo wanted to install sudo on www.lemis.com. Why? Real BSD users don't use sudo. But it's trivial to install: pkg install sudo. Well, that's what I thought. The ports on www date back to January 2014. It first wanted to modify 116 packages, including removing Emacs and Apacheand not reinstalling them! Exactly what you want for a web server machine. OK, let's upgrade the Ports Tree. How do you do that? With subversion, of course. Not installed.
More ripping fun
Ripping CDs with ripperX is relatively straightforward. There are two main issues, one serious, the other less so. The less serious one is that handling is less than completely smooth: CDs aren't recognized immediately, and I still need to tell it to look up the tracks (two mouse clicks). And when the CD is finished, it doesn't eject automatically. grip can do all thatif it works at all. Tried building it from the ports collection. Bingo! It workedsort of. For some reason, after recognizing a CD, the display cycled continuously through all tracks. It didn't stop it working, but it was irritating.
Ripping CDs, revisited
Some years ago I played with copying my CDs to disk for easier access. The results were not encouraging. My first attempts were with iTunes, and they drove me to distraction. It wasn't all iTunes' fault: the CD database (in this case Gracenote) made it almost impossible to understand the output. Later I tried grip, though the only mention of it in my diary was of failure. Tried it again today. It couldn't find the CD device, because my config file contained /dev/acd0 instead of /dev/cd0. OK, fix that. But it didn't seem to care. On the other hand, it offers a whole lot of configuration tabs in its interfacebut not a way to save the configuration!
Fixing the RSS feed
More information from Rodolfo Gouveia today, mail forwarded from the developer of his RSS reading app. When reading an RSS feed with a smart phone, there's a question of storage usage, which is why his app stops after 30 items. That got me thinking: my strategy is to assume that some people will only read my diary infrequently, so just feeding the last two days could result in items getting lost. Instead, my feed comes from the monthly diary, and for good measure it includes the last week of the previous month. That can result in files of over 100 kB in size.
RSS reader problems
Mail from Rodolfo Gouveia today. He's been reading this diaryfor 10 years!via the RSS feed, and his RSS app (apparently on iOS) displays my feed (and apparently only my feed) in chronological order. That's particularly bad for him, because the feed has dozens of items, and the app only displays the first 30. I write the diary in chronological order, of course: it's a chronology, and I have a horror of reverse chronological documents. But RSS should go by publication date. I tried it with NewsFox, and it worked as expected. Bad app? Maybe. The developer of the app suggested using Feedly, which at least suggests that it's not a configuration issue.
GPS: Use Google Maps
Considerable commentary on IRC today about my last rant on GPS navigation. Andy Snow said that Google Maps on Android was the answer to all my issues. That hasn't been my experience in the past, but it was worth trying again. Tried the route from here to Steve Zuideveld in Warrandyte. It gave me a nice, clean map of the start of the journey, with directions on the left, just like I know from Google maps on a real computer: But how do I show the whole itinerary?
GPS navigators: violation of POLA
It's been over five years since I bought my first GPS navigator. Since then I have bought two more, not counting the Android tablet that can also run GPS navigation apps. After that time, I still have serious issues with them. What do I want from a navigator? Here's a start: At the very least, I need a substitute for paper maps, for whatever purpose I want to use them. I want to be able to plan trips. Start here, go there.
More GPS navigator fun
How do you get from Dereel to Warrandyte? Let me count the ways. Warrandyte is on the other side of Melbourne from Dereel, and we have the choice of fighting our way through the west of the city (thanks, State Government, for spending hundreds of millions of dollars to cancel the freeway extension that would have made it bearable), or drive round to the north-east end of the ring road and then fight our way across country for another excruciating 20 km from Watsonia North to Warrandyte. Today we travelled via Watsonia North with two different GPS navigators, each of which wanted to go a different way once we left the freeway.
NBN charter and reality
A surprising number of people in Dereel can't get NBN access. Some, like Stewart Summersby, are in a dip and have no adequate visibility ( line of sight ) to the tower. But it seems that a large proportion of the problems are due to trees, which are up to 25 m high. But wait. Before building the tower, people came out here and took a look. They saw the trees. They saw the lie of the land. And they decided on a location for the tower, along with a coverage map, which currently looks like this: The map keeps changing, and is wildly inaccurate, as I've commented in the past, but the updates don't show the reality of the areas with demonstrated lack of coverage.
Old computers, the third
I built my third computer in 1980. It was also an S-100 bus machine, this time with an Intel 8086 processor. This was very much cutting-edge technology at the time, and there wasn't even an operating system for it. For whatever reason, Gary Kildall of Digital Research wasn't overly keen on releasing CP/M-86, and so the offer I had, from a small company called Seattle Computer Products, was a two board set with their own operating system called 86-DOS. I was a little dubious about that, and some time round October 1980 I called the company and spoke with Tim Paterson.
Old computers: Number 2
As I mentioned yesterday, it proved impractical to expand my Kontron kit computer, I only had 1.25 kB of memory, and expanding it would have been really expensive. Then I saw an advertisement in Byte: 32 kB of memory on four boards for only $790! The problem was that it was for the S-100 bus. But that was so much cheaper that I decided to migrate. It wasn't all progress: in those days the S-100 bus was so flaky that it was difficult to run a Z80 faster than 2 MHzand that where my Kontron CPU managed 4 MHz! But in the course of time I built up a reasonable system.
Don't invent email addresses!
A few years back I had a rather interesting exchange of views with Mark Teel, the author of the wview weather station software. It was remarkable enough that I published the mail exchange. Of course, I changed the email addresses. Mine is easy: [email protected], which also serves as a honeypot. But I changed his to a fictive gmail address. Bad idea. It wasn't that fictive after all, and the real owner contacted me today, justifiably complaining about the fact that he was made to look like an idiot, but also that he was getting spammed as a result. Why did I do that?
1970s personal computers
Unpacking the removal cartons in the music room (or should we call it library ?) is progressing, and in the process I keep finding old stuff. Today there was a collection of old computer boards representing most of my first three computers. I must have got the first machine some time in April 1977. It was made by Kontron and designated kit . It was a 4 MHz Z-80 based single board computer with 256 bytes each of RAM and ROM, and also serial and parallel interfaces, all on a Eurocard board 10×16 cm in size: The CPU and ROM are missing on this board.
What protocol?
Peter Jeremy is currently messing around with arcane net configurations. I haven't been following carefully, but he mentioned that he is happy that his ISP doesn't block IP protocol 41. That's a leading question, of course. What's protocol 41? Took a look in /etc/protocols and discovered that it's IPV6. OK, why not? But then something else caught my eye: # $FreeBSD: src/etc/protocols,v 1.22 2007/05/20 03:55:22 grog Exp $ That's my login. I can't recall ever having done anything with /etc/protocols. OK, we have a date. What did I do on 20 May 2007?
Unix-based mallet
One of the weirder entries in the BSD calendar files regards yesterday: Aug 14 First Unix-based mallet created, 1954 We've puzzled about it in the past. The FreeBSD project has a member called Juli Mallett, but she was born over 30 years later, and she doesn't understand the entry either. But Google keeps growing, and finally I found this page, reaped by archive.org, via this page. Finally the mystery has been uncovered, but like so many, the result is less than exciting. ACM only downloads articles once.
More VoIP debugging
A call from Farnaz of MyNetFone this afternoon, wanting to speak to CJ regarding his fault. I explained that he wasn't here, so she wanted his phone number. I explained that his phone didn't accept incoming calls, so she read the ticket (finally) and told me that the reason he couldn't make any calls was because his ATA wasn't registered. I asked her to read the rest of the ticket and note that he can place outgoing phone calls. Finally she agreed to send him email and get him to call them. About the only sensible thing she said was that my suspicion that the change of port from sip to sip-tls was not the cause of the problem.
More VoIP debugging
CJ Ellis has a strange problem with his VoIP connection: it works normally for outgoing calls, but incoming calls are rejected. I took a look at his ATA and found nothing wrong. So called up MyNetFone support, who told me that the line wasn't registered. That's clearly wrong, since CJ can call out with it. My guess at this stage is a misconfiguration at the server end, possibly related to the port number: he had been receiving spam calls on port sip (5060), so he had changed to 5061 (ostensibly sip-tls, but without TLS). It's almost exactly a year since he got the service; is that a coincidence?
Porting again
The current version of Hugin in the FreeBSD Ports Collection is 2013.0.0, two years old. It's always a pain to update the port, because of the dependencies. Tried today and discovered that it didn't like the current version of libpano13. OK, no worries, let's update it. ===> An older version of png is already installed (png-1.6.17) You may wish to ``make deinstall' and install this port again by ``make reinstall' to upgrade it properly. If you really wish to overwrite the old port of png without deleting it first, set the variable "FORCE_PKG_REGISTER" in your environment or the "make install" command line.
Arranging events via Facebook
Chris Bahlo arranged a seminar on (horse) saddles and saddle fitting for today. Margaret Swan (who lives about 450 km away) is here this weekend, and Nele Kömle also braved the over 100 km from Garvoc to attend. In addition, Chris had advertised on Facebook and had a further 8 registrations from people round here. Who came? Margaret and Nele. Not a single local person showed up. No apologies, just no show. Is this typical of the Facebook mentality? ACM only downloads articles once.
CAV complaints: the pain
So it's time to file formal complaints about JG King's lack of problem resolution. Went to the CAV Building disputes, defects and delays page, where they asked me to fill out a Domestic building complaintin Microsoft Word format! OK, I have a Microsoft box now, so loaded it there. What did I get? That's what Microsoft does with its own formats! Not only that, but it seems that it then corrupted the file, so I couldn't process it with other programs either. In the end I downloaded it to eureka and processed it with OpenOffice. That's still painful, and for some reason the form insists on mutilating my correct dates: 20 July 2014 gets truncated to 20/07/14 , although the former is the preferred format for use by Australian Government Agencies.
Spam traps
In this diary, I change my real mail addresses to [email protected]. On my home page I mention the mail address [email protected]. Both, of course, don't exist. And how about that, my caution was warranted: Aug 5 04:31:35 www postfix/smtpd[62315]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[124.73.159.164]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [124.73.159.164]; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<wotja.com> Aug 5 04:33:16 www postfix/smtpd[62360]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[124.73.153.162]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [124.73.153.162]; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<gmtmk.com> Aug 5 04:37:37 www postfix/smtpd[62315]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[219.157.200.18]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [219.157.200.18]; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=SMTP helo=<hn.kd.ny.adsl> Aug 5 05:29:58 www postfix/smtpd[63373]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[123.88.166.217]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [123.88.166.217]; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<uid.com> Aug 5 06:27:46 www postfix/smtpd[64083]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[204.151.195.161]: 450 ...
Spam traps
In this diary, I change my real mail addresses to [email protected]. On my home page I mention the mail address [email protected]. Both, of course, don't exist. And how about that, my caution was warranted: Aug 5 04:31:35 www postfix/smtpd[62315]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[124.73.159.164]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [124.73.159.164]; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<wotja.com> Aug 5 04:33:16 www postfix/smtpd[62360]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[124.73.153.162]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [124.73.153.162]; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<gmtmk.com> Aug 5 04:37:37 www postfix/smtpd[62315]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[219.157.200.18]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [219.157.200.18]; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=SMTP helo=<hn.kd.ny.adsl> Aug 5 05:29:58 www postfix/smtpd[63373]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[123.88.166.217]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [123.88.166.217]; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<uid.com> Aug 5 06:27:46 www postfix/smtpd[64083]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[204.151.195.161]: 450 ...
More AusPost online fun
I've already noted that Australia Post has an option to send you tracking information on parcels. A couple of weeks ago I tried it with some parcels I had send. No response. Today I got one, though: a parcel delivered to me. So it seems that this tracking information only works for parcels sent to me. What good is it to tell me I have received a parcel? ACM only downloads articles once.
Communication, Government style
A message in my inbox this morning. It's worth including the entire text: To: <[email protected]> From:<[email protected]> Reply-To: [email protected] Subject: New Centrelink letter available online Date: Wed, 5 Aug 2015 13:13:49 +1000 Please DO NOT REPLY by email as this mailbox is not monitored. This is a message from the Department of Human Services. You have a new Centrelink letter available online. You should view your letter as soon as possible. You may view your letter by going to: - the Inbox in your myGov account. If you do not have a myGov account, you will need to create one first by going to the myGov website and then linking it to Centrelink - one of our Express Plus mobile apps.
Off the net again!
Zhivago wasn't the only problem this morning. After we had looked at him, Yvonne told me we were off the net. Again! How do I even contact Aussie Broadband to tell them? It proved that I did have adequate mobile phone coverage in the garden (out towards Wendy's house), and I left a message. Of course network connectivity came back before anybody seemed to have looked at it again, but it was still nearly 70 minutes without coverage. What was the cause? I've had (a very few) cases where the NTD status indicators showed some connectivity problem with the tower, but here there were no problems.
Connecting the fire-fighting tank
Craig Mayor along today and connected up the fire-fighting tank. Now the high-pressure side of the irrigation system is complete, so we started filling it up. The bore produces quite a bit of water, 0.5 l/s, or 1800 l/h. But the tank holds 10,000 l, so it took over 5 hours to fill up. One of the questions I had was: was there a float valve inside? It's sealed, so the only way to find out was to fill it up and see what happened. There is either no float valve, or it's incorrectly adjusted: OK, I was expecting that.
Change of address, bureaucratic style
Since moving house, there are hundreds of people I need to inform about our change of address. It's not overly urgent: mail will be forwarded until the end of May 2016, but gradually we should do something about it. Today we received no less than 4 letters from Centrelink, probably a good candidate to start with. Based on my prior experience with their web site, I asked Google instead. And that took me to this page, explaining that I should go to https://my.gov.au/ instead and update addresses with multiple agencies with one fell swoop. It went into extreme detail about what could go wrong and what to do if it did.
Retail sales in the Internet age
To Masters today to pick up an eBay purchase. Huh? Masters is a normal Home Improvement shop, part of the Woolworths conglomerate. What do they have to do with eBay? They have a shop on eBay where they sell things that aren't in their normal catalogue, and they'll either send it to you normally, at a normal price, or you can opt to save money and pick them up at a shop of your choice. That's what I did today: I had bought a sprinkler controller for $55, while the closest comparable one in their catalogue cost $108. I suspect that mine is last year 's model, but that's OK; that applies to a number of things on eBay.
Getting information from Microsoft
People discussed yesterday's Microsoft adventures on IRC. Jamie Fraser came up with some information that I'll keep for next time: <fwaggle> grog needs pci ids under windows? i solved this problem ages ago. C+P from my notes: right-click My Computer and choose properties. Then, go to the Hardware tab, and pick Device Manager. Navigate to your unknown device, double-click it and then pick the Details tab. Find the Hardware Ids entry, and look for the most detailed entry. My shitty SiS network adaptors is PCI\VEN_1039&DEV_0900 . ACM only downloads articles once.
Installing Microsoft again
After yesterday's fun came the immense fun of installing Microsoft again. It started off badly: when it got to choosing the disk, once again it claimed that there were no disks. But I discovered that it works better if you plug it in, and after that it went off and did its installation. And of course I had to enter this license key thing. As instructed on the OEM box, the sticker was to be removed and attached to the computer somewhere, in this case on top of the case. How do you read that? It was in the shade, on its side, and in a small enough font (about 6 pt) that not only old fogeys like myself can't read it, especially when the font makes it difficult to distinguish between B and 8: ...
Recovering the Microsoft box
As Juha Kupiainen had suggested, took a look at Shaun O'Connor's computer today to see if it understood RAID. Yes! But as I had feared, that was just the first half of the problem: How do I bring the member back online? The menu offers Recovery Volume Options , but that just gives the option to create a backup. Once it's down, there seems to be nothing in the BIOS that can recover it.
BigPond: Go away!
Got a message from Warren Ure today, reporting discrepancies in traffic measurement between his mother and her (unspecified) ISP. Not surprisingly, the ISP claimed more traffic. I thought it might be something like my experience last year, where the router was compromised and used to relay traffic. But no, it seems not: she's on satellite, and the traffic is measured even when the modem is turned off. That doesn't make sense. Neither does the response of the ISP, claiming that there can still be traffic. Sent him a reply. <[email protected]>: host extmail.bigpond.com[61.9.189.122] said: 552 5.2.0 vj8v1q02L1sUVRc01j8wYc Suspected spam message rejected.
Understanding bad language
It's nothing new that Microsoft has obfuscated understanding file systems by referring to directories as folders, but today, while trying to find out how to work around Microsoft blockages and move a file from one directory to another, I got the message: Leave the file in the destination directory? Surely they mean the source directory. Have they reversed normal meaning, or is it typical of the quality of their messages?
Understanding the boot problems
While looking at the information I had about Shaun O'Connor's computer, I checked about the disks he had. WD1002FAEX. And they're 1 TB disks. So why did the fdisk output show 2 TB? Did Shaun accidentally overwrite the partition table? Juha Kupiainen came up with the most likely answer: the two disks are combined as RAID-0. That explains a lot of things, in particular why he couldn't boot after resetting the BIOS to default values (and yes, it does offer some kind of RAID). Of course, for every complex problem there's a solution which is simple, elegant and wrong. I didn't have time today, and I won't have time tomorrow, but hopefully we'll see a result on Friday.
Neighbourhood computer help
Shaun O'Connor, whom I don't know, sent out a request on Facebook today, looking for a PC repairman. Not quite my line of business, but in the interests of neighbourly help, I offered to take a look. He had had error messages relating to the first disk, which he couldn't interpret, and somebody online had suggested that he reset the BIOS to default values. That made a big difference: he could no longer boot at all: Can't load operating system ; doesn't that help pinpoint things? The machine wasn't your run-of-the-mill system: big tower, 4 nVidia video cards (more than I have!)
Air conditioners in sub-zero environments
We normally turn the air conditioner (heating) off at night. But yesterday morning it took several hours for the house to get warm. Last night we left it running overnight, and that was just as well. The temperature dropped to a measured -2.3°, only 0.1° warmer than the previous night, and the air conditioner had difficulty keeping the temperature. One clear reason is that it took forever to de-ice. De-icing is essential for air conditioners heating: ice collects on the coil and needs to be removed again by reversing the coolant flow and passing hot coolant through the coil. In my experience, it takes a few seconds to melt the ice, and a little while to blow the resulting water off the coil.
Fully tested toner
My cheap ( premium ) toner cartridge for my laser printer has arrived: Good that it's 100% tested, but does that mean that it's now empty? I'm reminded of a Monty Python (I think) sketch from about 1972, taking off the fuel economy TV advertisements of the time ( how far can I drive with 1 gallon of petrol? ). In this case, the car carried on for 110,000 miles. Great enthusiasm on the part of the petrol company, but the driver said But look at my car!
FreeBSD code of conduct
Recently the current FreeBSD core team announced a (new?) code of conduct. On the one hand, it's good to make it clear that people are expected to behave, and the wording is mildly amusing: We do not believe anyone should be treated any differently based on who they are, where they are from, where their ancestors were from, what they look like, what gender they identify as, who they choose to sleep with, how old they are, their physical capabilities or what sort of religious beliefs they may hold.
Tidying the garage
Continued working on the garage in Kleins Road today, and got close to finishing it. At least we have the skip full, so the immediate pressure is off. It's still immensely painful throwing all this stuff out. I salvaged the Tandem LXN some time back, but I still have a Microvax II, a MIPS-2000 and a Control Data Cyber 910 (really a rebadged SGI IRIS). Here are the first two: As computers, any smart phone would run rings round them.
Web browsing with FreeBSD
Since upgrading her system, Yvonne has been complaining that Facebook videos don't work. Finally they've ventured to say that the flash plugin needed upgrading. It was wrong, of course: none was installed. OK, we've been through that before. But now we have PKGng to do it all for us. Simply: === root@lagoon (/dev/pts/2) ~ 2 -> pkg search flash dummyflash-1.0_5 ems-flasher-0.03_3 flash-0.9.5 flasher-1.3 flashrom-0.9.7_2 get_flash_videos-1.24.20120610 kipi-plugin-flashexport-4.2.0 py27-WebFlash-0.1a9_1 vrflash-0.20 xpi-flashblock-1.5.18 xpi-flashgot-1.3.7 Which of those is the flash plugin? None of them! For some reason, pkg doesn't supply it, and you have to install it the old way, from the Ports Collection.
Understanding DxO bugs
House photo day today, and lots of photos to process. One of them had an error while reading it in from the camera (why does this happen so often?) : only 2 MB of 18 MB got read. Not surprisingly, DxO Optics Pro complained. But I couldn't get it to forget, even after reading the correct image again. Finally something persuaded itmaybe it was just a timeout. And when I started processing, I got the message: Huh? Nothing obvious in the directory. Let it run, and at the end found: But there were only 69 images!
Avoid BigPond mail!
I've had several mail messages bounce recently, with messages like: <[email protected]>: host extmail.bigpond.com[61.9.168.122] said: 552 5.2.0 qWBp1q02u1sUVRc01WBr8n Suspected spam message rejected. IB704 (in reply to end of DATA command) Why suspected spam? I've seen this before: their mail filters are so stupid that they don't recognize digital signatures when they see them. Their customers are typical non-technical, so they don't even give them the chance to choose for themselves. What advantage is the service? They would be much better off using gmail. More rants here.
eBay: your postage charges or ours?
My camera is sold again, for the third time, this time to a legitimate buyer in Australia. But he didn't pay immediately, so I decided to send him an invoice. And that offered only some express option for about $27. I had offered standard shipping, which eBay calculated at $16.20. Yes, I could change the shipping option, but it didn't get applied. Went through the maze of twisty little menus and found another page, print postage label , which also offered a comparison of postage charges. But they didn't match the Australia Post prices. Some were higher, some were lower. And then I found an indication that the buyer had specified express shipping.
Copying sparse files
I made the probably incorrect decision to copy my /home file system across the net, using a combination of tar to move large quantities of data and rsync to fill in the gaps. Speed was not a significant issue with tarI got up to 50 MB/sbut it was an issue with rsync, where speeds were closer to 3 MB/s. But it seems that rsync filled in the gaps too well: this morning I came in and found that the copied file system was 20% larger than the original. How could that happen? I have a number of files that are being loaded at a trickle by the BitTorrent protocol, which copies blocks at random.
Default UFS parameters
Every time I create a new UFS file system, I go through lots of RTFM. What are the optimal parameters? UFS is now over 30 years old. When it was written, a big disk was 300 MB in size. Now a small disk is about 1 TB. But the default inode count bases on the assumption that the average file is 4 fragmentsin this case, 16 kB. And there are these two parameters which seem to duplicate each other: -g avgfilesize specifies the average file size.
System upgrade: success
I've been meaning to upgrade our main systems for a year and a half. In that time I've maintained a development system, stable, that has been getting closer to its name as time went on. Today I finally finished preparing the new disk for lagoon, Yvonne's system. The steps were: Create a new disk on stable with five partitions: boot, two root file systems (each 40 GB in size), swap, and the rest as the /home file system.
More upgrade woes
I've been dragging my heelsagainwith updating Yvonne's computer, but it has to be done. I now have a disk I can put in there, containing a not quite up to date version of her /home file system, but it needs a system on it. Problem: the partition with the system I want to copy is on stable, which only has connections for one disk. I've been building the other disk images on swamp, but I can't easily copy partition contents from one system to another. OK, I have a SATA to USB adapterin fact, the one that came with the disk.
More Bluetooth fun
Try as I might, I can't adjust the volume of either of my Bluetooth headsets when connected to my Telstra 12850 phone. There are volume controls both on the phone and on the headsets, but they seem to be disabled when connected. And apart from that, the cheaper headset (BH-20) powers down when charging. Isn't modern technology wonderful? ACM only downloads articles once.
Another dying disk
Into the office this morning to find some admin mails with less pleasant content: (ada2:ahcich2:0:0:0): READ_FPDMA_QUEUED. ACB: 60 00 e2 9e d8 40 e6 00 00 01 00 00 (ada2:ahcich2:0:0:0): CAM status: ATA Status Error (ada2:ahcich2:0:0:0): ATA status: 41 (DRDY ERR), error: 40 (UNC ) (ada2:ahcich2:0:0:0): RES: 41 40 f0 9e d8 00 e6 00 00 00 01 (ada2:ahcich2:0:0:0): Error 5, Retries exhausted g_vfs_done():ada2p1[READ(offset=1982953521152, length=131072)]error = 5 What's that? It's the disk with eureka's /home file system, about the worst thing that could go wrong. The only bright side is that it seems to be confined to a few sectors with information that isn't that important: it can easily be downloaded again.
Bluetooth headsets: solved?
Yvonne back from town today with a surprisingly expensive Bluetooth headset from ALDI. I already have one headset, but I couldn't get it to pair with my new telephone. Tried it with the new one: power on, search. Nothing. RTFM time. Ah, obvious: ensure that the headset is powered off. Hold down the power button for 3 whole seconds. The unit powers on and says so in this grating American female voice that seems so popular with this kind of device. And the well-hidden LED flashes blue, once, and then red at about 1 second intervals. But wait, we're not done.
Replacing Yvonne's disk
The 1 TB disk that Chris Bahlo brought back last night was the cheapest I could find, but it's not what I would typically associate with cheap disks: 2½", in an external case with USB 3 connection. Can I use that as a system disk? In principle it should work, so I built a file system on it and tried it out. Mess with BIOS to find how it wanted me to set the boot order, and off it wentat a snail's pace. The twirling baton reminded me of CD-ROM boot; even DVD boots are faster. But it loaded the kernel, and then tried to mount the root file system.
Disk crash, again
One thing that I didn't expect while installing Yvonne's office furniture was a disk crash on her system lagoon. The system came up again, but with lots of disk errors (which for some reason once again manifested themselves as Out of inodes ). I've had this before, but managed to get it to go away by connecting the disk to a different controller, and thought so little about it that I didn't even bother to mention it. Today it wouldn't go away: the disk is toast. Why didn't I buy a new disk when it happened last time? Managed to resurrect an older incarnation of lagoon and restore her personal files, so she can work again.
Bluteooth pain
Some weeks ago I bought a new phone, specifically because of its Bluetooth connectivity. Problem: I had mislaid my Bluetooth headset. Today I found it, charged it, and tried to pair. Nothing. Tried with my Android tablet. No problem. I've heard of issues pairing with Bluetooth, but it's particularly difficult to debug when both devices are so primitive. Hopefully I'll find a different headset that works with the phone. ACM only downloads articles once.
eBay fraud, helped by toy mail
On Wednesday I sold my camera again. But the new buyer still hasn't paid for it. Sent him a couple of invoices, and got a familiar looking message, here nicely formatted by Gmail: Account restored? I've seen that before. And somehow the headers are so minimal that I didn't look at them. On a real MUA they look more interesting (trimmed here, of course): From [email protected] Sun Jun 21 16:05:07 2015 ... Received: from mail-wi0-f171.google.com (mail-wi0-f171.google.com [209.85.212.171]) by www.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 49AB91B72848 for <[email protected]>; Sun, 21 Jun 2015 06:00:34 +0000 (UTC) Received: by wicgi11 with SMTP id gi11so48713899wic.0 for <[email protected]>; Sat, 20 Jun 2015 23:00:32 -0700 (PDT) X-Google-DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; ...
LED brightness revisited
It's been nearly a month since I compared the brightness of a number of different lighting sources. Now all we have is (mainly) LED and fluoro globes. But it's clear that LED is taking over. This weekend ALDI had LEDs on special again, so I got a few more. They're all rated at 880 Lumen/10 W. Yesterday I had put one in an old reading lamp in replacement for the fluoro lamp that was in there. Big difference; the old one is probably one of the old IKEA lamps that I had already found so dim. Today I wanted to replace the lamps in the pantry, which also seemed dim.
Understanding the DxO problem
My response from DxO support today wasn't very helpful: he had closed the ticket, and no longer understood what the problem was. Still, weekend, so time to describe things. But first an experiment: try the conversion with the standard conversion settings. And how about that, it worked! Back to my custom settings, and once again it didn't work. But the dimensions were also not the same as they had been before: the images with the different sizes (now clearly 2 pixels higher than the others) were different. OK, we can send in the custom settings. I wonder if they'll fix it.
DxO problem resolution
Got a reply to my three tickets for DxO Optics Pro today. Two of them were closed! The only one left open was the can't install update one. Suggested resolution: remove the old version completely from my system, then download a specific file and try to install it. And if it doesn't work? I have no photo processing software any more. Tried the download and installed without first removing the old version; fortunately it worked. But the other two problems are still there. And of course the ticket with the sample files has been closed. I hope they can still access them.
DxO pain
I've taken a macro focus stack of a eucalyptus flower. First step in merging the images is align_image_stack. But the result wasn't quite what I expected: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/14) ~/Photos/20150616 71 -> align_image_stack -m -a FOO C/Eucalyptus-flower-* Assertion failed: (nextImgInfo.size() == firstImgInfo.size()), function main2, file /src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/graphics/hugin/work/hugin-2012.0.0/src/tools/align_image_stack.cpp, line 569. Abort trap: 6 (core dumped) Further investigation showed that the images really differed in size: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/14) ~/Photos/20150616 72 -> identify orig/*jpg orig/P6161378.jpg JPEG 4608x3456 4608x3456+0+0 8-bit DirectClass 3.397MB 0.000u 0:00.000 orig/P6161379.jpg[1] JPEG 4608x3458 4608x3458+0+0 8-bit DirectClass 3.452MB 0.000u 0:00.000 (etc) Another bug in DxO Optics Pro !
vigra problems, Yet Again
I maintain the FreeBSD port of enblend, not the easiest port to maintain. Recently, after an update to the dependent port vigra, the configuration failed: checking for Vigra import/export-library... no configure: error: libvigraimpex is required to compile Enblend. ===> Script "configure" failed unexpectedly. Huh? The vigra had been installed. The real information was in the log file: configure:5539: checking for Vigra import/export-library configure:5553: c++ -o conftest -O2 -pipe -fstack-protector -fno-strict-aliasing -Wno-c++11-extensions -I/usr/local/include -fstack-protector conftest.cpp -lvigraimpex -llcms2 -ltiff -lpng -ljpeg -lz -lgsl -lgslcblas -lm -L/usr/local/lib -lboost_system >&5 /usr/local/lib/libvigraimpex.so: undefined reference to `std::__1::basic_ios<char, std::__1::char_traits<char> >::widen(char) const' c++: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation) So it was just a simple test program intended to detect whether vigra was installed, and the config ...
Hardware problems in the Good Old Days
There's a fair amount of activity on the Unix Heritage Society mailing lists at the moment. I've been able to get rid of my old 4.4BSD and X manuals several times over. And somebody posted this link to an article by Brian Kernighan about the woes that he, Joe Condon and Ken Thompson had with a digital phototypesetter 35 years ago. The original paper makes good reading, especially since it shows how things in the Good Old Days weren't always as good as we recall. In passing, it's also interesting to see that they referred to Ken as KLT in those days.
eBay debugging
My support request to eBay, sent on Sunday, has timed out. Fought my way through their help system, which doesn't give me the opportunity to say what my problem is ( if we can't anticipate your problem, it doesn't exist ), so said that I needed help with first-time listing. And for that they were prepared to call me back (which they don't do for just any problem). Got a call back fairly soon, and spoke to Mark, who told me what I already suspected: that it was related to the fact that my account was registered in the USA. It seems that Australian accounts have only been in existence for about 4 years, and nobody thought to notify existing customers that they should change their registration.
Selling on eBay, day 4
eBay selling never ceases to amaze me. Now I've sold my camera again with Buy it now , this time to somebody across the river from Mildura. But I also received three identical messages (modulo formatting) from Howard Johnson , the first buyer, saying that eBay had messed up, but things were alright now, and I should have received a message from them. Looking in my eBay messages, there was nothing. But then I saw: 2324 15-06-2015 eBay Restored (2166) Re: Restoration Of The eBay Auction Listing Purchase The text went something like this: eBay International AG sent this message to you.Your registered name is included to show this message originated from eBay.
Selling on eBay, day 3
Into the office this morning expecting to hear from the buyer of my camera. Instead I had a message from eBay: We had to cancel bids and purchases on the following item(s) for the buyer, , because they were made without the account owner's permission: 271901200336 - Olympus E-30 12 MP digital SLR body Please note that we're working with the account owner to prevent any additional unauthorized activity. Curiouser and curiouser. My investigation yesterday suggested that it was kosher.
Australia Post helps again
So contrary to expectations, I sold my camera internationally. How do I calculate postage to the USA? Australia Post has a handy calculator which gives you an estimated price for postage. The easiest way to find it is from Google. If you go to http://auspost.com.au/ and run the cursor over the menu item Parcels & mail, you'll see a large choice: Unfortunately, none of the items in the section Sending overseas tell you what it costs. For that you have to go to the bottom of the next column, Postage calculator.
Selling on eBay: the pain
It's been over a year since I tried to sell my Olympus E-30. Despite contacting eBay's help centre, I failed: You can't sell internationally at this time . That can't be typical. Thousands people with less computer skills than I sell on eBay every day. What is it? My aura? My computer environment? The latter (old FreeBSD with out-of-date browsers) seems to be a possibility. But now that I have an up-to-date system, it's high time that I tried again. And sure enough, I didn't run into most of the problems that I had last year. But the big one remained: You can't sell internationally at this time. It's not a browser or system issue: I tried four different browsers on three different systems, including Microsoft.
OED returns
Call from Andrew at the State Library of Victoria this morning to tell me that the Oxford English Dictionary was back online. I had already discovered that, but he also told me that the outage had apparently affected all the world's libraries. It's amazing that I was the first to report it to two important Australian libraries (and possibly the first at all, since most libraries in the world were closed at the time). ACM only downloads articles once.
ACMA endorses Microsoft
Andy Snow pointed me at this page from the ACMA. It contained this markup: More information will be available at <a href="file:///C:/Users/shirca/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.Outlook/6CSKETL4/www.ag.gov.au/dataretention">www.ag.gov.au/dataretention</a> soon. Doesn't that make you feel that people know what they're doing? I put in a comment, which they chose not to publish, but they did fix the link. ACM only downloads articles once.
OED offline!
I put a typo in my diary yesterday: instead of too leet I wrote to leet , and of course somebody (Peter Jeremy) caught it. But what's the chance that to leet is a known English word? Off to look at the Oxford English Dictionary, not for the first time today. I have access as part of my membership of the State Library of Victoria, but it wouldn't accept the login. Called up SLV, where nothing was known of the problem, but they looked into it and discovered that yes, they had the same problem. We confirmed that I was still in the SLV domain (specifically http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.slv.vic.gov.au/), but it didn't show the SLV logo at the bottom.
ATA configuration for Australia, continued
My ATA is still not generating correct ring tones ( cadences , apparently). MyNetFone support is trying to be helpful with all sorts of unlikely suggestions, such as changing the dial plan. But there's a section in the Regional tab: Distinctive Ring/CWT Pattern Names . What does that mean? Potentially it could be related, and names like Bellcore-r1 suggest that they're currently American. So off to do some more searching. This page seems to relate to Australia, and potentially it has other useful settings, but it doesn't mention this section. This page at least explains the syntax of the entries. But this (PDF) document contains specifications.
Fighting spam with gmail
I've been running my own mail system for decades now, since March 1992 at the latest. I dedicated two chapters of The Complete FreeBSD to the topic, and I've rather looked down my nose at what the industry has come up with. But times change. Keeping track of spam, and avoiding it, is a serious and time-consuming business. Big commercial providers have the resources to do it, but I don't, and it seems that tools like SpamAssassin no longer work well enough. So how about filtering my mail through gmail? I receive my mail on the external server as before, but instead of downloading it directly from there, I can send it on to Gmail and download it from there.
AusPost helps change address
Part of moving house involved setting up a (snail) mail redirection service to the new house. Today I received written confirmation and the offer to inform a number of companies with whom I do business about the change of address. I could either fill out a paper form, or do it online at the unlikely address auspost.com.au/redirect mail. I didn't trust that, and found a completely different address via Google, but it seems that they really do have a page with such a silly address. So what do I need to fill it out? I have a reference number, which should be enough, but no, I needed to create an account with AusPost.
Ports upgrade, yet again
Now that my office is relatively tidy, it's time to finally upgrade eureka, my main system. That is staged via stable, which has been tracking the FreeBSD STABLE branch for over a year now. Bringing the base system up to date was no problem, modulo a panic on startup: panic: ncpus is 0 with non-zero map. That proved to be due to a mismatch between the kernel and the VirtualBox module. Arguably it should refuse to load; something to look at, maybe. Updating ports is still an adventure. Today I got: upgrade rule: upgrade local libreoffice-4.3.6_1 to remote libreoffice-4.3.7 cannot install package libreoffice, remove it from request?
Programming? Or just coding?
One thing about the parliamentary fiasco about teaching coding wasn't subject to disagreement: the term itself. Clearly they're talking about programming, but that's an old-fashioned and maybe slightly scary term. So now they separate the coding step from the much more important design step. But that's not their fault: in June 2013 the OED added a draft update to the word Coding: intr. Computing. To write or edit the code of a computer program. Cf. programme v. 5b. Somehow I don't like the word. It suggests hacking away without any thought.
Coding : not kid's stuff
The current Australian government would be good for many laughs if it weren't such a serious matter. Today's was from Tony Abbott, who, in response to a question from Bill Shorten, claimed that coding was not appropriate Let's just understand exactly what the Leader of the Opposition has asked, the Prime Minister said. He said that he wants primary school kids to be taught coding so they can get the jobs of the future. Does he want to send them all out to work at the age of 11? Is that what he wants to do?
rsync failures gone?
For some time I've been having problems with copying files to the external web server with rsync: at random, initial authentication fails: +++ rsync -lKzavP --delete-after --copy-unsafe-links --exclude=weather /home/grog/public_html/ www:www.lemis.com/grog ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [sender] rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(605) [sender=3.0.9] That's the only time there's an issue: if I get beyond the initial exchange, it always works. I've puzzled over it for a long time, and in the end I changed my scripts to retry the error.
www off the net
Into the office this morning to discover that my IRC session had closed unexpectedly. OK, that happens for a number of reasons. Tried to restart and got a can't connect error. What, was I off the net? No, it quickly became apparent that www.lemis.com was off the net. How do I fix that? I have some backdoor to access the system console (/dev/ttyv0), but I've used it so seldom that I had to look it up. And sure enough, the machine was upbut had only been so for 2 hours! And I couldn't access it because I didn't have a default route.
eBay: action
I clearly made the wrong choice of seller for the 4 TB disk that I ordered over two weeks ago. She had promised to send it by express post, which usually corresponds to overnight, but by the end of last week it still hadn't arrived. In the meantime I found my backup disks, so I didn't really need it, so I contacted her and asked for money back. eBay gave her until today to respond. She didn't, so I asked eBay to close the case. Based on my previous experience, I wasn't holding my breath, but in fact I got a refund in under an hour.
eBay and the Turing test
A couple of days ago I received an eBay item in damaged condition. Contacted seller, who offered to refund the money. Simple, right? So I tried to respond. But how? There's no Reply button! Why not? I tried Forward , but that just sent me a copy of the message to my real mail. Browser problem? Seems unlikely, but then eBay has some really leet programmers. Tried other browsers. Same thing. Help? When is eBay help helpful? And of course, it's just designed to answer FAQs, and this, it seems, wasn't one. But then there's the possibility of telephone contact. With 10 minutes wait.
Measuring light globe brightness
I've already tried some measurements of relative light output of various globes, but only using my camera exposre meter, which has a resolution of 0.1 EV, or about 7%. I have a better tool for this job: a light meter with 3.5 digit resolution. In the meantime I also have more globes, so today I tried a number of measurements. Here the raw data: Globe Type W Lumen Lux IKEA ...
VoIP ring tones
We still haven't resolved the issues with VoIP ring tones. Today I got a call from Donu from MyNetFone, who went through the whole thing Yet Again, starting with confirming that the other two people didn't report the problem correctly. She had her problems too: for her, the American ring tone was correct. More to the point, though, where is it coming from? The fact that normal calls ring correctly suggests that it's MyNetFone's problem. But Donu came up with one issue: which codec? And sure enough, there was a difference. Connections to the outside world used G.729a, while the internal connections used G.711a.
Another power failure!
I had hoped to be completely free of power failures on moving to Stones Road, but it hasn't started well. Today we had a failure of a completely novel kind: CJ connected an extension cord to a power point in the shed, and for some inexplicable reason turned the main UPS output switch off and on again. Bang! Was I happy, especially when eureka didn't detect its monitors the first time round. Fortunately it did after I had power cycled it. ACM only downloads articles once.
VoIP strangenesses
Call on the phone today. I answered it, and was immediately disconnected. That happened three times. But then I saw the calling number: CJ Ellis. So I called him back and discovered that he had been confused by the ringing tone. Tried calling from the other line. An American (single) ring tone, not the Australian (double) tone. Why did that happen? Called up MynEtfOne and spoke to Epi (that's how he spelt it), who took me through the typical rigmarole of telling me that it wasn't so, and that I shouldn't be calling the internal number (starting with 09), because that wouldn't work and I wouldn't get a connection.
More NBN outages
No less than three short network outages today, all in very quick succession: Start time End time Duration Badness from to (seconds) 1432086570 1432086605 35 0.012 # 20 May 2015 11:49:30 20 May 2015 11:50:05 1432086867 1432086913 46 13.740 # 20 May 2015 11:54:27 20 May 2015 11:55:13 1432087675 1432087689 14 4.724 # 20 May 2015 12:07:55 20 May 2015 12:08:09 What caused that?
Faster networking
The National Broadband Network is planning a new speed rating for fixed wireless: 50 Mb/s down, 20 Mb/s up, best effort. We're getting a trial at no additional cost. Yesterday, before the transition, I tested my speed for the first time ever since moving to Aussie Broadband. It didn't look bad: nominal 25/5, actual 23.7/4.9. You can't complain about that. Today I tried again, and got 40 Mb/s down, but only 4.97 Mb/s up. OK, it's best effort , but I'd expect a small increase in the upstream bandwidth. Still, it's early days yet. ACM only downloads articles once.
No toilet paper
We've gradually unpacked most things except for a large proportion of the books. Today we needed toilet paper. OK, we know where that is: it's marked on the carton. Opened it up. No toilet paper. Just the backup disks that I've been missing for the last 9 days! It makes sense: I had not written anything on the carton because it was to come out immediately at the other end. And it was an old carton, so it already had the description on it from 8 years ago. Thank God for that! The whole matter was seriously getting me down, and it took several hours for the relief to set in.
Spammers: adding insult to injury
While looking through spam headers today, found this: Received: from mx1.lemis.com (webxc17s05.ad.aruba.it [62.149.141.197]) Apart from being an abuse of my domain name, does this actually make things any easier for them? Clearly my Postfix configuration doesn't catch it, but it should do so, so there's no advantage to the spammer to do this. It looks as if they're just giving me the finger. ACM only downloads articles once.
A new phone
We have to leave the old Binatone answering machine in Kleins Road for the moment, so that it can give people the new number. The phones are pretty much worn out anywaythe displays are all missing segmentsso it's finally time for a set of new portable phones. I want one that is compatible with a Bluetooth headset. There are plenty of phones that offer Bluetooth functionality, but almost all of them seem to pair to mobile phones, something that seems of limited utilitywhy exchange one handset for another? After much searching, found that a number of Telstra portable phones have this feature.
Spam explosion
Is it just me, or has there been an explosion of spam lately? I suppose part of the issue is my old, worn-out tools, but although I reject a lot of spam before it gets near the server, and filter more out before it hits my inbox, I'm finding more serious spam, advertising dubious products. Things have changed: it seems that everybody who wanted a penis enlargement now has it, so that kind of spam has declined, but I'm bombarded with beautiful garage floors, medical miracles, walk-in bathtubs, lotto wins, even bulk mail delivery. One day I might get round to installing more up-to-date spam rejection software, but will it help?
More unpacking
Another day spent mainly unpacking things. This loss of my backup disks really hurts. Yvonne went shopping as usual on a Wednesday, and came back with a 2 TB disk for my normal backups, complete with useless backup software. But it's software, so before blowing it away, I tried to back up the backup software from the backup disk. I wasn't completely successful: somehow all the Microsoft copy programs don't do what I want. In particular XCOPYnow, it seems, obsoletedidn't copy subdirectories when I asked it to. In the end I ended up with this: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/5) /home/grog 26 -> l -R /src/Seagate-backup-software/ total 281 -rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 131,685,492 11 Apr 2014 Seagate Dashboard Installer.dmg -rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 159,169,664 1 May 2014 Seagate Dashboard Installer.exe -rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 308 3 Sep 2014 SerialNumber.xml ...
LED and fluoro lights compared
I've already puzzled about the difference in brightness between my 700 lumen fluorescent globes and the 800 lumen LED globes: the latter seem nearly double as bright than the former. Today I finally got out a light meter and measured them. The existing fluoro globes gave a reading of EV 5.5, and the LED globes gave a reading of 6.0 under the same conditions. Both readings were consistent. Half an EV is 2, close enough to 1.4 for this level of accuracy. So if the LEDs are 800 lumens, the fluoros can't be more than 570 lumens. Another return in the offing.
