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.
Living in the future: Using C++26 at work
I recently contributed a guest post on my employer’s blog about the importance of the almost-feature-complete C++26 draft standard: “Sea change in C++: Why opportunities abound” It starts by summarizing a talk I gave recently, about how C++26 is poised to do what C++11 did over a decade ago: usher in a new era of … Continue reading Living in the future: Using C++26 at work →
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?
CL XLV: Island Spring
Join me for a walk through a rain forest on a corner of of a small island. This is to remind everyone that even in a world full of bad news, the trees are still there. From the slopes leading down to the sea they reach up for sunshine and rain, offering no objections to humans walking in the tall quiet spaces between them. [The island is Keats Island, where we?ve had a cabin since 2008. It?s mostly just trees and cabins, you can buy an oceanfront mansion for millions or a basic Place That Needs Work for much less (as we did) or you can camp cheap.
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.
Decentralizing Schemes
I?m a fan of decentralized social media and that?s partly because I enjoy using it. But mostly because history teaches that decentralization is the best basis for sustainable, resilient online conversation. (Evidence? Email!) For the purpose of this essay, let?s assume that you agree with me. Let?s also assume that our online life is still Web-flavored. I?m going to describe a few unfortunate things that can happen in a decentralized world, then look at a basic built-in feature of the Web that might make the problems go away. Let?s start with bad-experience scenarios Sharing pain Suppose I post a picture to my social-media feed and since Ash follows me, it shows up in their stream.
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.
Coachella 2025
Last weekend I spent a few hours watching Coachella on YouTube. The audio and video quality are high. It?s free of ad clutter, but maybe that?s because I pay for Google Music? The quality of the music is all over the map. If I read the schedule correctly, they?ll repeat the exercise next weekend, so I thought a few recommendations might be helpful. Even if it?s not available live, quite a few captures still seem to be there on YouTube, so check ?em out. I tried sorting these into themes but that tied me in knots, so you get alphabetical order.
Nimby and the D-Hoppers CONCLUSION
This week on my podcast, I conclude my reading of my 2003 Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine story, Nimby and the D-Hoppers” (here’s the first half). The story has been widely reprinted (it was first published online in The Infinite Matrix in 2008), and was translated (by Elisabeth Vonarburg) into French for Solaris Magazine, as well... more
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.
The perils of GenAI student submissions
Generative AI (GenAI) systems, such as ChatGPT, can help students as their personal tutor, by allowing them to study what interests them, by providing in depth explanations to topics they didn?t quite understand, by assessing their work and problems with it, and by providing shortcuts to parts of their work that aren?t directly relevant to what they want to learn. However, students sometimes misuse GenAI to derive answers for work they were supposed to conduct on their own as part of their learning, or accept its answers uncritically. For the first type of misuse part of the blame occasionally also lies with educators for giving out-of-class assignments that GenAI can perform with ease.
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.
Alexa+ gets us a step closer to ambient interfaces
The vision was to build the Star Trek computer. 10 years ago that was an ambitious goal. We?ve come a long way since then - from basic voice commands to much more conversational interfaces with Alexa+.
The perils of GenAI student submissions
Generative AI (GenAI) systems, such as ChatGPT, can help students as their personal tutor, by allowing them to study what interests them, by providing in depth explanations to topics they didn?t quite understand, by assessing their work and problems with it, and by providing shortcuts to parts of their work that aren?t directly relevant to what they want to learn. However, students sometimes misuse GenAI to derive answers for work they were supposed to conduct on their own as part of their learning, or accept its answers uncritically. For the first type of misuse part of the blame occasionally also lies with educators for giving out-of-class assignments that GenAI can perform with ease.
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.
Nimby and the D-Hoppers
This week on my podcast, I once again read my 2003 Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine story, Nimby and the D-Hoppers” The story has been widely reprinted (it was first published online in The Infinite Matrix in 2008), and was translated (by Elisabeth Vonarburg) into French for Solaris Magazine, as well as into Chinese, Russian, Hebrew,... more
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.
The CoSocialist Future
This week marks the second anniversary of the launch of the CoSocial.ca Mastodon server, which is one leg of my online presence (the other is this blog.) I?ve never been more convinced that online social interaction has to change paths and take a new direction. And I think CoSocial has lessons to teach about that direction. Here are some. A personal note: I?ve been fortunate in that bits and pieces of my career have felt like building the future. For example, right now, about the Fediverse generally and CoSocial in particular.
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 ...