SBS reception quality
In general our TV reception quality is much better than it used to be, but I've still had issues with SBS. Another look today. The dtv_multiplex table looked interesting: mysql> select mplexid, transportid, frequency from dtv_multiplex order by frequency; +---------+-------------+-----------+ | mplexid | transportid | frequency | +---------+-------------+-----------+ | 4 | 880 | 571625000 | | 3 | 563 | 578500000 | | 5 | 2461 | 585500000 | | 1 | 12922 | 592500000 | | 2 | 2050 | 599500000 | +---------+-------------+-----------+ That's exactly as it was last October.
Unpacking my office
I hadn't really intended to unpack all my old books yet, since there are more pressing things to do. But one of those was to find my backup disks, and there was no obvious place left, so I unpacked everything. What a lot of old rubbish! In particular, a lot of O'Reilly books that I picked up in Sebastopol in December 1996, mainly because they were free. I've never looked at some of them, but in Computer Security Basics, referring to the Morris worm, I read: ... the Internet, a government-funded network ... Clearly our perspective (and the facts) have changed significantly since then.
Reporting accuracy, Facebook style
We had 18.2 mm rain overnight, quite a bit for round here. Our water tanks are full. In the afternoon I found a post on Facebook: Does anybody have a rain gauge reading for past 24 hours? Several useful replies, none with sub-millimetre resolution, but suggesting that further south in the middle of Dereel the rainfall was between 21 and 25 mm. But which one got a like ? We have had a lot of rain, during the night it was quite heavy and this morning Now doesn't that say a lot to people who live here?
Acclimatization
Another night in the new house, a little more restful than the previous. The cats are still unhappy, and I've established what the motor noise is: a freezer in the laundry, also just a couple of metres from my head. We may need to move that. Spent the day installing more of the electronics infrastructure. My main Ethernet switch, a D-Link DGS-1008D, is flaky: it kept going into what looked like a self-test sequence with alternately all Link LEDs and then the speed LED for port 8 lighting, something that is, of course, not mentioned in the manual.
Comparing LED and fluoro globes
I've already puzzled about the difference in light output between fluorescent and LED light globes. Now I have started replacing the fluoros with LED, I'm even more puzzled. Yes, the LEDs are brighter (rated at 800 instead of 700 lumens), but they seem to be nearly double the brightness. Time to do some light measurements. ACM only downloads articles once.
Bringing up the network
For the first time we have a gigabit network to almost every room in the house, including the shed. Only the laundry is missing. We haven't provided for a connection in the pantry, but that's where the central switch is, so effectively we have a network there too: Put lagoon, Yvonne's computer in with relatively little difficulty, though it's clear that the name is no longer appropriate. Also reinstalled dischord, the Microsoft box I use for photo processing. Somehow this looks wrong: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/6) ~/Photos/20150507 3 -> ruptime dischord up 4+07:53, 0 users, load 0.99, 0.19, 0.06 eureka up ...
Reviving eureka
I over to the new house to bring up eureka. I hadn't expected a smooth ride, and I was right. Even cabling things up is non-trivial with a four monitor system. but when I finally did it with as little mess as possible, I had firewall hell again. The biggest issue was the change of the gateway address, but after everything I did, I still can't ping any local interface apart from lo0. And for obviously completely unrelated reasons, the mouse became much more sensitive. All this is in unchanged configuration files. Why does that happen? On a more positive note, when connecting monitor 4 (the one connected by HDMI), it was recognized immediately.
Moving house, day 2
The day started with improvised breakfast: The red saucer dates from early 1968, when Kaufhof opened its first store in Hamburg, in the Mönckebergstraße. Apart from a second saucer, all has broken, and the saucers are chipped, and they're just there because I hate to throw anything out. The mug is some amazingly poor quality gift from some hotel in Kuala Lumpur, only about 20 years ago. The movers had promised to be here earlier today, and to a certain extent they were.
Understanding computers
What's an appropriate caption to this one? I'd go for Don't give up, Joe, newcomers always have difficulties learning to use computers. You'll make it . ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Recovering monitor 4
So was the failure of monitor 4 due to the fact that it wasn't powered on when I booted eureka? The only way to find out was toshudderreboot. Did that, and for some reason the system decided that one of the disks needed an hour-long fsck. Why? It was a demonstrably clean shutdown. In any case, after it came back up, sure enough, monitor 4 functioned normally. I wonder if there's a way to re-probe the connection without having to reboot. ACM only downloads articles once.
Powercor: going-away present
Power failure at 17:50 this evening. Thank God that will soon be a thing of the past. Saturday is also our good food evening, so the failure was at the worst possible time. Still, we have a generator, so why not keep things running? Dragged it out, fired it up, pulled a cable the length of the house to my computer UPS, and by the time I had done it the generator had stopped again. That's the first time ever. Further investigation showed that they last person (one of the builders) who used the generator hadn't turned off the petrol tap, so I had instead.
Lighting in the 21st century
Once upon a time electric lighting was simple: you bought a globe, either bayonet or Edison screw, and you chose the wattage to match the amount of light you wanted. But that's so 20th century. In the last couple of weeks we have bought lamps with three different technologies, none of them traditional incandescent, and it seems that even the equivalences we have come to take for granted are incorrect. And what do the manufacturers do? They relate them all to obsolete incandescent wattages. And two weeks ago I established that 11 W fluorescent globes ( equivalent to 60 W ) produce 700 lumen, whereas a traditional 60 W incandescent globe produces about 960 lumens.
Story maps
The course Maps and the Geospatial Revolution includes an assignment: make a story map. What's that? The name suggests a number of possibilities, but in fact it's relatively constrainedArcGIS has a framework for creating them. It's an interesting idea, but digging deeper I find that I can't do quite what I want with them (sound familiar?) . After some consideration, I decided to document a journey by car that I started 48 years ago, nominally from Singapore to London. I had a number of problems: the annotations for the journey are multimedia (in other words, photos or videos). I have photos, but not very many good ones.
Upgrading ports, again
I've been putting off my FreeBSD port upgrades for over a year now, but gradually my web browsers are getting so out of date that clever software refuses to run on them. So Yet Another attempt to get stable up to date. The OS upgrade ran without any problem, but once again pkg didn't do what I expected. After downloading a gigabyte of tarballs, I got: Fetching llvm35-3.5.2.txz... done Checking integrity... done (5 conflicting) pkg: Cannot solve problem using SAT solver: dependency rule: package akonadi(r) depends on: qt4-mysql-plugin(r)qt4-mysql-plugin(l) dependency rule: package akonadi(l) depends on: qt4-mysql-plugin(r)qt4-mysql-plugin(l) upgrade rule: upgrade local qt4-mysql-plugin-4.8.6 to remote qt4-mysql-plugin-4.8.6 cannot install package qt4-mysql-plugin, remove it from request?
CJ's computer
CJ Ellis along in the afternoon to pick up his computer, which I had rather reluctantly rid of resource-hungry anti-virus software. Demonstrated to him how much faster it was now. The Demonstration effect hit home: it was almost as slow as before, with the disk maxed out. What's causing that? I wish I understood Microsoft. He left the computer with me while I scratched my head over the issue. The Task Manager shows nothing obvious. How I wish I had nothing to do with Microsoft! ACM only downloads articles once.
Poor technology kills!
Interesting news item on the radio this morning: Privacy laws mean emails about patients [sic] medical history have to be encrypted, but only a few hospitals have the technology to do that Dr Levick said in one instance a patient died because their GP was not told about their blood thinning medication, which required daily monitoring. It's bad enough that the industry had dumbed down to Microsoft level, but surely they could find a way to encrypt their messages.
More Microsoft space experiences
CJ Ellis has a new monitor, one made in this century: an HP L1706 that he picked up for free on Freecycle. He brought it and his computer along this afternoon for me to perform any adjustments. There were few: change the text size, and that was about it. But his brother had installed lots of software on his machine for him, virus scanners, software updaters and who knows whatI don't. But it spent half an hour running some kind of scan (I think), and during that time the machine was almost completely non-responsive. I couldn't find any way to tell the thing to only run on request, so spent over an hour removing all this software.
Light globe equivalence
We've been using modern compact fluorescent lamps for about 10 years now, and gradually they're getting better. When we bought them today, we went with the conventional that an 11W flouro corresponds to 60 W conventional incandescent, and so on, though I recall seeing a chart which showed a non-linear relationship. And sure enough, there was a chart on the wall showing those relationships. But when I look at the packaging, what did I see? 11 W fluoro corresponds to 40 W incandescentfully S less output. And 18 W corresponds to 75 W. Why? I had already established that 11 W corresponds to 55 W, not 60, but now we're down to 40efficiency gain down from 80% to 72.5% or 76% respectively.
Polarization: generations meet
While in town, picked up my new prescription Polaroid sunglasses. Decades ago I wore (non-prescription) Polaroid sunglasses, but since then they seem to have become difficult to find. They work as well as ever, but I was in for a surprise: the LCD display on my GPS navigator is polarized at a 45° angle, making the display artificially dim. Time to investigate how other displays are polarized. ACM only downloads articles once.
Word order video
One of the Coursera courses I'm currently doing is Miracles of Human Language: An Introduction to Linguistics. Rather to my surprise, I discovered there was an assignment due on Monday, and it involves creating a video for YouTube. Find a native speaker of a language other than English, Basque, Mandarin Chinese, Abruzzese, Turkish, Tarifit Berber or Gungbe and get them to speak 16 sample sentences from which others will deduce the word order of the language. OK, where's my native speaker? English is my native language, so I can't do it myself. But there's Yvonne, who is French, so of course her native language is German, and I got her to record them for me: But getting there wasn't easy.
EPUB on Android
A few days ago i was offered some cheap photograpic books in EPUB format. My research suggested that it was worthwhile, so yesterday I bought them online and downloaded them, 500 MB at a snail's pace. Today they were finally there, and I unpacked the ZIP archive to find: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/31) ~/Documentation/Photography/Franzis 183 -> unzip -l ~/Downloads/20077-6-das-grosse_fotocommunity-e-book-paket.zip Archive: /home/grog/Downloads/20077-6-das-grosse_fotocommunity-e-book-paket.zip Length Date Time Name --------- ---------- ----- ---- 12492350 05-13-2013 16:07 4460-2_Digitale_Fotoschule_Panoramafotografie.pdf 68098180 12-21-2012 11:46 20022-6-Fotoschule_Reisefotografie.pdf 70629967 05-08-2013 13:01 20038-2_Beautyretusche_mit_Photoshop.pdf ... It's all in PDF!
Microsoft software update
One thing I have to admit about Microsoft is that the software updates go more smoothly than FreeBSD updates do. Another round today, and one of the optional updates was Skype. It's unlikely, but not impossible, that I'll use it, but it's also not much of an issue to install itI thought. The install hung: It took me some time to discover the tiny icon at the bottom of the screen: That was Skype, too shy to ask a question until I prodded it: ...
Working around the dead phone problem
Yesterday one of our cordless phones failed. It was clearly the base station, since the problem occurred with multiple handsets. But then it occurred to me: we needed four handsets, but the only way to do that was to buy two sets with two handsets each. So we had a spare base station which we hadn't been using. And sure enough, once I found the instructions, that worked. A little more time to investigate what to replace them with. ACM only downloads articles once.
Blocking unwanted ssh connections
The network traffic I observed a couple of days ago doesn't represent any security threat, but it's a lot of traffic. As I mentioned at the time, it's non-trivial to block it. Today I got a message from Harald Arnesen pointing me at sshguard. It does the work for you, firewalling repeat offenders. That sounds like an excellent idea when I look at the mail log on my external server: Apr 14 04:39:43 www postfix/smtpd[97364]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[46.29.73.42]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [46.29.73.42]; from=<> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<exchange.invstab.ru> Apr 14 04:39:43 www postfix/smtpd[97364]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[46.29.73.42]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [46.29.73.42]; from=<> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<exchange.invstab.ru> Apr 14 04:39:44 www postfix/smtpd[97434]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[213.171.53.91]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [213.171.53.91]; from=<> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP ...
Fake Ethernets
Not surprisingly, my network connection at the new property is on the same /24 as the one in the old property. Here the configuration on each system (look carefully at the system names, which are a little too close): === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/38) ~ 4 -> ifconfig xl0 xl0: flags=8943<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,PROMISC,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500 ether 00:50:da:cf:07:35 inet 180.150.4.128 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 180.150.4.255 media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX <full-duplex>) status: active === root@eucla (/dev/pts/1) ~ 10 -> ifconfig bfe0 bfe0: flags=8943<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,PROMISC,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500 ether 00:0b:db:98:eb:28 inet 192.109.197.145 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.109.197.255 media: Ethernet autoselect (100baseTX <full-duplex>) status: active The connection to the National Broadband Network is via Ethernet.
Another dead telephone
Call from somebody in the afternoon. Yvonne answered it, and the line went dead. Whoever it was (probably CJ) tried again. Same thing. A bit more trying showed that the (cordless) phone was doing it. Changed the phone with an old-fashioned POTS phone, and it works. OK, the phone was slated for replacement anyway, but I still had research to do about Bluetooth compatibility. This has forced my hand. ACM only downloads articles once.
Grog from the past
Mail from Sanjeev Gupta today, wanting to link on LinkedIn. I get an amazing number of link requests from people I don't know, but my memory isn't always accurate, so I ask people who want to link with me to remind me who they are. Almost nobody does. So far the only one has been Ahmad bin Mahmuddin in Kuala Lumpur, and now Sanjeev in Singapore, though I have no difficulty recalling him. He even sent a photo I haven't seen before, which I think must have been taken about 14 years ago: How times change.
Stones Road off the net
It's rather fun to be able to access the Stones Road house via the Internet. But when I tried today, there was no connection. Over to take a look, and discovered that the RCD for normal mains power had tripped. The UPS was stillbarelyholding out, but I had connected the laptop to an unprotected power point. Re-enabling the RCD worked, and for the rest of the day it continued that way. But why did we trip? The only load on the mains circuit is the UPS. Does it lose that much current? ACM only downloads articles once.
Networking in Stones Road
We've had a network connection in Stones Road for months. Now that we also have electricity, I can actually use it, at least to monitor the DHCP traffic. So I put that in place yesterday, and took a look today. The first thing that hit me was the traffic: Date Upload Download 14-04-2015 47.98 MB 30.91 MB Nearly 80 MB of traffic before 11 am! What's that? Another tcpdump showed: 10:41:58.819145 IP 216.253.237.222.46828 > 180-150-4-222.NBN.ballarat.aussiebb.net.ssh: Flags [P.]
Android space WYSIWYG
Yesterday's rant about Android included screen shots. I use AirDroid to download the files, since there seems to be no way to use NFS in Android. It presents a web server with lots of icons, tree-climbing, and truncated file names: in short, a real Android app: The only thing it does right is to sort the files in chronological order (probably because the date is encoded in the file name), but of course the distinction of the individual file names goes beyond the attention span of the display.
The legendary beard
Eleven years ago I sold my beard on eBay: The buyer was Christopher Yeoh, now sadly deceased. On the OzLabs mailing list, people were collecting memontos of Chris' life, and came up with a series of photos of him cutting Tridge's hair for him (which I can't currently show until I have permission). Also a recent photo of what happened to my beard: It seems that a legend has developed about the sanitary condition of the beard, probably from the disclaimer in the eBay auction: While the item is in clean condition and free of ...
More Android pain
I've been offered some cheap books in EPUB format, not something I've used before. How do I read them? Presumably the modern way is with a tablet or (shudder) a mobile phone. Is that even going to work for me? At the very least I should try things out before investing in even a small amount of money. Spent some time investigating what readers were available. Google have their own reader, so tried installing that. Choice of installation medium: Browser (inbuilt) or Chrome. I've had difficulties with Chromemissing functionality, which surprised me. So I chose Browser and was greeted with the message: What?
Map software with photos
One of the Coursera courses I'm doing is Maps and the Geospatial Revolution. I'm just getting in to it now; it's not quite the format of the normal Coursera course, and I'm still not convinced I like it. But it has shown some interesting stuff, including ArcGIS, which offers free interactive mapping services. Yes, Google Maps does that too, but this one looks like it could be much more flexible. In particular, it offers easy ways of adding images to maps. One of the exercises for the week including creating a sample map, starting with somewhere in the USA. I suspect I have created the only map connecting Bastrop, TX with Jerusalem (look for the green pin).
Batteries for cordless drills
One of the things that I could give to the Men's shed is any number of old cordless drills. They probably all work, but the batteries have died. Doug tells me that he can't find a replacement battery pack for under $90. That seemed excessive, so took apart one of the packs: The batteries are Nickel-Cadmium, 1.2 V, in this case 12 of them. The form factor is something I haven't seen before, Sub-C, and they're rated at only 1 Ah.
More network problems
I've been keeping records of DHCP traffic for weeks now. They all show the same thing: there's about a 10% chance that a DHCPREQUEST will get a reply. But with the exception of a 25 minute outage a couple of weeks ago, things still worked. All I'm doing is collecting lots of similar data. So today I pulled the plug. And in the evening, we were suddenly off the net. Why? Who knows? I was browsing the web at the time, so it became immediately apparent. Restarting dhclient got us back on the net. I should investigate the exact protocol, and whether I shouldn't modify dhclient to simply issue a DHCPDISCOVER after, say, 2 failed DHCPREQUESTs.
Moible phones for geriatrics
A quarter of a century ago I made two choices unusual at the time: I installed a computer with a 20" high-resolution display (1024×768), running Unix and X of course, while my colleagues used text-based Microsoft machines with 14" 640×480 displays. And I bought a mobile phone. I was one of the first people I know to use a mobile phone, and others considered me a little strange for it. How times have changed! Microsoft users have discovered (and destroyed) graphics, and everybody and his dog has a (smart) mobile phone. And I hardly use mobile phones any more. Still, I can't get by completely without one.
Nickel Zinc batteries: summary
I've been using Nickel-Zinc batteries for 3½ years, and I've been keeping records of charge voltages for over two years. Time to sum things up? Firstly, keeping these records is a pain. Clearly I didn't know what I was looking for when I started, but at any rate I now have a better understanding. What I have found is that a set of batteries seldom discharges evenly. Today, for example, the ring flash ran out of power. 3 batteries almost completely charged, the fourth had only round 1 V. On the face of it, that's a reason enough to throw away that battery.
We want our /24 back
Decades ago I was allocated a Class C network by unido, the University of Dortmund (this was before the opening up of the Internet and the advent of ISPs): inetnum: 192.109.197.0 - 192.109.197.255 descr: LEMIS Lehey Microcomputer Systems descr: D-W-6324 Feldatal descr: Germany changed: [email protected]-Dortmund.DE 19920521 changed: [email protected] 19950723 changed: [email protected] 19951010 changed: ripe-[email protected] 19990706 changed: ripe-[email protected] 20000225 changed: [email protected] 20030625 changed: [email protected] 20120524 changed: [email protected] 20140616 Today I got a message from Tranquil Hosting, who run the RootBSD server that is www.lemis.com.
Toner cartridges revisited
Last week I bought an after-market toner cartridge for my Brother HL-3170CDW laser printer, and established that it was only part of what I had expected: only half the unit, and 20% of the capacity. Complained about the former to the supplier, who sent a description of what to do: press the green button on the left, and the cartridge detaches from the drum. Press drum onto new cartridge, and you're away. And sure enough, it works fine. But what about the differences original and aftermarket cartridges? Checking again, I found that the instructions I had read were for my old HL-2700CN printerand they disagreed with themselves, claiming 10,000 pages in one place and 12,000 elsewhere.
Commodore diagnostics
To Ballarat Central Auto Electrics with the Commodore to see if they could find any diagnostic information from the ECU. Yes, indeed: two coils failed. And that will cost us round $700! Tony, the bloke who did the test, also has a VZ Commodore, and has just changed his coils: it seems to be a common problem with them. And it was with our old the VT Commodore. So why do they make it so difficult to change them, and why are they so expensive? And, of course, it means that my ELM327 clone is useless. What a waste of $5.99!
DPI's ugly head
Talking with Chris Bahlo this evening about the fun day she had had at work today. They have a new coworker, and she managed to pessimize a web site by putting in overly large images. How large? 300 dpi. What does that mean on a web page? Should it scale to the monitor resolution? No, it seems that people still can't get used to the fact that image resolutions are measured in pixels (these images were apparently 1200×900 or so, clearly too large). Admittedly pixel dimensions aren't ideal either, but what earthly use are dpi specifications? ACM only downloads articles once.
Diagnosing Yvonne's car problems
Another attempt with the ELM327 clone today to find out what's wrong with Yvonne's car. Once again it claimed that there was no error code stored. Tried to speak to Paul Sperber of Ballarat Automotive, but was blocked by his wife, who went in, discussed something with him, and said that they weren't interested in doing the work, and that I should go to Ballarat Central Auto Electrics. Called them, and eventually spoke to Wayne, who confirmed that it would be difficult to diagnose if the problem wasn't presenting itself, but that they'd try. Otherwise he suspects coils, which isn't out of the question, but I'd like some certainty before spending $600 on the off chance.
More GPS navigator fun
Today was the first time I used the new GPS navigator in the city. Of course it tried to take me through places that didn't exist, but the most surprising thing was what happened when I tried to find alternative ways from the city to Surrey Hills: it kept changing its mind, wanting to take me north of Victoria Street (probably correctly) and south of Victoria Street (very definitely wrong). And when we changed our minds to go to Springvale, Victoria instead, it tried to take me straight through the middle of town instead of the designated way to the freeway.
A new low in user interfaces
Parking at the Victoria market was made no easier by the parking meters. They're modern and electronic, of course, with a low-contrast, reflective LCD display: Today was overcast, so the display was marginally legible. On a sunny day I would have been facing into the sun, so things would have been much worse. Even so, to read the display you need either to be about 1.50 m tall or kneel down in front of it.
Cheap toner: the truth
As planned earlier this week, I bought some cheap toner for my laser printer. How do you install it? Easy, in principle. But there's a little problem. Here are the new cartridge on the top (still with protective cover) and the old one below: Half the cartridge is missing! Am I supposed to re-use the old one? If so, the least they could have done was to tell me how to do it. The other difference showed up when I read the printer instructions.
Y2K catches up
Last night's pepper steak required a little stock powder. We really don't use much, and the jars I have are long past their use-by date: It's interesting that they changed date format between the two jars. I had half expected them to have changed back, but it seems they haven't. The older jar has got so hard that I couldn't get anything out of it. I don't suppose it's too soon to throw it out. ACM only downloads articles once.
Understanding Google Plus
Some months ago, when I was complaining about Facebook, Peter Jeremy (a Google employee) suggested that I use Google Plus instead. I signed up, took a look, and found it confusing. It also didn't address the issue that I don't like the concept anyway. So I forgot about it again. Then today Peter was analysing the display of my web pages on mobile devices. I asked him for screen shots, and got the reply: <groggyhimself> Can you send me a screen shot? <peter> groggyhimself: I've shared them with you. <groggyhimself> ? <peter> groggyhimself: Look in Google+.
Still more network problems
I was out of the office most of the morning, but when I got back I found: Start time End time Duration Badness from to (seconds) 1426893625 1426895771 2146 0.005 # 21 March 2015 10:20:25 21 March 2015 10:56:11 1424453814 1424645964 192150 0.026 # 21 February 2015 04:36:54 23 February 2015 09:59:24 1425657732 1425657839 107 0.004 # 7 March 2015 03:02:12 7 March 2015 03:03:59 1426077275 1426077511 236 0.009 # 11 March 2015 23:34:35 11 March 2015 23:38:31 1426081952 1426083273 1321 0.811 # 12 March 2015 00:52:32 12 March 2015 01:14:33 1426083535 1426084719 1184 13.740 # 12 March 2015 01:18:55 12 March 2015 01:38:39 1426084979 1426085070 91 13.846 # 12 March 2015 01:42:59 12 March 2015 01:44:30 1426086004 1426086758 ...
Out of date, part 2
Mail from Google (really!) today: Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2015 18:29:15 -0700 (PDT) From: Google Webmaster Tools Team <wmx-[email protected]> Subject: Fix mobile usability issues found on http://www.lemis.com/ Google systems have tested 3,000 pages from your site and found that 100% of them have critical mobile usability errors. The errors on these 3,000 pages severely affect how mobile users are able to experience your website. These pages will not be seen as mobile-friendly by Google Search, and will therefore be displayed and ranked appropriately for smartphone users. What's that? There are lots of links, of course.
SpamAssassin: past use-by date?
I've been finding that SpamAssassin has flagged more and more legitimate mail as spam lately. The reason is always the same: 2.7 DNS_FROM_AHBL_RHSBL RBL: Envelope sender listed in dnsbl.ahbl.org Lately, though, I've noticed that even well-known senders are getting flagged like this. That's serious because I have set my maximum score to 3, so just about anything else will cause it to be classified as spam. It really hit home when my system classified local mail as spam. Clearly time to weaken the score. Went looking and found, in /usr/local/share/spamassassin/50_scores.cf: score DNS_FROM_AHBL_RHSBL 0 0.306 0 0.231 Huh?
Toner prices
The black toner for our Brother HL-3170CDW laser printer is running low. aI've had it for 8 months, so it was to be expected. Took a look on eBay and found the toner cartridge (TN-251) for $25.30, including free postage. While in town, dropped in at Officeworks. Yes, they had it in stockfor $129! That's ridiculous. OK, the cartridges on eBay are almost certainly replacements, but they have the chips, and there can't be that much difference in quality. The printer cost $249, so this single cartridge costs more than half the purchase price. A complete set of 4 would cost more than double the purchase price.
Microsoft error reporting
Earthworks invoice from Warwick Pitcher today. Needs to be scanned and sent to CVI. All went wellbut where was the image? Tried again, and again it didn't appear. This is Epson software under Microsoft. Had it decided to store the image somewhere else? Spent some time looking for the configuration menu which specifies where the document should go. Where is it? It proved to be this meaningless icon: Selected that and got another confusing menu: Only three choices of location: My Documents, My Pictures, or anything else.
More network investigations
More work on my network status page today, without making it really pretty. One thing of interest is the TCP speed plot, in blue: This shows the reciprocal of the time it takes to load a small document from the other end of the world. It's surprisingly constant. But for some reason the value increased round 10 March. Looking at the raw log data shows: 1425966865 0.70 # Tue 10 Mar 2015 16:54:26 EST 1425966926 0.71 # Tue 10 Mar 2015 16:55:27 EST 1425966987 0.72 # Tue 10 Mar 2015 16:56:28 EST 1425967049 0.71 # Tue 10 Mar 2015 16:57:29 EST 1425967110 0.55 # Tue 10 Mar 2015 16:58:30 EST 1425967171 0.57 # Tue 10 Mar 2015 16:59:32 EST 1425967232 0.55 # Tue 10 ...
Analysing yesterday's disaster
Network connectivity came back this morning at almost exactly midnight. I had traced the network since about 8:30 yesterday, but of course by the time I stopped it, we had about 200,000 packets and a 235 MB trace file. All that interested me was the time up to the restoration of service. How do I do that? With Edwin Groothuis' help discovered the wireshark export function. You can specify a packet range, in my case 1-8212. And sure enough, it saved a file with just those packets. Tried to read it back in again. The file "/home/grog/public_html/Day/20150313/offnet.trace" isn't a capture file in a format Wireshark understands.
Internode: Why PPPoE?
Time to change my ISP, I'm afraid. Whom should I choose? Internode has the best reputation. They offer a similar product as Aussie Broadband: 300 GB per month for $75 compared to 250 GB per month for $60. The price difference is real: I never use 250 GB, so the additional 50 GB from Internode are of no interest. Called them up and got the usual message, that I had a wait of between 5 and 9 minutes before I could speak to anybody. Accepted the offer of a call back when somebody was available. And the call back came almost immediately, followed by a 6 minute wait before I was connected to Alex.
NBN reliability: worse than satellite?
Yvonne dragged me out of bed this morning to tell me that we were off the net. It took me a while to understand, but in to the office, and sure enough, we had been off the net for hours. The usual thing: DHCPDISCOVER going out, no reply. Called up Aussie Broadband support, spoke to Kylie, who relatively quickly connected me to Jerom, who is (ahem!) 3rd level support. He confirmed that they were receiving the DHCPDISCOVER and replying correctly with a DHCPOFFER. But that reply never made it back here. Shades of last month? In any case, it's not acceptable. Got him to transfer me to Kevin, the manager, who told me that it was part of a more general outage, that the problem was within the National Broadband Network, with whom a ticket had been raised, and that hopefully things would soon come back to normal.
Touch screens and other obscenities
Yvonne's photos of the ride didn't come out quite as she had intended. Here's one of them:
Tektronix 555: Final photos?
Taking the photos of the Tektronix 555 oscilloscope has been surprisingly painful. But enough is enough. Tried again today with flash and the long telephoto lens, this time concentrating on the mainframe. Moving the lens further away also allowed me to put the flash units closer together, with good results. Here my five tries of the CA plug-in: The first was just with studio flash.
Telstra and bandwidth cost
On IRC today, Jürgen Lock pointed us at this comparison of network costs around the world. He's in Germany, but the take-home message, at least for me, was: Telstra .... charges some of the highest transit pricing in the world 20x the benchmark ($200/Mbps). So why hasn't the National Broadband Network changed that? I had thought that the geography was part of the problem, but the same article also says: Given that Australia is one large land mass with relatively concentrated population centers, it's difficult to justify the pricing based on anything other than Telstra's market power.
BigPond email: We don't need no steenking security
Sent a mail message to Gary Murray today. It didn't go through: <[email protected]>: host extmail.bigpond.com[61.9.168.122] said: 552 5.2.0 yrRW1p01Q1sUVRc01rRYpC Suspected spam message rejected. IB704 (in reply to end of DATA command) I've seen this before. BigPond is too stupid to distinguish digital signatures from spam. So they reject messages on the mere suspicion of spam. Is this in their users' interests? A good reason for any BigPond user to choose a competent mail service provider. I'm still amazed how incompetent everything to do with Telstra is.
Understanding NBN
Call today from Kevin, the support manager of Aussie Broadband, addressing last weekend's outage. He wasn't able to help; despite the claims on the web site, they really don't have any real support at weekends, at least not for residential customers. Apparently they do for business customers. Does that makes sense? A two day outage will annoy any VoIP user, whether business or residential. But Kevin promised to get somebody from the business team to contact me to talk about pricing. That's good, because they don't have anything about National Broadband Network for business customers on their web site. He also promised to bring it up at the next management meeting.
Understanding programming language syntax
Somebody posted this today: Amusing, yes. But it does beg the question about the use of the punctuation at the right. It's not until you run into weird bugs that you realize that they're on your side. One of the issues that (not only) I still have with Python ACM only downloads articles once.
Chasing the photo data corruption
A couple of days ago I discovered that there was a discrepancy between a photo file on my photo disk and on a backup disk. What was wrong? Today was time to make backups to the other disk, so clearly it was time to investigate before overwriting the good version. A good thing I did, too: most of the contents of the file on my primary disk was replaced by binary zeroes, exactly the scenario that I suggested a couple of days ago. === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/10) ~/Photos/20100717/orig 193 -> md5 P7178579*F MD5 (P7178579-archived.ORF) = 56fef8f95e9fdc9caad4c4fc8049feed MD5 (P7178579.ORF) = eae72bccd667956bedcfb5273de6dd69 === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/10) ~/Photos/20100717/orig 194 -> cmp P7178579*F P7178579-archived.ORF P7178579.ORF differ: char 6617089, line 31915 6617089 is not a number that immediately jumps out and grabs you.
Photo backup: complete!
As a result of the problems I had with photo backups recently, decided to make a backup using rsync's checksum feature. Normally it goes through directory trees and updates files with a different modification timestamp or EOF; that can be done from the inode and doesn't require accessing the file itself. But that clearly doesn't help if the file in the backup file is corrupt (contains a zero block, for example). The checksum feature creates and compares checksums of all files, which is at least an order of magnitude more work. And it shows. Here the summary information for my last two backups: Sun 22 Feb 2015 17:03:16 EST Disk 6 Sun 22 Feb 2015 17:13:26 EST Photo backup ended Wed 25 Feb 2015 16:46:21 EST Photo backup started Thu 26 Feb 2015 21:58:49 EST Photo backup ended ...
House construction waste
While looking round the house, found this, not far from the front door: It's a Cat6 cable, of course, one that I had left in the room that will become the office. Why did they throw it out? It looks OK, though. ACM only downloads articles once.
Getting back on the net
At 9:00 this morning we were still off the net, so called up Aussie Broadband support and spoke to John. Asked to be connected to Will or Ricky, the people I had spoken to on Friday. Will would not be in until the afternoon, and Ricky was on another call. I asked him to inform Ricky of the urgency of the matter and then connect me to company management. He didn't understand, and I had to repeat. Sorry, the whole company management had been at a fair over the weekend, and they had the day off. Technical support manager was on leave.
Out of inodes again!
My photo backup failed again today with an out of inodes message. I had that only a week ago, and it proved to be incorrect. How could it happen again? It has nothing to do with the disk: this is a different disk. And once again the message was incorrect: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/11) ~ 42 -> df -i /photobackup/ Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on /dev/da1p1 3,814,654 2,449,390 1,327,117 65% 814,196 1,352,586 38% /photobackup So I umounted it and remounted it, and this time got a console message: Feb 22 15:25:46 eureka kernel: WARNING: /photobackup was not properly dismounted How did that happen?
Barbecue at the O'Deas
Over to the O'Deas in Enfield this afternoon for a barbecue and to let the dogs run together: It's interesting to note how Leonid and Nikolai (¾ brothers) look so different, and Zhivago and Bindy (father and daughter) also look so different. On the other hand, Nikolai and Bindy look so similar that we sometimes mistake them for each other, despite the significant difference in size, and Zhivago and Leonid also bear a significant resemblance to each other.
Off the net!
Into the office this morning to discover that we had been off the net since 4:34. As always, Damn! No indication of any fault on the NTD. Had they decided to implement yesterday's change to a static IP address without telling me? Tried stopping dhcpd and setting the IP address manually. No go. Called up Aussie Broadband support and spoke to Aaron, who told me that he was only level 1 support, and that the level 2 people (including Will and Ricky, who had been looking at my DHCP issues) didn't work on weekends. Neither do the network people. It seems that I'll be off the net until Monday!
NBN DHCP issues: insights
Long phone call with Will of Aussie Broadband support today. We investigated a DHCP handshake from both ends. Here a summary, seen from my end: 13:36:08.117371 IP 180.150.4.128.68 > 255.255.255.255.67: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from 00:50:da:cf:07:35, length 300 DHCPREQUEST on xl0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 Other end: receive two packets send two ACKs. Neither arrived here. 13:36:15.118323 IP 180.150.4.128.68 > 255.255.255.255.67: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from 00:50:da:cf:07:35, length 300 DHCPREQUEST on xl0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 Other end: receive two packets send two ACKs.
Another NBN outage
Another National Broadband Network outage today, from 13:38 until 14:04: 1424313521 27.3112 5 # Thu 19 Feb 2015 13:38:41 EST 36.615 ms 1424313662 0 0 hub www www.freebsd.de ozlabs.org ftp.netbsd.org # Thu 19 Feb 2015 13:41:02 EST ... 1424315071 0 0 hub www www.freebsd.de ozlabs.org ftp.netbsd.org # Thu 19 Feb 2015 14:04:31 EST 1424315092 0 5 # Thu 19 Feb 2015 14:04:52 EST 1424315153 27.2985 5 # Thu 19 Feb 2015 14:05:53 EST 36.632 ms Clearly a communication issue: the ODU ( Outdoor unit , i.e.
eBay: Losing the edge?
I've been buying and selling things on eBay for over 15 years, and it's still one of my main sources of many kinds of item. But note that still: you'd think that they're going out of their way to annoy you. Last June I had such problems trying to sell a camera that I gave up, especially as they have now restricted sales to Australia onlywhy? I also receive daily messages with custom search results. Once upon a time they were legible. Now they're modern, so when looking for Olympus lenses I get a display like this: What is that lens?
Debugging photo processing scripts
My photo processing includes a number of kludgy scripts, mainly Bourne Shell. It makes things a lot easier than using Microsoft-space user-friendly GUIs, but of course there's room for bugs. Lately I've found that when I run the mkcompare script, which creates a web page comparing before and after running through an automatic optimizer, it presented comparisons with photos I had taken a couple of days before: a blast from the past. How can that happen? Simple, of course: I don't need the comparison page for more than a few minutes, so I create it in a fixed directory. But I had forgotten to clean out the directory before doing the image conversions, and since I use make, it didn't replace any images which were already there.
Apple: Monitor plug and play
Just before breakfast this morning, heard some growling from Chris Bahlo's direction. She had connected her Apple laptop to a Dell monitor, and the monitor didn't want to know. After breakfast we took another look, and by a process of elimination came to the conclusion that it was the operating system, which wasn't producing any output to the display. With some experimentation, she got it to drive the monitor (native resolution 1920×1080) at 800×600, but not higher. And the only resolutions it offered were 4:3 aspect ratio. Why? I'm not an Apple man, so I asked some of the renegades on the (BSD) IRC channel.
Spurious out of inodes
Ran photo backup this afternoon. The results weren't what I expected. I got so many out of inodes messages that the email message exceeded the maximum message size, so I couldn't find out how it started. How did I run out of inodes? Yes, I had specified far fewer inodes than standard for the disk. The standard assumes an average file size of 4 frags, or 8 kB. The average photo file (including thumbnails and other smaller images) is still closer to 1 MB. What did I see? === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/21) ~ 46 -> df -i /photobackup/ Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on /dev/da1p1 3,814,621 2,449,845 1,326,629 65% 812,391 1,354,391 37% /photobackup 37% used?
Disposing of old computer stuff
In preparation for moving house, I've already disposed of a lot of my old computer stuff, but some remains. Yesterday I found a Chris (surname unknown) on Freecycle looking for components, so I suggested he come along and help himself. To my surprise, he was really keen on having a lot of my old junk. Also gave him the laser printer that I bought 5 years ago. It still works, but it will soon need new toner. And then he looked longingly at my old HP field service oscilloscope. No, sorry, that's staying. After all, I only have 3 oscilloscopes. And when did I power the last one on?
More OBD fun
Yesterday I didn't get very far with my OBD apps: Torque only worked in the Commodore, and OBD Car Doctor PRO didn't work at all, but was too polite to say so. But there are other apps to try. How do you start? The toyshop doesn't give you the opportunity to list them by popularity or price. On a real web browser, you can eliminate payware and apps with less than 4 stars, but they're still not sorted. The browser on the tablet doesn't even offer that, and appears to display fewer stars than the computer browser does. So I had to use two browsers and try to find correlations between the display of both of them.
Diagnosing the car
My ELM327 clone arrived today. It's a modern device, so of course there's no documentation whatsoevernot even information on the PIN I need to connect it (which, after some searching, proves to be 1234; why do they bother with PINs if they're all the same?) . So: what do I do with it? It's a Bluetooth connect, so went looking in the toyshop for appropriate apps. That's a lost cause, of course; I've never found a good Android app, and today was no exception. A Commodore forum suggested Torque, which comes, of course, with no documentation whatsoever. Found the OBD connector on the car (directly above the driver's legs, just forward of where the underside of dashboard ends) and plugged it in.
DxO and TIFF
From time to time I've chosen TIFF images instead of JPEG for the intermediate stages of my photo processing. That makes perfect sense, but it's not easy. Some of the issues seem to be related to DxO Optics Pro . Some years ago I discovered that TIFF images produced by DxO don't align as well as JPEG copies of the same image. Why? Then a little over a year later I tried again and got many error messages. They're still there. If I take an output TIFF from DxO and try to convert it, I get a large number of relatively harmless warnings: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/7) ~/Photos/20150204/orig 209 -> convert P2021583.tiff foo.jpeg orig: Unknown field with tag 50341 (0xc4a5) encountered.
New switches
A present in the mail today: Those are three 8 port gigabyte Ethernet switches, donated by David, surname unknown, but with surnom Carneous . That's very generous of him. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Dead backup disk
My nightly backup failed last night: mount: /dev/da0s1d: R/W mount of /backups denied. Filesystem is not clean - run fsck.: Operation not permitted How did that happen? Ran fsck and found out: THE FOLLOWING DISK SECTORS COULD NOT BE READ: 1953267040, 1953267041, 1953267042, 1953267043, What caused that? Trawling through the logs found no bad sector messages, only: Jan 31 21:04:08 eureka kernel: Device da0s1d went missing before all of the data could be written to it; expect data loss.
Second-guessing car diagnostics
It's now been a week since my car problems, and since the following day we've had no indication whatsoever of problems with the car. We'll find out when my diagnostic interface arriveshopefully. In the meantime, I've been trying to guess what I might find. Looking back at the facts, we have: The car's electronics display the very unspecific message Check Powertrain . What does that mean? I'm reminded of the quote: Ken Thompson has an automobile which he helped design.
House photos in TIFF again
My weekly house photos require a lot of processing. To make a panorama I take multiple views of a scene and stitch them together. To get the requisite dynamic range I take multiple images of each view, with exposure bracketed in intervals of 3 EV. First I use align_image_stack and enfuse. to create blended photos, and then I use Hugin to create a panorama from the views. That's a lot of processing, and I'm still producing JPEG intermediate results. Why? I have the space, and I have the processing power. So today I tried using TIFF intermediate files. That's not for the first time, but last time I didn't have very good results, at least because of the performance of the machines I had at the time.
Dumb phones: not dumb enough?
Three weeks ago I bought a very cheap dumb phone , one that runs neither Android nor iOS, but which has a real keyboard. It was attractive enough that Yvonne bought one too to get away from the pain of scraping glass to do anything useful. But it's still a relatively modern device, with an illuminated colour display. And there's the problem: in bright sunshine it's illegible, while old-fashioned unilluminated displays have no difficulty. So we're thinking of returning them. While in town today, went to Dick We can't be bothered to serve you Smiths and JB HiFi to see what they had. Nothing as cheap as the $18 that we paid, of course, but also nothing that could be demonstrated.
Holden Commodore diagnostics
I have already established that our Holden VZ Commodore can display error codes on the dashboard. Here's what I found at the time: But now we have a real live error condition. What do they display now? The same! I have no idea what they're there for, but they don't help with out Check Powertrain condition. So there's nothing for it but to call up Ballarat Central Auto Electrics and get them to read the information out, for which they charge the princely (or is that knightly?)
Comparing GPS navigators
At least for the first 1½ hours I had both GPS navigators running to compare them. One thing's clear: the new one is so much easier to read. We were in bright sunshine, and the display of the old one was almost unrecognizable. So if I can get used to the interface of the new one, it might be worth keeping. ACM only downloads articles once.
GPS navigator woes
I've been bitching and moaning about GPS navigators since I first got one, and somehow the problem isn't going away. When I went into Ballarat today, I took my old one and my new one with me. I still can't work out how to do some simple things with the new one, like muting the sound. But then the display on the new navigator went crazy, like an old analogue TV with bad horizontal sync. And I couldn't turn it off. In the end, I had to reset it. OK, I still have the old navigator. But it wouldn't charge. Are the batteries that bad?
Network transfer rates
My Internet link has an uplink speed of 5 Mb/s, so theoretically I should be able to upload data at about 600 kB/s. In practice, window size and latency limit it to about 125 kB/s. Yes, of course I could increase the window size, but that requires rebooting, and I'm an uptime fanatic. So I put up with only 125 kB/s. But today I got much worse transfer rates, over an extended period of time: 20150117/big/Canna-3.jpeg 2469245 100% 28.23kB/s 0:01:25 (xfer#103, to-check=281/394) 20150117/big/Cistus.jpeg 3522116 100% 24.99kB/s 0:02:17 (xfer#104, to-check=280/394) 20150117/big/Cockatoos-1.jpeg 3101098 100% 26.08kB/s 0:01:56 (xfer#105, to-check=279/394) That's only 20% of the normal rate.
Tablet photos
I didn't think to bring my camera to the Emergency Room yesterday, but of course I had my Android tablet, which I use as a glorified eBook reader. And it has a camera, so I used it to take some photos of my hand. Today I moved them to eureka for processing. This is a pure Linux base, right, no Microsoft in sight. So why do I get this? -r----x--x 1 grog lemis 1,279,950 15 Jan 11:33 IMG_20150115_113355.jpg -r----x--x 1 grog lemis 1,194,553 15 Jan 11:34 IMG_20150115_113405.jpg Apart from that, of course, the photos confirm my prejudices against smart phone and tablet cameras.
Images of Tektronix 555
Mail from David Casler today, wanting to use a photo of my Tektronix 555 oscilloscope that I took 13 years ago: That was taken with a Nikon “Coolpix” 880, with 3 only megapixels, not really enough for him. But I still have the scope (and it's up for grabs!) . Now I have a decent camera, so why not take new photos? Along with the wound to my hand, this is why: They'll have to come out soon, but David needs the images by tomorrow, and there's no way that's going to ...
New GPS navigator, old problems
I've bought a new GPS navigator, not because the old one is more defective than it was when I bought it, but because the battery is as good as dead, and the maps are out of date. I had looked at some expensive models three months ago, and come to the conclusion that they weren't worth the additional price. So in the end I bought an el-cheapo one, 7" for only $69.96 (isn't that an inaccurate way of saying $70?) . I couldn't replace the battery and the maps for that. It arrived today. Yes, it uses iGO software, with which I'm familiar.
More throwaways
It looks as if Craig is so upset about what Michael did to his ute that he won't even communicate with us, and Leah didn't come to clean the house today either. That's sad. And it means that I have to do more work myself, which is even sadder. Out today to the shed to throw away some stuff. I'm getting better: threw away a whole lot of old floppy disks, mainly with old Microsoft-based software. But then there are other things I can't throw away, like my home-made Z-80-based CP/M machine, old listings, and a number of ancient copies of AUUGN.
The CAPTCHA to end all CAPTCHAS
At some time in the past I must have joined the FreeBSD forum site, though it's not really my thing. But what's the password? No worries, I can get it reset. But first I had to go through a CAPTCHA like I've never seen before: Yes, of course I knew the answer. But does every forum participant? ACM only downloads articles once.
FreeBSD Package update, try 2
So I've been getting this message from attempts to update FreeBSD packages on stable, my test machine: Fetching zsh-5.0.7_1.txz... done pkg: cached package zsh-5.0.7_1: size mismatch, cannot continue What does that imply? Does Google know? Of course. This page discusses the matter, and SirDice comes up with a suggestion: pkg clean # cleans /var/cache/pkg/ rm -rf /var/cache/pkg/* # just remove it all pkg update -f # forces update of repository catalog rm /var/db/pkg/repo-*.sqlite # removes all remote repository catalogs pkg bootstrap -f # forces reinstall of pkg ...
User interface pain
Yvonne uses a smart phone. That in itself isn't an issue, but she has real problems using it. I have a tablet with phone function, along with Bluetooth headphones, but I use it so seldom that I still have issues. In particular, the user interface is really bad. I've been using touch screens for years now, and I still find them one of the most obnoxious developments I've had the displeasure to experience. Answer a phone? Not so long ago you used to pull it out of your pocket, feel for the Talk button, and press it. Now you pull it out of your pocket, look at it to locate the green flashing area on the screen, and swipe it to one side (why?)
FreeBSD package upgrade: still not there
As I feared, updating my packages wasn't all plain sailing. In fact, it was almost impossible. Started on my stable machine (that's the name) with the disk cloned from lagoon. Away it ran, then: The process will require 210 MB more space. 2 GB to be downloaded. Proceed with this action? [y/N]: y Fetching zziplib-0.13.62_2.txz... done Fetching zsh-5.0.7_1.txz... done pkg: cached package zsh-5.0.7_1: size mismatch, fetching from remote Fetching zsh-5.0.7_1.txz... done pkg: cached package zsh-5.0.7_1: size mismatch, cannot continue What went wrong there? The cached package information is not very relevant, since the package had just been downloaded from the net, twice.
Finally updating my machines?
When I first started using computers at home, it was normal that it was difficult. In the course of time, though, things have generally got better. 16 years ago I gave a whole day tutorial on installing FreeBSD at the AUUG 1998 conference. I didn't finish. In the meantime, things have got easier. I can do the same installation in about 30 minutes. But what do I have? A base system. How do I configure it? How do I install useful programs (ports)? How do I keep it up to date? Commercial systems like Microsoft and Apple have solved that problem long ago.
Restarting eureka
The power came back after about 2¼ hours, and that's about the time I needed to get eureka back up and running again. I really must save my config files and check that the machine can start up without so much manual intervention. But then, that's part of the plan for the new machine. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Monitor pain
It's high time I got round to upgrading eureka, my main machine. It's still running FreeBSD 9.2, and I've been meaning to upgrade it for nearly a year. Today I got as far as connecting my spare BenQ monitor to two test machines. It wasn't easy. BenQ monitors say No cable connected when in fact they mean no signal. But there was a signal, as other monitors confirmed. Was the thing set up to only accept input from one source? The menu would tell me that. But the menu didn't display. After much cursing and monitor swapping, discovered that it was set for HDMI input, and that for some reason the menu wouldn't display under these circumstances.
Tracing the ssh issues
So it's fairly clear where the blame lies with my DHCP problems, though I still need to trace the other connection. I'll do that when the temperature has cooled down a bit. But there's another issue, and potentially it's related: from time to time ssh setup fails. More tracing, with very little to show for it: No. Time Source Source Destination Destination Protocol Length Info 45 10:52:04.502503 aussie-gw.lemis.com 00:19:07:77:9e:00 www.lemis.com 00:16:3e:06:34:53 SSHv2 113 Client Protocol: SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_6.2_hpn13v11 FreeBSD-20130515 Frame 45: 113 bytes on wire (904 bits), 113 bytes captured (904 bits) Ethernet II, Src: Cisco_77:9e:00 (00:19:07:77:9e:00), Dst: Xensourc_06:34:53 (00:16:3e:06:34:53) Internet Protocol Version 4, Src: aussie-gw.lemis.com (180.150.4.128), Dst: www.lemis.com (208.86.226.86) Transmission Control Protocol, ...
More traces, no insights
More DHCP traces today, both bootp and ICMP. Got some extreme examples of the problem: 18:21:25.932442 IP radiation-tower.aussiebb.net.bootps > aussie-gw.lemis.com.bootpc: BOOTP/DHCP, Reply, length 300 Last successful renewal 18:51:25.917433 IP aussie-gw.lemis.com.bootpc > radiation-tower.aussiebb.net.bootps: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from 00:50:da:cf:07:35 (oui Unknown), length 300 ... 46 more unanswered requests 19:13:36.067439 IP aussie-gw.lemis.com.bootpc > radiation-tower.aussiebb.net.bootps: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from 00:50:da:cf:07:35 (oui Unknown), length 300 give up, send request to broadcast address 19:14:27.068420 IP aussie-gw.lemis.com.bootpc > 255.255.255.255.bootps: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from 00:50:da:cf:07:35 (oui Unknown), length 300 ... 12 more unanswered requests 19:21:17.080421 IP aussie-gw.lemis.com.bootpc > 255.255.255.255.bootps: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from 00:50:da:cf:07:35 (oui Unknown), length 300 Issue a DHCPDISCOVER 19:21:26.099194 IP 0.0.0.0.bootpc > 255.255.255.255.bootps: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from 00:50:da:cf:07:35 (oui Unknown), length 300 Two replies in less than 300 ms 19:21:26.392024 IP radiation-tower.aussiebb.net.bootps > aussie-gw.lemis.com.bootpc: BOOTP/DHCP, Reply, length 300 19:21:26.396913 IP radiation-tower.aussiebb.net.bootps > aussie-gw.lemis.com.bootpc: BOOTP/DHCP, Reply, length 300 And this one?
Tracing the DHCP issues
Why is my DHCP not renewing its leases cleanly? Started running a wireshark trace on bootpc and discovered that the DHCP server only responds when it feels like it: 10:04:36.806443 IP aussie-gw.lemis.com.bootpc > radiation-tower.aussiebb.net.bootps: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from 00:50:da:cf:07:35 (oui Unknown), length 300 10:04:40.807439 IP aussie-gw.lemis.com.bootpc > radiation-tower.aussiebb.net.bootps: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from 00:50:da:cf:07:35 (oui Unknown), length 300 10:04:50.808421 IP aussie-gw.lemis.com.bootpc > radiation-tower.aussiebb.net.bootps: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from 00:50:da:cf:07:35 (oui Unknown), length 300 10:04:57.809439 IP aussie-gw.lemis.com.bootpc > radiation-tower.aussiebb.net.bootps: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from 00:50:da:cf:07:35 (oui Unknown), length 300 10:05:12.810434 IP aussie-gw.lemis.com.bootpc > radiation-tower.aussiebb.net.bootps: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from 00:50:da:cf:07:35 (oui Unknown), length 300 10:05:35.811432 IP aussie-gw.lemis.com.bootpc > radiation-tower.aussiebb.net.bootps: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from 00:50:da:cf:07:35 (oui Unknown), length 300 10:06:15.812437 IP aussie-gw.lemis.com.bootpc > radiation-tower.aussiebb.net.bootps: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from 00:50:da:cf:07:35 (oui Unknown), length 300 10:07:24.813424 IP aussie-gw.lemis.com.bootpc > radiation-tower.aussiebb.net.bootps: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from 00:50:da:cf:07:35 (oui Unknown), length 300 10:07:24.860089 IP radiation-tower.aussiebb.net.bootps > aussie-gw.lemis.com.bootpc: BOOTP/DHCP, Reply, length 300 ...
Bushfires and house sites
We've had another bushfire in Dereel. Nothing overly serious, fortunately. 22 ha burnt, but no particular damage, no injuries. This morning Dan from the CFA came by to collect a donation we've been trying to make, and told me that it had started from an overheated compost heap in Leigh Court, and quickly jumped the BallaratColac road: Not overly interesting until you consider that this is next to a property we investigated last year. At the time it was clear that last year's bushfire had stopped at the east end of the property.
Another dhcp failure!
This evening it was Chris who told me that we were off the net. Same problem as yesterday. Time to do some tracing. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
NBN problems again?
Watching TV this evening, wanted to check on something on the web. No connection. Further checks showed that we were off the net again! What's wrong with the National Broadband Network? OK, go through the motions. First restart dhcpd. That was it! Immediate connection. So what went wrong? We went offline at 20:45, and all I see in /var/log/messages is: Dec 28 20:15:26 eureka dhclient[18871]: unknown dhcp option value 0x52 Dec 28 20:45:26 eureka dhclient[18871]: unknown dhcp option value 0x52 Dec 28 21:07:44 eureka ntpd[948]: sendto(202.142.142.241) (fd=25): No route to host Dec 28 21:08:41 eureka ntpd[948]: sendto(192.189.54.33) (fd=25): No route to host Dec 28 21:12:23 eureka ntpd[948]: sendto(203.161.12.165) (fd=25): No route to host Dec 28 21:15:26 eureka dhclient[18871]: send_packet: No route to host Dec 28 21:15:40 eureka last message repeated 3 times Dec 28 21:16:04 eureka dhclient[60636]: unknown dhcp option value ...
Merry Christmas!
I've finally finished my Christmas Card. In past years I've sent it out just as a URL, like here. But that's not really much use to somebody out of range of high speed networking. So I printed the page as a PDF document and appended it to the message. The HTML version is interactive, so it's preferable, but why not offer the PDF too? I've had trouble sending this letter in past years, mainly finger trouble, so I checked the logs on my mail server: Dec 22 01:58:41 www postfix/cleanup[94666]: 0117B1B72843: message-id=<[email protected]> Dec 22 01:58:41 www postfix/cleanup[94666]: 0117B1B72843: resent-message-id=<[email protected]> Dec 22 01:58:53 www postfix/smtpd[94675]: connect from unknown[123.124.153.126] Dec 22 01:58:54 www postfix/smtpd[94675]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[123.124.153.126]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [123.124.153.126]; from=<lijuan@tianlu-tech.com> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<WebServer.Tianlu-tech.com> Dec 22 01:58:54 www postfix/smtpd[94675]: disconnect from unknown[123.124.153.126] Dec 22 ...
OI.Share revisited
It's coming up for Christmas, time for our annual Christmas letter to our friends. Last year we wrote that we expected to be in the new house by now, so we thought it appropriate to take this year's photo there: Somehow we didn't look as happy as last year: This wasn't the only photo we took, but none of them were better. Why? This year we had to get three dogs to stand still instead of only one year, but a big issue was controlling the camera: The camera no longer has an infrared remote control: ...
A year of NBN
A year ago today my network problems were solved with the installation of National Broadband Network fixed wireless. What a relief it was. It still is, and that's why we had the second installation done in Stones Road last week. Why so early? I don't trust the current government not to kill off new installations on the NBN. With good reason, it seems, if this article is to be believed. That's from The Register, not exactly the most neutral of publications. What's behind it? Should a country nationalize Internet topology? Australia has a particular problem because, although it's a highly developed country, the population density is very low, which makes providing fair network access to people outside the towns.
Luigi Rizzo visits
Another dreary, moist day, and somehow got nothing done. About the only thing of interest was when Luigi Rizzo and his friend Valeria came for dinner. Spent some time showing them some kangaroos which had obligingly appeared in the north paddock, then Yvonne and Margaret Swann returned from Warrnambool, where the weather had been better. Had dinner, and Luigi and Valeria were off again. ACM only downloads articles once.
An ATA for Stones Road
Now that we have a network connection, the obvious thing to do is to set up VoIP to make up for the appalling mobile coverage in the area (thanks, Wendy). All I need is an ATA. After last month's damage, I only have one, with the other on order. But what's wrong with the defective one? No power indication. Is it possible that there's a fuse in there somewhere? Took it apart and examined the board: Sure enough, there's a surface mount fuse just next to the power connector at top left.
Networking!
Over to the building site this morning to meet with Duncan and discuss the bleak situation finding builders prepared to work over Christmas and the summer holidays. He was happy enough about the relocation of the gas supply, so that's one less problem. Jim Lannen was there too with his apprentice, and they got as far as putting in the Cat 6 cable. But still no power! Discussed with Jim and Duncan, who both agreed that a call to John Willowhite of Powercor was in order. But as I was leaving, I discovered an extension cable in front of the house, and sure enough: We have power!
NBN installation?
Call from Walter Bonilla of the National Broadband Network today, reminding me of the network installation for Stones Road tomorrow. I had to remind him that we had already spoken, that there was no wall to attach the NTD, and that he was supposed to get the techies to call me. He volunteered the information that the installer was called Adam, and yes, he would call me before they came out. Somehow this organization sounds just as bureaucratic as all the others I have to deal with. ACM only downloads articles once.
NBN next week
Also heard from Aussie Broadband that my National Broadband Network antenna would be installed next week. Do the installers know what will await them? On the one hand it's the correct time to install the cabling, but we won't have any walls to attach the NTD to. Asked Aussie to confirm with the installers, but no, they have no contact with the installers, who work for NBN. But then I got a call from a Walter Bonilla from the NBN, who told me what they needed and explained that they had exact instructions on what to do, and they weren't allowed to diverge from them at all.
rsync problems
Lately I've had difficulty syncing my diary and photos to the external web server: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/9) ~/public_html 5 -> syncgrog Thu 27 Nov 2014 12:54:54 EST +++ Transferring grog to www:www.lemis.com +++ rsync -lKzavP --delete-after --copy-unsafe-links --exclude=weather /home/grog/public_html/ www:www.lemis.com/grog ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [sender] rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(605) [sender=3.0.9] === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/9) ~/public_html 6 -> syncgrog (again) === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/9) ~/public_html 7 -> syncgrog Thu 27 Nov 2014 12:55:01 EST +++ Transferring grog to www:www.lemis.com +++ rsync -lKzavP --delete-after --copy-unsafe-links --exclude=weather /home/grog/public_html/ www:www.lemis.com/grog building file list ...
GPU hang workaround
The GPU hang messages that I had earlier this month are back. They had caused me to restart X, and were thus particularly irritating. But the seemed to come from Google Chrome, so tried shooting it down. Success! Another X session saved. And probably another indication that it's high time to upgrade my system software. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Fibre: Yes? No?
Also finishing the specs for the electrical wiring of the house. At one point I thought that it was trivial to find cheap glass fibre. The more I look, the more it seems to be a can of worms. The only reason to put in fibre now is to save on installation expenses later, if I ever need it. But it's not clear that I ever will, and Cat 6A will be enough for 10 Gb/s, so I think I'll just take the easy way out and forget it for the time being. ACM only downloads articles once.
More lightning damage
Call from Tom of Bushmans todayfor about 5 seconds. Then the connection was dropped. That wouldn't be that unusual, except that it happened twice yesterday to other callers. Was there something wrong with my other ATA? Tried using a straight telephone without ATA, and it worked fine. Checked later: Daniel O'Connor called me on the Telstra line (passthrough through the Netcomm V210P) and on VoIP via the same ATA. Yes, it's repeatable: the VoIP circuits work well, but the PSTN connection repeatedly gets dropped after 5 seconds. That clarifies a number of things: first, it supports the hypothesis that the damage came in through the phone line.
Flash! Bang!
The bad weather was accompanied by lots of thunder and lightning. At one point I heard a spark right in front of meit sounded as if a monitor had arced. But a second later there was a clap of thunder, so it must have been a lightning strike. Surprisingly, nothing was obviously damaged. And then an hour later two of my monitors died. It took me a while to realize that the rest of the system was running on UPS, and that something had tripped the circuit breaker in the switchboard. In the afternoon, wanted to make a phone call. Phone was dead.
State of the art
Somebody on IRC found this on imgur today: I wonder who put it there? It's a JPEG image, but it doesn't have any EXIF information. How do you find the copyright holder? ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
New monitor
A few days ago I bought a spare monitor, in case one failed. But presumably it would be of better quality than my older monitors, so swapped out my oldest monitor for the new one. I can use the old one for machines that have previously been headless. That wasn't as simple as it sounded: yes, they have the same resolution and pretty much the same dimensions, but the old one was connected by HDMI, and the new one doesn't have an HDMI connection. So I ended up having to move monitors around, and since the other monitor with HDMI had a different resolution, I had to restart (but not reconfigure) X.
Worst web site: new contender
Yvonne decided to go to Melbourne tomorrow to visit Equitana. We had really wanted to plan it with an overnight visit, but somehow that didn't happen, so Yvonne decided to go just for the day. Under those circumstances it probably doesn't make sense to go by car. 270 km at 10 l/100 km is 27 litres of petrol, or about $40. Then there's the pain of navigating through Melbourne and the probably horrendous parking fees. Wouldn't it be simpler to go by train? What does it cost? After fighting http://www.vline.com.au/ for 15 minutes, I still didn't know. I was able to establish the timetable, sort of, but nothing I could do divulged the fares.
Where's my network?
I've been trying since Friday to get an National Broadband Network connection for Stones Road. Called up Aussie Broadband and spoke to Fabien, who told me that the trouble is the lack of a location ID. It seems that NBN has assigned location IDs to all houses, but since we don't have one (yet), they don't have a location ID. Why is it taking so long to assign one? NBN can be slow. Called up the NBN and spoke to Jane, who asked me for the geographical coordinatesgood thing I had themand told me that it could take up to a week, but would probably be here by the end of the week.
New monitor?
Into town this morning to pick up a new monitor for Yvonne, and while I was at it picked up a second cheaper one$129 for a 21| 1920×1080 monitorto be prepared for the next failure. My Tandem background must be showing. Later did some searching about the causes of monitor failures. Things aren't quite as clear-cut as I thought, but articles like this one suggest that power supply failure is one of the leading causes. ACM only downloads articles once.
Dead monitor
Yvonne's monitor died today. Not the first monitor that has died on us, but since moving to LCD screens, there seems to be only one failure mode: the power supply dies. Why? We've had switching power supplies for decades, and while they have certainly evolved, you'd think it was well understood technology. LCD digital displays, on the other hand, are only now receding from the bleeding edge. You'd really expect them to be more likely to die than the power supply. The other obvious thing is that it's hardly worth getting somebody to repair it. A replacement costs $129 at Officeworks, and repair technicians can easily take that even for a simple repair.
Interpreting exposure meter output
The raw output from the exposure meter tests wasn't very helpful. Here the readings for the MK-300: 1 11:3 1/2 11:2 1/4 8:9 1/8 8:1 1/16 5.6:5 1/32 4:5 1/64 2.8:0 1/128 1:9 The first column is the power level, and the second column is the exposure meter reading, in aperture and tenths. That's really difficult to interpret.
More chrome pain
It's been a few days since I last had the dreaded GP process hung message. Maybe a web page that I have since removed from the browser state? But today I got another message, not once but dozens of times: [27418:209744896:12854200258323:ERROR:gles2_cmd_decoder.cc(4856)] glDrawEleemnts framebuffer incomplete (check) Google confirms that this, too, comes from chrome. Unlike the other message, though, it wasn't associated with an X hang. It seemed related to some issues I had mounting an SDHC card; the message output came in bursts related to inserting and removing the card.
Next DxO bug
Processing today's photos with DxO Optics Pro showed an interesting issue: I couldn't load presets. Why? Here I have tried to set a black and white preset (as the most obvious kind), and the image remains in colour. But the two smaller previews are black and white: Is this the result of my manually editing the preset files?
The way we were, 1982
This video is just going round the Unix Heritage Society mailing list: How times have changed in less than a third of a century. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Ignoring image problems
Yvonne went out riding with Chris today, and for some reason used Chris' camera rather than her own. Back home it was up to me to read in the card, for which I didn't have a cable. And at least 3 images didn't get read: Nov 9 13:48:31 eureka kernel: (da4:umass-sim2:2:0:2): READ(10). CDB: 28 40 00 00 22 00 00 00 10 00 Nov 9 13:48:31 eureka kernel: (da4:umass-sim2:2:0:2): CAM status: SCSI Status Error Nov 9 13:48:31 eureka kernel: (da4:umass-sim2:2:0:2): SCSI status: Check Condition Nov 9 13:48:31 eureka kernel: (da4:umass-sim2:2:0:2): SCSI sense: HARDWARE FAILURE asc:0,0 (No additional sense information) Nov 9 13:48:31 eureka kernel: (da4:umass-sim2:2:0:2): Retrying command (per sense data) Nov 9 13:48:32 eureka kernel: (da4:umass-sim2:2:0:2): READ(10).
GPU hang cornered?
Another GPU hang this morning! This time I had left X server 1 active, but once again it was server 0 that was affected. Something to do with the clients? Ran ps and got hundreds of processes, including 300 zombie ssh-agents, to be inspected later. But that's not the way you solve a problem nowadays. Google is your friend. And, as it proved, also the enemy. This article describes a (perhaps only marginally) different issue, but it makes it clear that the problem is associated with Google chrome. That may mean that it's sufficient to shoot down chrome, and not the X server, if it happens again.
Another GPU hang
Yet another GPU hang this morning! It's frustrating that it only appears on the console. I had hoped that the numbers at the beginning of the line would give some indication, but they don't make much sense. The first could conceivably be the PID; the second is the same as last time. On IRC, the opinion was that it was a hardware issue, maybe overheating. But the fact point elsewhere: I have an xearth process complaining about a missing marker file every 5 minutes. And the hang message is always at the bottom, so it must appear round the time I power on the monitors.
Configuring DxO
The new version of DxO Optics Pro has a number of improvements over the previous version: it can now display properly on medium resolution (2560×1440) screens, and hopefully also on 3840×2160 screens. It has reinstated the old image comparison function (original/modified), which they had previously put on the Ctrl-D key. But that repeats, so I ended up with a quick alternation of the two. Now there's a button you can hold down with the mouse. Best, though, they have finally found a (cumbersome) way of telling the crop function not to enforce aspect ratio, at least for the elite version: you can save the information with a preset .
More lagoon migration
Yvonne wanted to print a document today, something she does so seldom that she needed my help. And in the process discovered that I hadn't configured the printers since last month's system upgrade, five weeks ago. Note to self: check /etc/printcap and that the spool directories exist. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Another GPU hang
Another GPU hang today! What's causing it? This system has been running unchanged since February, and it's been up for 139 days. The hang only affects one of the two X servers, so it doesn't seem to be hardware. It's not logged anywhere except on the console, not helped by whining flash plugins: When I first saw the problem, the error message was still on the screen, but later it had long been flushed by these useless error messages. The resultant image is strange.
Web sites and ACID
I've finally decided on an exposure meter. After some backwarding and forwarding, decided on the Sekonic L-308S after all. The cheapest offer was from eGlobaL [sic] Digital Cameras, only AU $184 with postage. The cheapest price I could find on eBay was US $167.90, which corresponds to AU $198.40, and reputable US sellers are offering it for round US $235 plus postage. So I went ahead and fought my way through Yet Another Broken Website to finalize the purchase. Most web sites are too leet to accept phone numbers in standard formats (like (03) 5346 1730 in Australia). Instead they want all punctuation removed, like 0353461730.
X hang
Into the office this morning and found all my X windows empty, just with the background colour. Looking at the console showed: What's that? Nothing in /var/log/messages. The other X server was still running, but server 0 was using lots of CPU time and was otherwise unresponsive: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/19) ~ 53 -> ps au|grep X root 16471 82.9 1.5 3840764 500208 v0 R 7Sep14 1439:46.34 /usr/local/bin/X :0 -config xorg-0.conf -logverbose 6 grog 16470 0.0 0.0 19612 1816 v0 I+ 7Sep14 0:00.00 xinit /home/grog/.xinitrc -- /usr/local/bin/X :0 -conf grog 69613 0.0 0.0 19612 0 v4 IW+ ...
New DxO version
During a discussion on the German Olympus forum, discovered that there's a new version of DxO Optics Pro . Downloaded and tried to start it: We've seen things like that before, so I tried installing on Chris Bahlo's laptop, not helped by the fact that the thing didn't want to know that our DNS has changed since last time I used it. Same thing, so it's not the same as the problem I had last month. Another support request. To my immense surprise, got a response in a little over two hours.
Another NBN outage
Into the office this morning to find us off the net again. And this time it had been for over 9 hours. The NTD showed the same display as last time: the ODU LED was red. So I power cycled it, which got rid of the red LED, but I still didn't get any traffic. Called Aussie Broadband support and spoke to Abraham. No outage known, ticket taken. And I had just hung up when the connection came up again, at 09:19:40, an outage of almost exactly 10 hours. Called again, got connected to Vincent, who must be new. He took considerably longer to log the fact that the net was up again than Abraham did to log the fault in the first place.
More DxO pain
Yesterday's sausage photos required processing to square up the trays. DxO Optics Pro didn't make it easy. The first step is to use the rectangle tool to straighten up the sides: The right-hand image shows the original above and the corrected image below. But it has truncated the top! Went back and tried againand it refused to show me the original image, just the truncated version that I wanted to get rid of.
Preparing for return
It has been clear for a while that the laptop/tablet wasn't for me, though it also showed that Microsoft can still offer tablet operating systems a run for their money. So time to return it. And my private data? Daniel O'Connor found the solution for me. It's relatively easy to reset a modern Microsoft box to its factory defaults, though cleaning the disk took a couple of hours. But now I'm confident that none of my personal data remains. ACM only downloads articles once.
Zoom lenses and extension tubes
I've located some automatic extension tubes for my Olympus OM-D E-M1. I've had extension tubes for my Pentax for decades, but they're useless for Olympus lenses, because the lenses don't have a manual diaphragm: it has to be set electrically. And that's what these new tubes promise. One problem is that there are only two tubes, 10 mm and 16 mm. My old Pentax tubes were a set of 3, 11 mm, 20 mm and 30 mm, double as much as the new tubes, and with them you can get a 1:1 magnification with a 50 mm lens set on .
Watching videos the easy way
The last issue of Heise's Digitale Fotografie included a DVD with some videos on that I thought would be worth watching. OK, found the DVD, tried to put it in the DVD drive in eureka. Wouldn't open. Why not? Nothing mounted, but before I had to power cycle the machine, decided to put it in lagoon instead. === root@lagoon (/dev/pts/3) ~ 400 -> mount /cdrom mount_cd9660: /dev/cd0: Invalid argument What's wrong there? Tried in dischord, my Microsoft box, and it mounted with no difficulties. And it showed that it was a UDF file system. That might at least explain the problems with lagoon.
Computers anonymous
The lens wasn't the only thing I picked up at Napoleons. There was also a saddle blanket and a small box, also from Queensland. What was it? I wasn't expecting anything like that, and the description on the box just said A GIFT!: Opening it was even more confusing: a Raspberry Pi B+, the latest version, in a plastic enclosure. There was also an SD card with NOOBS on it. And that was all. The only documentation pointed me at http://www.element14.com/community/community/raspberry-pi, a community site.
Using Ashampoo optimizer
Since Ashampoo have broken the optimization function of their Photo Commander version 11, and they haven't responded to my error report, it looks like I'll have to move to Photo Optimizer, which has the same functionality, currently not broken. But it works completely differently. The most amazing thing is the display while it's processing photos: The only thing in focus is a completely useless image suggesting printed photos scattered at random on a cork pinboard.
Google image search: improvement needed
What are my mystery flowers? I still have some that I can't identify. But Google images have an image search function. How well does it work? Let's look for this relatively recognizable image: It comes up with no less than 5 direct hits, all of them in this diary or my daily photos page. That's reasonable. But apart from that, none of the images it found looks in the least bit like the original. At least for flowers, it's useless. ACM only downloads articles once.
NBN is here!
A flyer in the dead tree mail today with good news: the National Broadband Network is finally available in Dereel! That's more than 10 months since my service was activated. At first I thought it was Telstra, who so far have been the slowest to report, but no, this is a company called Infinity NBN. What do they have to offer to make up for their tardiness? Nothing obvious. They're more expensive than Aussie Broadband, and it seems you have to commit for at least 12 months. Still, I like their concept of how we live and work in the bush.
Multiple network pain
Lately I've been having dropouts with communication between here and my external web server in Raleigh, NC. Occasionally there'll be a few minutes disconnection, but more often it's just high packet loss. traceroute points at Telstra's net infrastructure on the US West Coast: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/22) ~ 66 -> traceroute www traceroute to www.lemis.com (208.86.226.86), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets 1 radiation-tower.aussiebb.net (180.150.4.1) 33.162 ms 29.931 ms 30.013 ms 2 gi6-4-19.core1.portmel.aussiebb.net (202.142.143.65) 30.991 ms 39.812 ms 29.972 ms 3 gi0-0-2.bdr1.portmel.aussiebb.net (180.150.0.145) 29.015 ms 29.766 ms 30.009 ms 4 TenGigabitEthernet8-4.lon55.melbourne.telstra.net (165.228.138.149) 31.008 ms 28.842 ms 39.937 ms 5 bundle-ether3-100.exi-core1.melbourne.telstra.net (203.50.80.1) 41.012 ms 43.785 ms 39.967 ms 6 bundle-ether12.chw-core10.sydney.telstra.net (203.50.11.124) 40.974 ms 39.787 ms 41.014 ms 7 Bundle-ether17.oxf-gw2.sydney.telstra.net (203.50.13.70) 38.980 ms 39.800 ms 40.060 ms 8 bundle-ether1.sydo-core01.sydney.reach.com (203.50.13.38) 43.898 ms 36.946 ms 52.957 ms 9 i-0-6-0-6.sydo-core02.bi.telstraglobal.net (202.84.223.38) 46.029 ms i-0-4-0-3.paix-core01.bx.telstraglobal.net (202.84.140.70) 198.774 ...
Ashampoo bug discovered
Yesterday's problems with Ashampoo Photo Commander were clearly worth entering a bug report, so did so today. One of the things they wanted was the build version, sensibly enough. And that was interesting: version 11.1.8 of 10 September 2014. Clearly something they need to fix quickly. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Investigating GPS navigators
I've given up hope of finding a usable Android GPS navigation app, so I'll probably buy a new GPS navigator. But why stick with the el cheapo navigators? I can afford a Big Name one. Spent some time looking around the web, and found that Garmin has some that don't look bad. But how easy are they to use? Watched a number of eBay clips, none of which really answered my questions. The biggest is: how accurate are the maps? While I was at JB HiFi, looked for their GPS navigators. Mounted vertically on a column. Yes, there's power to them, and you can try them out if you don't mind kneeling in the aisle to do so.
Ashampoo problems
I've been postprocessing my photos with Ashampoo Photo Optimizer on a regular basis for over 6 years, and it's good enough that I actually bought another package from them, Photo Commander, which does other stuff as well. Only in the course of time did I discover that the other stuff isn't worth it, and that the GUI makes normal optimization more difficult. But now it seems to be suffering from bit rot. Lately all the optimized images have had a distinctly brown tinge to them. Here before and after . How did that happen? To investigate, downloaded a trial version of the current Optimizer and tried again.
Where's my mail?
Yvonne told me today that various people have complained (on Facebook, of course), that they haven't received mail from her. On checking, yes, indeed: after upgrading lagoon I had forgotten to configure postfix, and she had mail backed up for days. Why didn't she notice earlier? And are there other misconfigurations lurking somewhere? ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Photo processing problems
Yvonne came to me with a problem processing her photos. The contact print page showed the image names, but not the images themselves. Looking at her screen, I saw: === yvonne@lagoon (/dev/pts/1) ~/Photos/20141004 10 -> make contacts Converting PA042709.jpg to /home/yvonne/public_html/localtmp/contacts/20141004/PA042709.jpg /Photos/Tools/mkcontacts: line 179: [: : integer expression expected Converting PA042710.jpg to /home/yvonne/public_html/localtmp/contacts/20141004/PA042710.jpg /Photos/Tools/mkcontacts: line 179: [: : integer expression expected OK, a bug in my mkcontacts script? Took a look, added some debugging echos, and finally discovered that identify (another of these namespace-polluting programs that come with ImageMagick) was dying with an illegal instruction exception and not even mentioning it on the screen.
Android: Give up?
On IRC today, Peter Jeremy mentioned Google Drive. What's that? To quote: <peter> groggy: It's also the green/gold/blue triangle on your Android tablet. OK, I'll bite. Where? I suppose some Android tablets do display them, but if mine does, it's very discreet about it. Looking around, though, I found a tulip at top left: That proved to be a microphone symbol. Touched it and got a voice non-recognition service that competes with the best of them.
Android GPS: Give up?
My old GPS navigator (only three years old) has worn-out batteries. How do I repair it? No idea. But then, I don't need a dedicated navigator, right? My Android tablet can do that too. Well, it could, and better, if I could find a useful app to do it. Tried again with GPS Navgiation & Maps - light, which is apparently a trial version of GPS Navgiation & Maps, which costs $1. Once again an app that seems to be completely useless. Like OsnAnd, it's based on OpenStreetMap, which is completely inadequate in our area. And once again the functionality appears to be minimal.
Completing the move to Victoria
Seven years ago I moved from South Australia to Victoria, and currently I'm planning the next move. But as Jürgen Lock pointed out, I haven't completely finished the move here: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/1) ~ 3 -> finger [email protected] Login: grog Name: Greg Lehey Directory: /home/grog Shell: /usr/local/bin/bash Office: Echunga South Australia Office Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Home Phone: +61-8-8388-8250 Why does finger still show the old address and phone number?
Reinstalling SML
A few days ago I reinstalled smlnj on lagoon, my (finally!) up-to-date FreeBSD box, for a programming language course I'm doing. And that went much more smoothly than before. But that's not all the software I needed. For Emacs I needed the sml-mode package. That wasn't as smooth: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/15) /usr/ports/lang/sml-mode.el 156 -> make install ===> sml-mode-3.9.5_5 is marked as broken: Not staged.. *** [install] Error code 1 Stop in /home/src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/lang/sml-mode.el.
Use our software!
Participating in an online survey today, was rejected for a strange reason: OK, I'll bite. If it's not a PC, a Mac, a tablet, a smart phone or a netbook, what is it that they think I'm running? Restarted running Microsoft, and that seemed to be OK, but the survey software was so broken that I had to give up in the end. ACM only downloads articles once.
More tablet thoughts
Somehow I've opened a can of worms with this Medion ¥ tablet. It's getting me thinking about issues that hadn't previously interested me. But the more I look at it, the more problems crop up. Andy Snow read my article comparing Microsoft and Android, and came up with a couple of comments. Firstly, he pointed out that I wasn't comparing Microsoft and Android at all, just the specific tablets I had. Correct, and I've changed the article to make that clearer. More interestingly, though, he showed me a way to stop an Android process without going through the force stop procedure: click on the double rectangle icon, which displays all apps except the current one, and swipe the icon to one side.
Upgrading lagoon, day 2
Upgrading lagoon, Yvonne's computer, had the usual hiccups, but things haven't been too bad. The good news is: === root@lagoon (/dev/pts/3) ~ 60 -> pkg install smlnj Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue... FreeBSD repository is up-to-date. All repositories are up-to-date. The following 1 packages will be affected (of 0 checked): New packages to be INSTALLED: smlnj: 110.76_1 The process will require 34 MB more space. 7 MB to be downloaded. Proceed with this action? [y/N]: y Fetching smlnj-110.76_1.txz: 100% 7 MB 692.2k/s 00:11 Checking integrity... done (0 conflicting) [1/1] Installing smlnj-110.76_1: 100% === root@lagoon (/dev/pts/3) ~ 61 -> sml Standard ML of New Jersey v110.76 [built: Wed Sep 10 09:31:40 2014] - ^D === root@lagoon (/dev/pts/3) ~ 62 -> That seems normal enough, but this time last year I had ...
Microsoft tablet experience
One of the last things for which I still found Android useful was playing streaming audio from the web. As I have discovered, Android apps can do this, but badly. How about Microsoft? Select http://www.radioswissclassic.ch/live/aacp.m3u in firefox, and it Just Works. Of course, without a connection to my Bluetooth adapter, it plays on the internal tinny loudspeakers (which, however, aren't quite as tinny as on my Android tablet). Still, the thing has Bluetooth support. Just associate it and we should be OK, right? Ah, but this is Microsoft. Go to Control Panel and select Add a device . Off it goes, finds the device, and starts installing a driver.
Microsoft tablet
Yvonne came back from shopping with a Medion ¥ tablet (or is that a laptop?) running Microsoft Windows 8.1, that was on special at ALDI today. Physically it's a very big tablet (11.6") with a docking station. That's rather like what I mused about three years ago. But what do I want with a Windows device? I was driven to it by Android. At least with Microsoft you have access to normal software, even if the implementation is dubious. But with Android you don't. I went through the first year's experience with Android a month ago. Here's how things compare: Normal computer functionality, including word processing, web browsing, social networking and all those things you used to need a computer for.
System upgrade: doing it
It's been nearly 10 months since I bought new hardware for eureka and started my upgrade to FreeBSD release 10. And it's still not done! Part of the problem was the migration to pkgng, which was somewhat rocky, but which now seems to work. And then there's my fear of painting myself into a corner and not having a machine to work with. But I'm coming up to my second time round the Coursera course on programming languages, and I need to run smlnj. And I could no longer find that on eureka. eureka is running 9.2-STABLE, and it's impractical to upgrade anything on it any more.
Microsoft resource hog caught
After all my updates on Chris' Microsoft laptop, it still spends between 10 and 15 minutes of saturated disk activity after each boot or resume. Spent some more time looking at (and learning) the task manager, and found the problem: a process called SanService.exe was performing up to 10 MB/s of consistent disk access during the whole time. And how about that, Google found it for me: it's part of Sophos Anti-Virus. That's something I know nothing about. Is it necessary to scan at startup time? I'll have to do some more learning. ACM only downloads articles once.
Olympus Capture
Olympus has introduced a new feature for the OM-D E-M1: Tethered shooting , implemented with OLYMPUS Capture. Tried it out today. Finding the instructions is difficult, and so far I can only get them through the application itself, conveniently set up so that you need several mouse clicks to move from one page to the next. But by comparison it looks a lot better than other Olympus documentation. When I connected my camera, Capture didn't detect it. Olympus Viewer did, and wanted to download images. It seems that Olympus has introduced a new USB access mode. It doesn't have a name, only an image, which I call hookah : height="45" width="59" />, and that's the one that you need to select.
DxO problem: solved ?
My ongoing problem with DxO Optics Pro seems to be looping. On 5 September 2014 Marion asked me to replace a file: Could you please delete the file caflist90.db in the following folder: C:\Users\ user_name \AppData\Local\DxO_Labs\DxO Optics Pro 9 The file was in fact called CAFList90.db, but who cares? At the time I removed it, and it was immediately replaced by an identical copy. I reported this, and they looked elsewhere. Then I got another message a couple of days ago: Could you please go to the following page: https://www.dxo.com/intl/manual-download Once you have entered your equipment details, you'll be given the option to download the CAFList90.db file.
More Microsoft updates
Part of the problem chasing the DxO Optics Pro bug is that I have to use Chris Bahlo's laptop to process photos taken with Four Thirds lenses. And for some reason after boot or resume from hibernation, it takes 15 minutes or so of heavy disk activity before it's usable. Why? Clearly the things to do are defragmentation and software update. Defragging takes forever! And software Windows update had even more surprises for me. It established that 57 important updates were needed, of which it installed none: And another unknown 32 bit hex code!
We don't need no steenking uptime
DxO still haven't fixed the problem with DxO Optics Pro . In fact, they're looping: Once you have entered your equipment details, you'll be given the option to download the CAFList90.db file. Please download and copy this file to: C:\Users\ user_name \AppData\Local\DxO_Labs\DxO Optics Pro 9 Then, restart Optics Pro. You should then be able to download your modules. The only problem is, that's exactly what they said a couple of weeks ago, and I reported that the version I had was identical to the one I downloaded. It also doesn't address the fact that it still doesn't work after removing as much as I could and then reinstalling, including this file.
Fixing shellshock, the FreeBSD way
Why hasn't the FreeBSD project issued a security advisory for Shellshock? Simple, it has nothing to do with FreeBSD. It's a GNU problem. Can you compromise a FreeBSD system with it? Sure. But that's not the project's problem. Read your CERT Advisories. OK, I don't want to finger-point. I want to get rid of the problem, which seems to exist on all my systems. eureka is way out of date (and also completely inaccessible, but that's no reason for complacency). Go to the port and rebuild it: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/15) /usr/ports/shells/bash 95 -> cd /usr/ports/shells/bash You have new mail in /var/mail/grog === root@eureka (/dev/pts/15) /usr/ports/shells/bash 96 -> make ===> License GPLv3 accepted by the user ===> Found saved configuration for bash-4.3.25_1 ===> bash-4.3.25_1 depends on file: /usr/local/sbin/pkg - not found ===> Verifying install for /usr/local/sbin/pkg in /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/pkg You are ...
Shell shock
Another serious security bug in Open Source software! Once upon a time I was convinced that security bugs were the province of the Microsoft Spaceand that despite the RTM Worm. But now I discover I've been living with a bug in my shell for the last 25 years! And sure enough, it's still there: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/11) ~ 429 -> env x='() { :;}; echo vulnerable' bash -c "echo this is a test" vulnerable this is a test ACM only downloads articles once.
How much uptime?
It's been over a year since my longest ever computer uptime came to an end: 1,812 days terminated by a hardware fault. But today on Facebook somebody asked me if the machine was still up. Sadly, no. But then Ollivier Robert piped in: his machine was booted a few months before mine, and it didn't fail. Now he has: 2:17AM up 2279 days, 5:42, 19 users, load averages: 0.01, 0.02, 0.00 I'm green with envy. ACM only downloads articles once.
Voice mail problems: identified!
Over the last couple of days I've tried various things to work out why voice mail doesn't work with my MyNetFone VoIP service. And then something occurred to me, something you'd normally never notice: when the exact message Your call cannot be taken at the moment, and you cannot leave a message, so please call later is produced, I heard it too, from the base station of the wireless phone system. That can't be MyNetFone. Tried disconnecting the wireless phone, and sure enough, voice mail worked normally! What's wrong with this picture? A surprising number of things: This can't be the first time that local phone equipment causes problems.
Cygwin revisited
It's been decades since I first tried Cygwin. At the time I wasn't very impressed, and when I had to try it again I was no more impressed. But Edwin Groothuis suggested that it might be a way to find my modified files for the DxO Optics Pro problem, so I installed it again. My view hasn't changed. In particular, it still bends the directory hierarchies to suit a Unix-like view of the world. But there's a way to access the bare Microsoft drives . To quote Edwin: <MavvieRVBD> But you can still access the various disk via c: d: etc But that doesn't work for me.
DxO workaround, try 3
More playing around trying to find the DxO Optics Pro bug, ultimately without success. There's clearly something, whether a file or a registry entry, that is preventing newer versions of DxO from working correctly. But what? I've removed all files and entries that I can find, but the problem remains the same. Sent off a ticket update to DxO. I can see this, too, taking a long time. ACM only downloads articles once.
MyNetFone voice mail
What's happened to my voice mail? When I tried today I couldn't even get a connection to the voice mail number (121): silence for 60 seconds, then a disconnect signal. There's clearly something seriously wrong here. Called up MyNetFone and spoke to Naomi (again), who told me that the matter had been escalated to 2nd level, and that I'd get a call back. That happened from Mino (if I have the name right) at 14:35. Over half an hour she proved that she could leave voice mail for me, both calling from a Telstra line and from their own lines. That's better than nothing, but when I tried the same thing from my other VoIP line, I got the same old message: The phone is unattended, and you cannot leave a message .
Reinstalling DxO
As I said yesterday, what is Microsoft for find / -mtime -1? It seems that the closest I can come is with Windows explorer, which explores file systems, not windows. I can specify a time range, so selected yesterday, and found these files that Revo Uninstaller Pro had left behind: Directory of C:\ProgramData\DxO Labs\Licenses 21 Nov 2013 09:43 <DIR> . 21 Nov 2013 09:43 <DIR> .. 09 Jan 2013 15:38 253 dxoopticspro8demo_8.0_20130109_053828.lic 10 Feb 2013 13:18 273 dxoopticspro8_8.0_20130210_031835.lic 04 Nov 2013 13:53 250 dxoopticspro9demo_9.0_20131104_035353.lic 21 Nov 2013 09:43 275 dxoopticspro9_9.0_20131120_234351.lic 4 File(s) 1,051 bytes ...
Catching the DxO bug
So far any attempt to get DxO Optics Pro to recognize the new modules has failed. Borrowed Chris' laptop, which has never had DxO installed on it, and tried there. It worked! So somewhere DxO have been too clever for themselves and left junk behind after deinstallation that prevents a clean reinstallation. What do I do? They want a TeamViewer session to mess around themselves. And strangely their help desk doesn't open until 8:00 UTC (well, currently 10:00 MET), which is after I stop working for the day. If it were a matter of a couple of minutes, I wouldn't be so concerned, but given that they can't just issue a fix, there's a good chance that they'll play around for hours before declaring (preliminary) defeat.
Totally removing Microsoft programs, try 2
Why can't I remove all trace of a Microsoft program, in this case DxO Optics Pro , from my computer? Somehow I find it offensive that the system retains a memory of what I have been doing. But lots of people use Microsoft; went looking for methods to remove the remains. This page promised to do just that, but in the end just removed stuff from the registry, leaving a large number of files behind. And then there are things like Revo Uninstaller Pro , which was available for a 30 day trial, so I tried it out. Sure enough, it removed all the files too.
Fixing DxO
I've had a couple of exchanges with DxO support since last week, and finally they explained (and demonstrated) to me that yes, they can load Four Thirds modules for Micro Four Thirds bodies. So why doesn't it work here? Broken update seems the most obvious cause. OK, that's simple: completely remove the old installation and start again. To be on the safe side, tried it out on dxo, my old Microsoft Vista machine, after first confirming that yes, the problem existed there too. But after removing two different versions, there were still files left in AppData. Tried various methods of removing them without success.
Phantom calls resolved
Did some research on VoIP phantom calls today. This discussion throws some light on the matter: it's a form of spam, where phone spammers scan the net for open sip ports. Why don't they say anything when you answer? Because they're oversubscribed. So if you run your SIP connection on a non-standard port, they (probably) won't get you. Met CJ today, and he confirmed that his phantom calls have stopped. So why doesn't this happen to me? Because I don't have a SIP port open to the net; it's behind my NAT setup. But this sounds like a traditional application for a firewall: allow connections only from trusted IP addresses.
Support Hell: DxO
So yesterday I sent a support request to DxO. I've had grief from them in the past, but this time the problem was obvious: they advertise that they support certain combinations of camera and lens, but the program doesn't know that. The easiest way to check is to get the program to show what modules it thinks are available: That's only partial, and of course the window can't be resized, but any Zuiko FT lenses should have been there, and scrolling shows that they're not available at all.
DxO supports more Olympus?
I have a love-hate relationship with DxO Optics Pro . It's buggy, glacially slow, and has a number of really irritating issues, like insisting on resetting crop to preserve aspect ratio . But it produces good results. About my biggest issue now is that they don't support Four Thirds lenses on Micro Four Thirds bodies. But they do! Or at least, that's what their supported equipment page says: So I tried it out.
Support Hell: MyNetFone
CJ is still having no luck with phantom calls on his VoIP installation with MyNetFone, and the support people don't seem to be able to help him. He can't even set up voice mail. He asked me to call them up, so we set up another TeamViewer session, I confirmed that it worked, and then I called up support and asked them to connect and fix the problem. Spoke to Zack, who is clearly not German. He didn't understand the issuelast week Harriet had planned to change a port number, but he didn't understand that. In fact, he didn't even know how to set up a Team Viewer connection, which is really surprisingly simple.
CJ's next problems
CJ Ellis along today with computer and VoIP problems. He couldn't find how to send a message with Gmail, so he had deleted all the important messages he had instead. And he is getting continuous calls on his phone. How is that happening? Called up MyNetFone and spoke to Harriette, with whom I had spoken a couple of weeks ago. This time she was more intelligible and wanted to configure the ATA to reject the calls. On enquiry, it seems that she was going to set a different port to listen on, though that might just be my interpretation. In any case, that means that CJ needs to be there at home, so who knows how that will pan out.
MTM: A new TLA
Discussing the National Broadband Network on IRC today, Andy Farkas came up with a new TLA: MTM. What's that? We had a number of guesses. It seems that he meant multi-technology mix , but it can also be expanded to Malcolm Turnbull's Mess . ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
zerofile for Microsoft
Comment from Andy Snow on IRC today: it seems that a program like my zerofile is available from Microsoft as sdelete.exe. It seems that the main purpose of the program is to obliterate the content of an existign file and then delete it, but the -z option (and yes, really -z and not /z) performs the function of zerofile. ACM only downloads articles once.
Finishing CJ's computer
Finally the backup was done, so I put the disk back into CJ's computer and booted. Your computer was unable to start\nStartup Repair is checking . My fault. When I had put the disk in the test machine, it started booting from it instead of from the FreeBSD disk. I had powered down immediately, but this suggest that it wasn't quite immediately enough. So I left Startup Repair running. What does it do? Looks like an fsck, and it took about the same time. At the end: Startup Repair cannot repair this computer automatically . What does that mean? Followed various links, but there was nothing sensible there.
CJ's installation and random Microsoft pain
So basically CJ's computer is ready, and I had planned to give it to him today. But how is he going to back it up? The way Microsoft people always do, I suppose: not at all. The least I could do was to make a copy of the disk image. And to ensure it compresses well, it makes sense to zero out all the unused file space, in this case about 90% of the total. With real computers I do this with a little program called zerofile, which creates a file and writes binary zeros to it until the file system is full.
Setting up Microsoft, again
Into the office this morning to find that CJ's computer had finished its upgrades and rebooted. And, of course, there were upgrades waiting. Tried installing them and got not one, but two of typical Microsoft 8 digit hex error numbers, 0x80070490 and 0x800f020b. I now know better than to try to decipher them, and tried again. Sure enough, this time only one error, 0x800f020bwith a difference. I followed the Get help with this error link and got no less than 8 hitsnone of which referenced the error number: Clearly they thought that they were close enough.
Firefox stupidity
While rsyncing my web pages this morning, saw something surprising: js/ js/Ge-29490ge2.html 17482 100% 14.58kB/s 0:00:01 (xfer#4, to-check=5234/11363) js/Ge-29490ge2_files/ js/Ge-29490ge2_files/ca-pub-5294144413784354.js 108 100% 0.09kB/s 0:00:01 (xfer#5, to-check=5222/11363) ... Had somebody broken in and placed a Javascript exploit? Took a look at the stuff and discovered that it was a web page saved by firefox. Yet Another Example of its complete misunderstanding of file system hierarchies. ACM only downloads articles once.
VoIP ATA configuration
So now I have two VoIP connections, one via a NetComm V210P and the other via a Linksys PAP2T. Theoretically I could run both services via the Linksys, but it doesn't have a POTS input. But it does have the advantage of relatively complete syslog facility, so it seemed good to use it for the VoIP input line so that I could log callers' phone numbers. Reconfigured it and discovered that, although I could call it, the phone didn't ring. What's wrong there? Spent a lot of time examining all the myriad configuration details of the ATA. It's a US model.
Browser memory usage
Lately firefox has been hanging frequently, and this morning I had to restart it several times in rapid succession. It seems that one of the unselected pages in Restore session was the problem. While doing that, shot down all my browsers and npviewer.bin. Shooting down Chrome was a surprise: I regained 10 GB of RAM! As I said on IRC a couple of days ago, if EMACS once stood for Eight Megabytes And Continually Swapping , they should introduce the term EGACS for web browsers. ACM only downloads articles once.
Getting CJ's computer
Yesterday TNT tried to deliver CJ's new computer. Given where he lives, that's quite impressive, but why don't they try to confirm that somebody will be there to receive the parcel before driving an estimated 50 km to deliver it? CJ is very deaf, so he asked me to call them. Did so and got Yet Another Emetic Voice Non-Recognition Disservice. Finally got through to a human by the name of TracyStacey, who told me that she would put in a request for pickup from the depot in Ballarat and call me back. Given that I was about to leave, that didn't help much.
A year of Android
It's been a year since I bought an Android tablet for real use. I had tried one a year before that, but had not persevered. Now I have been using a tablet for a year. What good is it? The attraction of the tablet is flexibility. It promises: Normal computer functionality, including word processing, web browsing, social networking and all those things you used to need a computer for.
A year of Android
It's been a year since I bought an Android tablet for real use. I had tried one a year before that, but had not persevered. Now I have been using a tablet for a year. What good is it? The attraction of the tablet is flexibility. It promises: Normal computer functionality, including word processing, web browsing, social networking and all those things you used to need a computer for.
A computer for CJ
CJ Ellis showed up here today, apparently because he had wanted to do some work on our site, but got caught by the rain. Took the opportunity to help him transfer his home phone line to VoIP, which proved more difficult than I had expected. First, of course, I had to set up access for him. CJ's not stupid, but he's 75 years old and has never really learnt anything about computers. For him nothing is intuitive. No point in trying to teach him the fine points of FreeBSD. First, he needs a computer. There's a mob called Computers for Seniors that offers cheap computers for concession card holders.
ATA: finally
Over to CJ's place this evening to connect up the ATA. It worked, fortunately. Now he's going to have to learn to live with another paradigm. Hopefully it won't involve me in too much work. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Telstra: super up-to-date
Advertising from Telstra today to inform us that the National Broadband Network is now availableless than nine months after the event. But that's nothing. Look at the address: Cliff Taylor sold me the house in July 2007, and he hasn't been seen here since. And they've misspelt Kleins Road as Kliens Road . I'm a Telstra customer, for pity's sake! What incredible corruption do they have in their databases? Admittedly, it's not even the second time, but at least the third.
Configuring CJ's ATA
Called MyNetFone about CJ's unconfigured ATA. This time I spoke to somebody who told me he wanted to start a remote desktop on my PC . That's interesting simply because not all versions of Microsoft support it. But no, it wasn't really a remote desktop, that's just what he called it. Instead he wanted to use TeamViewer. Problem: I don't want people messing around on my computers, and while TeamViewer is probably relatively safe, I always run it on pain, my XP laptop. And I had left that with CJ. Reluctantly fired up dxo, the Vista box, and installed TeamViewer on that.
VoIP ATA hell
CJ's ATA, a Mitron MNFMV1, has arrived, and I promised to install it for him. Basically that means plugging it in. And sure enough, it came online and an IP address to the laptop (pain) that I had plugged into the LAN port. All plug and play. But the SIP light didn't light up. How do you diagnose that with a black box? Fortunately pain (now eucla, running FreeBSD) knew the device address, since it's the Internet gateway. So: point a browser at it? Sure, and it wants a user name and password, which MyNetFone didn't supply. admin/admin? Yup! And how about that, the thing hadn't been configured.
New ammunition against telemarketeers
On IRC today found this post from Chris Blasko (and not Chris Bahlo) about how to get your own back on telemarketeers: convince them that you're from their IT department and there's something wrong with their phone. Offer to fix it for them and get them to reset their phone to factory defaults. The more I think of this, the more fun it seems. In the example the perpetrator was connected to the marketeer, not the more usual other way round. But that doesn't make as much difference as I thought. Hypothetical conversation: TM (Silence, sound of nose-picking) Helllo, how are you today?
Next planning permit amendment
Spent quite some time trying to fill out a form to amend my application for a planning permit. Filling out the form should be simple, but I was hindered by various software issues. The form is in editable PDF format, and I have already filled one, so it made sense to amend that form to fit the new data. But no, for some reason I couldn't change it, only the original. Make a copy? That didn't work either, though I confirmed that the content of the copy was identical. Permissions, maybe? This is using Acrobat reader on Microsoft against a file mounted via Samba on a UFS file system.
More sloppy error reporting
Copied a video file to teevee tonight. I had difficulty watching it: === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/0) /spool/Videos 10 -> mplayer Careful-He-Might-Hear-You.1983 MPlayer SVN-r35933-snapshot-3.2 (C) 2000-2013 MPlayer Team Playing Careful-He-Might-Hear-You.1983. File not found: 'Careful-He-Might-Hear-You.1983' Failed to open Careful-He-Might-Hear-You.1983. OK, that's not so surprising in itself, but I didn't type in the name: I started it and let the shell complete the file name. And ls(1) showed that the file was there. After a bit of head-scratching, found: === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/0) /spool/Videos 12 -> file Careful-He-Might-Hear-You.1983 Careful-He-Might-Hear-You.1983: regular file, no read permission It seems that cp(1) sets the permissions to --------- while copying.
Why I don't use Facebook
In the evening, discussed with Chris Bahlo how we find things on the web. I go to some trouble to correlate my own content, and for others Google is the clear favourite. But we know that Facebook also keeps things forever. But for whom? The NSA? It's not easy for normal users to find things there. A case in point: a couple of months ago Jordan Hubbard put names to some photos on a photo, including mine. Most of them were deliberate falsifications, but that was part of the fun. The issue was: how to find the posting? A Google search for hubbard lehey mckusick facebook brings up a number of hits ( 23,300 , if you want to believe it), including several of this diary (one claiming a date of April 7, nearly two months before the event), but nothing from Facebook.
Internet for CJ
CJ Ellis along this afternoon to get help connecting to the Internet. His real concern is not so much Internet connectivity as telephony: with MyNetFone he saves so much money compared to Telstra that it covers the price of the Internet connection as well. It'll all get connected next Friday. Now where can we find somebody to teach CJ about computers? ACM only downloads articles once.
ANOTHER NBN failure
This morning at 9:38 we went off the net again! I was having breakfast and didn't find out until about 10:15. Called up Aussie Broadband support and was just describing the problem when the connection came back again. Only 40 minutes outage. But that was premature. It failed again after 8 minutes, and stayed down. Called Aussie again and got confirmation that others had had the same problem. But they still needed to treat it as an isolated fault, because the National Broadband Network hadn't reported any failure. Why not? The NTD was showing normal status, so it makes sense to guess that the problem was in the link between Dereel and Ballarat.
Where's my new VoIP account?
One of the advantages of my new MyNetFone VoIP account is that I can call in on the numbers as well. I can either transfer an existing number or be allocated a suitable one. Just go to the web site and start searching... And searching. And searching. All I found was my existing account. Finally called up MyNetFone technical support and spoke to somebody who mumbled her name as Nutella . She didn't seem to understand the issue, and I had to explain things to her several times. Then she decided to reset my login password, occasioning further delay, and in the end decided that she couldn't fix it, so she opened a ticket and told me I'd hear back from them.
New VoIP connections
Gradually we're making more phone calls, and from time to time we both need to call at once, or we get an incoming call on the landline while we're making an outgoing call on VoIP. In addition, the cost of the calls is increasing. It's still almost nothing by comparison with landline calls, but particularly the $0.24 per minute for calls to mobile phones adds up. I'm with MyNetFone, and they have other tariffs: in fact, the tariff I'm on (no rental, pay only per call) is no longer being offered. But the calls are more expensive, and they have a tariff for $9.95 a month (or $99 a year) that includes 200 landline calls, more than I'd ever use.
Intuition and documentation
It's been nearly 25 years since I got my first mobile phone, a Motorola Brick. I was one of the first people I knew to use mobiles. But times have changed: the cost differential between mobile and fixed lines has increased, VoIP has lowered the costs of fixed telephony, and now that I'm not as mobile any more myself, there seems to be no need. Well, almost. We do move around a little, and it's good to have a phone with you. But now it has to be a smart phone. Yvonne has one from Chris Bahlo, and last week I got a call on it.
Computer problems: hat trick
I've found a course on animal welfare on Coursera. That's something close to Yvonne's heart, so I suggested she go to the Coursera web site and take a look. The connection hung. Why? I still don't know. What I've established so far is that it only happens from lagoon, her machine, and only when accessing Coursera. It all goes via an instance of squid running on eureka, so you'd expect there to be no difference between individual machines. It's also not the browser: I tried both firefox and Chrome, and the results were the same. The squid logs aren't very helpful: 1405999219.104 68641 192.109.197.134 TCP_MISS/200 11922 CONNECT www.coursera.org:443 - DIRECT/107.21.206.124 - 192.109.197.134 is lagoon.
Linux error reporting
For some reason my MPEG recodings on cvr2, my Ubuntu Linux computer video recorder, ground to a halt today. No obvious reason, but mythtranscode ran at a snail's pace. No error messages, just very slow. Anything in /var/log/messages? No, there never is, just: Jul 22 13:16:10 cvr2 -- MARK -- Jul 22 13:36:10 cvr2 -- MARK -- Jul 22 13:56:10 cvr2 -- MARK -- I don't know why it bothers. cvr2 is Linux, not Microsoft, but since there was nothing obvious, I tried rebooting. And mythbackend didn't come back for a long time.
Swap space needs
Yvonne came to me this morning to tell me that the photo processing software had hung itself up again. That's normal enough for the Microsoft-based products, but this was FreeBSD, and she was just running make. ps(1) showed that the X server was no longer running. And /var/log/messages? ... Jul 22 11:29:03 lagoon kernel: swap_pager_getswapspace(8): failed Jul 22 11:29:03 lagoon kernel: swap_pager_getswapspace(9): failed Jul 22 11:29:03 lagoon kernel: swap_pager_getswapspace(16): failed Jul 22 11:29:04 lagoon kernel: pid 67064 (Xorg), uid 0, was killed: out of swap space Decades ago I ran computers with 8 and 16 MB of memory.
ATA internals
I'm storing more quick dial numbers in my NetComm V210P ATA, not something that is normally of very much interest. I'm putting different categories on different pages (really just web pages), and I've chosen page 3 for numbers related to house construction. So: entry 20, code 020# was JG King. 21 was Tom Tyler. But I entered the number as 021 just to see what would happen. Nothing appeared. OK, bug. Then I went back to page 2. There was an entry for Tom, entry 17. How did that get there? It took me about 15 seconds to realize how. And as Peter Jeremy suggested, 0xe also created an entry 14.
New FreeBSD books?
Mail from Mohsen Mostafa Jokar today. He wants to translate a FreeBSD book into Farsi. Problem: which book? The Complete FreeBSD is now over 10 years out of date. Michael Lucas has written Absolute FreeBSD, but that, too, is nearly 7 years out of date. Is there nothing newer? I'm half inclined to bring The Complete FreeBSD up to date, but I don't know if I have the energy any more. Maybe we should get a group of people to pitch in. ACM only downloads articles once.
Configuring Android storage
I've had my Android tablet now for nearly a year. In that time I haven't exactly made friends with it, but there are some things that aren't too painful. It has a 16 GB SD card, but it kept telling me that storage was full. When I look at the output of df(1), I saw: Filesysterm Size Used Free Blksize /storage/sdcard0 1952M 1952M 0M 4096 /storage/sdcard1 14983M 710M 14272M 4096 Why are there two partitions on the SD card?
Colour printers: 10 years of progress
Ten years ago I bought my first colour laser printer, a Brother HL-2700CN. It didn't last very long: on 6 December 2005, while I was flying back from Europe, a power surge killed it, though I didn't discover that for nearly a week. I replaced it with the same model because I had the consumables and also the duplex unit. That printer is now 8½ years old and showing its age. It prints unevenly and makes particularly worrying grinding noises while doing so.
Programming VoIP adapters
One of the minor irritations I have with VoIP via my NetComm V210P ATA is that I still have to use the phone keypad to make calls. Wouldn't it be so much easier to click on a number on the screen and have the ATA dial it? Of course it would. And as far as I know, nobody has ever implemented such an obviously good idea. But then, the ATA can store frequently called numbers and call them up via an abbreviation. Can't I store the number in one of those registers via a web application? It turns out that the answer is yes, sort of .
BigPond support from the outside
Sent a message to Ron Frolley today. It didn't get delivered: <[email protected]>: host extmail.bigpond.com[61.9.189.122] said: 552 5.2.0 Mexs1o00h1sUVRc01extSj Suspected spam message rejected. IB703 (in reply to end of DATA command) Suspected spam? What's that? Against my better judgement, called up BigPond support on 13 39 33, fought their stupid voice non-recognition system, and was connected relatively quickly with a Matteo who sounded distinctly Indian. He was out of his depth from the outset. He asked for my account number, and when I told him I didn't have an account with Telstra, he asked for my birth date.
Android networking: there can only be one
One thing that really puzzles me about Microsoft networking is that every network interface has a default gateway associated with it. What does that mean? I just can't see how it can work, nor what the implementers were thinking when they did it that way. But the poison is spreading: today I rebooted flachmann, my Android tablet, and for some reason a program started itself: Android's based on Linux!
Fixing the TV reception issues
It's been over two weeks since I tried to improve my TV reception.
Microsoft Windows : 30 years and no window management
In December 1983, while in hospital recovering from an appendicectomy, Yvonne brought me a copy of Byte magazine describing Microsoft's new Windows display manager. I was excited: we had seen this before with Apple's Lisa computer, but this would run on commodity hardware. By the time it actually appeared, it was less attractive, and gradually I wandered away from the Microsoft world. When I finally got a graphical desktop environment, it was X, not Microsoft, and I managed to stay out of the Microsoft space almost completely until I had to use it for my photographic software a couple of years ago.
Android and USB
Discussion on IRC about keyboards for Android devices today. Jashank Jeremy opined that Bluetooth keyboards were no good. I've already been there, done that, and came to the conclusion that there wasn't much point attaching a keyboard to an Android. But Jashank had a different problem: the key spacing is too small, at least on the keyboards he tried. But a couple of weeks ago, for a completely different reason, I blew $1 on a normal USB to micro USB adapter, which allows me to connect normal USB devices to the tablet. Would it work with a keyboard? Most people thought not.
digitalmailbox revisited
Further discussion of Austraila Post's MyPost on IRC today. It seems that this isn't Australia Post's first attempt at something like this: they already have https://paypaperbills.postbillpay.com.au/, which seems to do exactly the same thing. And Jürgen Lock came up with Qualsys SSL labs, which gave results for digitalmailbox.com.au that were less than stellar: A-. Still, that's better than postbillpay.com.au and anz.com.au, both of which get a B, So maybe they do offer bank-level security . By comparison, FreeBSD.org, google.com and ozlabs.org all get A. There's still a long way to go before you can trust any online financial institution, it seems. ACM only downloads articles once.
Reading Microsoft Word documents
Mark Richardson sent me a Microsoft Word document yesterday. How do I look at that? That's what a Microsoft box is for, right, and now I have one. Tried to open it, and discovered: Windows can't open this file . Why not? Sure, I don't have Word , but even Apple's base utilities can approximate to reading it. OK, off to search the web, which came up with FreeFileViewer. Installing that involved running the gauntlet of a whole lot of spamware: I got by without installing any, but I still had a registry checker that told me I had over 200 registry errors: ...
Australia Post goes electronic
Interesting paper mail from Australia Post today: they're going electronic. Instructions on how to set up an electronic mailbox, with the comforting URL http://www.digitalmailbox.com.au/, showing instantly that it's related to Australia Post. As an aside, why are people creating such long domain names lately? Not only do most people not type well, but the toys they use to access the web make it even more difficult. Still, it was worth trying. Setup was easy modulo the stupid password rules. It seems that A2z is an acceptable password, but Don't break in isn't. And the confirmation email I got was typical of modern systems: Content analysis details: (4.0 points, 3.0 required) pts rule name description ---- ---------------------- -------------------------------------------------- 1.0 HTML_FONT_FACE_BAD BODY: HTML font face is not a word 3.0 MIME_HTML_ONLY ...
DxO PRIME: Worth the trouble?
DxO Optics Pro is one of the slowest programs I've ever used. Even on a relatively fast machine it takes about a minute of CPU time per image. But clearly that's not slow enough: the latest version includes a noise reduction algorithm that slows it down to about 15 minutes of CPU time on my machine. Is it worth it? I've been taking photos of the dogs with the camera sensitivity set to 33° ISO (1600 linear), and there's some noise to be seen. Today I tried the effect of PRIME. It's hard to see: It's not until you magnify the detail images to their original 600×450 crop and run ...
More TV reception problems
Somehow my fix to the MythTV configuration didn't do the job. I'm still getting really bad reception on tuner 2. About the only thing I have eliminated is the cabling: tuner 2 is the first tuner in the daisy chain, and it's the one with the problems. It looks like I'll have to try to recover the old tuner database and see if there's something obvious about the differences. That's not the only problem. Recently just about every new programme has simply not been recorded. Looking in the log file, I find things like: 014-06-20 16:04:25.698 DB Error (change_program): Query was: UPDATE program SET starttime = '2014-06-21T22:32:44', endtime = '2014-06-21T23:28:51' WHERE chanid = 2002 AND starttime = '2014-06-21T22:32:34' Driver error was [2/1062]: QMYSQL3: Unable to execute query Database error was: Duplicate entry '2002-2014-06-21 22:32:44-0' ...
USB catastrophe
I know that FreeBSD release 9 has issues with USB, particularlyfor some reasonon eureka, my main machine. So when I connect cameras or backup disks to it, I first switch to /dev/ttyv0 to avoid this strange X bug that causes the mouse to hang. But today that didn't work. The display hung, and I couldn't get any response even after disconnecting and reconnecting keyboard, mouse and other things. I had to reboot. How I hate rebooting! My troubles weren't over, though. I had no networking! After some cursing and investigation, discovered that natd wasn't working: although it was configured, I had put in my own firewall rules, and natd only gets started if I use the standard firewall configuration.
New mouse
While in town yesterday, I picked up a new 6 button wireless mouse from OfficeWorks. It represents a new low in documentation: And that's really everything. The fun started when the receiver wasn't detected when I plugged it in to the keyboard hub. Only when I put it in a port on the motherboard did I get: Jun 14 08:28:18 eureka kernel: ugen1.9: <MOSART Semi.> at usbus1 Jun 14 08:28:18 eureka kernel: ukbd2: <MOSART Semi.
TV reception problems, next step
I've had TV reception problems for years, and I've been keeping notes in my diary. Why didn't I look there earlier? It seems that almost exactly three years ago I had the same problem: fine-tuning was disabled. And so it was again today. Set the flag; now to see if it helps. It wasn't helped by random variations in each direction. I seem to recall some issues with frequency, but so far I haven't been able to find them. ACM only downloads articles once.
Parting from my old computers
What do I do with all the old computers, books and listings in the shipping container? I haven't looked at them in years, and we don't want to take the container with us when we move. Chris Bahlo wants to buy it, and we should move it before the winter sets in and the ground gets too soft. So today Stewart and Craig came by and picked up many of the old computers, and also my old brewing fridges, to be scrapped: I couldn't bear to look.
More recording problems
I've been keeping an eye on my TV reception quality for nearly 3 years now, and I still don't understand why sometimes things are normal, and sometimes the image quality is completely unacceptable, to the point where no data at all are recorded. I've eliminated most things, including the tuners and cabling. But since my reconfiguration of the system over the weekend, things are different. Recordings on tuner 1 are consistently fine, and recordings on tuner 2 are consistently unusable. Why? I didn't do anything with the hardware. It looks as if it must be something to do with the configuration itself, which is certainly confused: it had lost the names of the tuners, for example.
The weekly eBay pain
Last week I tried to sell my old camera on eBay Australia. The problems I ran into were clearly bugs. Somewhat to my surprise I got a well-thought out answer to my bug report a few days later, offering workarounds for the bugs. But I didn't want to list it on a Wednesday. I have a hypothesis that from the seller's perspective the best time for an auction to finish is on a Sunday afternoon, when lots of people can watch it run to completion. It also seems reasonable to have a 7 day auctionanything longer tends to get forgotten. So that meant putting it up on a Sunday afternoon.
MythTV: the agony
So what do I do with my MythTV problems? I have at least three alternatives: address the immediate problem by modifying or updating the grabber software, install the latest version of MythTV, or install something else altogether. Fixing the problem in the current release has two significant disadvantages: it's probably only a matter of time before a new shepherd update will break it againafter all, I had the same issue 18 months ago. And it also requires me to learn more PERL than I want. Installing a new version of MythTV makes more sense, but how much work will it be?
More MythTV pain
Spent some more time reluctantly looking at my MythTV problems today. Once again, I see the value of keeping a diary: I got an almost identical error message 18 months ago. And it looks as if once again a shepherd update broke things. Unfortunately, the solution isn't the same. I'm going to have to accept the fact that my MythTV installation, installed over 5 years ago, is too old. Can I bear reinstalling it? ACM only downloads articles once.
Failure after failure
Woken up at 0:57 by the UPSs beeping: another power failure. That's so common here that I don't do more than confirm the fact. But it wasn't the only failure. My nightly mythfilldatabase run failed. Why? This stuff is so opaque that I really don't know. Tried re-running shepherd, which seemed to have forgotten everything it ever knew, and at the end it could no longer communicate with mythtv: 2014-06-06 14:46:45.044 XMLTV config file is: /home/mythtv/.mythtv/.xmltv 2014-06-06 14:46:49.110 Error in 1:1: unexpected end of file Huh?
eBay workaround
It took a while, but finally I have an answer from eBay about my listing problems. In fact, the support person (later identified as Jehan) went to a lot of trouble and just about listed the item for me. The problem? Who knows? He suggested clearing all cookies, which might have made a difference, but a lot of those cookies are unrelated to eBay, and any script that is so confused by them is clearly badly written. I wonder if this has been reported to the software development people. I suspect not, since they didn't ask me for any more details.
Network outage: aftermath
Updated my Facebook post about Saturday's network outage. Yes, at least one person affected wasn't using Aussie Broadband, so it looks like an National Broadband Network issue. When I have time I'll chase that one down. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Online activations: failed
We've been waiting for the activation of a SIM card from ALDI mobile and two debit cards from ANZ bank. It's not clear than any of them have worked. The last thing I heard from ALDI mobile was: Transferring your number can take from 4 to 48 business hours to complete, and we appreciate your patience. Whilst you are waiting for your transfer to complete, you can track the progress of your order by logging in to your account using your account number (instead of your mobile number).
Selling cameras on eBay
It's time to get rid of my old Olympus E-30. eBay's the place to do that, of course, so collected my photos and set off to list it. Things have changed at eBay, not only the massive breach of security they had a few weeks back, and which they didn't report to their users until much laterI heard about it on the radio news. But they've also changed their listing policies since I last sold something, so it was a little slow. But that wasn't all. After filling out all the fields, I got a message: OK, what policy?
Network outage!
Since the advent of the National Broadband Network, our network troubles are overaren't they? Today I discovered that I had lost connection round 16:10. Called up Aussie Broadband support and went through the usual debugging steps. At least he didn't ask me to reboot my computer, but he did ask if I had a spare router lying around. I did, and it also got no connection. How do you debug this kind of problem? The NTD is pretty much a black box. We know that it's an Ethernet bridge, but how exactly does it work? What do these constantly flashing LEDs mean?
More NiZn insights
The NiZn batteries in my mouse were discharged and needed changing today. There are two, and they're in parallel. On removal the voltages were 0.387 V and 0.630 V. That's surprising for two reasons: firstly, being in parallel the voltages should have been very close. Secondly, they're far too low: a discharged NiZn battery has about 1.55 V. But until yesterday evening the mouse worked normally. What happened? One issue with batteries in parallel is that they need to discharge at the same rate. That implies very consistent characteristics. The fact that the two batteries had such markedly different voltages after discharge shows that that's not the case here.
Facebook tracks me!
BSDCan is over, but not forgotten. David Maxwell posted a photo of a whole lot of us, including not only me, but also Jordan Hubbard, Kirk McKusick and Randi Harper. Problem: none of us were there. Jordan and Randi confirmed it,and I can't see Kirk there. In fact, I haven't been out of Australia for 8 years, coincidentally after returning from BSDCan 2006. Why did David claim we were there? Why, did David claim we were there? No. It seems that Facebook decided that it recognized us there. It's clearly not very clever: as far as I can see, all the people in the photo are male, but it seems that Tamara Colby (whom I don't know) is female, and so is Randi.
Mail address harvesters
Spam's a fact of life, of course, but occasionally I see things that are a little unusual: 740 N 21-05-2014 PlatinumPfizer To bloedmann ( 12) N Mr. bloedmann, Ready For 71% OFF? 743 N F 21-05-2014 To freebeer To freebeer ( 12) N F Mr. freebeer, Ready For 71% OFF? 745 N + 22-05-2014 PlatinumPfizer To brewer ( 12) + Mr. brewer, Ready For 71% OFF? 747 N 21-05-2014 PlatinumPfizer To daemon ( 12) N Mr.
Monitor damage?
I've been quite happy with the Matrix NEO 270WQ 2560×1440 monitor monitor that I bought 18 months ago. The price was right, and it works wellmost of the time. About one time out of 10, when I turn it on, the display is scrambled, just a lot of vertical lines. I've found that switching to a different vty or X server gets rid of that. When I came into the office this morning, it happened again. But this time I was so engrossed in an IRC topic on monitor 3 that I didn't notice for several minutes. And when I did the switch, there were residual vertical lines on the display.
Sudden traffic increase
I don't monitor my external web site traffic very frequently, but RootBSD supply some useful tools. Today I took a look and discovered that I had used about 280 GB since the beginning of the month. That's a little more than average for the whole month. Looking at the graphs showed that most of it had occurred in the past two days. Time to look at the log files: dsl-hkibrasgw1-58c393-42.dhcp.inet.fi - - [13/May/2014:12:41:18 -0400] "GET /grog/diary-aug2010.php?dirdate=20100409&imagesizes=1111111111111111111121111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 HTTP/1.0" 200 521410 "-" "Riddler (http://riddler.io/about.html)" ec2-54-87-63-67.compute-1.amazonaws.com - - [13/May/2014:12:43:08 -0400] "GET /grog/diary-nov2009.php?dirdate=20091111&imagesizes=111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111112111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 HTTP/1.0" 200 509842 "-" "Riddler (http://riddler.io/about.html)" ec2-54-211-80-117.compute-1.amazonaws.com - - [13/May/2014:12:43:52 -0400] "GET /grog/diary-nov2009.php?dirdate=20091113&imagesizes=111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 HTTP/1.0" 200 501004 "-" "Riddler (http://riddler.io/about.html)" ec2-54-87-63-67.compute-1.amazonaws.com - - [13/May/2014:12:44:03 -0400] "GET /grog/diary-aug2011.php?dirdate=20110822&imagesizes=111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111211111111111111111111111 HTTP/1.0" 200 502215 "-" "Riddler (http://riddler.io/about.html)" On the face of it, that's not a particularly high hit rate, but each ...
Ports upgrade: proof of the pudding
So yesterday I finally got my FreeBSD ports up to date. Today I checked: ==== Wed 14 May 2014 09:33:17 EST on stable-amd64.lemis.com: pkg upgrade Updating repository catalogue Nothing to do Finally! === root@stable-amd64 (/dev/pts/3) /usr/ports 5 -> hugin Shared object "libexiv2.so.12" not found, required by "hugin" What caused that? Yes, like so many other ports, Hugin was installed from the Ports Collection, not from a package. But the information was stored in the same database. Clearly there's something wrong here.
FreeBSD ports: finally up to date
Continued with the port upgrade on my build machine today. 551 fatal warnings to remove. In fact, it wasn't quite that bad: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/12) /src/Music/audiostream 15 -> grep WARN /usr/ports/Log.log.0 |sed 's:conflict.*::'|sort -u Checking integrity...pkg: WARNING: locally installed cups-image-1.5.4_1 Checking integrity...pkg: WARNING: locally installed py27-setuptools-2.0.1 Proceed with installing packages [y/N]: Checking integrity...pkg: WARNING: locally installed cups-image-1.5.4_1 pkg: WARNING: locally installed docbook-4.2 pkg: WARNING: locally installed docbook-4.3 pkg: WARNING: locally installed docbook-sk-4.1.2_4 pkg: WARNING: locally installed docbook-xml-4.3 pkg: WARNING: locally installed docbook-xml44-4.4_1 pkg: WARNING: locally installed docbook-xml45-4.5 pkg: WARNING: locally installed docbook440-4.4_2 pkg: WARNING: locally installed docbook450-4.5_2 pkg: WARNING: locally installed docbook500-5.0_1 pkg: WARNING: locally installed hdf5-1.8.10 pkg: WARNING: locally installed py27-setuptools-2.0.1 So basically it was only 4 ports, though DocBook accounted for many of them, includingit seemsmultiple versions.
RawTherapee: first impressions
RawTherapee seems to have a lot of features. What it doesn't have is a manual. Still, photo software is photo software, right, and it should be easy enough to understand. So I fired it up and got a barely legible screen: How can you read that? Spent 10 minutes looking for the settings tab (it's at bottom left) and came up with a better looking screen (GTK default): But that's as far as I got.
Fatal pkg warnings
I still haven't got round to upgrading to FreeBSD release 10. My last attempt, nearly 2 weeks ago, ended with the system hanging on shutdown. But that could have been due to the old machine I was running it on. I needed to try it in my current build machine. And to get at that I had to tidy away the mess on the desk. Got that done today, put in the disk, and sure enough, it works fine. So the next step was to bring the software up to date. Build world, build kernel, install kernel, upgrade packages. 1 GB of packages to download!
Security and cameras
I've grumbled about the network connectivity of my Olympus OM-D E-M1 in the past, but it seems that there are cameras that have more functionality. The Samsung NX300 looks like a competitor to the E-M1, but it seems to have better functionality, well hidden in the documentation. It seems that it even has an X server. But Georg Lukas did some investigations and came up with some amazing security issues. 802.11 with no passwords, no encryption. It reminds me of the bad old days of war chalking. I suppose it's a sign of the changes in wireless network security that www.warchalking.org is for sale.
Indian Doctor: Easter egg or coincidence
We're watching the third episode of The Indian Doctor at the moment. One thing in the current episode jumped out at me: the registration of what I think is an Austin A30: Is that an Easter egg or coincidence? ACM only downloads articles once.
Toshiba FlashAir: first impressions
Today I received the Toyota FlashAir" card that I ordered a while back, along with a manual (a single large sheet of paper with pages reduced in size by a factor of about 12). Fortunately I had already located the manuals page, so used that instead. and sure enough, it worked as well as can be expected with my android tablet ( signal strength: excellent\ntransfer rate: 1 mb/s ). but that's not what i wanted to use it for. How about connecting it to a real computer? The problem there is that, like so many network adapters in the photography space, it behaves as an access point.
More network mysteries
Why do I get protracted network outages after a power failure? There are many reasons, but finding it is easier if the NTD is on a UPS. Did that today, watched the bizarre LED sequences as it rebooted (the power light doesn't come on immediately, for example), and then saw: May 4 15:26:55 eureka kernel: xl0: link state changed to UP May 4 15:28:11 eureka dhclient: New IP Address (xl0): 180.150.4.134 May 4 15:28:11 eureka dhclient: New Subnet Mask (xl0): 255.255.255.0 May 4 15:28:11 eureka dhclient: New Broadcast Address (xl0): 180.150.4.255 May 4 15:28:11 eureka dhclient: New Routers (xl0): 180.150.4.1 May 4 15:28:12 eureka dhclient: New Routers (xl0): 180.150.4.1 That suggests that the boot time is 1 minute, 16 seconds, which seems to be about normal for a modern device with the processing power of ...
Power and net failures
Another short power failure this morning at 3:42. Nothing unusual, but when I got into the office, I discovered that we had been off the net from then until 6:30. Why did that happen? Yes, I still don't have my NTD on a UPS, so the initial failure is understandable. But why so long? As (bad) luck would have it, I had the opportunity to compare in the evening, when the next failure occurred. This time we were off the net from 23:02 to 23:40, only 38 minutes. But even a slow reestablishment of the link should be complete in 5 minutes.
System migration, one small step
I've been gradually upgrading systems for several months now. Yvonne's machine is particularly down-rev: FreeBSD lagoon.lemis.com 8.1-PRERELEASE FreeBSD 8.1-PRERELEASE #0: Mon May 31 16:22:12 CST 2010 [email protected]:/usr/obj/src/FreeBSD/svn/stable/8/sys/GENERIC i386 One of the reasons I'm dragging my feet is because I don't want to find myself in a position on eureka where there's some show-stopper and I can't go back. So it makes sense to try upgrading Yvonne's machine first. OK, that's easy enough. Put a spare disk into my development machine, partition it, copy the root file system (which in my way of doing things includes /usr), then sync her /home directory across the net.
Photo processing for Yvonne, 10 years on
Yvonne's new camera also opens opportunities for better processing, including distortion correction with DxO Optics Pro . But how do I explain it to her? Document it, of course. I've had a document on line for what proves to be well over 10 years, and times have changed. Surprisingly, it didn't take very long to write it, and Yvonne managed to use it without too many problems. The biggest issue I found was Microsoft: since it doesn't really understand the concept of users, files created on CIFS file systems belong to the user who mounted them (me) even when Yvonne is logged in, and so back in the Real World she can't modify the files.
Networking cameras
I've ranted in the past about the appalling quality of network support for my Olympus OM-D E-M1. But to be fair to the designers, it appears that they didn't originate this nonsense: they appear to have copied others. I've seen reviews of other cameras with the same fettered (or is that tethered?) view of networks . Yvonne's new camera has remarkably similar specifications to mine, but it doesn't have any networking capability. For that Olympus suggests the PENPAL PP1. This is a really professional unit: When OLYMPUS PENPAL is connected to the Accessory Port 2*1 on back of the OLYMPUS PEN E-PL2 camera, resized JPEG images (sizes: 640 x 480 (default), 1280 x 960 or 1920 x 1440 pixels) can be transferred easily to a Bluetooth device such as a smart phone, or to another camera with OLYMPUS PENPAL installed.
SBS on demand: only in emergencies
SBS TV is currently running an interesting series, Putin, Russia and the West, which their terminally broken web site can't find. I started watching the second episode a couple of days ago, but couldn't recall finishing it. Still, never mind, that's what SBS on demand is for: watch recent episodes via the web. So I tried that. What a catastrophe! First I had to log in, and the web page blocked automatic filling in of the user name and password. Finally I had found the information, but after it played some particularly emetic, non-skippable commercials, I get the message this program is currently not available .
FreeBSD fixes OpenSSL bugtwice
Yesterday's forced upgrade of my OpenSSL installation also solved the Heartbleed issues. But that was the port security/openssl. There's also a version of OpenSSL in the base system. How do you know which you're using? The base program is /usr/bin/openssl, and the port is /usr/lcal/bin/openssl. Which do you execute? Depends only on the sequence of directories in your PATH environment variable. In my case, it's /usr/local/bin/openssl. You can check the version like this: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/29) ~ 1 -> /usr/bin/openssl version OpenSSL 0.9.8y 5 Feb 2013 === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/29) ~ 2 -> /usr/local/bin/openssl version OpenSSL 1.0.1g 7 Apr 2014 But this is on my old, down-rev system, as the first output shows.
OpenSSL: Upgrade!
OpenSSL is certainly the the topic of the month, but that topic doesn't address my problem: why can I not access qpopper on my new server, while anybody else can (but not login, of course), and I can access qpopper on the old server with the same software? It wasn't a FreeBSD issue: I also tried with Linux both from my network (failed) and externally (worked). Asked on IRC, and most people confirmed that they could access it. Only Jamie Fraser had the same problems as I did. At least that took the emphasis off the network connection. In the meantime, I bitched and moaned about the fact that I had to have a certificate in the first place and have the choice of a paid signature or an untrusted certificate.
Another OpenSSL issue
Today was the day that the Heartbleed bug was announced. Did I care? I had my own OpenSSL issues. Mainly for Chris Bahlo's sake we run qpopper on our external server, and today I had to migrate it. I failed. I suppose part of the issue is my aversion to the entire thing. It requires certificates, and you have the choice of paying money to somebody to sing the certificates, or be our own certificate authority. Since this is only for our personal use, we're more than happy to take the second choice, and that's what we've been doing for nearly 5 years.
Migrating external servers
I had intended to take my time migrating my web server to the new platform. RootBSD have given me a month, and so far it has only been a week. But then I heard from Stephen Rothwell that he's migrating ozlabs.org to a new platform tomorrow. That will involveoh horror!one hour's downtime, and it will also require a change in IP address, which is a bit of work in itself. So: what do I need to do to get the new platform up and running? Web server, mail server (for web-generated error messages) and DNS. The web server's already running, but without PHP.
Firmware update, Nikon style
One of my main objections to Olympus' Digital Camera Updater is that it exists. I know from the existence of the Canon Hack Development Kit that Canon/business/imaging.html does it via the memory card. What about Nikon? Checked, and yes, they do it that way too. But in the process I discovered a firmware update for my old CoolPix L1. OK, that's worth trying for comparison's sake, even though the update doesn't reallly mean anything to me: With a PictBridge connection to certain printers, images with a file size greater than 1 MB - those captured at higher quality settings such as 6M* High (2816*) - began printing irregularly part way through the printing process.
A day wasted with Olympus firmware updates
Yesterday I managed to upgrade the firmware for my Olympus Zuiko Digital ED 70-300mm telephoto using the Olympus E-30 and Microsoft Vista, but by then the day was over, so I didn't get round to upgrading the firmware for the E-M1. That should be pretty straightforward with Vista, but I wanted to understand why it didn't work with Windows 7. Called up Olympus support on 1300 659 678 and spoke to Vivian, who told me that it was a Windows error, and that they couldn't help.
Updating firmware, Olympus style
Olympus has released new firmware for the E-M1, so today I tried to install it. What a catastrophe! Other vendors do it correctly and supply a downloadable file that can then be copied to the camera via USB. But Olympus has a special program to do this, and of course it only runs on certain softwareand hardware, it seems. From their system requirements : This software requires a computer with a pre-installed operating system. Operation is not guaranteed when using a home-built PC or upgraded operating system. It's a good thing Olympus doesn't make computers, or they might restrict its use to their own computers.
How to fill 32 GB memory
While processing my photos this morning, I discovered that I was using 70% (7 GB) of swap. How could that happen? I have 32 GB of memory in this box. Further investigation showed that I had left a wireshark process running, and it had collected in the order of 32 million packetsand stored them all in memory! PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND 14334 root 1 21 0 24819M 20095M select 7 22:26 5.27% wireshark A good reason to keep an eye on these things.
Microsoft space programs: why so slow?
I've been grumblingwith good reasonabout the speed of my Microsoft-based programs for some time. I used to think that DxO Optics Pro was particularly slow, but the other ones I'm using aren't noticeably faster, and Olympus Viewer is significantly slower. In particular, display refreshing is a matter of chance, and some things are orders of magnitude slower than on FreeBSD. Part of this is the insistence on showing unrecognizable images of each file. Today I measured the time it took DxO to start up and get as far as being able to do anything useful: Time Elapsed Status ...
... and stoop to build 'em up with worn-out tools
It's been over a day since I got a patch to ls(1) from Kirk McKusick. Why didn't I commit it? First I needed to bring my FreeBSD -CURRENT system up to date. Then I discovered that the disk was PATA and thus no longer fitted into my test box. Still, I had an older box lying around, the remains of my teevee computer after Yet Another Power Surge killed the USB bus and the Ethernet interface, so put the disk into it and started bringing -CURRENT up to date. And that took 24 hours! On rebooting, I didn't have any Ethernet devices!
ls: our grandfathers' cruft
Mail from Kirk McKusick today enclosing a patch to ls from Igor Sobrado of the OpenBSD project. It seems that FreeBSD ls (and maybe ls from some other BSDs) doesn't conform to the standard. The -f (don't sort) flag must imply the -a (show entries starting with a dot) flag: -f List the entries in directory operands in the order they appear in the directory. The behavior for non-directory operands is unspecified. This option shall turn on -a. When -f is specified, any occurrences of the -r, -S, and -t options shall be ignored and any occurrences of the -A, [XSI] -g, -l, -n, [XSI] -o, and -s options may be ignored.
New machine
Chris Bahlo and I have had a virtual server with RootBSD for nearly 6 years. Although my professional life was very much related to high availability, this one beat everything I have experienced. It's sad that hardware failure took it down just 2 weeks before the 5 year anniversary, but that's still 1,733 days uptime, nothing to sneeze at. The down side, of course, is that the operating system is 6 years down-rev. In addition, the disk space is minusculeonly 10 GBso I've been hosting my many photos with my friends at Ozlabs. But their conditions are changing, and one of the problems is that I am generating half their traffic.
Wireless camera access: new hardware
On 21 February 2014 I bought a USB wireless LAN adapter on eBay: After a month, there was still no sign of it, so I asked for and got a refund, then purchased a new one. Today the first one arrived: it hadn't been posted until 15 March 2014, over three weeks after purchase and only a couple of days before the refund. No wonder it didn't arrive on time. And how does it work? Mar 31 14:48:32 stable-amd64 root: Unknown USB device: vendor 0x148f product 0x5370 bus uhub3 Still, that's enough to google for, and the first hit related to FreeBSD.
System upgrade, next step
My network connection via stable-amd64 has been working well for a couple of days, and I haven't had any of these timeouts that were irritating me earlier in the week. Time to move the connection to its final location, on eureka. Put in another network interface, and while I was at it looked for the speaker connector, which I hadn't set up when I built the machine. With good reason: this high-quality enclosure doesn't have a speaker! Not a big issue, since they almost never fail, and I had dozens of old machines from which I could cannibalize a speaker. But why didn't they include one?
Another day of photo processing
Continued with my photo processing today. Processing TIFF is even slower than processing JPEG, and it's not helped by the tools. Although I saved time by not using DxO Optics Pro , things took much longer. In particular, enblend ran literally for hours: grog 44082 100.0 17.6 13336228 5888976 ?? RN 11:43am 101:33.71 enblend --compression=LZW -- ---m 10000 -w -f15080 Looking at those large numbers is easier with top: PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND 44082 grog 1 108 5 7128M 3017M CPU4 4 14:34 100.00% enblend But why so little memory?
Patching Leo's notes
Mail from Harald Arnesen and also IRC comments from Jashank Jeremy today. Both have patched most of the problems in The Lions Book. But incorporating the means messing with TeX again, and I voiced my opinion about that years ago in Porting UNIX Software: I have been using TeX frequently for years, and I still find it the most frustrating program I have ever seen. In the process, discovered mail from Liu Yubao, about 4 years ago, addressing some rendering issues. I can see I'm going to have to do something Real Soon Now.
Reviewing the DHCP issue
I've been tracing DHCP traffic since yesterday, and it shows what I expect: cases where the DHCP server doesn't respond. And at the same time various connection resets. Apart from yesterday's example with IRC, discovered that my problems with streaming radio are also related: each time I have a hiccup like that, the radio drops out and requires 30 seconds to pull itself together again. Clearly a nuisance. But is this a problem with the DHCP server? Maybe that's just another symptom. One thing that's not only related to DHCP is the DHCP discover request: it's a broadcast, so potentially it can get through where other things can't, maybe because it has lost the ARP information.
Router breakin: more analysis
Mail from Michael Hughes today. He obviously has even more time on his hands than I do, and looked at the data that my intruder was copying on Tuesday: I got to looking at the long echo line you have in your diary and the first part of it is an ELF head for a binary. It looks like they are trying to create an executable through echos. So some kind of breakin program? I'm not sure that I care that much, but it's interesting to note.
Leo's notes updated
Some time in May 1994, nearly 20 years ago, I came into my office in the morning, took a look into alt.folklore.computers, as you do, and found a large uuencoded document with the subject Leo's notes . Could it be? Passed it through uudecode, and sure enough: TeX sources for the Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code! I was ecstatic. Somehow I have lost that original post. So, it seems, has alt.folklore.computers. But I kept the files and published them. And now I get a message from Brian Foley with errata for the text, which had been scanned in by a friend I only met several years later.
Understanding DHCP
My network connection is still flaky. In particular, the IRC connections continue to drop. Traced both DHCP and IRC and came up with some interesting details. To save space, the trace shows the IP addresses in numeric form. 180.150.4.134 is my router, 180.150.4.1 is the other end of the link, and 206.86.224.149 is w3.lemis.com, my external server. First the router issues three DHCP requests and gets no reply: After 15 seconds it issues a DHCP Discover and gets immediate (47 ms) replies from the previously unresponsive DHCP server: So I was back and had the same IP address, so most TCP connections remained.
Tracking the network problems
Spent much of the day waiting for my sporadic network problems to crop up again. They happened, but on analysis I found that I had two different DHCP servers on the same network: one from the router and one from the machine with which I was monitoring the net. Killed the latter dhclient and let things trace again. No problems any more (apart from the 60% drop in download speed caused by the old hub). But a lack of problem doesn't mean it's gone, so left it run. ACM only downloads articles once.
Goldweb GW-WR401N exploit
So who is abusing my router? Found a power supply for the 10 Mb/s Ethernet hub and put it between the router and the NTD and sniffed. A lot of false positives, but then: localhost login: root Password: root BusyBox v1.6.1 (2011-11-18 17:55:13 CST) Built-in shell (ash) Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands. # echo -e \x5A Z # mkdir -p /var/run/.zollard/ # cd /var/run/.zollard/ # rm -rf armeabi # echo -n > armeabi # chmod +x armeabi && echo -e \x5A # echo -ne \x7F\x45\x4C\x46\x01\x01\x01\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00 \x02\x00\x28\x00\x01\x00\x00\x00\xC4\x85\x00\x00\x34\x00\x00\x00\xB4\x00 \x02\x00\x02\x00\x00\x05\x34\x00\x20\x00\x04\x00\x28\x00\x0E\x00\x0D\x00 \x01\x00\x00\x70\x14\xFD\x01\x00\x14\x7D\x02\x00\x14\x7D\x02\x00\x08\x00 \x00\x00\x08\x00\x00\x00\x04\x00\x00\x00\x04\x00\x00\x00\x01\x00\x00\x00 \x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x80\x00\x00\x00\x80 >> armeabi This box (a Goldweb GW-WR401N) is wide open!
Compromising a BSD network
When I got up this morning, Yvonne's first words were We're off the web . How can I get her to distinguish between net and web? She was right, of course, and the logs suggested that something happened at midnight: 1395579442 2.02739 5 # Sun 23 Mar 2014 23:57:22 EST 246.622 ms 1395579508 0.539084 5 # Sun 23 Mar 2014 23:58:28 EST 927.500 ms 1395579571 1.35849 5 # Sun 23 Mar 2014 23:59:31 EST 368.057 ms 1395579716 0 0 hub w3 www.auug.org.au ozlabs.org ftp.netbsd.org # Mon 24 Mar 2014 00:01:56 EST 1395579806 0 0 hub w3 www.auug.org.au ozlabs.org ftp.netbsd.org # Mon 24 Mar 2014 00:03:26 EST Connectivity dropped to 0 (3rd column) pretty much exactly at midnight.
GPS collar for the dogs
While in town, took a look at what ALDI had to offer. Just what I was looking for! A Cocoon GT42395 GPS tracker, advertised as being usefulamongst other thingsfor tracking (presumably runaway) dogs. It cost $80, and I've since found it advertised on eBay for $250. Brought it home and took a look: How do I unpack it? That's not a package, it's a protective case, and it's screwed down, something they didn't think necessary to mention in the instruction manual.
Stitching the Apostles, continued
I've continued trying to get the exposure consistent for my panorama of the Twelve Apostles. I sent a message to the Hugin forum a couple of days ago and got a couple of different suggestions: Terry Duell pointed me at this tutorial and noted that he had had good results with it; basically select Exposure fused from any arrangement in the stitcher tab. Yes, that made some improvement, but not as much as I wanted. Dave H (yes, that's all the name I have) had a different approach: lighten in GIMP before stitching. Fine, but that's exactly what I did, modulo program.
More panorama strangenesses
Apart from the fact that yesterday's panoramas at the Twelve Apostles weren't overly interesting, there were a couple of other issues: firstly, I made the mistake of not getting the stretches of waves in any one image (something that I learnt not to do last year in Apollo Bay. That's obviously my own fault. But what about the exposure? The right-hand side of this image is far too dark: But that's not what the image said: Clearly I need to look more at exposure compensation.
Strange shutdown behaviour
Shutting down the TV this evening was surprising: What went wrong there? It looks as if it was a lot of npviewer.bin processes core dumping, leaving a single dump file: -rw------- 1 grog wheel 427,184,128 15 Mar 22:19 npviewer.bin.core Surprisingly, given the lack of the final 4 seconds with no buffers dirty, the system did shut down clean. ACM only downloads articles once.
Enblend fixed!
Message from Rusmir Dusko on IRC this morning, asking me to close the bug reports against the enblend build failures. Sure enough, it seems that it has been fixed, or more likely, the vigra has. Took me several hours to bring my ports tree up to dateSubversion has had Yet Another Incompatible Updatebut at the end of it I finally had a working enblend on FreeBSD 10-RELEASE. Thank God for that! Now I can complete migrating eureka to release 10. ACM only downloads articles once.
Android: do I need it?
Just a couple of days ago I had more or less come to the conclusion that Android tablets were worth the trouble. And now I run into other problems: the battery of my tablet, just over 6 months old and always carefully looked after, is dying. What do I do? It's under warranty. Well, maybe they exclude the battery, but there are ways around that ( OK, then change it, and I'll pay for the new battery . Sorry, sir, we don't repair these things . OK, replace the tablet or I'll contact Consumer Affairs ), but do I want another of these tablets? In all likelihood it's a design fault that causes the battery to be overcharged.
Android and smart phones: change of opinion?
For years I've been saying that smart phones are not worth the trouble. And now I have had an Android tablet for over 6 months. Have I changed my opinions? The first mention was a suggestion from Tom Maynard to take a smart phone to my greenhouse for identification purposes. My objections at the time were price, network coverage and display resolution. I suspect I was wrong in assuming that it would have to be a mobile network; I specifically mentioned the availability of an 802.11 network, but implicitly discounted it. And since then my assumption of a price of $800 has dropped to below $200, and the resolution of my current tablet is towards the low end at 1280×800.
Internet in 20 years?
I'm currently doing Charles Severance's course Internet History, Technology, and Security. Although I've been living in networks for decades, it's interesting, and it fills in a few gaps. One of the assignments is: Write an essay that imagines how the Internet will be different 20 years from now . That's an interesting thought, and so I wrote more than the 1000 word limit. There's nothing surprising there. I don't really see any killer app coming: it's more a social issue now. I think network speeds will stagnate somewhere between 100 Mb/s and 1 Gb/s, unless the unexpected killer app shows up. No more paper newspapers, few books, no more radio-frequency radio or TV broadcasts, few physical shops.
Internet in 20 years?
I'm currently doing Charles Severance's course Internet History, Technology, and Security. Although I've been living in networks for decades, it's interesting, and it fills in a few gaps. One of the assignments is: Write an essay that imagines how the Internet will be different 20 years from now . That's an interesting thought, and so I wrote more than the 1000 word limit. There's nothing surprising there. I don't really see any killer app coming: it's more a social issue now. I think network speeds will stagnate somewhere between 100 Mb/s and 1 Gb/s, unless the unexpected killer app shows up. No more paper newspapers, few books, no more radio-frequency radio or TV broadcasts, few physical shops.
Microsoft: no strerror ()
It seems that Microsoft space programs don't like to scare users with error messages, and when they do, they try to be as vague about it as possible. But a couple of days ago I got a different error message while trying to update dischord, my Microsoft Windows machine, something like: Can't install update: error 0x80072f78 The use of Unix-like 0x to represent a hex number shows that this isn't typical Microsoft. But what does the code mean? Why don't they have an error string, like strerror () returns?
4K monitors on the way?
For years I've been waiting for high-definition monitors to show up. 14 years ago I had two Hitachi SuperScan 813 monitors with a resolution of 2048×1536 (3 MP). That was the highest I had for over 12 years, until September 2012, when I got my 2560×1440 monitor, but I still don't have a monitor with a vertical resolution as high as that of the Hitachis. Now, finally, 4K TVs with a resolution of 3840×2160 pixels are coming on the market at prices people can afford to pay. Andy Snow and others on IRC pointed me at this page, describing the 39" Seiki SE39UY04.
A shampoo for Yvonne
Yvonne is also taking a large number of photos nowadays. Up until yesterday she had taken 8,523 photos or videos in less than 3 years with her Canon IXY 200F. Up to now she has been processing them with xv, which offers a relatively limited range of processing options. In particular, in view of my success with Ashampoo Photo Commander 11, I thought that I could migrate her to that as well. That required a number of things. It runs on dischord, my Microsoft box, so I had to set up a user for her and enable remote access. Here Microsoft's limitations are particularly apparent.
A use for Ashampoo
Last night I took more silly photos of Chris Bahlo with the dogs. And I've found a disadvantage in my new Meike flash unit: though it recharges relatively quickly (about 4 s with NiZn batteries after a full discharge), the lower capacity means that the full discharge happens more often. In addition, lack of full charge doesn't stop my camera from taking photos when not enough charge is available. I need to check whether that's a camera setting, or whether there's something wrong. In any case, the result were some seriously underexposed photos. How well can I compensate for that with the processing?
Microsoft space strangenesses
House photo day today, the extended set on the first Saturday of a month. And lately I've been doing more and more of my processing on a Microsoft platform. The software may perform the required operations, but I never cease to marvel how difficult it is to interact with all of this software. Never mind that Olympus Viewer can't remember its settings from one minute to the next, or that DxO Optics Pro is slower than molasses and sometimes can't read directories: they all seem to have problems just hanging, and the lack of a window manager in Microsoft means that they can get in your way.
Honest CPU cycles
Decades ago at Tandem, our CEO Jimmy Treybig told us that we should find ways to use CPU cycles honestly. What he meant, of course, was to find applications that justifiably used lots of CPU time and thus sold processors. He would have been proud of modern web browsers: PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND 400 grog 1 103 0 197M 60304K CPU7 7 19.9H 100.00% chrome 387 grog 1 103 0 197M 60304K CPU6 6 19.9H 100.00% chrome 16418 grog 35 20 0 1188M 815M uwait 3 138:43 100.00% firefox-bin It's difficult to compare the speed of ...
Yet Another Broken Photography Package
C't digitale Fotographie arrived today, along with a DVD with various things on it. One was Studioline Photo Classic SE 3, which promises lots of useful base functions: Professional photographic processing and photo database with hierarchical categories and evaluation system. Allows importing raw photos and can read and process IPTC and EXIF data. Maybe that reference to databases and import should have warned me. But I installed it, and found at least voluminous documentation: 305 pages of it. That's almost too much.
Watching H.264
Yesterday's download of Downton Abbey had one problem: it's 1080p in MPEG-4/H.264 coding, and my TV computer couldn't handle it. Discussing the matter, though, Jürgen Lock mentioned VDPAU. Yes, of course I'm using it. Look... Oh. Modified the baroque script I use to launch mplayer and all was well: CPU usage down from 70% to 3%. === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/4) /spool/Images 6 -> mmp Downton-Abbey-4-1 /usr/local/bin/mplayer-old -alang en -cache 16384 -osdlevel 3 -subfont-osd-scale 1 -vo vdpau -vc ffh264vdpau -calctime -savetime Downton-Abbey-4-1 -framedrop -fs -really-quiet 2> /var/tmp/mmp-errors And in passing it's interesting to note that the definition of this recording is really much better than what we see on TV.
Improving signal to noise ratio
This diary has always been my personal diary, though I share. But much of I write must be deathly boring to most people. In particular, for the past 5 years it has been aggregated into the ACM queue web site. Early on I introduced categories so that ACM could select only computer-related topics. But as time goes on, I'm writing more and more, and little of it can be interesting to the average ACMQ reader. This month, out of a total of 132 entries in ACMQ, I wrote 53. Yes, they're all somehow related to computers, but that doesn't make them interesting to anybody except myself.
More E-M1 network experiences
So how do I download photos from my camera to a computer without the help of OI.Share? Yes, I have a web page, but I need the individual images. Maybe it's as simple as appending the image name, like http://192.168.0.10/DCIM/100OLYMP/P2244123.ORF. Tried that with a browser on my Android, and it seems that it might be right; only of course the browser doesn't know what to do with the image. Tried a JPEG image with OI.Share, and sure enough, it downloaded it. Almost. It changed the name to hide the origin, and seems to have done some kind of reformatting: -r----x--x 1 grog lemis 2,903,504 24 Feb 11:22 OI000001.jpg -rw-rw-r-- 2 grog lemis 2,887,042 23 Feb 12:12 P2234068.JPG That's the same image, firstly downloaded via OI.Share and then directly from the card.
Understanding Android, next attempt
When I came into the lounge room this morning, my Android tablet had the display illuminated, and it didn't respond correctly to swiping. Some software hang? Found the reset hole and reset the thing, which didn't seem to improve matters greatly. Not until another reboot did it respond normally. Why? It was trying, with apparent lack of success, to update the Zoiper app. Running out of space? For some obscure reason, the tablet has divided its 16 GB SD card into a 1.9 GB partition and a 14 GB partition, and it only uses the former, now nearly full. Will it overflow into the second?
How to scan QR codes
My discussion about the Olympus OM-D E-M1 wireless link support continues. It seems that there are two users, User and Admin . But the documentation speaks, probably more correctly, of a private and a one-time connection. The documented difference is that in the latter case the password changes every time you set up a connection. In fact, not even that is correct: you get the chance to change it every time you set up a connection. The undocumented difference is that you can only control the camera in private mode. And that's what Reinhard was talking about. In fact, the one-time connection mode makes sense in many scenarios.
More computer pain
Spent much of the day processing photos, not helped by various X bugs that came to bite me. Got server 1 stuck in a loop again, and this time on restarting I was back to this strange behaviour where I had to move the cursor after input. And then I got the dreaded mouse jump hang not once, but twice. No doubt about it: it's related to USB. Now if I could only get enblend to work on release 10, I'd finally be able to upgrade. ACM only downloads articles once.
More E-M1 networking
More investigation of the Olympus OM-D E-M1 wireless networking today. Reinhard Wagner had told me that there are two different users defined in the camera: one could control the camera, the other just access the images. By chance I had got hold of a second Android tablet, a Bauhn (i.e. ALDI) AT-HK97. Under the circumstances it proved to be a poor choice: OI.Share doesn't support it. But I was able to connect to the camera using the standard settings page: the camera shows up as an access point, and it allows setup with WPS, just like a normal access point. Unfortunately, I was not able to connect a second tablet.
Completing XP SP3 install
Into the office this morning to find pain, my Microsoft XP box, telling me that it couldn't install Service Pack 3 because there wasn't enough space. OK, that can be fixed. But then I couldn't find the download! Internet Explorer had put it somewhere that I couldn't find, and it doesn't seem to have a downloads page. Fortunately I had the name of the file from yesterday's security issues, and was able to search for it with a recursive DIR invocation. It was in C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\Download\2bc0b3c55e0c166e04844934d1c7c342\WindowsXP-KB936929-SP3-x86-ENU.exe. Clearly they didn't want me to find it. Installation ran for hours! But it succeeded. And when it did, of course, I was waiting for many more software updates, but it still wanted to install updates for SP2.
Installing Windows XP Service Pack 3
Installing Windows XP service pack 3 sounded like a good idea. My old Dell Inspiron 5100 has only 512 MB of memory (or, as I said at the time Microsoft must be getting really memory hungry if a laptop can use that much memory ), so there's no point in trying to upgrade to a newer version of Microsoft. And since support for XP is about to cease, it looked like time to install the latest version. How do you do that? The control panel, which hasn't really changed since those days, doesn't have a Windows Update function. It seems that you must use Internet Explorer to do that.
Networking an E-M1
Yesterday's revelations about the nature of the network support of the Olympus OM-D E-M1 got me thinking. Can't I do that too? The problem is that the camera has its own SSID and generates its own password. Those are basically access point functions. The thing doesn't know its place in the network . So I need a device that can associate with it. I have one, of course: my Android tablet. But that means disconnecting from any other network. Apart from that, I don't use wireless networking. But I do have an old PCMCIA wireless card, one of the many that Rasmus bought for us over 12 years ago.
Olympus E-M1 networking
One of the big disappointments about my new Olympus OM-D E-M1 is the abysmal networking support. According to the instructions, it can only interface to a tablet or smart phone, and to do so the device must completely disconnect from any other network. Network indeed! It's a point-to-point connection. There was a discussion of the matter on the German Olympus Forum today, in the course of which Oliver Musch pointed me at this thread in another forum, where somebody had actually managed to talk to the camera from a PC. He describes it here: the problem is that the camera generates its own SSID, of the form E-M1-P<serial-number>; it's as if it wants to be its own access point.
Microsoft hibernation, next pain
I still haven't found a way to get dischord, my Microsoft 7 box, to hibernate correctly. What I'm trying now is to power cycle it after hibernation. It then will still react to a magic packet across the network, so the only real issue is the physical access to power cycle it. But today, though it came up, I couldn't access it via rdesktop. Why not? Took at look with tcpdump and discovered dischord trying to access the Internet via sky-gw, the now-removed gateway to the SkyMesh network. That needed fixing, of course. And for some reason, Microsoft decided that I was now on a new network, Network 3 .
Net download speeds revisited
A couple of days ago I had significant problems downloading videos from Coursera, getting under 100 kB/s aggregate. That appeared to be at least in part because I was using a different download server. Today I had more videos to download from the same server. This time, though, things were fine: That's an aggregate speed of 3.221 MB/s, or 25.678 Mb/s payload. You certainly can't complain about that. ACM only downloads articles once.
Continued enblend pain
Another attempt at compiling enblend with clang. It's like pulling teeth. At Jürgen Lock's suggestion, tried telling it to use different C++ standards. That made a difference: things died in different places. I'm reminded of Andy Tanenbaum's quote: The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from . More seriously, this whole thing is a catastrophe. I have two large, not-very-well written packages that are so compiler-sensitive that I can't find a way through the jungle. Is this what C++ was meant to be? In the end, I put it back on the too hard queue, at least for the time being.
Enblend port, next try
Finally got round to looking at the enblend port, which has been broken for months since changing compilers. Applied all the patches that people have sent to me, but it still fails with undefined references like this one: enfuse.cc:(.text._ZN5vigra6detail11exportImageIN9vigra_ext28ConstCachedFileImageIteratorINS_8RGBValueIhLj0ELj1ELj2EEEEENS_11RGBAccessorIS5_EEEEvT_S9_T0_RKNS_15ImageExportInfoENS_14VigraFalseTypeE[_ZN5vigra6detail11exportImageIN9vigra_ext28ConstCachedFileImageIteratorINS_8RGBValueIhLj0ELj1ELj2EEEEENS_11RGBAccessorIS5_EEEEvT_S9_T0_RKNS_15ImageExportInfoENS_14VigraFalseTypeE]+0x116): undefined reference to `vigra::isBandNumberSupported(std::__1::basic_string<char, std::__1::char_traits<char>, std::__1::allocator<char> > const&, int)' What's causing that? Both enblend and vigra are unduly sensitive to the compiler in use, and the change to clang has completely broken them.
Goodbye SkyMesh
My two month trial with SkyMesh started either on 19 December, when I got the equipment, or on 21 December, when they finally sorted out their configuration. Time to give notice of termination. Sent a message to Paul Rees, summarizing the reasons: Parts of it were excellent. Good things: Reliable connection.
Aussie Broadband support
Another round of Coursera videos today, 184 MB of them. Not a worry any more since my connection to the National Broadband Network: that corresponds to a download time of a little over a minute. But today that didn't happen; instead of the expected 2.5 MB/s download speeds, I ended up with about 20 kB/s. What went wrong? Tried again from my external server in Maryland. 8 MB/s. Even copying from there came over with 450 kB/s. So what was wrong?
MySQL table editor: finished!
More work on MySQL Edit Table today. Now it works, I think. I can add, modify and delete records, and search for them. For the time being it's enough. There are still many rough edges and other things I'd like to do, but since I have (re)written much of the code, I'm in a better position to do that kind of thing. ACM only downloads articles once.
Still more backup disk isssues
My issues with the backup disk are still not over. Even after reading data from the disk, mount claims that the device is not configured: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/26) /var/log 202 -> dd if=/dev/da0s1d of=/dev/null count=1 1+0 records in 1+0 records out 512 bytes transferred in 0.000490 secs (1045004 bytes/sec) === root@eureka (/dev/pts/26) /var/log 203 -> mount /dev/da0s1d /backups mount: /backups: Device not configured What now? It almost looks like a kernel debugging session, but first I'll complete my migration to FreeBSD release 10. ACM only downloads articles once.
X pain
Since moving to my new computer, I've had more strange problems with X: server 1, which had previously never given me any trouble, started hanging. Today I managed to provoke it again, but after restarting I couldn't get my mouse to respond. I've had that issue before. In fact, every time I start server 0, the first time round the mouse is dead. I have to immediately stop it and restart it. But that no longer worked. Time to look in the log files. In /var/log/Xorg.1.log I found: (WW) product 0x05d8: No Device specified, looking for one...
Network speed comparisons
I was very impressed by my 26 ms ping time to ozlabs.org yesterday. But today things weren't nearly as good. Ran mtr for a while and discovered that the bottleneck was at the other end, in the TransACT network, and that in fact my link is capable of very fast speeds, down as low as 17 ms. I'm impressed. ACM only downloads articles once.
More database editor pain
I'm making progress on fixing MySQL Edit Table, but it's slow. The lack of comments and the emetic HTML output make it very difficult to understand, and today I spent much of my time reformatting the HTML output so that I could understand it. I hate ugly indentation at the best of times, but now is not the best of times: it was absolutely necessary to get anything done. Finally I had the Add record functionality almost working. But it seems the code makes assumptions about the primary key: if (!$edit && $key == $this->primary_key) $field = "<input type='hidden' name='$key' value='>[auto increment]"; And no, there's no check to see if that's the case or not.
Networking: faster?
Still no technical message from Aussie Broadband today, but I did receive an invoice, which also indicated that I would get double the data allowance (in other words, 100 GB) for the first 6 months. That's not on their web site, but it was on the advertising I got a few months ago. So: I'm on the net. How is it? Ran some speed tests and got some quite good results: latency ( ping ) of 36 ms, downlink 26.2 Mb/s, uplink 4.2 Mb/s. That's about as good as I've had.
Still more USB pain
Somehow the USB connection for my new system is more than a slight problem: Feb 13 02:05:19 eureka kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): READ(10). CDB: 28 00 00 01 61 1f 00 00 04 00 Feb 13 02:05:19 eureka kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error Feb 13 02:05:19 eureka kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): SCSI status: Check Condition Feb 13 02:05:19 eureka kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): SCSI sense: UNIT ATTENTION asc:28,0 (Not ready to ready change, medium may have changed) Feb 13 02:05:19 eureka kernel: (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): Retrying command (per sense data) Feb 13 02:05:25 eureka kernel: g_vfs_done():da0s1d[READ(offset=806802456576, length=16384)]error = 6 ...
Electric fence equipment
We've provisionally fenced our property in Stones Road so that we can put horses on it. Problem: no power yet. So we bought a solar-powered electric fence actuator , which should deliver 8 kV and a charge of 0.3 J. Not according to our voltmeter: Who's right? Is it possible that the voltmeter is wrong? We've seen relatively low voltages from our main electric fence too. More checking needed. ACM only downloads articles once.
Where's my network?
It's been two days since I signed up for a National Broadband Network service with Aussie Broadband. I've received documentation including user name and password that looked surprisingly like I had created themand discovered that I had. I was with Aussie until nearly 4 years ago, and they still have my details on file. But that's all I've heard of them, and after 2 days the link still hasn't been provisioned. The documentation suggested that I should have received contact details, but I haven't had any email from them whatsoever. Called up (why do they, as a VoIP supplier, only have a more-expensive number 1 300 880 905?
My first network contact
I'm participating in the Coursera course Internet History, Technology, and Security , mainly, it seems, because I read only History . So far there have been two weeks of seven, in which we have covered practically all of Internet history up to the opening up to the general public. And now I have an assignment: Write an essay about how your first encountered the Internet or an earlier networking technology. [sic] I suspect that my history is a little atypical, so I'll keep it online as well. Like Unix, my first encounter with the Internet was relatively late.
Next table editor: MySQL table edit
Continued looking at table editors today. The next on the list was MySQL Edit Table (or MySQL table edit, depending on where you look: the author doesn't seem to have decided). Yesterday I noted that MySQL Ajax Table Editor had very brief installation instructions. You can't say that about MySQL table edit. It has none whatsoever, just UTSL. Once again you have to edit an example and bend it to your table. So I did thatno easier or more difficult than with MySQL Ajax Table Editorand found a screen full of error messages about undefined variables.
More new system problems
Somehow my issues with the system upgrade aren't over. As I feared, yesterday's fixworkaround for Microsoft's hibernation issues didn't work. In fact, it didn't make any difference at all, and once again I had a dirty reboot. Why can't Microsoft get it right, or at least report the errors in a sensible way? FreeBSD is a completely different matter, of course. It's been years since I had any suspend working. But I have other issues there too: I discovered that the nightly backup jobs had been failing, and I hadn't noticed for over a week: mount: /dev/da0s1d: Device not configured That looks like one of these issues I've been contending with for years.
MySQL table editors
One of the software packages that has atrophied over the course of time is phpMyEdit, which we (mainly Yvonne) use for maintaining tables like household expenditure and the contents of the deep freeze. But two years ago the maintainers of PHP, in their infinite wisdom, brokedeprecated the interfaces it relies on, and the only solution I could find was to run a separate web server in a virtual machine with the old version. That's seriously suboptimal, of course, and now that VirtualBox no longer runs (until I rebuild the port), did some consideration about what I could replace it with.
Power line Ethernet throughput
I've been complaining about the poor throughput of my power line Ethernet adapters since I got them. But recent thoughts about network throughput led me to the thought that maybe once again we're running into TCP window issues. And sure enough, teevee had the sysctl net.inet.tcp.rfc1323 set to 0, which in particular turns off window scaling. Why? I didn't change anything, and the default should be 1. But after setting it to 1 and setting big buffer sizes, things sped up considerably.
Hello ISP
As planned, called up Aussie Broadband and signed up for a 50 GB service. First spoke to Will in technical support, who apparently thought I was signing up for fibre and told me that I could expect effectively the full 100 Mb/s download speed. Once again, I'm not sure if he understood the term TCP, but we'll see. The service is direct Ethernet with DHCP, and he was surprised to hear that Exetel still use PPPoE. But he wasn't much help with more technical details, like link configuration; clearly they have other people for that.
Goodbye ISP
Call early this morning from Angelo Senaratne of Exetel, the Level 1 Support Engineer who sent me the we won't fix message last week. No, they hadn't reconsidered, though he rejected my claim that they were not prepared to offer the same level of service as Internode. But he made it abundantly clear that he didn't know what TCP isinstead he talked of client/server relationships, which of course are normally TCP. So maybe they just don't understand that their performance is sub-par.
Fixing Microsoft hibernation problem
One great thing about Microsoft is that almost everybody uses it, so if I run into a problem, the web will have an answerwon't it? This search led me to a number of things, including this thread with an answer from a Microsoft engineer that almost worked, though clearly it's a workaround, not a fix. Now I need to see how well it recovers, but given the time it takes, I'll postpone until I need it. ACM only downloads articles once.
Stitching a huge panorama
Nine months ago I took a set of photos of the verandah in autumn, this time at 24 mm focal length. Processing the image proved to be impossible with the hardware I had at the time. But now I have a machine that is 4 times as fast, and more importantly with 4 times the memory, so set to to reprocess the images. It workedeventually. Last May I spent over a day waiting for the machine to swap its way through the files before finally giving up. Today it was much faster. cpfind ran for 150 CPU minutes (a little under 20 minutes elapsed time) and used 3.2 GB memory.
Looking for an ISP again
So after Exetel's refusal to address their throughput problems, I'm in the market for a new ISP. Whom should I take? Internode sound like an obvious choice, especially since I've been a customer for years, but their accounting department greatly get on my nerves with things like undocumented deduction of two months' fees in advance, non-responsiveness to my email, and a completely unjustified further deduction of 2 months' fees on the day I terminated my last service. As of the moment they owe me about 3 months' fees, assuming that they didn't do something similar years ago with my ADSL service.
Photo processing strangenesses
Got my house photos done today before heading in to Ballarat for dog training. Managed to get the first level of processing started so that it could run while I was away. To my surprise, when I got back it was still running. But that didn't matter: when it was finished I discovered I had converted the raw images into JPEG instead of TIFF, so I had to start all over again. This time I put the intermediate TIFF images on local (Microsoft) disk instead of the net, in the hope that things might run faster. I was disappointed. The whole processing was marred by irritating problems: I have set up dischord to connect to my leftmost monitor, and for some reason during the changeover to the new machine I changed the connection to DVI; for reasons related to the hardware configuration on eureka, that monitor is normally connected by ...
Exetel: good enough for us
Sent a message to Exetel this morning, essentially repeating the contents of yesterday's article, and suggesting running packet traces on their mirror, on the leaf node interfacing to the National Broadband Network, and on my system. I got a somewhat unexpected reply: Date: Fri, 07 Feb 2014 17:22:41 +1100 From: Exetel Residential Support <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Exetel Residential Support #7460458] Poor throughput on NBN fixed wireless 0301244975 NBN As the speed tests are providing results within specification we will no longer be able to carry out further investigations on the matter.
Trying Lightroom
So in the end I did download the Lightroom free trial. Typically enough, it's for 30 days. The first impression is that it looks just like DxO Optics Pro , which obviously says more about DxO than about Lightroom. The second look was less positive: We want to take over your life , or, as they put it, please create a catalog , and then import the images. To quote the manual: You must import photos into the Lightroom catalog to begin working with them. Importing tells Lightroom what photos are in the catalog, and whether they are imported directly from a camera, hard drive, memory card reader, or other storage device.
NBN network speeds
My network speed tests are now looking quite good. ftp access isn't: I'm still getting a maximum of round 800 kB/s to 1 MB/s. Sent a message to Scott Weston, who confirmed the speeds he gets from activ8me and Internode. In summary, with Exetel and SkyMesh for comparison. The files in question are http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/test/100meg.test and http://speedtest.dodo.com.au/Download/100Mb.txt. ISP Internode file dodo file (kB/s) (kB/s) activ8me ...
NBN problems, or Powercor?
Message on the DEREEL OUTPOST Facebook page today: Carol Moyse had difficulties with her National Broadband Network connection. As a neighbourly gesture, over to take a look. It seems they had a power outage last night, and it killed the ADSL2 modem that they had specially bought to run as a wireless AP and router. That's Powercor's responsibility, of course, but it brought home to me how little help normal users get in setting up their networks. ACM only downloads articles once.
ALDI video camera
Yesterday Yvonne brought back a special buy from ALDI: a set of HD action camera glasses , basically sunglasses with a video camera between the eyes. That sounded like fun, so I tried it out, after fighting my way through the excuse for instructions: this one really did consist of more than 50% safety and warranty information. It recorded normally, but when I tried to read the data into a computer, it refused: Feb 6 09:08:02 eureka kernel: da2 at umass-sim2 bus 2 scbus6 target 0 lun 0 Feb 6 09:08:02 eureka kernel: da2: <Anyka SD card 1.00> Removable Direct Access SCSI-2 device Feb 6 09:08:02 eureka kernel: da2: Serial Number USBDEVICE Feb 6 09:08:02 eureka kernel: da2: 40.000MB/s transfers Feb 6 09:08:02 eureka kernel: da2: Attempt to query device size failed: NOT READY, Medium not present ...
Lightroom after all?
Jamie Fraser's wife Sabriena uses Lightroom for photo processing. Why don't I? It's not as if I haven't looked at these products before. I rejected them for various reasons, including difficulty of use, price and lack of features. But since then I've been forced to lower my standards to match what's on the market. After all, Ashampoo Photo Commander 11 doesn't really have very much to recommend it, but at least it was cheap. So, back to looking at Lightroom. Lens profiles? Yes or no? Yes, or no. It does have lens profiles, and this page explains how they work. They look quite similar to what DxO Optics Pro does.
Which photos processing software?
Talking with Jamie Fraser on IRC about photo processing software today. He's thinking of buying Lightroom, which I had rejected because of its limited correction for lens distortion and chromatic aberration. I got him to send me a sample image and processed it myself. Here the comparisons. From left to right, the original JPEG from the camera, image as processed by Lightroom, image as processed by DxO with default settings, and image as processed by DxO with Artistic HDR profile. These images are best compared in enlargements (click on the image). The HTML version of this page shows direct comparisons. It's clear that the Lightroom processing made no changes to the shape of the image.
Microsoft: problems
My recent experience with Microsoft software hasn't been as bad as it used to be. In particular, reliability seems to have improved over the years, and in general things have worked. But since my installation on the old eureka, many problems have occurred. In particular, wakeup from sleep/hibernate seems to be very unreliable. On occasion the disk light goes on and stays on for several minutes, during which not even the NumLock light on the keyboard responds to the key. On one occasion it came back without the network interface. Why? This is the same version that I ran on the old dxo with few issues.
Reinstalling Microsoft, yet again
So now I have installed Microsoft Windows 7 Once Again, and I had to apply all the fixes all over again. Time to write things down to make it easier next time. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Upgrading Microsoft
Now that I have the new eureka, the old machine is available for other purposes. I had planned to use it to replace the relatively weak machine on which I run Microsoft. Is it as simple as FreeBSD, just move the disk to the new machine? I got off to a bad start. I thought I had shut down the old machine, but the gyroscopic effect when moving the disk showed me that I had removed it while spinning. Fortunately it didn't do any harm, as replacing it in the machine showed. Putting it in the new machine was a completely different matter.
First photo processing with new machine
So now I have a fast machine with lots of memory, just what I needed for my panorama photography processing. And yesterday was the day of the month where I took the most photos, a total of 366 of them. I had started initial processing on Microsoft yesterday, but it still took another 3½ hours this morning. Moving to FreeBSD and eureka was completely different. The first thing to do was the HDR processing, which I do in parallel. Previously it was 5 images in parallel, really too much for the memory of the system, and it took forever. Now I'm doing 12 at a time, and it really races through.
New computer, next attempt
I've got lots of things to do at the moment. As I said on IRC yesterday, gr0Ogle: I think I'll proceed in the following manner: gr0Ogle: 1. Take house photos tomorrow morning. gr0Ogle: 2. Complete Bushfire Management Statement. gr0Ogle: 3. Complete application for Planning Permit. gr0Ogle: 4. Go to Bannockburn and hand it in. gr0Ogle: 5. Move current eureka disk to stable-amd64 and get X running. gr0Ogle: 6. Try to fix enblend breakage and other riddles. jashank: For some reason, I expect 1, 2, 3, 4 to take as much time as 5.
Bad language explained
Talking to Chris Bahlo after dinner. Like many, she doesn't understand my strong aversion to the use of the word folder to mean directory. The real issue is the all-too-common use of misleading words in computer terminology, and folder is misleading for a number of reasons. The results are a lessened understanding of the concepts. In addition, in this particular case, there are linguistic subtleties that make the terms hard to translateeven between American and other English. Looking at the linguistic issues first: apart from the term folder , there's also the term file . In American usage it seems that there's also the even more confusing term file folder .
Connecting Garry to the NBN
Garry Marriott, our neighbour-to-be in Stones Road, came over today to take a look at the National Broadband Network installation. While I was showing him the equipment, the NTD lights started flashing red, something I have never seen before. Closer examination showed that it was the signal strength lights: they alternated between all three green and the two left red, in about half-second intervals. No idea what that means; I didn't lose connection, though there was some packet loss: 986 packets transmitted, 977 packets received, 0.9% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 40.514/85.363/381.775/45.183 ms I'll have to follow up during the week.
Disk space wastage: where?
A few days ago I built a file system on my new 4 TB photo drive and copied the old one to it. The results weren't quite what I expected: Filesystem 1048576-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on eureka:/Photos 1,907,196 1,851,986 36,137 98% /Photos /dev/ada1p1 3,814,654 1,925,782 1,850,725 51% /mnt That's nearly 75 GB difference in used space. Where did it go? Compared the output of dumpfs -m and found: # newfs command for /Photos/ (/dev/ada1p1) newfs -L Photos -O 2 -U -a 64 -b 16384 -d 16384 -e 2048 -f 2048 -g 2097152 -h 64 -m 1 -o space -s 3907029100 /dev/ada1p1 # newfs command for /dev/ada1p1 (/dev/ada1p1) newfs ...
Photo processing with the new machine
One of the main reasons I upgraded my machine was to process my photos better. So that was pretty much the first thing I tried. Tried with last week's verandah panorama. The control point detector crashed! That was autopano-sift-C, which I don't use, so set panomatic instead. I don't have much in the way of comparison timing, but it seemed to run much faster. The first part of stitching is running nona, which is single-threaded. On an 8 CPU machine it barely made a difference, and there were noticeable periods where it was idle, apparently transferring to disk. But the disk was the photo disk /dev/ada1, not the SSD /dev/ada0.
Dassaulted
Call on the phone today from Max somebody, who was calling because I had downloaded the free DraftSight CAD program from Dassault Systèmes last week. It's not clear what he wanted: as he confirmed, it's free. Maybe he just wanted to help, but I didn't have time, and asked him to send mail. I received none. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
New computer, finally
Spent much of the morning putting together my new computer. The CPU is an Intel Core" i7-4771, my first Intel machine for nearly 14 years. It has 32 GB of aggressive Corsair memory. I'm using an SSD (128 GB) for the first time, and after some consideration decided to partition it with a 35 GB root file system, 16 GB of swap, and the remaining 68 GB (don't you love storage systems manufacturers' arithmetic?) will be scratch space for photo processing: many of the panoramas I do have up to 90 components, each of which can expand to a TIFF image of 70 MB or so.
Exetel tuning
Exetel has been investigating alternatives to traffic shaping on my National Broadband Network connection. Today Eroshan called and asked me to run Yet Another speed test.
Into town again
Phone call early in the morning, from Sue at Paper Freight to tell me that my package had finally arrived in Ballarat. In principle I had asked Chris Bahlo to pick it up for me, but based on the problems I've had so far, decided to go in and pick it up myself. My way took me directly past the CFA headquarters, so stopped in and asked for a Bushfire Management Statement form. Blank stare. They spent some time discussing where I could find it, and in the meantime I went to pick up my parcel. Picking up the parcel was interesting.
Exetel performance issues rectified?
Yet Another support session with Exetel this afternoon. For testing purposes they gave me a /30 direct Ethernet connection, which made absolutely no difference to the performance. And once again they wanted to run tests with axel, which once again produced the same results. About the only difference was that I got up to 1 MB/s with ftp. As I pointed out, the real application that requires good bandwidth is streaming video, and that generally doesn't use multiple TCP connections. Some discussion on packet tracing: it seems they don't know what that means! They were talking in terms of traceroute and mtr, and I had to explain to them what tcpdump and wireshark were, and how they worked.
Fastway couriers: inappropriately named
The remaining components for my new computer were sent from Brisbane by Fastway a week ago. They should have been here yesterday at the latest. Where are they? Your parcel is currently in transit between our 'Geelong' and 'Geelong' depots. What does that mean? And why was it misdirected? Called up the Geelong franchise and spoke to Bob, who explained that the package had been sent to Ballarat by accident, and since Ballarat is not manned, the tracking information shows Your parcel is currently in transit between our 'Geelong' and 'Geelong' depots. And the next item?
More cvr2 pain
Once again cvr2 Just Shut Down. Is this a thermal issue? It was very hot again today, even over 30° inside, but the operating system (Linux) didn't say. But then, it seems that it only ever marks time. Possibly it's just the defaults that are so laconic, but the comparison with FreeBSD is particularly noticeable. In any case, once again it wouldn't come up. Took the opportunity to blow the dust out of the CPU cooler, and tried powering on again. Still nothing. Disconnect disk. Still nothing. Replace power supply. Still nothing. Remove tuners. Powers on. Replace tuners. Powers on. So what's going on?
Ports pain: end in sight?
Into the office this morning to see how my ports build was getting on. Not well: ./Source/JavaScriptCore/wtf/Vector.h:58: error: invalid use of incomplete type 'struct WebCore::ScriptSourceCode' ./Source/WebCore/bindings/js/ScriptController.h:53: error: forward declaration of 'struct WebCore::ScriptSourceCode' gmake[1]: *** [Source/WebCore/page/libWebCore_la-Frame.lo] Error 1 Stop in /src/FreeBSD/svn/ports/www/webkit-gtk2. 19666.67 real 3425.40 user 1269.94 sys WebCore had built before. Why not now? Presumably because I had dug the perl installation out from under it and replaced it with something else. That's not the correct way to do it, of course, but given the time it has taken, it seemed a reasonable attempt.
Time for more HDR investigation
Yesterday it was windy, and the Bureau of Meteorology promised only light winds today, so I put off my house photos until today. They lied: it was quite windy. High time to find a better HDR solution. I'll start keeping thoughts on this page, though it'll be a while before it's finished. I intend to take this photo as an example: It shows significant ghosting on the yellow (Yellow King Umbert) cannas. There are various ways to address that, including masking that area from a suitably exposed component image, but it'll be interesting to see what the commercial products do.
Ports pain continues
After resolving yesterday's perl problem, things carried on building. GIMP started building last night at 19:20, and was still going this morning. The processor is an AMD Athlon 64 3500+, with 525 CPU marks roughly 5% the speed of my new machine. But part of the slowness is probably due to my decision to copy my photo disk across the Ethernet, and the test machine only has a 100 Mb/s interface. That also affected photo processing, presumably because of contention for the disk. Finally it finished: ===> Installing for webkit-gtk2-1.8.3_2 ===> Checking if www/webkit-gtk2 already installed pkg_add: could not find package perl5-5.16.3_6 !
New photo backup disk
One of the things I got with my latest shipment of components was a new disk for my photos; the old one with a 2 TB file system is filling up, so this one has 4 TB. Hopefully disk capacity growth will outstrip my ability to produce images. Set it up as before, but things didn't quite work: === root@stable-amd64 (/dev/pts/0) /home/grog 19 -> gpart destroy -F ada1 ada1 destroyed === root@stable-amd64 (/dev/pts/0) /home/grog 21 -> gpart create -s GPT ada1 ada1 created === root@stable-amd64 (/dev/pts/0) /home/grog 25 -> gpart add -t freebsd-ufs ada1 ada1p1 added === root@stable-amd64 (/dev/pts/0) /home/grog 26 -> gpart show ada1 => 34 7814037101 ada1 GPT (3.7T) 34 6 - free - (3.0k) 40 7814037088 1 ...
New photo backup disk
One of the things I got with my latest shipment of components was a new disk for my photos; the old one with a 2 TB file system is filling up, so this one has 4 TB. Hopefully disk capacity growth will outstrip my ability to produce images. Set it up as before, but things didn't quite work: === root@stable-amd64 (/dev/pts/0) /home/grog 19 -> gpart destroy -F ada1 ada1 destroyed === root@stable-amd64 (/dev/pts/0) /home/grog 21 -> gpart create -s GPT ada1 ada1 created === root@stable-amd64 (/dev/pts/0) /home/grog 25 -> gpart add -t freebsd-ufs ada1 ada1p1 added === root@stable-amd64 (/dev/pts/0) /home/grog 26 -> gpart show ada1 => 34 7814037101 ada1 GPT (3.7T) 34 6 - free - (3.0k) 40 7814037088 1 ...
Ports pain, yet again
On with building ports today. My ports-try target completed, and I went back to look for the stragglers. Some I don't know about at all. What's mozplugger? According to /usr/ports/www/mozplugger/pkg-descr it's a small general purpose Mozilla plugin that displays various types of media formats found on the Internet in your browser . And it doesn't fetch, and the web site doesn't respond. Who cares? Maybe I do, but it's not exactly on the critical path. Then there's kdenlive, another package that I didn't recognize, though it seems to be a video editor. It died with a broken dependency: XML::Parser...
Ports pain, yet again
On with building ports today. My ports-try target completed, and I went back to look for the stragglers. Some I don't know about at all. What's mozplugger? According to /usr/ports/www/mozplugger/pkg-descr it's a small general purpose Mozilla plugin that displays various types of media formats found on the Internet in your browser . And it doesn't fetch, and the web site doesn't respond. Who cares? Maybe I do, but it's not exactly on the critical path. Then there's kdenlive, another package that I didn't recognize, though it seems to be a video editor. It died with a broken dependency: XML::Parser...
Tracing the Exetel connection
It's now been over three weeks since I submitted my ticket to Exetel. Yesterday's tracing gave us some new information, but they still don't seem to have done the obvious thing and trace the connection. Instead a got a call from Exetel (Eroshan Jayaweera, if I got the name right) asking questions that I had answered several time in my speed test page.
New computer arrivesalmost
Phone call from TNT this afternoon: they had attempted in vain to deliver my new computer, because the driver couldn't find the address in his GPS navigator. That's understandableI've ranted enough about the poor quality of the maps round herebut why didn't he call me? In any case, that proved not to be a problem, because Yvonne was just about to go into town, so she picked it up. But it's still missing memory, SSD and power supply. Maybe, if we're lucky, that will arrive tomorrow. ACM only downloads articles once.
Exetel problem, next chapter
Call from Exetel support today: they wanted access to a BSD machine. Why? They couldn't tell me. But after some discussion on IRC, where in particular Edwin Groothuis was very much in favour, set up an account on stable-amd64, the machine that I'm still in the process of building. How do you give access to somebody from outside when connected via NAT? The simplest solution, it seems, was not to do so. Instead set up PPPoE on the box and connected directly. That worked relatively well, and the tech (Glen) basically repeated Yet Again all the things that I had done before.
Raw images: Not with Ashampoo Commander
Since getting my new Olympus OM-D E-M1 my photo processing hasn't got any easier. I used to use DxO Optics Pro to convert the raw images and enhance them a little, then pass the images through Ashampoo photo optimizer. Now DxO no longer understands my combination of camera and lens, so I have to use Olympus Viewer to convert the images to JPEG. And now I have the new Photo Commander 11 to do the optimization for me. But Commander can also process raw images. In the cases where distortion correction isn't important, why not just use it as a one-stop conversion program?
FreeBSD 10.0: Not ready for prime time
Once again I've spent some considerable time installing the latest and greatest version of FreeBSD on a new disk in preparation for the new machine that is on its way. Coincidentally the FreeBSD project announced 10.0-RELEASE today, though I have been tracking it for some time. Yesterday I started a ports-try target, which tries to install every port in my list of ports. It doesn't have to succeed: if not, it just goes on and builds the next one. Then I can come back and look at the ports that fail to build. Why should a port fail to build? Hasn't it been tested?
Preparing for the new machine
Another phone call to Umart today about my new machine. They promised to find an ETA for the still-missing components and get back to me with details. They were about the best I could expect: things have been shipped. In preparation, started building those ports that wouldn't install from the PKGng repository. First was just configuring the packages, which took an hour of pressing Return. How many packages did I configure ? Hard to say, since all that information is stored in a database that doesn't easily (to me, anyway) show what packages it belongs to. But it must have been several hundred.
Coursera in the age of NBN
A few months ago I participated in a few courses from Coursera. Getting the videos was difficult, and it took me several hours each week to download them. They were taking up too much time, so I stopped for a while, but now there are a couple that are quite interesting: Programming Mobile Applications for Android Handheld Systems and Human Evolution: Past and Future. The second will presumably not take up too much time, and the first sounds interesting enough to expend some time on it if necessary. Today both courses started, and I loaded the videos. What a difference! All were done within a couple of minutes.
Ports pain all over again
The hardware for my new machine should arrive some time this week, so it's high time to have a system to put on it. I've already installed those packages that I could find in the FreeBSD repository, but that was a while back. PKGng has an upgrade command: type pkg upgrade and it should upgrade all installed packages. That's the theory. What I got was: pkg: Error while trying to install/upgrade packages, as there are unresolved dependencies: x11-drivers/xf86-input-keyboard: x11-servers/xorg-server Further investigation showed that xorg-server had failed to build on the build machine and had thus been removed from the repository.
Ashampoo Photo Commander
Last week I was considering buying Ashampoo Photo Commander 11, and gradually came to the conclusion that it wasn't worth it. But I bought it anyway. They had a special offer, and along with Movie Studio (explicitly not Pro) it cost me $20. Was it worth it? One problem is clear: in the documentation they claim to have exceptional customer service, but so far neither of my questions about the products have been answered. One thing that it can definitely do is optimize photos. I've been using an old version of their Optimizer program for some time, but it occasionally goes crazy and messes up photos, and it can't handle the size of images I've been generating lately.
Playing with DraftSight
Tom Tyler's email included an attachment with the name Not used for HTML emails.dwg. Apart from the silly name , what's that? Jürgen Lock came out with the discovery that it's an AutoCAD file format, and Jashank Jeremy was able to decode it: it's the site plan above. He also came up with the information that there's a free compatible CAD package called DraftSight that can process them. Installed that and took a bit of a look: yes, it seems to be relatively powerful. Now I just need the time to learn how to use it. ACM only downloads articles once.
Time for better HDR software?
House photo day again today, and again I've tried making HDR images of all of them. And again things were less than perfect, with lots of ghosting: How do I fix that? Other software seems to be about the only way. Currently I'm using align_image_stack (part of Hugin) and enblend to merge the images. Here's the core of my HDR script: nice align_image_stack -a $TMP $* nice enfuse -o $RESULT $TMP* That works well for static images, but it has no provision at all for avoiding ghosting.
Domestic network woes
There's something funny in my domestic network infrastructure as well. I've reported various problems which seem to be related to the switch in Yvonne's office, and so far the only one I have identified beyond reasonable doubt are the two cables that Tanya chewed through. Today I tried to read in some photos from my camera. I do that on lagoon, Yvonne's machine because of the USB issues on my own (current) machine. And they get copied via NFS to my machine. The network topology involves a cable to a switch in the cupboard in Yvonne's office, then a cable under the house to my office, and thence into the main switch.
Tracking down the Exetel problems
Call from Theje of Exetel today to address the ongoing network problems. He claimed that they had changed the routing. I had expected something like this, and had already saved a traceroute output of what I currently had: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/5) /home/grog 5 -> traceroute cdn-edge1.mel4.internode.on.net traceroute to cdn-edge1.mel4.internode.on.net (150.101.208.62), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets 1 air-gw-2 (192.109.197.153) 0.722 ms 0.406 ms 0.402 ms 2 226.2.96.58.static.exetel.com.au (58.96.2.226) 30.126 ms 26.398 ms 17.908 ms 3 97.2.96.58.static.exetel.com.au (58.96.2.97) 27.108 ms 29.601 ms 34.935 ms ... (leaves Exetel network) So it was relatively easy to compare the new routing: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/14) ~/Photos/20140114 4 -> traceroute cdn-edge1.mel4.internode.on.net traceroute to cdn-edge1.mel4.internode.on.net (150.101.208.62), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets 1 air-gw-2 (192.109.197.153) 1.231 ms 0.418 ms 0.410 ms 2 226.2.96.58.static.exetel.com.au ...
Reception problems: insights?
I've been puzzling about TV reception quality for years now, without coming to any obvious conclusions. Radio has also been very variable as well, and from time to time I've wondered if the issues are related. But today I had a surprise: just out of the shower, there was a power surge or similar, not enough to cause any devices to power cycle, but enough to make at least one UPS scream. And the radio reception went to hell! All I could hear was noise. So: is this a (or more than one) rogue UPS? Chasing that one down could be fun.
Still more network problems
I had put an Ethernet cable over the floor last week after Tanya had chewed through the other one. Somehow I wasn't expecting her to do it again, and to a certain extent I was right: Despite the appearance, it still works. But clearly we'll have to find an alternative. For the time being I have cut the old cable into 2 m lengths and spread them round the house; if she (or Niko) starts chewing on them, we're more likely to catch them and make it clear that it's not allowed.
NBN: An NSA plot
For some reason Edwin Groothuis wanted to know about physical access to the Radiation Tower tower today, in particular whether there was a sign on the gate. No: But he meant the access to the immediate compound, and that's not accessible to the public. I had, however, taken a photo of the entrance to the Enfield tower last year: NSA?
Exetel: on the way out?
Exetel have still done nothing to fix my network throughput problems. Though they appear friendly and cooperative, they also appear to have no understanding of the issues or how to address them. On Sunday I gave them until the end of the week to fix the problem. So far they have done nothing. So I called up sales to tell them that I was about to terminate my contract because of breach of contract. Spoke to Paula, who didn't seem to understand the issue and told me I'd have to pay $100 early termination fee. Finally she suggested that it was a matter for support, and promised to connect me with a support manager.
USB says: time for a new system
Into the office this morning to find the keyboard and mouse dead again. Disconnecting and reconnecting didn't help: Jan 14 07:55:53 eureka kernel: usb_alloc_device: set address 4 failed (USB_ERR_STALLED, ignored) Jan 14 07:55:53 eureka kernel: usbd_setup_device_desc: getting device descriptor at addr 4 failed, USB_ERR_STALLED Jan 14 07:55:54 eureka kernel: usbd_req_re_enumerate: addr=4, set address failed! (USB_ERR_STALLED, ignored) Jan 14 07:55:54 eureka kernel: usbd_setup_device_desc: getting device descriptor at addr 4 failed, USB_ERR_STALLED Jan 14 07:55:55 eureka kernel: usbd_req_re_enumerate: addr=4, set address failed! (USB_ERR_STALLED, ignored) Jan 14 07:55:55 eureka kernel: usbd_setup_device_desc: getting device descriptor at addr 4 failed, USB_ERR_STALLED Jan 14 07:55:55 eureka kernel: ugen6.4: <Unknown> at usbus6 (disconnected) Jan 14 07:55:55 eureka kernel: uhub_reattach_port: could not allocate new device Finally, after removing everything and reconnecting it, I got things to work.
Bluetooth audio
I've been listening to Radio Swiss Classic via the web for some time now. That meant moving the Android tablet to the fridge, where the mini-Hi-Fi system is located, and connecting it with a cable. It also meant that I couldn't do much else with the tablet while it was playing music. Clearly a case for a Bluetooth audio adapter. Do they exist? Yes, and they cost next to nothing, $6.50 including postage. I ordered one from eBay last week, and today it arrived. There's almost nothing to it: a USB connector at one end, for power, an audio jack at the other end, and very little in between: It even comes with a far-too-short cable, but no instructions.
Exetel througput problems: install new Windows !
So now I have demonstrated to Exetel beyond any reasonable doubt that they have a througput problem somewhere in their network. I've sent them comparisons with SkyMesh, they've tried their toy torrents personally, so there's really no doubt where the problem lies. So what's the next step? Please be informed that we have tested couple of services affected as yours and we were able to reach the correct speed according to their fibre plan. Therefore, we suggest you to test the service with a Windows 7 or 8 PC and check if the speeds are still failing. Do let us know if the issue is persisting.
Specifying the new system
I've been investigating components for my new computer for a week now, and it's been tough. Finally I'm getting there, mainly by eliminating possibilities that seem too hard. The big issues remain the motherboard and the memory. An article in c't suggests that the Asrock motherboards are a good choice, and that's what Jürgen Lock recently chose. It works for him, so there seems little reason to compare the others. And memory? There seem to be relatively few manufacturers to choose from: G.Skill, Corsair and Kingston. And almost all memory is dressed up for kiddies and has particularly violent names: Ripjaws, Sniper, Vengeance, Dominator.
Processing photos, continued
On with my photo processing today. The verandah panorama took all morning, over 2 hours for the normal panorama and 3½ hours for the interactive flash version. What's the cause? Clearly it was worth finding out before spending days converting the remaining images, so processed the images the way I have been doing previously: first convert the image to TIFF with Olympus Viewer 3, and then use DxO Optics Pro to convert the TIFF to JPEG. Externally there wasn't much to be seen. Here's one of the 20 input images for the panorama; the others are similar: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/7) ~/Photos/20140111 11 -> l C*/verandah-centre-0.jpeg -rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 2,904,174 11 Jan 08:26 C-oly/verandah-centre-0.jpeg -rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 3,324,648 11 Jan 08:26 C/verandah-centre-0.jpeg === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/7) ~/Photos/20140111 12 -> identify C*/verandah-centre-0.jpeg C-oly/verandah-centre-0.jpeg JPEG 3456x4608 3456x4608+0+0 8-bit DirectClass 2.904MB 0.000u 0:00.000 C/verandah-centre-0.jpeg[1] ...
Fixing the enblend port
Some months ago a change to the FreeBSD port of vigra broke the build of anblen, which I maintain. When loading the final image, it produces voluminous can't find error messages, terminating in: enblend.cc:(.text._ZN5vigra6detail11exportImageIN9vigra_ext28ConstCachedFileImageIteratorINS_8RGBValueIhLj0ELj1ELj2EEEEENS_11RGBAccessorIS5_EEEEvT_S9_T0_RKNS_15ImageExportInfoENS_14VigraFalseTypeE[void vigra::detail::exportImage<vigra_ext::ConstCachedFileImageIterator<vigra::RGBValue<unsigned char, 0u, 1u, 2u> >,vigra::RGBAccessor<vigra::RGBValue<unsigned char, 0u, 1u, 2u> > >(vigra_ext::ConstCachedFileImageIterator<vigra::RGBValue<unsigned char, 0u, 1u, 2u> >, vigra_ext::ConstCachedFileImageIterator<vigra::RGBValue<unsigned char, 0u, 1u, 2u> >, vigra::RGBAccessor<vigra::RGBValue<unsigned char, 0u, 1u, 2u> >,vigra::ImageExportInfo const&, vigra::VigraFalseType)]+0x118): undefined reference to `vigra::isBandNumberSupported(std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> > const&, int)' enblend-enblend.o: In function `main': enblend.cc:(.text.startup+0x1ebd): undefined reference to `vigra::ImageExportInfo::setICCProfile(vigra::ArrayVector<unsigned char, std::allocator<unsigned char> > const&)' I must admit to being a little upset: this is not of my doing, and to fix it I need to look at the internals of vigra, which has given me pain in the past.
Photo processing at a snail's pace
House photo day again today. I've now migrated my Microsoft box dxo ( Windows Vista 32 bit) to Windows 7 64 bit, and at Daniel O'Connor's suggestion I've renamed it dischord. Fired up the newly installed Olympus Viewer 3 and got a completely different view of the world. Suddenly I couldn't just select photos any more, I had to import them. Started doing that. I had 258 images, and after 5 minutes it had imported (copied across the network?) 20 of them. I can't handle that kind of pain, and decided to go back to the old dxo disk. But the system had more pain in store: Please do not power off or unplug your machine.
More installation fun
On with my installation of FreeBSD 10 today, making a little progress. There are still rough edges and bits missing, though the result is still much better than things were 15 years ago, where I held installation workshops at conferences. But that's not enough. It's now lagging behind the competition. Hopefully Jordan Hubbard's return to the BSD fold will help there. Just to add to the fun, installed the new copy of Microsoft Windows 7 that I received today. A completely different experience. And on the whole it went well, but then that's just a base installation. I only really use Microsoft to run photographic processing software, and most of the problems I have are the fault of that software, not of Microsoft.
System upgrade pain
So it's time once again to upgrade my system. When it comes to installing FreeBSD, I wrote the book, but there's a vast difference between installing an operating system for the first time and migrating a large installation to a newer version. I've been working on this forever, and I thought that maybe the PKGng would make things easier. Maybe it will, too, but it won't make them easy. Spent most of the day, and at the end had some semblance of installation, but first I need to fix my scripts to install the packages that I don't have. ACM only downloads articles once.
More network interruptions
Somehow I've had lots of trouble with the network connection to cvr2 lately. Only a couple of weeks ago I had to replace the network cable, but this morning it was off the net again. After a lot of searching, found this: Clearly Tanya has developed a taste for network cables. Surprisingly, I was able to find another cable and connect it to the switch in Yvonne's officeand it wouldn't work. Connected it to a switch in my office, and all was well.
Exetel addreses performance issues
Exetel was due to call me this morning to address the network performance issues, so I first checked the status quo. That was interesting: 32.22 Mb/s downlinkand that on a 25 Mb/s connection. Had they fixed things? Tried testing via SkyMesh and got 33.62 Mb/s. Is that possible? My first conclusion was that speedtest was broken. But of course this is an LTE connection, and it's capable of much more than that; it's just limited to 25 Mb/s, and if something goes wrong there, it could exceed the limit. More to the point, though: file transfer. There, too, things looked better than before.
Ugly violent hardware
I'm in the process of choosing hardware for my next machine. It's not easy. Once upon a time you had a choice of two or three different processors, maybe different speeds, and any old motherboard. Now the choice of processor, motherboard and RAM is an order of magnitude more varied, and thus difficult. I've more or less settled on a Core i7 4771, the first Intel processor in over 20 years, and probably the Z87 chip set. But in the process of investigating the products, I came across a really ugly trend: violent names. So far I have seen Vengeance, Fatal1ty, Sniper, Killer, DOMINATOR and Ripjaws.
No Exetel
For reasons I still don't understand, Exetel support asked me to make a PC (read: running Microsoft) available to them for remote maintenance today, so I installed their software on an old laptop and agreed to a call some time after 10:30. The call came really quite some time after 10:30, in fact at 18:30 as we were preparing dinner. So we had to postpone it until tomorrow. At least it gave me the chance to say to the engineer that the issue was not at my end. We'll see what happens tomorrow. ACM only downloads articles once.
Mouse crash
Nearly a year ago I bought a new mouse, a Logitech m705. I haven't been overly happy with it: of course, being modern, it doesn't have a middle button, and the side buttons don't fit well to my hand. I've assigned button 2 to one of them, and from time to time it vomits over my screen. The good news: it works. Or at least, it worked. Today I accidentally ran out of desk while moving it, and it fell onto the carpeted floor, from a height of about 70 cm. That shouldn't be an issue, but it bent the right button , really a long strip of plastic, so that it fouled the left button .
Eliminating Ashampoo
More investigation of Ashampoo Photo Commander 11 today. My fears are confirmed: it can't do perspective correction. And the real issue, clever automatic exposure adjustments, also seems to be inadequate. In fact, it doesn't do anything that GIMP can't do, costs money, and requires Microsoft to run. So, once again, it has nothing useful to offer. Maybe I should try to make friends with GIMP again, but it's such a pain to use. ACM only downloads articles once.
Another Ashampoo
I should be trying out the various photo processing packages that I have downloaded, but somehow I couldn't face it. In the process, I asked myself what functions I really needed. It's not much: mainly perspective adjustment and cropping. Even xv can do the latter. But wait. There's something more basic: automatic exposure correction. I've been using Ashampoo photo optimizer on most photos for years now, and it tends to improve the overall appearance of the images. What else do they have to offer? Took a look and came up with Photo Commander 11 (and not even Pro ). It offers all the usual useless functions like backup and restore, and it's not even clear whether it can do perspective correction, but it seemed worth investigating.
More Viewer insights
One of the disappointments about the new Olympus Viewer 3 is that, although it saves the EXIF data, it appears not to save it all. In particular, the crop factor information that Hugin wants is not there, so once again I have to enter it manually in every panorama. But it has a function I hadn't noticed before: import photos from a camera. I have never connected an Olympus camera to that machine, but today I took a memory card from Yvonne's camera and put it in there. Up pops a Viewer screen and offers to do things with the images.
cvr2 crash
In mid-afternoon discovered that my recording of the news had failed: cvr2, the recording computer, had powered down. And it wouldn't come up. Dragged it into the office, where it powered up normally. And it did so again when I put it back in its cupboard. What caused that? No idea. Hopefully it was a one-off. For some reason, I've had more trouble with that machine (or the machine with that function) than with most of the others. ACM only downloads articles once.
Running out of resources
Photo processing was interesting for other reasons. Everything was so slow! Viewer 3 took nearly a minute to process each image, speeds that I've only seen with DxO Optics Pro . And when I processed the output with DxO, it was also only half speed! I've seen inexplicable (to me, anyway) differences in Microsoft processing speed in the past, but with 300 photos to process, this was worth more investigation. What really surprised me was that the Viewer batch module was using 50% of CPU timewhen it should be idle. Once I stopped Viewer, DxO carried on at its normal speed, about 25 seconds per TIFF image.
Goodbye Capture One, hello ACDSee
A little more playing around with Capture One Pro today, but not much. Like all such software, it seems to insist on looking at everything in a directory, whether I've told it to do so or not. In my test directory I had 302 images (from last week's house photos), and it had to go and make thumbnails of every one, using another 900 GB of disk and taking 8 minutes to do so. But this is release 6, and the current version has been release 7 for some time.
More CaptureOne pain
Spent some more time looking at Capture One Pro today. It's really hard to understand, and the documentation is nowhere near as good as that of DxO Optics Pro . By the end of the day I still didn't know how to process (sorry, export ) an image. What I did find was that it creates enormous quantities of files in a subdirectory: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/30) /Photos/00-Oly 3 -> l -R CaptureOne/ total 1 drwxr-xr-x 3 grog lemis 512 2 Jan 18:26 Cache drwxr-xr-x 2 grog lemis 1,024 2 Jan 18:30 Settings50 CaptureOne/Cache: total 1 drwxr-xr-x 2 grog lemis 16,896 2 Jan 18:32 Proxies CaptureOne/Cache/Proxies: total 771 -rwxr--r-- 1 grog lemis 9,144 2 Jan 18:29 P1021059.tif.cof -rwxr--r-- 1 grog lemis 2,999,818 2 Jan 18:29 ...
More network throughput investigations
Talking about my network throughput issues on IRC today, and I went to prove some point with axel. To my surprise, I got good throughput: 2.2 MB/s, or about 17.6 Mb/s. That was with SkyMesh, so I tried it with Exetel. 1.1 MB/s. Clearly this difference has nothing to do with the National Broadband Network. It also implies that SkyMesh also has throughput issues, just that they weren't showing very much today. Sent off a ticket to Exetel, and got a reply asking for some strange tests: Please go through the test below and forward us the screen capture for further investigation.
Network speeds revisited
I've been dragging my feet with network speed measurements, mainly because of the pain of analysing network traces. Tried setting some tuning parameters described in this file, in the process ignoring the warning: # IMPORTANT NOTE - that must be done BEFORE setting the values below, # otherwise You will run out of mbufs! But kern.ipc.nmbclusters was already set to 25600, so there didn't seem to be much danger, and of course it didn't cause any problems. So I applied it to my external server as well. Throughput not improved. Then Yvonne reported problems: her mail wasn't going out.
Capture One revisited
It's becoming increasingly clear that I made a mistake buying the latest version of DxO Optics Pro , since it no longer supports my camera hardware, and it doesn't look as if it ever will. Thus the interest in Olympus Viewer . But that's only part of the picture. Yes, Viewer can convert raw images to TIFF or JPEG and correct for lens distortion (but not for Chromatic aberration). At the moment I'm using DxO to process the output, and it's not well suited. Agreed, it's a little faster than processing the raw images, but not much. I tried Capture One Pro a year ago and basically came to the conclusion that, though it had some advantages, it wasn't much use because it couldn't correct for lens distortion.
Olympus Viewer revisited
So was yesterday's upgrade to Olympus Viewer 3 worth the effort? Reading the release notes (1 line to a paragraph, of course, and requiring reformatting even under Microsoft before they can be read) suggest that there's nothing much new. In fact, most of the document is boilerplate, including a prohibition of reproduction in whole or in parta rather silly restriction for something that's freely available on the web. But it says hardly anything about the changes, just what's on the web site. Punctuation is original, but I've fixed the markup to validate: OLYMPUS Viewer 3 ...
Olympus Viewer upgrade
Olympus have brought out an update to Viewer 3, their aptly named image processing software. Version 1.3, they say. Or maybe 1.2, depending on where you look. I've had trouble with Viewer in the past, so I took my time installing it, first saving the complete directory hierarchy of the previous installation, including the all-important help file (in German). Then I tried the automatic update from Viewer itself: Not the first time I've seen that incorrect claim. So I went to the web site and downloaded it again.
pkgNG in practice
One of the new things in FreeBSD 10 is the new package system. You should be able to just install all packages from a central repository. That was a long time coming after a security scare some time ago, but it's supposed to be there now, so I tried it out. The first thing is that the base system comes with a dummy program pkg(8), which was just clever enough to locate the current version of pkg on the web and install it. After that, tried installing bash, which first installed a repository based on the information in /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf, and then the shell.
How not to install FreeBSD
Once again, I've been dragging my heels updating my machine. And now FreeBSD release 10 is well on its way. So I installed it on a VM a few days ago, and today I finally got round to installing it on a real machine. How do you do that? I did it by copying the disk image from the VM to a file on eureka, starting a test box with the destination system disk as a second disk, repartitioning the disk and copying the image across. In the process, I changed the partitioning scheme from MBR to GPT. Finished copy, started the new system, and I got the old release 9.1 image!
Telstra: we never forget
I rant about Telstra so often that it's getting boring. But finally they've got round to informing me that the National Broadband Network is available in my area. Or have they? Not quite: Clifford Taylor? In Kliens Road? Yes, we bought the house from Cliff Taylor. But that was over 6½ years ago. How can they make such a mess of their data? It's not the first case: five years ago they revived not the previous owner, but the one before that, who had left the house in 1996.
House design software, try 1
It would be nice to have some way of simulating the appearance of our new house in software. Nearly 15 years ago I bought some software for this sort of thing: 3D Home Architect by Brøderbund, for Microsoft of course and with dimensions firmly anchored in the non-metric past. Still, it wasn't bad and ran acceptably on the hardware of the day. But clearly time has moved on, and there should be better stuff available now. But what? Found an online design program that camedon't they allwith no documentation, and with a menu system that I can't interpret. About the only documentation appears to be a selection of video clips, something that I can't make friends with.
Monitoring network traffic
Now that I'm connected to the National Broadband Network, life should be so simple. But that assumes that I'm so simple. Firstly I still haven't got my head around the finer details of TCP flow control, in particular configuring it for FreeBSD, and secondly I no longer have a program that shows me how much traffic is going across the link. With HSPA I used a heavily hacked version of Edwin Groothuis' e169-stats, to be found on FreeBSD boxen at /usr/ports/net/. It keeps track of the traffic over an HSPA link. And what is there for real networks? Lots of different programs, of course, so many that it makes your head smoke.
BUGS Christmas dinner
It's been nearly 4 years since the last BUGS barbecue. On that occasion, along with many others, we had five other active members of the #bugs IRC channel: Sue Blake (unixhag), Callum Gibson (callum), Edwin Groothuis (Mavvie) and Jashank (jashank) and Peter (AlephNull) Jeremy. Today we had 2: Chris Bahlo (fenix, present at the last, but as observer) and Jari Kirma (kirma). And then Jamie Fraser (fwaggle) announced an interest in meeting Jari, so off he set at 18:00 for an 80 km drive to arrive at 19:00and made it only a couple of minutes late. So in the end we had four BUGS people for dinner: It was also interesting because it's the first time any of us had met fwaggle, though you could be excused for getting the impression that ...
DHCP configuration isses
The first thing Jari needed was a connection to the Internet, of course. Since the National Broadband Network that's not a general problem, and I had already configured and SIGHUPped my DHCP server. But he had problems connecting, from my view not helped by the fact that his laptop runs MacOS X rather than FreeBSD. After a lot of messing around, discovered the cause: Dec 24 12:27:14 eureka dhcpd: DHCPDISCOVER from b8:f6:b1:18:2c:c9 via re0: network 192.109.197.0/24: no free leases But there was only one lease, and I had configured dozens of addresses.
Tracking flights
Now that I have a reasonable network connection, I can use services like flightradar24 without timeouts. Today was the perfect opportunity: Jari Kirma, whom I met in Helsinki 8 years ago, decided on Saturday to come to Australia for 5 days over Christmas (in addition to 2½ days in the air). Tracking was interesting: we could see him taking off on the last leg from Hong Kong, but then he disappeared over the South China Sea. He popped up a couple of times, over the Phillipines and the North of Australia, but disappeared somewhere in the Back of Bourke. Clearly this is indicative of radar coverage, but the site itself gave no explanation.
Scaling Windows
My TCP traces across the National Broadband Network show that window scaling doesn't occur. Why not? A check of my system showed that the sysctl net.inet.tcp.rfc1323 was set to 0 (disable). But even after I enabled it, it didn't scale. More investigation needed, but I didn't have time today. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
SkyMesh network speed
So now I finally have two functional connections via the National Broadband Network. How do they compare in speed? I haven't been overly happy with Exetel's performance, so this was of particular interest.
SkyMesh outage, day 3
For the past couple of days I've been running a couple of tcpdump processes on my laptop eucla, connected directly to the SkyMesh port of the National Broadband Network NTD. One traced all traffic, while another traced traffic that didn't relate to the local interface. I checked from time to time: the former showed dhclient try repeatedly to get an address, and no reply arriving. And then, round 11:09, I got a call from Kear of SkyMesh technical support. He suddenly found life in the link: 11:11:49.837739 IP 0.0.0.0.bootpc > 255.255.255.255.bootps: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from 48:f8:b3:b5:04:7b (oui Unknown), length 300 11:11:50.571587 IP ntp.skymesh.net.au.bootps > 181-209-181-180.cpe.skymesh.net.au.bootpc: BOOTP/DHCP, Reply, length 300 11:11:52.580733 IP 0.0.0.0.bootpc > 255.255.255.255.bootps: BOOTP/DHCP, Request from 48:f8:b3:b5:04:7b (oui Unknown), length 300 11:11:52.726601 IP 1-208-181-180.cpe.skymesh.net.au.bootps > 181-209-181-180.cpe.skymesh.net.au.bootpc: BOOTP/DHCP, Reply, length 300 11:11:52.731440 ARP, Request who-has 181-209-181-180.cpe.skymesh.net.au tell 1-208-181-180.cpe.skymesh.net.au, length 46 11:11:52.790918 ARP, ...
Still more network pain!
Somehow networks just don't like me at the moment. Today cvr2 fell off the LAN again. More searching and finally found the problem: the cable between cvr2 and the switch in Yvonne's office. It goes under the house, and years ago I put it in and terminated it myself, apparently badly. The correct solution would be to try again, but I don't know if I ever want to put a CAT-5 cable together again. The new house will have Ethernet and fibre connections in every room. In the meantime, I put Yet Another cable over the floor. ACM only downloads articles once.
Olympus networking in practice
I'm in the process of finalizing our web Christmas card for this year, and once again I've taken a photo of Yvonne, myself and as many animals as we can fit in the picture. Last year I took the photos using the infrared remote control, which has the disadvantage that it's hard to hide: Now I have this 802.11 link between the camera and a tablet (but not a network: it refuses to connect with any other networking equipment except a phone), and OI.Share, the app that connects with the camera.
Looking for SkyMesh support
As promised, got a call from Dean at SkyMesh support today to do Level 1 fault analysis. Basically this required showing the IP addresses of the interfaces and the contents of the ARP cache. I explained to him that there was no traffic whatsoever, and that the only MAC addresses were of my own interface, but he didn't seem to understand. But that was all the information he wanted, and he hadn't even bothered to report that I was receiving no traffic at all, which clearly made his other questions meaningless. Another waste of time. And so far a 24 out of 24 hour outage.
SkyMesh: All your networks are belong to us
I signed up with SkyMesh a couple of days ago, and they had promised to send me details of how to connect to their National Broadband Network service. But nothing came. Then today the hardware arrived: a CiscoLinksys EA2700 router and SPA112 ATA. Also a welcome sheet giving me user names and passwords for the router, and network name and password for the 802.11 wireless network, and a second sheet with a picture of a fibre NTD, which looks quite different from a fixed wireless NTD, and instructions how to interconnect things: And that's all!
Exetel: support? What's that?
Now that the National Broadband Network connection is up and running, it's time to terminate my contract with Internode and update my private web pages with ISP contact information. I had most of the information for Exetel, but not the email address for technical support. Finally stumbled across this page, which offered to answer my questions. Clearly not one that it expected: Later I found out that they do, in fact, have a help desk page where you can log faults. But that wasn't visible from my search.
Network problems, part 2
The National Broadband Network connection wasn't the only network problem I've been having recently. A couple of times recently I have lost connections to cvr2, my TV recording computer. That almost certainly relates to a dubious switch in Yvonne's office, so I changed that. Then I tried to move a recording from cvr2 to teevee, the TV computer in the lounge room. The transfer rates were terrible! In fact, they were slower than the NBN connection, only round 480 kB/s. Now my network topology has just growed , and it's somewhat baroque. From cvr2 the data goes to the switch I had just replaced, and then to the 100 Mb/s switch in my office, thence into a power line adapter to the lounge room, and then through an 802.11 access point to teevee.
Network problems, part 1
I'm still wondering where the problems are with my network throughput. My Speedtest results are not quite consistentof coursebut they're always far short of the 25 Mb/s downlink speed that I'm paying for. On IRC, Andy Snow suggested using axel to test download speeds. Why? Because TCP has throughput limitations, depending on the window size. OK, possibly that's an issue, so I tried it, downloading a 100 MB file. Here the results (octopus.com.au is Andy's domain): === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/11) /var/tmp 27 -> axel -n 10 -a http://octopus.com.au/speedtest100mb.bin Downloaded 99.3 megabytes in 1:56 seconds.
Telstra: we can do worse!
Over the years I've developed a healthy hatred of Telstra in all things networking, as I've documented here and here. But what I've seen in connection with the National Broadband Network installation in Dereel blows my mind. I commented on the first one, assuming that it was a contract issue. But no, the phone they cut off was supplied by a competitor! That sounds like it should be a criminal act. And as far as I can see, after 4 days, the phone is still cut off. And then Yvonne received a message from a friend: Updated to the NBN today and it will be installed on the 13/01/14.
Debugging Android networking
While in town, tried again to use my Android tablet on the phone network. Yes, I got a message saying that the phone was on the (which?) network, and my Access Point Name was correct. But, it seems, no Internet connection. What really annoys me is that there seems to be no way to debug these things. ACM only downloads articles once.
Network speed: what should I expect?
More playing around with Speedtest today. Clearly it's an approximate test at best, and for some reason it has decided that I'm in Cairns, nearly 3,000 km away, and so it appears to choose servers in Papua New Guinea, though I suppose they're really in northern Queensland. But even when I correct that and select local servers, the best downlink speed I have ever had was 14.73 Mb/s, and normally it's round 10 Mb/s. I've started to keep a statistics page to monitor the speeds. When SkyMesh provisions the connection, it'll be very interesting to see the difference. ACM only downloads articles once.
More Android networking
So why did my Android tablet not connect yesterday? How do I even configure it? Asked on IRC and got the startling instructions to go to settings/WIRELESS & NETWORKS/More.../Mobile network settings/Access Point Names. Access point names? What do access points have to do with mobile phones? Anyway, selected new APN , clearly an undocumented abbreviation meaning Access Point Name, and was asked for a whole lot of information. How to fill it out? Ask Internode support, I suppose. There I found a general setting page which hardly overlapped at all with the display on the Android: ...
Back with SkyMesh again?
It's been three years since SkyMesh terminated my satellite connection, thereby doing me a favour. And today, somewhat later than others, I got an offer from them to connect me to the NBN. More waste paper basket fodder? It's interesting enough to read what people offer, and this one was particularly interesting: no prices. In fact, I couldn't find their prices for NBN fixed wireless anywhere on their site. It seems they only got put up after my search: now they're here.
NBN connect via FreeBSD
I've had difficulties connecting to the NBN with FreeBSD: the FreeBSD PPPoE implementation violates RFC 2516. Took at look at the code (/usr/src/sys/netgraph/ng_pppoe.c), which didn't show any obvious bug. Here round line 1462, where we're building the PADR: insert_tag(sp, utag); /* Host Unique */ if ((tag = get_tag(ph, PTT_AC_COOKIE))) insert_tag(sp, tag); /* return cookie */ if ((tag = get_tag(ph, PTT_AC_NAME))) { insert_tag(sp, tag); /* return it */ send_acname(sp, tag); } insert_tag(sp, ...
MyNetFone: only one connection after all
I had been rather surprised yesterday to discover that I could register my Android tablet with MyNetFone while my ATA was still registered. Today I discovered the truth: yes, the SIP LED was still lit on the ATA, but nobody was home. I had to stop the VoIP application on the tablet, and also power cycle the ATA, before I could use it again. This isn't a bug, of course: it's only one line. But it is a feature. Now when I go anywhere I can turn off the ATA and take my home phone number with me. No need for two phone numbers, no need for redirection.
VoIP over Android
Finally VoIP is working at home. Why shouldn't it work on an Android tablet as well? Did some looking round and came up with Zoiper, which installed. And the service provider? In principle MyNetFone SuperSaver is free but for the calls, so it would make sense to sign up for a second account. But they wanted $20 for bring your own hardware . Not something I want to do for a test. Tried registering with the same account number, and to my surprise it worked, and the VoIP adapter still showed that it was registered too. That's strange. Anyway, it worked, so when we were in Ballarat, I tried it with the Internode SIM card.
Photo processing software changes
The new Olympus OM-D E-M1 also requires changes to my photo processing. Since DxO Optics Pro no longer supports my lens combinations, I have to use Olympus Viewer to convert the raw images to TIFF. I then (currently) use DxO to apply other corrections, but it's clear that once I don't have lens corrections, DxO doesn't have much to offer. Viewer is a pain! It seems to continually reset the options I have set, including the paths to where I want to save the image. I think I'll have to give up and make its choice of path a symlink to where I really want the images.
Debugging the PPPoE connection
Finally got round to looking at the PPPoE connection problems from a couple of days ago. Not a good advertisement for FreeBSD: it is in violation of RFC 2516. Here the view from wireshark: The session starts with eureka sending out a PADI broadcast. Interestingly, it gets two PADOs in reply. That's explicitly allowed by the RFC, but I hadn't expected it. It then sends a PADR to the first one, and gets a confirmatory PADS. That's all that PPPoE needs, and the rest goes on with the PPP LCP.
Streaming Internet video
So now we have a real Internet connection, we can get films and other TV programmes off the web, right? Well, yes, but how? Looking at YouTube, the films on offer are old and boring. And today to start things off, I wanted to find something as a surprise for Yvonne: Et la Tendresse... Bordel !, a reminder of her days in France. No difficulty finding it: as usual, Google is your friend. But then? The links promised free downloads. Are they legal? I still don't know, but since some of them do it quickly for money or slowly for free, I'm guessing yes.
Understanding the NBN
I'm not the only person who has connected to the National Broadband Network, of course, and there was a lot of discussion on the Dereel Facebook page today. It's amazing how many people have chosen Telstra as an ISP. And already Telstra's bureaucracy has claimed at least one victim: swapped their current Internet line for NBN and had their phone disconnected. How could that happen? Presumably the phone was on the same contract as the Internet service, and nobody bothered to tell them. Spent some time on Facebook answering questions, but Facebook is such a pain, so I put together a web page with general information.
NBN performance
So now I have a network link with 25 Mb/s down and 5 Mb/s up. How much of this am I really getting? Not very much, it seems. Repeated test with speedtest suggest about 8Mb/s down and 4 Mb/s up. Is that NBN or Exetel? To be observed. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Configuring for NBN
That wasn't the end of the story, of course. I really wanted to run PPPoE from eureka, my main FreeBSD machine. And that didn't go as smoothly. Reading the logs didn't make much sense to me, so I put if off until later. And now we can use VoIP normally! Turned the adapter (a NetComm V210p) back on, but it didn't register. Why? While messing around, realized that I was still connected via the Internode link, so whatever the problem was, it had nothing to do with the NBN. Played around with various settings, at one point setting NAT to on .
NBNFinally!
Today was the day scheduled for the installation of my connection to the National Broadband Network. They had given a time window between 8:00 and 12:00 to perform the installation, so I was up and about by 7:30, walking around like a tiger in a cage. No sign of them at 8:00, of course. That's to be expected. No sign at 9:00. Well, they could be late. No sign at 10:00. How long are they going to be? Were they given the wrong phone number? As Andy Snow put it: PID USERNAME PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND 612 nbnco 44 0 98268K 44424K zombie 0 1367:16 99.95% install --location dereel Round 10:30 I finally said Where's the bloody NBN? .
NBN installation failures
Tomorrow's the Big Day when I get connected to the National Broadband Networkmaybe. It seems that the coverage maps are a best-case scenario. Spent a while setting up a Google Map showing installation locations. Now I just need to get people to add their locations and state whether it was a success or a failure. ACM only downloads articles once.
Preparing for NBN
The first NBN installations took place in Dereel today. There were reportsas expectedof superb throughput, but not all were successful: two installations, in Browns Road and Golden Reef Road, had to be aborted because of lack of signal. Browns Road I can understand, but Golden Reef Road is almost in the middle of Dereel. If they have problems there, some designer hasn't done his homework properly. My installation is on Thursday. What do I need to do to make things work? One is to find a place to put the network termination device (officially NTD, but which they call a connection box in their end-user documentation).
Networking in the new house
It's only 3 days until the NBN installer arrives and hopefully connects me up. And in only a few months we will move home. What happens to my NBN connection? Called up the NBN and spoke to Chloë, who didn't quite seem to understand the issue. But yes, there is enough bandwidth available to service everybody in the rollout area (marked in purple), currently very much including Stones Road: ACM only downloads articles once.
Microsoft photo software doesn't like me
I've already commented on the fact that DxO Optics Pro Elite doesn't recognize the Olympus E-M1. But it seems it just doesn't want to do it for me. It works fine for others. Why? There are lots of bugs in DxO, but the likeliest one I can think of is that it recognizes my email address as licensee for the standard edition, and even the trial version won't work properly in Elite mode. And then there's Olympus Viewer 3, which comes without documentation. But only for me, it seems. Others have a file OLYMPUSViewer3.chm with some kind of help text.
Still more E-M1 experience
More playing around with the Olympus OM-D E-M1 today. I was particularly concerned with the quality of the photos that I took yesterday, which seemed far too dark as processed by Olympus Viewer 3. Spent some time looking for documentation, but I've come to the conclusion that here, too, there is none: This was immediately after a fresh install. Searching the web found nothing. Searching the file system found only a README written one line per paragraph, something that even the Microsoft tools don't seem to be able to handle: It's hardly believable that people can provide software with no documentation at ...
Suddenly summer
It's summer! And the weather shows it: That's a big difference from the last two months, which were far cooler than the seasonal average: mysql> SELECT year(date), avg(outside_temp) FROM observations WHERE month(date) > 9 AND month(date) < 12 GROUP BY year(date); +------------+-------------------+ | year(date) | avg(outside_temp) | +------------+-------------------+ | 2009 | 17.5731496596709 | | 2010 | 14.36821202979 | | 2011 | 15.1622464410373 | | 2012 | 14.9027108163907 | | 2013 | 13.4479453197917 | +------------+-------------------+ And for some reason, weather station readings were very erraticat times over 30 minutes passed without a reading coming through.
Keeping EXIF data in a database
I have something like 100,000 distinct photos on my system, and with all copies in different sizes, data formats and qualities, it's over 500,000. How do I keep track of the EXIF data? Specifically at the moment I'm wondering which lenses I use the most, and at what focal lengths. Clearly l need to store the information in a database. That's so clear, in fact, that there must be software out there that does it. But a Google search didn't come up with anything very promising.
NBN installation, bad language and survey
Where do I put the network termination box for my NBN service? It's designed to be mounted on a wall inside the house, preferably close to a power point. We're going to be moving house in the foreseeable future, so it makes sense to consider where the new owner of the house would like to have it. Clearly it should be somewhere near the existing network infrastructure. That's mainly the south half of the house; my powerline network adapters that connect to the north are so flaky that they may not be as fast as the NBN downlink.
NBN coming nearer
Mail message from Exetel today: We have been notified by NBN that an appointment has been made for a technician to visit your premises to complete the installation of the Fiber Broadband. Appointment date: Thursday, 12 December 2013, 8:00 AM - 12:00 PM Fiber broadband! Not even fibre . Still, I suppose fixed wireless is the invisible fibre. But after 2½ years of waiting, we finally have a date. The relief was overwhelming. Hopefully everything will go smoothly. ACM only downloads articles once.
NBN wants residents
Looking Yet Again at the NBN rollout map for some reason, and it asked me if I wanted to take a survey after visiting the site (which involved explicitly closing the window when I was done). It confirmed my negative impression of the NBN bureaucracy, producing the smallest window I have ever seen: Without the frame it must be about 100×100 pixels. Once I had enlarged it, it wanted to know what kind of visitor I was, a button list of course. What kind didn't it mention?
DCW credit card security
One of the more interesting issues completing my purchase with Digital Camera Warehouse was that they didn't simply accept my credit card on the phone: they did a sample booking between $1 and $2 and asked me to check the sum and report it back to them. Given the horrendous lack of security in the online market, that seemed not to be a bad idea. Only problem was, of course, that ANZ didn't play along: the updates to the online banking site can take hours or even a day. So I had to call them up and get the information on the phone, with only my secret word as identification.
More bad language
While signing up with Exetel today, Shannon asked me if I wanted a modem. Huh? Why do you need a modem when NBN supplies a layer 2 bridge? She couldn't tell me either, of course, but it seems that she meant a switch or maybe a router. So why call it a modem? It seems that the central home networking box, including ADSL modem, a switch, NAT, firewall, and probably 802.11 access point, has come to be referred to as a modem. Now the successor devices no longer have the ADSL modem component, but the name has become established, and though it's no longer a modem, that's what they call it.
Finally! NBN!
Started writing up my diary for yesterday and brought up the NBN rollout map. And what do I see? So Aussie Broadband were only slightly wrong in their timing. And once again the NBN have demonstrated how completely useless their information is. Yesterday, just the day before it became available, they were pretending that the service wouldn't be available until August 2014. What a useless system. Hopefully the network side will be better. So: once again tried to sign up with Exetel. Called up 1300 393 835 and spoke to Shannon, who had all my details. Nevertheless she couldn't process my order until I gave her a mobile phone number.
No NBN, part 2
Exciting junk mail in the letterbox today: Could it be true? Have they finally got the Radiation Tower up and running? Took a look at the rollout map. Nothing. But then what do they know? Called up NBN on 1800 687 626 and spoke to Christine, who told me the same old story: construction commenced in August, and it normally takes 12 months to complete. Why do they repeat that nonsense? She seemed put out when I told her that that was nonsense, but promised to forward it to her superiors.
New backup disks
To Officeworks to buy some new backup disks (or, as they put it, hard drives ) for my photos. 4TB each, and to hedge my bets (and also tell them apart) I bought one Seagate, one Western Digital. How the old units fail with file systems of this size: Filesystem 512-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/da2p1 7,812,344,416 16 7,734,220,960 0% /photobackup Normally my backups are just of the day's photos, and they take about 10 minutes, mainly with rsync checking the directory trees of the two disks.
No NBN in Dereel
Phone call from Chris Bahlo during breakfast. The people from the NBN were there to install her antenna! Well, it's really David Yeardley's installationChris would never have chosen Telstraand they can be connected because the NBN has determined that they're in the range of the Rokewood tower, while we are not. But more to the point, nobody was home except for Minh Chau, and since she's under age, they wouldn't accept a signature from her. So one of us had to go over, and out of curiosity I volunteered. Unfortunately in vain: they had moved on, and would come back later, by which time David would be there.
Paving the way to hell
My programming languages course has now moved from Racket to Ruby, and the first assignment is due in soon. It's difficult to keep up with the sheer volume of lectures, but finally I started today: === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/4) ~/Coursera/Programming-Languages/assignments 3 -> ruby hw6runner.rb original /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `require': cannot load such file -- tk (LoadError) from /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.9/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `require' from /eureka/home/grog/Coursera/Programming-Languages/assignments/hw6graphics.rb:6:in `<top (required)>' from /eureka/home/grog/Coursera/Programming-Languages/assignments/hw6provided.rb:3:in `require_relative' from /eureka/home/grog/Coursera/Programming-Languages/assignments/hw6provided.rb:3:in `<top (required)>' from hw6runner.rb:3:in `require_relative' from hw6runner.rb:3:in `<main>' What's that?
Don't use Internet Explorer !
Participated in another silly survey today. About the most interesting part was at the beginning: How times change! ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
DxO support for E-M1
Rather to my surprise, DxO has already announced support for the Olympus OM-D E-M1. Which lenses? A number of Panasonic lenses as well as from Olympusbut only micro-FT lenses! In general the optical quality of the µFT lenses is less than that of the Four Thirds lensesthe only one that really qualifies as professional is the still-undeliverable M.Zuiko 12-40 mm To make up for that, they've decided that the E-M1 is a professional camera (my E-30 isn't), so I'd have to pay double the price for dropping support for my existing lenses. That would be the last straw. So off looking for alternatives.
Exploring the ALDI tuner
Discussion about the ALDI tuner on IRC today. Jürgen Lock suggested that I try installing the webcamd port, so did that and tried it out: === root@teevee (/dev/pts/0) /usr/ports/multimedia/webcamd 8 -> webcamd Attached to ugen0.5[0] webcamd: Cannot find USB device Clearly it was lying: it did find /dev/ugen0.5. But why? It seems that to get debug output you need to rebuild the port, so did that and got lots of messages on the screen, many of them obviously errors. But the real one that stood out was: ERR: : : this USB2.0 device cannot be run on a USB1.1 port (it lacks a hardware PID filter) Now isn't that something that should only appear in debug output?
New toy
A few weeks back I bought an infrared thermometer on eBay, and today it finally arrived. The main purpose is to measure the temperature of the pizza stone in the pizza oven, but of course that won't be for a while. In the meantime I played around with it a bit. One thing's clear: it's not the kind that you can stick into your ear and measure blood temperature. I tried that and got a temperature of about 23°. But pointing it at hot and cold objects show that it works, at least in principle. The trouble is that it's a spot measurement, so the variation between -18° and -14° in the deep freezer, or 190° in the corners of the oven to 210° in the middle, could be correct.
New USB tuner
Yvonne back from shopping today with more toys from ALDI: two USB TV tuners and an 802.11 range extender. One of the tuners can go back unopened: there's no way to connect two to a standard TV cable. The other one probes under FreeBSD without revealing very much: Nov 19 17:30:26 teevee kernel: ugen0.5: <Realtek> at usbus0 Nov 19 17:30:26 teevee root: Unknown USB device: vendor 0x1d19 product 0x1101 bus uhub2 Nov 19 17:30:26 teevee root: Unknown USB device: vendor 0x1d19 product 0x1101 bus uhub2 So now I'll have to revisit the whole tuner setup under Linux.
ABS survey
While I was in town yesterday, somebody from the Australian Bureau of Statistics came by and told Yvonne that we had been selected for a Survey of Income and Housing. She left a letter, which proved to contain a Web Address , numerical user identifier and password, containing upper and lower case letters, digits and a special character. I was to go to this Web Address to say when it would be convenient to conduct a survey of unspecified duration. Do I want to do this? This kind of bad language raises prejudices which too often prove to be justified. They were today, too.
Comparing DxO releases
Comparing the processing times of DxO Optics Pro releases 8 and 9 also gave me an opportunity to compare the images themselves. They should be the same, right? Well, I've been applying the Artistic HDR profile (which they call a preset), and they seem to have fine-tuned that. The results are most visible in images with a lot of white, but unfortunately I didn't compare any of them, and given the processing time, I'll put it off for some other time. But even in more normal images some differences are obvious. To compare the images, visit the HTML version of this page with JavaScript enabled.
DxO release 9: faster after all
I've commented in the past both on the glacial speed of DxO Optics Pro and the chutzpah they had to claim that release 9 is even faster. My own tests confirmed only the former allegation. But over the last couple of days I've processed a large number of photos with release 9, and yes, indeed, it's notably faster. Here the times: Release Image count Time Time per image (s) CPU Time per image (s) ...
Microsoft bashing, 15 years on
Mail from Bob Nelson today, who had dug out an old copy of The Complete FreeBSD, third edition. He was concerned by a couple of things I said about Microsoft. Now it's not exactly a secret that I don't like Microsoft, but nevertheless it was interesting to see what it was that concerned him. The first was a reference to Microsoft's Operating System Bob thought that the quotes were inappropriate. But in the context, no, they weren't. I was referring to Windows 95, which was not an operating system at all, but a graphical interface to MS-DOS. Calling it an operating system would be like calling X an operating system.
Tools for Android
I'm gradually making friends with Android, but it's not easy. Under the surface it looks almost like a real machine: u0_a83@android:/ $ df Filesystem Size Used Free Blksize /dev 403M 64K 402M 4096 /mnt/asec 403M 0K 403M 4096 /mnt/obb 403M 0K 403M 4096 /system 531M 322M 208M 4096 /system/media 98M 67M 31M 4096 /cache 98M 4M 94M 4096 /persist 9M ...
Positive NBN news
We've all been more than a little unhappy about the direction the new Australian government is taking with the National Broadband Network, as I've commented repeatedly in the past. And so far there seems to be no sign of a change of directionuntil today. Now it seems that Simon Hackett is joining the board of the NBN. That's hopefully good news. Simon has a much better understanding of the issues than most of the people on the NBN, very much including the current government. Hopefully he'll be able to maintain his viewpoints. Certainly the public opinion is very positive. ACM only downloads articles once.
(Re)Learning programming
I've been programming for nearly 45 years now, but I've always been interested in programming languages, and so a couple of months ago I signed up for an online Programming languages course from the University of Washington. It's been interesting. One of the things about programming languages is that each has its own way of doing things. Yes, you can write FORTRAN in any language, and Rasmus Lerdorf has told me Programming in PHP is simple. Just write C and put a $ in front of the variables . But it's not that simple, and the course shows idioms that I wouldn't have thought of myself.
More GPS navigation apps
I still haven't found a good Android navigation app. I'm going to Melbourne tomorrow, so it's a good test. Spent some time looking for other apps, and came up with a package I can no longer trace. It has some other name somewhere, but it just identifies itself as Navigator . I had thought that it was NavFree, but the description in the toyshop looks very different. It's also based on OpenStreetMap. Is the navigation any better? No. It was almost impossible to enter the details of where my cousin Mick lives (it didn't believe that the street number existed), and finding the South Melbourne Market took me 5 minutes offline.
Comparing DxO PRIME
As planned, spent some time converting the photos taken on 30 January 2010 with the new DxO Optics Pro version 9, including the blue moon with the ice-age-glacial PRIME denoising functionality53 minutes for 7 images! And the results? It's still hard to say. The original images were processed with ufraw, not the best software in the world. DxO gave generally better-looking results. But there's not that much difference in the noise. In sequence are the image as processed by ufraw, the same image as optimized by Ashampoo photo optimizer, DxO with the High profile and DxO with the PRIME profile: The differences in the crop are due to the fact that ufraw uses the ...
Modem comparisons
My wireless network congestion continues, though it's currently not as bad as it has been. But Internode support have sent me a new modem to see if that will make any difference. Yes, it did. It's a Huawei E3131, and my system doesn't recognize it: Nov 6 10:43:12 eureka kernel: ugen6.4: <HUAWEI> at usbus6 Nov 6 10:43:14 eureka root: Unknown USB device : vendor 0x12d1 product 0x1c05 bus uhub8 Nov 6 10:43:14 eureka kernel: ugen6.4: <HUAWEI> at usbus6 In particular, it doesn't create any device nodes, so I can't use it.
More DxO investigation
As planned, continued today looking at the new DxO Optics Pro version 9. It's certainly interesting. The first thing I needed to do was to process the images from the GPS navigator as part of the article on GPS navigation apps. I couldn't be bothered to mount the camera on a tripod, so I took the images hand-held with the camera sensitivity set to 36° (3200) ISO. That created quite noisy images, just what I needed to try their new PRIME denoising, a term that proves to stand for Probabilistic Raw IMage Enhancement. One thing's sure: it's slow. And when processingexporting a second image, I discovered: I had to wait for the first image to complete before I could start the second, presumably because of some limitation in their processingexporting logic.
Web server down time
Stephen Rothwell updated our communal OzLabs weather server today, while I was in Geelong. It didn't take long to find that things didn't go well for http://www.lemis.com/. Error 403 ( Permission denied ) on all pages. Contacted Stephen and discovered that I hadn't read his warning letter closely enough, and that I needed a configuration change. Fortunately that didn't take too long. ACM only downloads articles once.
Navigation apps revisited
The journey to Geelong was useful for another purpose: another comparison of OsmAnd Maps & Navigation and the Nav N Go in my dedicated navigator. It was interesting: OsmAnd Maps took well over a minute to calculate a route back home from Geelong, a distance of 80 km. There's clearly a lot of room for improvement there. When it did, it was a very different shortest route than what Nav N Go calculated.
More bad language
So today I've had two different new examples of bad language: income stream products and export . What's wrong with them? They're bad in different ways. Income stream product is clearly intended to be very specific. Presumably stream implies continuous, relatively even income, and product is some kind of wrapper. But that's a guess. To be specific, it also needs to be completely understandable. Presumably the people at Centrelink know exactly what it means and how it differs from other jargon terms that would sound the same to me. But unless you can look it up in a dictionary, they shouldn't be using it when communicating with the general public.
New DxO release
A couple of weeks ago DxO released version 9 of DxO Optics Pro , of which they said, with amazing chutzpah: DxO Optics Pro is now even faster That's of a photo processing package that is an order of magnitude slower than any other I know. Still, any speed improvement is good, so today I decided to try it out. The user interface has changed: previously there were the relatively understandable tabs Organize (climb trees to find the files you want to process), Customize (select what you want to do with them) and Process (produce the corresponding output images).
NBN letdown
On the dot of 9:00 this morning, called up Exetel (1300 393 835, Option 1), spoke to Bernie and asked her to reinstate the order that they rejected last month. Yes, indeed, they still had all the details, but they'd have to reenter it manually. Their problem, I suppose, since they were prepared to do it. But of course the NBN info still showed no service from the Radiation Tower, so they couldn't accept it. Called up the NBN and spoke to Adam, who told me that the tower was indeed not in service, but some people, notably in Browns Road (which goes past the edge of Chris Bahlo's property) already had service.
Radiation Tower: finally!
The Radiation Tower is finished! Or at least, that's what Yvonne found in Facebook: Yeah baby, booked in for the NBN today, been told the technician will be out in the next couple of weeks to hook us up......bye bye 15 gig @ $89 yippee........ I can't check myself: it seems I've been removed from the group. And of course the coverage map doesn't show any change, but what else is new? Hopefully it'll be installed before my current month of wireless coverage ends on the 20th. ACM only downloads articles once.
LinkedIn: Somebody wants to link to you
Mail from LinkedIn (yes, really, not spam) today: Who? It doesn't say. It seems to be unimportant, though viewing the profile showed that it was, indeed, somebody that I know. But this was the entire message, apart from my personal details below. Still, documentation is overrated. ACM only downloads articles once.
New VoIP adapter
My new NetComm V210P VoIP adapter arrived today. Why does it have a WAN and a LAN port? It seems to want to be a firewall as well, and it's a little hazy about which port it uses for DNS requests. After a bit of playing around, discovered that it works better with the WAN port connected. But I still can't find a way to create a sensible dial plan. On the one hand it's a lot simpler than the dial plan for the Sipura, but on the other hand it's a lot simpler than the dial plan for the Sipura.
More Radiation Tower activity
They're doing more work on the Radiation Tower: At first I thought it was the electricity, but the heaps of soil don't seem right for that. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Alternative Android software
My search for a good navigation app for Android has not been very successful. I had expected something better than the Nav N Go software, but so far I haven't found anything that is anywhere near as good. So why not Nav N Go? It clearly has the advantage that I know how to use it. Spent some more time looking around and came across a site that offered it. So I tried to install it. Ended up with a 415 byte file in the Downloads directory, with no explanation of what to do with it. Clearly I had to sign up with Aptoide.
The advantages of dithering
My Android tablet proves to be quite good for reading PDF documents, much better than the E-book reader that I bought last year. That seems to have more to do with the software (dare I say Acrobat reader?) than the hardware, since the resolution isn't very different. A closer looks shows the advantage of dithering: I consider dithering just a substitute for high-resolution displays, but here it does the job quite well. ACM only downloads articles once.
MySQL communication failure
After yesterday's panic, I had difficulty accessing the freezer database on dereel. It's using phpMyEdit, which no longer works with modern, backwards incompatible versions of PHP, so I run it on a different, down-rev (virtual) machine. But since the reboot I couldn't access the database. Much checking, not helped by the lack of error reporting. Running wireshark didn't help: I only saw the traffic in one direction, presumably because of the virtual machine. But running mysql directly showed: === root@dereel (/dev/pts/0) /usr/local/www/data/household 16 -> mysql -u grog -h eureka ERROR 1130 (HY000): Host '192.109.197.135' is not allowed to connect to this MySQL server No, I don't have passwords for this database (clearly that will have to change if I go back to direct connect to the Internet).
VoIP reliability
Years ago I bought two Sipura SPA-3000 VoIP ATAs. After retiring I only needed one of them, but it died two years ago. Today I discovered that the second one had died too. I didn't record the exact symptoms of the death of the last one, but I suspect at least the LEDs still illuminated. This time there was just no power indication, though the power adapter seemed OK. Not a good advertisement for SipuraLinksysCisco. With the upcoming Radiation Tower, time to buy a new one. Saw one (a NetComm V210P) being auctioned on eBay and got it for $9.99. Who can be bothered to fix old hardware when you can get new stuff that cheaply?
Backup data corruption
Yesterday's photo data backup didn't exactly work as planned. Looking at the output, I found lots of: rsync: stat "/photobackup/Photos/grog/www/20080531/small" failed: Bad file descriptor (9) rsync: recv_generator: failed to stat "/photobackup/Photos/grog/www/20080531/small/daisy-bush.jpeg": Not a directory (20) rsync: recv_generator: failed to stat "/photobackup/Photos/grog/www/20080531/small/dam-ne.jpeg": Not a directory (20) Further investigation showed a couple of things: first, the (USB-connected) disk had been detected as a 1 MB/s device: Oct 26 17:04:33 eureka kernel: da2 at umass-sim3 bus 3 scbus11 target 0 lun 0 Oct 26 17:04:33 eureka kernel: da2: <ST ST2000DL003-9VT1 3.00> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-4 device Oct 26 17:04:33 eureka kernel: da2: 1.000MB/s transfers Oct 26 17:04:33 eureka kernel: da2: 1907729MB (3907029168 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 243201C) Normally I'd expect to see ...
Radiation Tower close up
The work on the Radiation Tower this week looked like completion, so off to take a closer look. Up to now I have only taken photos from the road, but it looked like time to go in and take a closer look. For some reason they've locked the gates leading to the tower, though that's not the case with the other towers I've seen. In any case, it's easy enough to get in: And clearly the tower isn't complete yet: Still, there's not much to do.
How to compromise ANZ web banking
Despite my complaints about ANZ yesterday, it was clear that I would have to go along with their silly security questions, so I chose some with answers that nobodynot even Icould guess. Then a little later Yvonne came in and told me that she had managed to lock herself out of the web banking servicetyped the correct password three times, and it was rejected each time. Now we had to call 13 33 50 to get it reinstated. How could that happen? Clearly they couldn't have objected to my choice of answers (which, in fact, were less unflattering than usual). Something wrong in their application?
Bluetooth keyboard: success
More playing around with the Bluetooth keyboard today. This time it Just Worked, irritatingly while I was trying to get some screen shots of it not working. And once it was there, identifying itself not with a MAC address but with the name of the keyboard's owner (not Chris Bahlo), I couldn't get rid of it. So: how well does it work? There's no problem entering data, but it's still difficult to use: Android isn't really designed for keyboards, and I still need to smear the tablet to navigate the screen. The keyboard is really only useful when doing a lot of text entry with little screen navigation.
DNS strangeness
What's my test box called? It's headless, so I need to connect to it before I can find out. But then there's ARP. After booting, it should show up in eureka's ARP table, since it NFS mounts file systems. Took a look: eureka.lemis.com (192.109.197.137) at 00:1f:d0:20:4e:7f on re0 permanent [ethernet] swamp.lemis.com (192.109.197.138) at 00:10:5a:75:8d:ad on re0 expires in 36 seconds [ethernet] dxo.lemis.com (192.109.197.173) at 00:21:86:21:ab:7e on re0 expires in 1190 seconds [ethernet] stable-amd64.lemis.com.197.109.192.in-addr.arpa (192.109.197.192) at 08:00:27:3c:7f:5e on re0 expires in 1005 seconds [ethernet] ? (192.168.1.2) at 00:1f:d0:20:4e:7f on re0 permanent [ethernet] ?
Androids and Bluetooth keyboards
Chris Bahlo came in in the evening with a Bluetooth keyboard to try out on the Android tablet. Not an unqualified success: What's wrong there? And why does it identify itself with something that looks like an Ethernet MAC address? More investigation needed. ACM only downloads articles once.
More Radiation Tower progress
They're back at work on the Radiation Tower: It looks as if they're connecting up the power, which shouldn't take them too long. Hopefully it'll just be a few days now. So: can I see the tower from my house? Up on the roof to take a look in that direction: Where is it? With the help of Google Maps, established that it's behind the gum trees in the middle of the view: This is from my Internet connection options map.
Ports pain
Some months ago I had a horrible experience: enblend only worked correctly with vigra if it was compiled with a specific version of gcc. I fixed that by ensuring that the correct version was used. But later I started getting error messages by email: From: pkg-[email protected] To: [email protected] Subject: [REL - head-amd64-default][graphics/enblend] Failed for enblend-4.1.1_1 in build You are receiving this mail as a port that you maintain is failing to build on the FreeBSD package build server. Please investigate the failure and submit a PR to fix build.
Weather too dry to measure
It's been nearly 4 years since I wrote my weather station software. It's been a fight against the vagaries of the weather station, but in general things seem to be working as well as the device will allow. But today I got a whole set of 0 readings. Further investigation showed that the station wasn't returning valid external humidity information. It was warm and dry, and the last readings had been 10%. Sure enough, as things cooled down, the humidity went up again: So it seems that the station can't report less than 10% humidity.
Android navigators: worth the trouble?
Into town again to see the doctor, and of course took my Android tablet with two navigation programs: Sygic and OsmAnd Maps & Navigation. Things didn't start well: the clinic is at 49 Albert St, Sebastopol. Albert Street is the main street in Sebastopol, but Sygic didn't know it: it proved that it knew it only as Midland Highway , so it directed me to Alfred Street instead. OsmAnd knew Alfred St, but not the number. The building is relatively new, admittedly, but my old GPS navigator knows it. On the whole, a good thing I didn't have to rely on either program.
Sygic: the weaknesses
One of the reasons I went to town was to try out Sygic in more normal circumstances. A good thing, too: it didn't do well. Going from the Botanical Gardens to the petrol station in Sebastopol took a seriously suboptimal shortest difference: The alternative suggestion to the south-west is just so far from short that it's incomprehensible how it could have come up at all. But the correct way would have been down to the east of Victoria park (triangle at top middle), like every other program chose.
Radiation Tower progress
On the way into town, stopped at the Radiation Tower, of course. They've mounted the S-shaped cable channel: What needs to be done? The cabling, of course, but presumably that's almost only power, which shouldn't take too long. ACM only downloads articles once.
Humour, then and now
While tidying up my web pages, came across an orphan that has obviously been there for a long time: collected humourous articles from USENET and similar sources, about 20 years old. It's amazing how badly they have aged. ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Still more map errors
Discussed my article about the NBN coverage maps and with Callum Gibson today, and it occurred to us to look at the information from ACMA. They have a search page where you can find all communication towers in the country. So went looking, and sure enough, we came up with information for the Dereel and Cape Clear towersbut not for Rokewood. But Callum did some investigation and found this towerit's the Optus tower that was erected two years ago. And, of course, it's nowhere near where the NBN put it. But more careful investigation showed that the ACMA coordinates are wrong too!
More NBN tower investigations
Looking more carefully at the NBN rollout map shows that they've put up a number of towers. In this area alone four are marked as being operational: The one in Cape Clear puzzled me: according to Scott Weston, it receives its uplink from the Dereel tower. So I set off to have a look. It seems that every single tower is significantly misplaced, and to actually find any I had to look around in the area. In Cape Clear I was successful, though the tower is over 4 km from where it is claimed to be: Looking at the uplink antennas, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with Dereel.
NBN delays: explanation?
So yesterday Exetel told me that NBN had rejected my application for a connection. Correct? I also got an automated courtesy call on the phone, telling me that my application for ADSL had been rejected, so a bit of clarity would go a long way. First took a look at the coverage map, which has now been updated: Fixed wireless | Construction commenced - construction commenced in your area on [sic] Aug 2013. It is estimated that the average time from construction beginning to NBN services being available is 12 months What nonsense!
Radiation Tower progress
After yesterday's erection of the Radiation Tower, I was expecting a delay before the next stage, but it seems that they're continuing: My guess is that they're about to pour the concrete base. ACM only downloads articles once.
Trying Sygic again
Some weeks ago I tried Sygic on my Android tablet. It was somewhat inconclusive, because I didn't have a windscreen mount for the tablet, and then I discovered that the free app in fact was only a one week free trial, which expired before I could do any more. Now I have a new tablet, but the same account. Can I run another one week trial with it? Surprisingly, yes. And after loading hundreds of megabytes of map data (and surviving a couple of network problems), spent some time looking at the features. On the down side, of course, it's an Android app, which means that there's almost no help available.
Still more unexpected network pain
Even before my current unresolved issues with Internode's sales team, I had decided that I would try Extel for my NBN network connection. Yes, Internode has the best reputationpossibly based mainly on past achievementsbut almost the only issues I've ever had with my network connection have been between the ISP and my premises. And with NBN that's independent of the ISP. On the other hand, Exetel offers higher traffic rates for the same price: 50 GB per month instead of 30 with Internode, and only downlink traffic is counted. Most importantly, though, traffic between 01:00 and 09:00 isn't metered. At 25 Mb/s you can download a theoretical 90 GB of data (video, for example) in a single day during that time.
Radiation Tower erected
Everybody's watching the progress on the Radiation Tower, and today was a milestone: How much longer? Hard to guess. Three weeks? A month? ACM only downloads articles once. It's possible that this article has changed since being downloaded, but the only way you can find out is by looking at the original article.
Unexpected network pain
I've had enough pain with the services quality of my wireless Internet service, but despite the imminent erection of the Radiation Tower, I needed to increase my traffic allowance in the meantime, hopefully only for one month. I did that last week, but things didn't go as smoothly as I had expected. As I mentioned last Friday, they sent me an invoice for two months' fees, and also stated that billing would start at the latest 7 days after provisioning. And then they didn't answer the mail I sent them. That happened today: In regards to your plan costs, I can confirm that as you've ordered the NodeMobile 9GB plan your monthly service cost will simply be $39.95 per month.
New photo processing software?
It's fairly clear that I'm going to buy an Olympus OM-D E-M1 camera. That will require some changes to my photo processing. Currently I'm using DxO Optics Pro , but it only supports specific combinations of camera and lens. The E-M1 is only just appearing on the market, so so far they don't have any support for it, but when it comes it'll almost certainly be only for ¼FT lenses. And I currently have 5 normal FT. Based on past performance, it's fairly clear that DxO will not support those combinations. But what's the alternative? One might be Olympus Viewer, which I tried out earlier this year.
Android streamers: a solution
Yesterday's experiment with streaming audio on Android was less than completely successful, so I went searching further. Why is the toyshop so badly organized? There's no way to search by feature, rating, or number of downloads. Instead I went to Google and found, right at the top, TuneIn Radio. Downloaded that, and it worked. I still don't know why I need a separate app to play this stuff, but it really seems that Android web browsers are so castrated that you can't do much with them. ACM only downloads articles once.
Playing music on Android
One of the things an Android tablet is good for is playing music, right? Well, that's the idea, anyway. With the promise of more network traffic just round the corner, considered listening to Radio Swiss Classic on the radio instead of ABC: they have a more interesting programme. Just plug the tablet into the Hi-Fi system and we're away. I even found a suitable cable in my assorted junk. That's straightforward enough, right? I have already had problems playing music on Android, but I worked around them by installing firefox. Tried again on the stream. Sorry, can not open file . Why not?
Internode: more decay
I've commented in the past that Internode isn't what it used to be. Buying the second SIM card proved to be relatively simple, but the followup wasn't. It's clear that with the coming of the Radiation Tower I'll only need the card for one, maybe two months, and that's why I bought one with a one month renewal period. But the follow-up emails read: Your Order Reference Number: #1264795/nNodeMobile Data at 47 Kleins Road, DEREEL VIC 3352 * For 1 Month ...
Documentation web sites
My new car has nearly used up a tank full of petrol, which seems surprising. But then, I've done nearly 500 km with it. How big's the tank? That's the sort of thing you'd find in the instruction manual, but mine came without one. That's what the web's for! Went out searching for (ultimately) hyundai elantra 2002 owners manual download, and found lots of links like this one: That looked like just what I wanted, and elsewhere it had claimed to be free.
More Radiation Tower progress
The weather has been wet recentlyin the last 10 days, we've had nearly 50 mm of rain, and it shows. Heard a report from Wendy, our neighbour across the road, that she had seen a crane bogged down in the paddock where the Radiation Tower is being erected. It sounds plausible: Chris Bahlo told me she saw a crane there this morning, too, so I went by laterthis may be becoming a daily exercise at the moment. There was no crane there, but it's clear that they're assembling the tower in preparation for erection: It's interesting that the uplink antenna already appears to be ...
Radiation Tower progress
Yvonne went shopping this morning. She had barely left when I got an excited call They're working on the tower! . And so they were: The truck had an emblem from Task National Pty Ltd, a company that appears to have no web site. But I found references to employees, one of them a telecommunications engineer, so I assume they're doing more than just laying a power cable. ACM only downloads articles once.
Getting more Internet traffic
One of the consequences of the Coursera courses I'm taking is that my Internet traffic has increased dramatically. Last month we barely managed to stay within the 18 GB limit on my wireless broadband connection. Roll on the Radiation Tower! This month doesn't look much better. I'm just under, but a couple of new courses are about to start, and I can't see any hope of staying within the limits. I'd take a tariff plan with more volume if I could, but Internode doesn't offer one. But there's an obvious, if slightly clumsy, workaround: buy another SIM card, though it's a pity I have to do this so shortly before completion of the Radiation Tower.
OsmAnd Maps & Navigation in practice
The trip to Ballarat also gave me the first opportunity to try out OsmAnd Maps & Navigation in practice. The results were interesting, both good and (unfortunately mainly) bad: The TTS voice output sounds like a caricature of an old (US American) woman. We tried it in German instead, which was barely better, but had the amusing side effect of extreme mispronunciation of street names. I'm sure that can be fixed.
Trying OsmAnd
Last month I did some brief investigation of navigation applications for Android. I briefly tried Sygic, but at the time I didn't have a holder for the tablet, so I decided to put it off. And then Sygic told me that it was a free 7 day trial copy, so by the time I got the tablet holder I couldn't use it any more without significant cost. That leaves a bad taste in my mouth: the toyshop claims it's free. And as a result I allowed my free trial to expire without being able to use it. So today I tried another one, OsmAnd Maps & Navigation.
Trying OsmAnd
Last month I did some brief investigation of navigation applications for Android. I briefly tried Sygic, but at the time I didn't have a holder for the tablet, so I decided to put it off. And then Sygic told me that it was a free 7 day trial copy, so by the time I got the tablet holder I couldn't use it any more without significant cost. That leaves a bad taste in my mouth: the toyshop claims it's free. And as a result I allowed my free trial to expire without being able to use it. So today I tried another one, OsmAnd Maps & Navigation.
Trying OsmAnd
Last month I did some brief investigation of navigation applications for Android. I briefly tried Sygic, but at the time I didn't have a holder for the tablet, so I decided to put it off. And then Sygic told me that it was a free 7 day trial copy, so by the time I got the tablet holder I couldn't use it any more without significant cost. That leaves a bad taste in my mouth: the toyshop claims it's free. And as a result I allowed my free trial to expire without being able to use it. So today I tried another one, OsmAnd Maps & Navigation.
More Coursera pain
When I was young I was fascinated by languages, both natural and computer. I certainly haven't given up on that interest, but the plethora of languages now available makes it difficult to keep up. So I've signed up for a Coursera course on programming languages. Now the first information is coming in: it's about programming languages in general, but it's taught using SML, Racket and Ruby. Of these, I have only ever heard of Ruby. The (apparently required) editor is Emacs, and they want a specific version of it. OK, time to install the rest. The convenient instructions cover Windows , Mac OS X and Linux, but not BSD.
More NiZn battery strangeness
It's been some time since I started using NiZn batteries, and in that time I've been quite happy with them. They discharge, of course, and today I found the internal unit of the lounge weather station (not the computer one) barely legible. Only yesterday it had looked perfectly normal. Took out the batteries and discovered that one battery had a voltage of 1.546, definitely discharged, while the other only had 0.170 V. According to what documentation I have seen, it should be unrecoverable. Put in a set of fresh (well, not used since last recharge) batteries and discovered that things were no better: one had 1.798 V, normal enough, while the other had 0.376 V.
Radiation tower progress
The site of the Radiation Tower has been quiet now for over two weeks. I've assumed that this is to allow the concrete of the base to harden, but it's also a concern because since the last real work we have a new, (NBN)-unfriendly government. So it was good to hear from Chris Yeardley today that Powercor had been on site and apparently installed a new transformer: It's some distance form the site, but that's where the power line runs.
AirDroid
Received mail from William Witteman pointing at AirDroid, an application to make life with Android easier. It provides a web server that you can use to access the tablet from a real computer: It doesn't have any instructions, of courseafter all, it is an Android appand it also changes the names of directories, but it's not too difficult to guess what it does. I still need to play with it, but so far it looks very usable, and it might make the pain with copying files easier.
VZ Commodore hidden codes
Yesterday I tried without success to adapt the tricks to access hidden functionality of the VT Commodore trip computer to our new VZ Commodore. On reflection, it occurred to me that there was an obvious difference: the VT computer has only three buttons (Mode and up and down arrows). The VZ computer has all of these, and also a Set button. So tried that, and it worked. So: to enter the secret functions of the computer, ensure that the car is turned off. Hold down Mode and Set buttons, turn on the ignition and start the engine. It's not enough just to turn on the ignition.
A browser for Android
Continued my attempts to play music on my Android tablet. The Music app is too stupid to access music from the Internet, and the Browser app refuses to play MP3 files. Another browser? I had tried Chrome, but I couldn't find a way to get it to save a Home location. On Andy Snow's recommendation I tried what he said was Dolphin Beta , but all I found was Dolphin, which proved to be too stupid to even rotate the display to the current orientation. Finally tried firefox, which seems to do the trick. Why is this all so difficult? ACM only downloads articles once.
Hidden trip computer functions
Callum Gibson had a comment on my discussion of the trip computer on our new VZ Commodore, and came up with this page, describing hidden functionality in the trip computer of a VT Commodore, the model that we have just traded in after nearly 14 years. Tried the tricks out on the VZ, but they didn't work. Tried other combinations, and managed to accidentally reset the service interval counter (hold down the up arrow and the down arrow, turn on the ignition and start the car). Maybe there's some other trick to get the hidden functions, but I didn't find it.
Understanding Android
One obvious use of an Android tablet is to play music. Never mind that the speaker in this tablet sounds tinnier than anything I've heard in years: I'm expecting a bluetooth headset any time now. But how do I play things? The Music app seems incapable of downloading music files. OK, in this modern world, that's what a browser is for. So I tried that. Sorry, the player does not support that kind of audio file . What does that mean? It's an MP3, and it even has a file name advertising the fact! No specifics, nothing about what it thinks it is.
Give us a real backbone network
Now that the Coalition has won the election, plans for a sensible National Broadband Network have been canned. It's not true that nobody's happy about that: clearly Tony Abbott and maybe Malcolm Turnbull are. But a very large number of voters are not. Now there's a petition for the coalition to continue with the FTTH approach. As I write this, they have collected 250,000 signatures in a little over a week. That's impressive enough as a figure, but it's all the more interesting in that it represents over 1% of the population of Australia. I've signed, of course; I wonder if it will have any effect.
NAT: safe from intrusion
Like many other networks running IPv4, I connect my local network to the Internet via NAT. I don't like the concept: I have a real /24 address block, but I can't connect it via this network. It also means that I have to maintain an external web server, because my local web server http://wwww.lemis.com/ is not accessible. Or so I thought. Today I saw a surprising set of messages: [Sun Sep 15 16:59:52 2013] [error] [client 58.211.18.184] File does not exist: /usr/local/www/data/admin [Sun Sep 15 16:59:53 2013] [error] [client 58.211.18.184] File does not exist: /usr/local/www/data/db [Sun Sep 15 16:59:54 2013] [error] [client 58.211.18.184] File does not exist: /usr/local/www/data/dbadmin [Sun Sep 15 16:59:55 2013] [error] [client 58.211.18.184] File does not exist: /usr/local/www/data/myadmin [Sun Sep 15 16:59:56 2013] [error] [client 58.211.18.184] File does not exist: /usr/local/www/data/mysql [Sun Sep 15 16:59:57 2013] [error] [client ...
Five years uptime: really?
I booted my external web server, w3.lemis.com, on 28 September 2008 just before midnight UTC. Since it reached 600 days uptimethe longest I had ever experienced, even at Tandem ComputersI started monitoring it every day. And then 3 months ago the unthinkable happened: they had to move data centres, after 1,733 days' uptime. Fortunately w3 is a virtual machine, and they were able to save the machine state and resume execution in the new data centre. But is that reasonable to assume that the uptime remains despite being put on ice for 100 minutes? I think so. There are a number of issues with keeping a machine up: Hardware reliability.
The price of free apps
More playing around with my Android tablets today. Gradually I'm getting the bigger one to do the things that I want. GPS worksbetter than on the small one, I can use it as a phone if I can stand the thought, and at least it doesn't change its MAC address every time it's booted, like the small one does. The PIN-based WPS also doesn't seem to require reinitialization all the time. What about navigation? Last month I tried Sygic and was relatively happy with it. But there was some strangeness about the software: although the toyshop called it free , there was some mention of having to pay.
Wireless AP, try 2
I've got to say one thing for the eBay seller who sold me the now defunct wireless access point: he's fast. I bought the original on Saturday, it was posted on Monday, arrived on Tuesday and died on Wednesday. I contacted him and he sent another one (without waiting for the return of the first) on Thursday, and I got it today. Looking at the device, it had a protective plastic film on the top side. Normally I don't remove these until I'm sure I'm going to keep them. But this one covered the cooling holes. Is that the reason why the first one died?
Radiation Tower progress
Every time we drive into town, we look at the site of the radiation tower. The components of the tower itself are now there: The site is visible in front of the trees in the first image. ACM only downloads articles once.
New wireless router
Got my new, el-cheapo wireless router today. The login screen speaks volumes: XXX Systems! But it has a lot of features, and seems to do what I want to do. In fact, I'd be completely happy with itmaybeif it hadn't died after two hours. All LEDs off except for power, and no way of turning it on again. And now the fun of returning the thing. I should have kept the ALDI boxes I bought a while back. ACM only downloads articles once.
Equine insurance, continued
We're still trying to insure Yvonne's new horse. It's not helped by the insurers. They have online descriptions of what they do and don't cover, of course, with lots of Big Fat Words, and a number of things that appear to contradict the statements of the agent. Sent him not one, but a total of three emails trying to get him to respond to the issues. We failed. It seems that the idea of actually reading an email message and responding to it is no longer Modern. Of course, it doesn't help that people in the Microsoft Space write their replies in a place where they can no longer see what they're replying to, but you'd think that a Professional would find a solution to that problem.
Android: So nice, so nice, we do it twice
Between looking for cars and contacting Yvonne, I had some time over. In to ALDI to see if they had an accessory pack for my Android tablet. No, but they had one for a slightly older 10.1" model, and even that tablet still in stock. OK, that might be worth trying out, so I bought both. For a tablet hater, I'm not exactly true to form. ACM only downloads articles once.
Finally! The Radiation Tower!
Yvonne called me on the way to town this morning: they've started building the Radiation Tower. Later out to take a look: So finally it has started! What a wait it's been: 6 December 2011: They want to be finished by June 2012, but that will depend on how many spanners Wendy wants to throw into the works. And indeed she did.
More nadir stitching
Spent much of the day today attacking my full 360°×180° panoramas. They were difficult for a number of reasons, not all of them related to the nadir. First was the panorama of the verandah centre: the initial flash panorama worked fine, but the flat version kept failing: enblend --compression=LZW -m 10000 -w -f9000x6597 -o verandah-centre.tif -- verandah-centre0000.tif verandah-centre0001.tif verandah-centre0002.tif verandah-centre0003.tif verandah-centre0004.tif verandah-centre0005.tif verandah-centre0006.tif verandah-centre0007.tif verandah-centre0008.tif verandah-centre0009.tif verandah-centre0010.tif verandah-centre0011.tif verandah-centre0012.tif verandah-centre0013.tif verandah-centre0014.tif verandah-centre0015.tif verandah-centre0016.tif verandah-centre0017.tif verandah-centre0019.tif verandah-centre0020.tif verandah-centre0021.tif verandah-centre0022.tif verandah-centre0023.tif enblend: info: loading next image: verandah-centre0000.tif 1/1 ... enblend: info: loading next image: verandah-centre0022.tif 1/1 enblend: warning: failed to detect any seam enblend: mask is entirely black, but white image was not identified as redundant enblend: info: remove invalid output image "verandah-centre.tif" gmake: *** [verandah-centre.tif] Error 1 Why that?
Still more USB strangenesses
I took a number of photos of the nadir setup with my old Nikon “Coolpix” L1, and then transferred them to computer via USB. And then I forgot to disconnect for a couple of hours. When I did, the camera was warm, the batteries (freshly charged NiZn) were also hot and discharged. Why? The camera can't charge the batteries via USB, so when it's on USB, it shouldn't have any connection to the batteries at all. ACM only downloads articles once.
Other Android insights
Writing yesterday's article on eBooks required screen shots from the Android tablet. How do you do that? Went looking in the toy shop, but the things I found didn't look very good, and most were either for a specific tablet, or they required rooting, something that I don't want to attempt yet. So I went off looking on Google. It's simple (and intuitive!) : the system has a built-in screen shot facility. Just hold down Vol-- and the power button for a second or two, and it makes a clicking noise and saves the screen contents. Where? With a bit of finger-sliding (starting at the Gallery icon), it gives you a useful information page: OK, how do I get that to a ...
USB charging problems understood
Why did my Android tablet not charge when connected to the charger via the USB extension cable? On IRC, Jürgen Lock suggested that the resistance might be too high. Nonsense, I thought, and did a quick calculation: the charger is rated at 2 A, and I've already established that the tablet needs more than 1 A to run. So what would we need to get a voltage drop of, say, 0.5 V? R = E / I, so the surprising result is: 0.25 ©. That's not much. Clearly what I should do is to measure the voltage at the device when connected in this way.
More eBooks with Android
I made one of the biggest decisions of my life in September 1962, over 50 years ago, when I started school at King's College, Taunton. We had a choice of one of four optional subjects to study: Biology, History, Geography and German. I really, really wanted to study both Biology and German. In the end, I chose German, and that decision determined the course of my lifeI ended up living in Germany for a total of 25 years. If I had chosen Biology, it, too, could have changed the course of my life. I almost certainly would never have lived in Germany, and there's a good chance that I would have ended up in some biological career instead of computers.
Android charge problems cornered
I'm still having issues with charging the Android tablet. I can leave it on charge overnight, and it will still be only partially charged. Then I charge it in the day, and it goes up to 100% charge within an hour or so. How can that be? Then it occurred to me: in all cases where it didn't charge properly, I was charging in the lounge room. The power point is some distance from my armchair, but the charger simply connects to the USB data cable, so I put a 5 m extension USB cable in between. The tablet recognizes the power and produces the rather silly status message Charging (AC) , but it seems that there's something in the connection that makes it actually not charge.
Android as eBook reader
The linear algebra course course has now completed, but I haven't finished all the lectures quite yet. There's a deadline in about 10 days to submit the final assignments, but I suspect I won't bother. Mohamed Ifadir pointed me to a book on the subject, which I downloaded to my Android tablet and read while waitingfar too longat the doctor's. It was enlightening for a number of reasons. Firstly, the book is completely different from the course I've been doing. Pretty much the first thing it discusses is Gaussian elimination, which in the course is only handled in the second-last week.
What's wrong with my DNS?
Network connectivity has gone to hell again, and there's still no sign of the radiation tower, though on various occasions we've been told commencement dates round late June, late July and then 19 August, the latter two immediately before the non-event. I wish I knew why they tell us these things. And once again I was faced with DNS lookup failures, including NXDOMAIN for domains like ebay.com and google.com. Where's this coming from? I've been tracing for some time now, but I still haven't finished analysing it. One thing I have established is that the problem isn't just with Internode's name servers: I've seen requests go to the root name servers as well.
Tempo: not in the German sense
Tempo Australia is the company that provides support for ALDI electronics. I've had occasion to call them twice last week, each time leaving a message to call back, and I have already commented that it took them 2 days to call me back the first time. Today the other shoe dropped: a call back for the message I was forced to leave, after only 6 days. What a company! As Jürgen Lock commented, not the German use of the word Tempo , which means speed. ACM only downloads articles once.
Using Sygic
The trip to Bannockburn gave me a good opportunity to try out the Sygic navigation software on my Android tablet. It was a little more understandable than last time I tried. As I discovered when I got my first navigator, it takes a lot to understand navigation software, and initially you see the problems, not the advantages. But there were some good aspects too. Here some observations: Things weren't made any easier by the lack of a holder for the tablet, so I could only look at the screen by holding it in my hand, not something that you can do all the time.
Microsoft to the rescue
I don't really like Microsoft software messing around in my computer, and today I wasn't too happy to see that Security essentials had found a potential threat . But this time it proved to be useful: That's almost certainly the thing that I was looking for two weeks ago. Found and removed, in the process pondering the abuse of the term quarantine . ACM only downloads articles once.
Another dead tablet!
I had left the Android tablet on charge overnight, but when I came in this morning it had powered off. And I couldn't get it to start again. After some investigation I discovered that the battery was completely discharged, and that a normal USB connector didn't deliver enough power to charge it. Put it on the supplied charger (again!) and it started charging, and after a few hours the battery was fully charged. But how did that happen? I had left the thing in standby mode with the charger connected. How could the battery have discharged? Is this a bad batch of batteries, or is there some problem with the charging circuitry?
Android navigation apps
More fun with the new Android tablet today. How do I keep track of apps? Yes, it stores information in the tablet. But what if the tablet dies? Ended up writing a page which is currently just a list of URLs (and how do you extract them on the tablet? No idea). Went looking for some GPS navigation apps, not helped by a lack of overlap between the reviews and what I could find in the toy shop. This page describes 5 of them, without links of course. Of those, I only found two. And the toy shop itself doesn't seem to want to let you know banal things like URLs.
Another sound hang
While watching TV this afternoon, I ended up with another hang in the sound system: Aug 23 13:45:44 teevee kernel: pcm0: chn_write(): pcm0:play:dsp0.p1: play interrupt timeout, channel dead Previously I had thought that this was related to running a flash player, but I hadn't done anything like that today. More discussion on IRC (doesn't it help to have IRC on your TV?) , and Callum Gibson pointed me at this problem report, which describes what appears to be exactly the same problem, and which claims to have a solution: # /boot/device.hints hint.hdac.0.msi="0" # /etc/sysctl.conf dev.hdac.0.polling=1 Callum also suggested the script he used to use: sudo sysctl -w ...
More Android investigations
So what do I do with my defective Android tablet? No call back from the service department, of course, so I called up ALDI and complained. No, they couldn't do much, though they took note of my complaint, but they were able to put me in contact with Tempo, where I was first asked if I had charged the thing overnight. Stupid questions, but as it happened I hadalthough it's not clear what difference that makes considering the battery was showing 100% charged and it was on the charger anyway. I was offered the opportunity of going and getting another one from ALDIthat's not a support, that's just normal business practice.
Android tablet: it goes back
More playing with my Android tablet today. Turned it on and discovered that it claimed only 36% battery charge, which was strange considering that it had been on charge overnight. Took it into the office and checked again: 100%. There's clearly something wrong with the reporting. Apart from that, didn't get very far. I was able to load a ssh server for the device, which meant that I could at least access it from outside. Here partial output from top, which is too stupid to clear the screen between iterations: User 7%, System 6%, IOW 0%, IRQ 0% User 37 + Nice 9 + Sys 42 + Idle 527 + IOW 2 + IRQ 0 + SIRQ 3 = 620 PID PR CPU% S #THR VSS RSS PCY UID Name 10374 1 3% S ...
When is mv not a mv?
Watched All Creatures Great and Small on TV this evening. I don't want to delete the recordings when I'm done, so I move the recording to a subdirectory called Already: === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/0) /spool/DVDs/All-Creatures-Great-and-Small 15 -> mv Series-3-1-3 Already/ === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/0) /spool/DVDs/All-Creatures-Great-and-Small 16 -> rm Series-3-1-3<tab> Series-3-1-3 Series-3-1-3.fpos Series-3-1-3.time Huh? I just removed Series-3-1-3. Why is it still there? === grog@teevee (/dev/pts/0) /spool/DVDs/All-Creatures-Great-and-Small 17 -> ls -li Series-3-1-3 Already/Series-3-1-3 534949 -rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 2,006,484,992 19 Oct 2011 Already/Series-3-1-3 534949 -rw-r--r-- 1 grog lemis 2,006,484,992 19 Oct 2011 Series-3-1-3 In other words, it was already there.
Android, try 2
Last year I had my first experience with Android tablets, and I was greatly impressednegatively. Since then a number of things have happened: I've discovered a use for them controlling Olympus cameras, and the current issue of c't magazine had numerous articles on hacking old tablets. As a result I took a look on eBay and discovered I could get a usable second-hand tablet for about $120 to $130. Then this week ALDI had a tablet on special: Apart from the normal functions, it has full telephony functions (though I wonder how to hold it) and GPS.
Online streaming video
The signs are increasing that they'll finally start building the radiation tower soonScott Weston has claimed that work will start this week. So once again I'm looking at tariffs plans . Exetel has one one that looks interesting: 50 GB Peak and unmetered off peak. Off peak proves to be from 01:00 to 09:00, not exactly prime surfing time. But it's ideal to run cron jobs and pull down lots of pre-recorded TV programmes. But how? Yvonne asked me to find out about German TV, and Jürgen Lock was able to point me at Online TV recorder and Zattoo. The latter seems to be restricted to IP address ranges, and my current (Internode) address isn't part of it, but Exetel also offers a static IP address, so I could route my /24 to it.
Finally a use for a tablet?
I've had my Olympus E-30 camera for over 4 years now, and I've taken over 60,000 photos with it. It's time to upgrade before the shutter decides to give in. I've been waiting for some time for Olympus to bring out its new high-end camera, and lately rumours have been increasing. And then somebody leaked a video of a new camera. In the meantime it has been removed again, but not before I saw it. Steve Huff has also written a detailed article on the subject, including several clips from the video. It's a mirrorless camera, looks pretty much like the existing OM-D E-M5 (where do they get these names from?)
Who read my facebook password?
Rethinking yesterday's surprise Facebook password change, it occurred to me that one of the most likely scenarios was that this was a man-in-the-middle attack. Not the reported exploit, but the report itself: somebody could thus get hold of my new password. Clearly it would make sense to change it again. But how? Going through the Facebook personal details pages, I can tell people where I was born (Almaty) or where I live (Ulaanbaatar), but I couldn't find anywhere to change my password. In the end I turned to Google, who proved that I wasn't alone. This page looked good, so I tried to follow it: To change your facebook account password: Log in to your account ...
Your account has been compromised
For some obscure reason I accessed Facebook again todayprobably by accident. But I wasn't expecting what I saw: Clearly that's not me. But how did they break my password? How did they break my password? Did they break my password? In any case, I reset it. And then a little later I got a message from my Microsoft box telling me that I needed to upgrade my Internet Explorer . I get so used to that sort of thing that I barely think about it.
Weather: off the scale
Horribly windy day todayI later discovered that they had had gusts of up to 140 km/h in some parts of Victoria. It wasn't that bad here, but it kept up all day long, so I spent much of the day watching TV, like the Climate Change course, which is still rather off-topic. Also kept an eye on my weather readings. I'm sure that the wind speed gauge shows too little; the maximum gust measured today was 35.8 km/h, but I suspect we had over 60 km/h in reality. But the real thing that got me was the drop in barometric pressure: And in the evening the readings, which should be one per minute, became more infrequent, and round 18:00 they stopped altogether: SELECT date, ...
Lost photos
A couple of days ago I discovered that some old photos were no longer on my web site, notably those taken on 2 December 2000 and 3 December 2000 Today it seemed to be a good idea to see if any more were missing. Indeed, there wereno less than 390 of them! Most of them proved not to be missing: only the entry in the date index was gone. How did that happen? Fortunately, it's relatively trivial to recreate it, so spent some time doing that, in the process discovering that a large number required further attention. That'll keep me going for a while.
Web browser font sizes
Most web browsers offer to set a minimum font size so that you can read things even if some leet web programmer has decided to write his pages with fonts that would not be too big on a 640×480 screen. On a 2560×1440 display, they render like flyspeck. The web programmers don't like that. Neither do their pages. A case in point is the Naxos Music Library, which I like to run on teevee, my TV computer. The screen is 1.27 m wide and 3.5 m from my armchair, so each of the 1,920 pixels subtends an angle of only 0.01°.
Wedged sound hardware: a clue?
While watching TV this afternoon, did some reading, and played some music from the Naxos Music Library on teevee. When I returned to playing video lectures, the sound hung again. That's the third time in as many days, after I had had no trouble for months. And then it dawned on me: I think that every time it hung was after playing something from Naxos. That's played with some flash player and firefox. Is there some issue with that? How else can I play the stuff? But at least it's a lead. ACM only downloads articles once.
Unstoppable fack
While rebooting teevee, saw a message fly past: Aug 8 20:29:03 teevee kernel: WARNING: /home was not properly dismounted Huh? I hadn't crashed the system: it was an orderly reboot. But further examination showed that I had an error in /etc/fstab and wasn't fscking the /home file system. With soft updates that isn't as big a problem as it might seem, and who knows how long this has been going on for? Looking at my old log files, it goes back at least a couple of weeks.
More sound problems
I've had a sporadic problem with teevee, my TV computer: from time to time the sound hardware wedges. I get this message: Aug 8 20:24:49 teevee kernel: pcm0: chn_write(): pcm0:play:dsp0.p1: play interrupt timeout, channel dead I've done some investigation, but so far I can't find a way to recover from the problem: I have to reboot. The fact that a reboot (without power cycling) fixes the problem suggests that there's a programmatic way to do it, but I haven't found it yet. So far it's been pretty sporadic, but this is the second time now in a couple of days.
XCompose: new insights
Mail from pmarin today about my Compose key problems. He reminded me of one point that I noted when I first mentioned it: For GTK and QT, set the environment variables: export GTK_IM_MODULE=xim export QT_IM_MODULE=xim I don't use anything like that, so I didn't set it. But wait, doesn't the browser build pull in all sorts of libraries?
Print on demand
Exactly on time, my freshly printed Linear Algebra book arrived today. It doesn't look at all bad from a production point of view. No flyleaf, and clearly formatted with TeX , but the production quality appears at least as good as many conventional books, and significantly better than some. That's quite impressive. So I went looking at how createspace, the printer, do business from the author's point of view. I couldn't make much sense of it: The tabs at the top are almost illegible, and the link at the bottom to highest royalties isn't a link at all, just an underlined textor so I thought until I looked at the HTML source: <dt>Competitive Royalties</dt><dd>Some of the <a onclick="javascript:setContent(5);">highest royalties</a><!-- link ...
Premature optmztion is rt of all evl
Much of Linear algebra relates to things like image compression, and I'm currently learning some interesting facts. But then I was pointed at this page, showing some serious dangers of the techniques. In the case in point, it seems that two different Xerox photocopiers changed texts to other plausible, but incorrect texts. Here one example of a copy of a building plan where the area specification changed from 14,13 m² to 21,11 m²: How can that happen? This kind of detail occurs many times in the plan (it's a description of the room, along with its floor area), and the incorrect copy matches a correct detail elsewhere on the plan.
Maps, projections and coordinates
More watching the video lectures of the linear algebra course today. I've complained about them in the past, but there are also some interesting trivia in the lectures. It seems that René Descartes had similar problems to me when getting up in the morning. The story goes that while he was lying in bed one morning (or afternoon, or evening) while he was bored (or maybe sick or insomniac), he saw a fly walking over the ceiling and contemplated how best to describe its position.
Compose key revisited
For 2½ years now I've been using an .XCompose file supplied to me by Marin , ostensibly from Plan 9 from User Space. It has worked well, and about the only issue I had is that the key description file didn't quite match the man page. And then this evening I wanted to enter some Russian text into the web browser on teevee, the TV computer. Beep. Did I have those key bindings right? Compose-@-L should give . But as soon as I entered @ it beeped. How about Greek? Compose-*-L should give . At least I could enter the entire sequence before it beeped.
Chrome image updating
I view images with Chrom* on my highest-resolution monitor, and today's reprocessing should have shown the results well. But the new images didn't display! I had renamed the old images and given the new images the previous name of the old images, and Chrom* continues to display the old images long after they're gone. At first I thought I had made a mistake, but no, firefox shows them correctly. Ctrl-Shift-R doesn't help. Not even stopping and restarting helps! What a pain. ACM only downloads articles once.
Google: don't be evil?
Like many people, I've been watching the increasing influence of Google with a mixture of admiration and concern. How can a company of that size remain true to its motto? And so I get more concerned every time I see something pointing away from this premise. Today I read an article in Wired about unnecessary restrictions on use of Google Fiber. It seems that the terms of service prohibit servers , whatever they may be. The article goes on to assume evil intent behind these limitations. That's possible, but the article doesn't make it plausible enough. They forget Hanlon's razor. What's a server?
Wake on LAN: the rest
So yesterday I configured Wake on LAN on dxo, my Microsoft box. Modulo some unexpected behaviour (wake on any LAN event), it went remarkably smoothly. Today I had more photos to process, so I tried to wake up dxo again. Nothing. Further investigation showed that wake(1) wasn't working: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/11) ~ 42 -> wake dxo wake: Cannot open bpf interface: Permission denied It worked fine as root. A clear case for setuid: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/20) ~ 7 -> chmod 4555 /usr/sbin/wake ...
My CookBook on Android
Gregory Orange reported back today. He had taken the original version of the recipe for tajine de bSuf aux pois chiches and put it on the My CookBook app on his Android device. It's difficult to get a screen shot, but what he saw was: How much use is that? I suppose it's about as good as the original recipe. But in the meantime I've changed it, and I wonder how long it would take Gregory to update it accordingly. At least it seems to be possible, unlike the web version.
Using wake on LAN
On Saturday evening Chris Bahlo were looking at the web site of her new employer, ruadvertising.com.au. First question: does it render correctly? Well, sort of, modulo overrun at the bottom, caused by guessing that I would use the standard character size. We were looking at the page on the TV, 58" diagonal, but some distance away. I've already noted that resolution isn't the issue: it's angle of view. At default sizes, it's illegible on the TV. Chris took that on board and then asked And what is it like under Internet Explorer? . I knew the answer, but of course the real challenge was getting Internet Explorer to display on the TV.
Enblend insider joke?
While looking at the enblend home page today, I noticed an interesting detail: That jaggy in the white stripe (which is part of a SVG image) is exactly the kind of thing that enblend is supposed to eliminate. I wonder what the thought processes behind it are. ACM only downloads articles once.
Enblend refuses to stitch more than 9 images
Some weeks ago Thomas Zenker reported a problem with the FreeBSD port of enblend, which I maintain: he couldn't get it to stitch more than 9 images at a time. It aborted with the messages: enblend: cannot load image "20120702-125206-125507-000009.tif" enblend: Precondition violation! did not find a matching file type. (/usr/ports/graphics/vigra/work/vigra-1.9.0/src/impex/codecmanager.cxx:234) He thought this was a general restriction, but of course I have been stitching many more than that, coincidentally with an almost identical configuration. He sent me his images and I was able to stitch them with no problems.
Symlinks with Microsoft
One of the results of tidying up the house was that I found a whole lot of old photos that I need to scan in. And after my experience with SANE, I've decided to use my Microsoft box to do scanning. That works about as well as you can expect with a Microsoft box, but one irritating thing is that it saves the scanned data on the Microsoft machine, and I have to move it manually to eureka. What I need is a symlink. But doesn't Microsoft have symlink functionality? Does it work to external file systems? Asked on IRC and was told that it was called a shortcut (another modern joining of two words), and that I could make one by pushing mice between Windows Explorer windows.
Spammers getting even more stupid?
Spam is bad at the moment, and I'm continually wondering whether I shouldn't do something draconian like whitelists. But the spammers are not getting any cleverer. Or maybe they're catering to the toy MUA crowd who can't see the nonsense they're sending: From no-[email protected] Fri Jul 25 00:30:25 2013 Return-Path: <no-[email protected]> ... Received: from mail.lemis.com [208.86.224.149] by eureka.lemis.com with POP3 (fetchmail-6.3.21) for <[email protected]> (single-drop); Fri, 25 Jul 2013 00:30:24 +1000 (EST) Received: from a81-84-240-48.static.cpe.netcabo.pt (a81-84-240-48.static.cpe.netcabo.pt [81.84.240.48]) by w3.lemis.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id D24B53B79C; Thu, 24 Jul 2013 14:19:26 +0000 (UTC) Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2013 14:19:26 +0000 From: "Facebook" <no-[email protected]> To: <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>, <[email protected]> Subject: Kendall Carlson wants to be friends with you on Facebook.
Disk problems with a difference
Trying to back up my photos today, I ran into a problem I hadn't seen before: === root@eureka (/dev/pts/11) /home/grog 20 -> mount /dev/da2p1 /photobackup mount: /photobackup: Device not configured Huh? I had just plugged in the (USB) disk and confirmed that it had been probed successfully: Jul 24 15:38:13 eureka kernel: da2 at umass-sim3 bus 3 scbus11 target 0 lun 0 Jul 24 15:38:13 eureka kernel: da2: <ST ST2000DL003-9VT1 3.00> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-4 device Jul 24 15:38:13 eureka kernel: da2: 40.000MB/s transfers Jul 24 15:38:13 eureka kernel: da2: 1907729MB (3907029168 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 243201C) Disk label problems?
Blurring computer history
Seen on Pinterest while looking for something different and useful: Rear Admiral Grace Hopper. She worked for UNIVAC in 1949 who made some of the first computers ever. In 1951 she discovered the first computer bug. . In 1952 she had an operational compiler. Nobody believed that, she said. I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic. A compiler is the reason you have an Operating System with programs, a phone with apps.
More July anniversaries
I've just finished reading the end of my paper diaries, from January 1968 via the end of contiguous diaries on 1 October 1970 until the final isolated entry on 14 June 1977. It hasn't been as pleasant a reading as I had expectedyou remember the good things, but you tend to write down the bad things as well, and there's so much of that that I'll probably never type them in. But one thing I discovered was that my original assumptions about various anniversaries were wrong. I've already noted that a number of anniversaries fall in mid to late Julyin two days' time, for example, I will have known Yvonne for 31 yearsbut now I discover that the end of July seems to have been a good time to meet girls.
Apps for cooking
A lot of discussion about cooking on IRC today. Does it make sense to use a tablet computer to view your recipes? That was one of the reasons I bought a tablet last year. My experience with this particular device was so negative that I didn't even try it in the kitchen: it went back. But that was that specific tablet, and potentially a tablet could be useful in the kitchen; it's just that it seems to be a lot of money for one small application. If I were to do that, a relatively modern laptop seems preferable. Then Gregory Orange came up singing the praises of My CookBook, a tablet App that he uses extensively in the kitchen.
Linear algebra pain
Finally finished last week's assignments for my linear algebra course. Algebra? Statistical analysis using vectors. They're not due until next week, but the next assignments are there already, and I want to keep up to date. So on with the next week's lectures. No question, we're talking mathematics here. And I don't understand any of it! At the beginning of the series it seemed that they paid too much attention to things that were obvious; now it's very much the other way round. What's a vector space? I have a vague idea, but only a vague one, and the concept is central to the whole course.
Paying for the NBN
It seems that yesterday Simon Hackett gave a presentation about issues with the Australian National Broadband Network, pointing to serious deficiencies. In recent times most criticism relating to the NBN has been directed at the Federal Opposition's planned castration of the network, as I've commented in the past. But no, while Simon disagrees with that too, this time he's talking about the cost. If his calculations are right, by 2040 the NBN will cost 5 times as much as ADSL (which, strangely, will cost exactly as much as it does now, a round $20 per month). He comes up with a number of suggestions about how to reduce the cost.
New English
What's a namespace? A filesystem? How do they differ from name spaces and file systems? Is it just a difference in spelling, or is it a difference in meaning? My spelling check highlights both words as incorrect. Taking a step back: one of the biggest differences between English and German spelling is that in German nouns are written together, like Filmempfindlichkeitseinstellung , which looks terrifying until you split it up into Film Empfindlichkeits Einstellung ( film sensitivity setting , which has the same number of syllables). There's a tendency in German to do this split, although it's a breach of spelling rules. And, it seems, there's the opposite tendency in English.
Goodbye ACM Queue
It's been some years since this diary was included in the ACM Queue RSS feed. As I noted at the time, the topics in the diary range far beyond the normal subject material for ACM Queue, so I quickly modified the structure of the diary to present the content as a series of articles on various topics. ACM Queue takes the ones with a computer topic. Last month that was 33 articles out of a total of 91. But somehow that's not restrictive enough. This is a diary, not a blog, and the main purpose is for me to make notes for myself.
Erecting radiation tower?
The start of construction for the radiation tower is long past the estimate of four to five weeks that I got two months ago, and yesterday I asked my sources again. No, no problems, and construction should start within days. But when I went past today, I still didn't see anything. Well, not much. In the paddock next door there have been a number of old bales of hay. Now they're being removed and burnt (the smoke on the left): Are these the last preparations?
Internode support?
My network connection has gone to hell again. After 5 days of relative peace (though not good throughput) it started again a couple of days ago: 3 disconnects on the 9th, 7 on the 10th, 3 on the 11th, 6 on the 12th, and 8 today. And in each case reconnecting my myriad TCP connections can take up to 5 minutes. I can no longer keep my MythTV programme information up to date, because the network link won't stay up long enough. What should I do? Report it to Internode Support? That way madness lies. Once they were good. Now they don't even bother to escalate things.
Fixing Emacs
I've been using Emacs for ever, to the point where the key bindings come so naturally that I couldn't describe them without looking at what I do on the keyboard. So every small change made in subsequent versions of Emacs is particularly irritating. I'm not the only one. Peter Jeremy was complaining about it on IRC recently, but unlike me, he did something about it.
What's a vector?
On with my linear algebra course, which is getting easier. But it seems to come from a parallel universe. No wonder I was confused. I've known about vectors for over 50 years, and it's clear what they are: a magnitude and a direction. Just to be sure I dragged out my old university maths book, which showed exactly what I remember. But that's not what vectors are today, at least according to this course: they're a special kind of discrete function. That's part of the reason why this is taking me so long: a new student would just learn and accept, but I'm stopping on every corner looking for reasoning.
Linear algebra, finally
So I've finished my first two assignments for the linear algebra course, and finally we're getting to the subject of the course. Spent some time watching the video lectures, which are much easier than the assignments, probably because (so far) there's not much to learn. Still, it has taken a lot of time to get this far. Hopefully the assignments will become more understandable too.
More network hell
One of the most frustrating things about my wireless Internet connection is its variability. When it works well, it's better than a standard ADSL connectionI've had real-world transfer rates of up to 300 kB/s in both directions. But you can't rely on it, and since the beginning of the year even VoIP has become unreliable. And they still haven't started building the radiation tower. Today, after nearly 5 days of connection and acceptable signal quality, things went to hell again. It's not just slowness, it's the timeouts that irritate me. For some reason DNS is a particular problem. Spent some time playing with my named configuration, in particular increasing the query timeout to 30 seconds: options { directory "/etc/namedb"; + resolver-query-timeout 30; forwarders { That's only of limited use, though, as Edwin Groothuis pointed out: many ...
Are you old enough to drink?
While writing yesterday's diary, checked the Pilsner Urquell web site. What a catastrophe! You're not even allowed to read it if you're not of drinking age. And how do they check that? You have to enter your date of birth! And even that is difficult. Three drop-down choice menus: So if you're born in October to December, or after the 9th of any month, or before 2001 (i.e.
Another day of python
Revisited my inefficient python program today, and as expected got it much more efficient0.9 seconds instead of 140 minutes, just shy of a 1000-fold improvement in performance. It still wasn't easy, not because of program logic, but because of python strangenesses. The more I learn of python, the more I like LISP. How do you select from a composite object? It depends. Maybe there's a function to do it for you, maybe you can subscript them. Most of my modifications were related to finding the correct syntax for selecting what I wanted. Doubtless there are good reasons, but it seems so much easier just to keep everything as a list.
Python learning notes
I'm continuing with this supposed linear algebra course, though so far I've only been learning python, and even the exercises aren't obviously related to linear algebra. I've signed a declaration of honour that I won't tell people about itdesigned to ensure that people don't copy other people's results. So I can't give too much detail, but the current exercise is to build a reverse index for a text search engine. How do you do that? The assignment documentation gives just enough information for you to be able to infer what they mean.
State of the art web infrastructure
Chris Bahlo along for dinner tonight, as usual on Saturdays. After dinner, while Yvonne went to sleep with boredom, we talked about her new job at a local web design company whose name I forgot to ask. We discussed again my incomprehension that Wordsworth had taken four days to move the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens web site from the existing, functional site to the new sitewhy couldn't they just have cut over the DNS when it was up and running? Chris said updating a page on our sites normally doesn't cause more than two minutes lack of access . WHAT?
More weather station problems
My weather station has never been very reliable, and over the course of time I've been putting more and more heuristics into my software to catch the more obvious errors, most recently three months ago. But once again it seems to be getting cleverer: it's generating less obvious errors, and I can't catch them. Do I care? Yes, but not enough to drop everything and think out Yet Another Way of catching errors. Why didn't they just put a checksum in the transmitted data?
Comprehending python
Most language courses are boringly simplistic. The one I'm going through for Python is not. One of the issues, of course, is the lack of description of the syntax, particularly since it's so baroque. But mainly the issue is that it requires a completely different approach to programming from what I've seen before. I hope it gets easier once I have accepted the basics.
Learning Python, again
I never finished the computational photography course that I started a couple of months ago. I had started in mid-course, and it became apparent that both my linear algebra and python skills were lacking. I started a Python course a little later, but it was too elementary, so I gave up on that too. Now they're offering a course on linear algebra, coincidentally using Python, so I've enrolled in that. First issue: it requires python 3.3.2, but the version installed on my machine is 2.7.2.
Direct delivery email problems
So a few days ago I unblocked port 25 and started delivering email directly to the destination MTA. And today I discovered: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/12) ~ 35 -> mailq -Queue ID- --Size-- ----Arrival Time---- -Sender/Recipient------- 2FFBAF76A4 3029 Sat Jun 29 13:09:19 [email protected] (host extmail.bigpond.com[61.9.168.122] refused to talk to me: 554 nskntcmgw02p BigPond Inbound IB105. Connection refused. 121.44.114.34 has a poor Sender Score reputation. See https://www.senderscore.org/blacklistlookup/ for more information.) [email protected] The problem here is that the address that the remote MTA sees is a dynamic address from Internode's pool, and it might once really have been abused.
w3 lives!
Yesterday was the day when RootBSD moved their server room, taking with it w3.lemis.com, which had an uptime of 4¾ years: Fri Jun 28 00:55:04 UTC 2013 12:55AM up 1733 days, 2:24, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 When I came into the office this morning, w3 was still up. Moved or not? Sun Jun 30 00:18:16 UTC 2013 12:18AM up 1735 days, 9 mins, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 Clearly it hadn't been rebooted. But had it been moved?
Goodbye Evi Nemeth
Sad news went around a couple of days ago: Evi Nemeth was lost at sea at the beginning of the month. After Jim Gray that's the second person I know who went out to sea and never came back. And they were both well-known computer people, not exactly the kind of person you'd expect to end like that.
Apple: four times as good
More investigation of Apple's host naming today. It's clear that there's a naming issue somewhere. Investigation with scutil revealed two different names: sh-3.2# scutil --get HostName Melbourne sh-3.2# scutil --get ComputerName newyork Apart from these two, there's the dynamic global hostname , which is something else again. I can only find it in the GUI setup screen, but it does get saved: But wait! There's more! hostname has its own view of the world: sh-3.2# hostname Melbourne sh-3.2# hostname -s Dereel sh-3.2# hostname Dereel sh-3.2# scutil --get HostName Melbourne sh-3.2# scutil --get ComputerName newyork Four different names for one computer!
Investigating mail problems
So despite setting the firewall rules, I still wasn't able to connect to my remote MTA. But the reason was easy enough to find: 12:26:32.694551 IP ppp121-44-119-168.lns20.syd6.internode.on.net.40321 > w3.lemis.com.smtp: Flags [S], seq 161129313, win 65535, options [mss 1460,sackOK,eol], length 0 12:26:32.807306 IP lns20.syd6.on.ii.net > ppp121-44-119-168.lns20.syd6.internode.on.net: ICMP host w3.lemis.com unreachable - admin prohibited filter, length 36 Clearly a configuration problem, so I sent a message to Internode Support asking them to fix it. Some hours later got a call from Stuart, telling me that they're not blocking anything.
Australian Liberal Party Spam
In my article about Facebook spam last week I couldn't find a really good example of a reputable organization spamming Facebook users. Today I got a perfect one. The Liberal Party of Australia, arguably a reputable organization, considers it appropriate to spam its potential voters: Never mind the polemic and inaccurate message (electricity prices have gone up, but not by 94%): would you vote for spammers?
Networking, Apple style
While following up on my network problems, decided to compare what Apple does. Yes, like other BSD-based system they also have a localhost bound to the interface lo0. This seems to be a BSDism: the Linux interface is simply called lo. But somehow since last use the machine had changed its system name, from newyork to newyorkmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. No idea how that happened, but it should be trivial to change it, right? hostname is your friend. Well, it may be your friend, but Apple doesn't take it seriously. I'm told it works until you reboot, and then you're back to the old name again.
Following up on mail problems
Pulled my tuit item about the mail problems today. As I suspected, there were two different problems. The more obvious one was setting up the mail tunnel. The script is called mailtunnel: === grog@eureka (/dev/pts/10) ~ 17 -> which mailtunnel /home/local/bin/mailtunnel I modified the script to include debug output, and none came. After quite some time it occurred to me that I had a function in my .bashrc, and that's what got executed. And at some juncture while setting up teevee, I modified its .bashrc, conveniently a symlink to /eureka/home/grog/.bashrc, and managed to save an older version: --- .bashrc 2012/10/04 06:01:06 1.57 +++ .bashrc 2013/05/19 04:55:38 @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@ -# $Id: diary-jun2013.php,v 1.34 2013/06/25 02:24:38 grog Exp $ +# ...
Where is localhost?
Sent off a relatively routine mail message today and got an unexpected response: This is the mail system at host eureka.lemis.com. I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below. ... <[email protected]>: Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=localhost type=AAAA: Host not found Huh? What does that mean? In particular, it's a resolution failure for an AAAA record, which relates to IPv6. And I don't use IPv6. More importantly, though, why now?
Server down after nearly 5 years?
My external server is hosted with RootBSD, and I've been very happy with them. As of today it has an uptime of 1,726 days4 years, 8 months and 24 days. And now they're going to move the data centre! To quote this page: And his server had only been up for 2½ years.
Friends web site still down
I noted a couple of days ago that the new web site for the Friends of the Ballarat Botanical Gardens is still down. It seems that they jumped the gun and changed the DNS information before installing the web site. Since the site has been down for days, it's reasonable to assume that they've run into trouble. So I put up the old site at fbbg.lemis.com and offered to Adel to redirect to it while she sorts out her problems. But today I got a message which blew my mind. This isn't a bug, it's standard procedure, it seems, and they had warned the Friends that the site would be out of action for a couple of days: there are some elements of the site that can't be implemented and tested until after propagation .
Goodbye Facebook, hello Google+?
After my rant about Facebook yesterday, Peter Jeremy came up with a solution : use Google+ instead. It doesn't have inline spam (yet). I had actually had a better solution: ignore all these social media sites. But for the fun of it, I signed up with Google+. What is it? Yes, of course I didn't read the description, but what I'm presented with looks nothing like what I expected. I'll revisit it some time when I'm bored, but for the moment the difference is clear: I'm on Facebook because it's the only way to communicate with lots of people I know. Few people have invited me to join them on Google+, and most of those are also on Facebook.
Why we can't beat spam
Spam has been one of the most irritating aspects of online life since I first started using email on the Internet. There are all sorts of ways to try to limit it, but as time goes on, it's clear that we can't win. The basic problem is that too many people consider it to be just another legitimate form of advertising, and too many users just accept it. Yes, penis enlargements and Viagra are frowned upon, but that's because of the subject, not because of spam. But who uses email any more anyway? Facebook is the way of the future (Oh brave new world, that has such people in't!)
SCO: The pain that never ends
In other news, Jürgen Lock pointed me at this report. After only 10 years, a complete lack of evidence, and a bankruptcy, SCO (now spelt XINUOS ) is still not giving up with their law suit against IBM. Why? Went back looking and discovered that it was ten years ago today that SCO announced that they had terminated IBM's UNIX license. It's also the tenth anniversary of the publication of a Byte interview with Chris Sontag, unfortunately also no longer accessible. Went looking and found that most of the documents to which I had referred in my documentation of the case have since ceased to exist.
Death to HTML!
While playing around with my photos a few days ago, I came across a strange problem: in my diary for 16 April 2011, my normal photo resizing stopped working correctly. Spent some considerable time investigating it, finally reducing it to a simple example. Normally I have five potential display sizes for an image: hide (size 0), thumbnail (67,500 pixels, size 1), small (270,000 pixels, size 2), and two big , both the native size of the image. Size 3 scales this image to the width of the window, while size 4 shows it in full resolution. In this case, though, size 3 was smaller than size 2.
Goodbye Friends
Phone call from somebody at a company Wordsworth. He wanted access to the domain fbbg.org.au. I told him there was a web site, but no, it seems Wordsworth (or whatever) is the company doing the transition to a professional web site, and what he really wanted was information on how to update the DNS information. He had the registry key, but didn't know what to do with it. Asked him to send me a mail message, which came from Adel, with whom I had spoken earlier this year, with an email domain address from a different domain. Sent her the information, and the DNS records were quickly updated.
Reprocessing old panoramas
It's been nearly two years since I started my current panoramic views of the garden, and in that time lots of things have changed. In particular, at the time I was using out-of-camera JPEGs, and now I process my images with DxO Optics Pro . The difference in appearance may be at least partially due to that. Here the verandah two years ago and now: Spent quite some time reprocessing the images with DxO Optics Pro , but the difference wasn't that pronounced.
PayPal: Don't follow this link
Mail from PayPal today with some policy updates and the good advice not to follow any links in their messages, but to type in the URL! Yes, it's possible to have a disguised link, but the idea of cutting and pasting doesn't seem to have occurred to them. And then they provide links anywaywhich do exactly the kind of obfuscation they're warning about (real URL at bottom left): What happens if you follow that link? An electronic rap on the knuckles?
Taming DxO
I've been processing my photos with DxO Optics Pro for over a year now, but I still haven't really understood all the details. I frequently use the HDR Artistic profile, which gives me the kind of in-your-face colours and shadow accentuation that I like, but I've only gradually come to realize that it comes at the expense of considerable burnout in the highlights. Today I had to adjust some of my flower images by up to 2 EV to get some detail back in the highlights. More to be learnt.
Revisiting AEC map slowness
One of my complaints about the AEC web site was that the maps they provided were enormously bloated, and they took up to 15 minutes CPU time to render on my machine. We discussed the matter on IRC and discovered a number of interesting things. Firstly, one of the issues was the way I zoomed: increase the map size to 800% and then pan with the slide bars. I didn't realize that most maps have labels in text, so I could have searched with normal text search, which speeded things up considerablyonly a couple of minutes. But then somebody tried running with Microsoft, and the map rendered orders of magnitude faster than under FreeBSDso fast that I probably wouldn't have commented.
Internode: our fault after all
My network problems are no longer quite as bad as they were two months ago. The connection quality is still so bad that VoIP is seldom practical, but I no longer have the extreme dropout rate that I had at the time. That's no thanks to Internode, who ignored my traces and just gave up. I asked them to escalate the matter, and they said yes, they'd do so. Silence. And then I got a message: Apologises for the late reply, this email is in regards to the throughput issue that you reported back in early April.
More Hugin project file frobbing
Preparing comparison images of panoramas isn't easy. Each time the crop is subtly different, so they don't register correctly when combined on a web page: the images tend to jump when the mouse goes over them. What I need is a way to crop different images identically. And that information, too, should be in the Hugin project file. But where? I still can't find the documentation. Still, inspection can be useful. Tried comparing the project files of the normal panorama and the HDR version of yesterday's garden to the south-east investigation. They differ in many ways, of course, notably in the number of images, but right at the start I got: --- garden-se.jpeg.pto 2013-06-10 11:27:25.000000000 +1000 +++ garden-se-hdr.jpeg.pto 2013-06-09 12:21:25.000000000 +1000 @@ -1,21 +1,45 @@ # hugin project file #hugin_ptoversion 2 -p f1 w6057 h3490 v237 E12.2262 R0 S364,5763,771,3284 ...
Turnbull speaks
Reply to the mail message I sent to Malcolm Turnbull last month: Greg, we have every intention on delivering on our plan. Thanks for your tip on the fasterbroadband survey site, we will look into that. Nothing world-shattering, and I remain to be convinced, but since at the time I voiced an opinion that he might not reply, it's only fair to note that I was wrong.
More alternative panoramas
On with my panorama processing experiments today. One view that is particularly challenging is the 180° view south-east from the north-east corner of the house. The left-hand end is a shade area, and to the right of centre it's open, so the difference in illumination is markedtoday, surprisingly, it was only a difference of 3.4 EV from the darkest to the brightest. Still, an interesting motive for comparing the three relevant methods. In each case I started with the same 18 images, representing the following 6 views: I've deliberately shown these taken at ...
Alternative panorama processing
More playing around with panorama processing today. The sun was shining, so I took more HDR images than normal. Normally I process the images by first converting them to tone-mapped images, and then running Hugin to stitch them together. But Hugin can handle the HDR conversion too, so today I tried that ( Exposure fused from stacks ). What a time it takes! The tone-mapping step takes quite a time too, but here I had a total of 63 images, and cpfind alone took over an hour of CPU time to find its control points. Stitching took about another 90 minutes, and in total the whole thing took 3½ hours.
PHP: planned obsolescence
About a week ago the Oly-e web site went down, with messages like: Warning: fopen(data/.threading): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /var/www/clients/client35/web109/web/news/a.php4 on line 76 Warning: fgets() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given in /var/www/clients/client35/web109/web/news/a.php4 on line 77 Warning: fclose() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given in /var/www/clients/client35/web109/web/news/a.php4 on line 94 No prizes for guessing where that came from. Reported it to Reinhard Wagner, who runs the site, and he told me that his ISP had spring a PHP update on him without warning.
Interrupt timeout, channel dead
Watching TV today, the playback tripped over some kind of data corruption, after which I couldn't play anything back. It's not the first time, but this time I looked at the system log and discovered: Jun 6 16:54:14 teevee kernel: pcm0: chn_write(): pcm0:play:dsp0.p1: play interrupt timeout, channel dead That's the audio output channel. And there seems to be no way to revive it. Reboot time. And clearly, since it has happened more than once, time to investigate more carefully. It seems that there have been a number of reports of this problem, most recently probably this one.