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| Tuesday, 20 May 2025 | Dereel | Images for 20 May 2025 |
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More atrial fibrillation
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Topic: health, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne into my office this morning with bad news: her KardiaMobile 6L shows “possible atrial fibrillation” again.
That's not that bad news. Last week Professor Peter Kistler had suggested stopping taking Flecainide, which is intended to suppress AF. Clearly she still needs it. But maybe half a dose?
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Web server load again
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Topic: technology | Link here |
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.
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Hibiscus recovery?
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
It's been quite cold lately—yesterday the overnight low was 1.0°, and today it was 0.8°. How is my Hibiscus rosa-sinensis “Uncle Max” in the garden doing?
Surprisingly, well:
The cannas around it, though ugly, seem to have protected it, and it has more flowers than I've seen in a long time.
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So does the Alyogyne huegelii, though it's not so obvious:
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Focus stacking: the pain
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Topic: photography, gardening, opinion | Link here |
Finally continued with my focus stacking photos of the Schlumbergera truncata. It wasn't easy. Out of 200 images, this is the best I got:
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Once again, the biggest issue was focus. Digital cameras have made all sorts of progress with autofocus since the introduction of “mirrorless” cameras, but it's all directed towards conventional photos and video. When I have a subject, how can I tell where the start and end focus points are, let alone how many images I need to cover that range? Today I took groups of 40 images for each view, though it turned out that my range was only about 15 images. But how do I select the start point? Despite focus stacking (which really needs to be adjustable), I missed it on a number of images. The fifth was completely out: nothing was in focus. And the first went way beyond the flower to include the background:
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Yes, I could fix it by restacking without the last 10 or so images, but it wasn't the best image.
Another issue is how difficult it is to set the number of images. I need to dig deep into the menu system (here the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II) to get the settings, and then set the numbers individually for ones, tens and hundreds. I spent some time playing with the OM System OM-1 Mark II, which has a completely different menu system, one which puts “focus stacking” (in-camera) in a completely different place from what they call “focus bracketing”, where the images have to be merged in postprocessing.
So: what focus assistance should the camera provide? How about:
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Injured kangaroo
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Topic: animals | Link here |
While walking the dogs down Grassy Gully Road, Elena suddenly went crazy and pulled on her leash. Kangaroo? It sounded right, but she was particularly violent, and I didn't see anything. But yes, about 15 m away there was a kangaroo stuck in a bush, maybe caught in a fence.
That was the end of the walk. Took the dogs back home and out again to see what was going on:
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Had it been caught in the fence? I don't think so: when we first saw it, it was on this side of the fence. In the meantime it had certainly made its way through, and it had left some fur behind in the barbed wire:
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But that didn't seem to be the problem. It was unable to stand up, though I couldn't see any injury.
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OK, call wildlife rescue. Vince from the Wala Animal Sanctuary? That's in Smythes_Creek. Is there nobody closer?
Yes: Sandra Thompson, phone 0413 624 205. Called her up with great difficulty. She told me that she was in Ferrers Road, here in Dereel, and had particularly bad phone coverage. But she came along, found—as expected—that he had a broken leg. He's at peace now, as she put it.
| Wednesday, 21 May 2025 | Dereel | |
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| previous day |
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More noodle preparation
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
I've finally found the Tak On Chow Mein noodles that I've been looking for for some time. In the past I have cooked them individually, but nowadays I freeze them in 180 g portions.
First, “cook” them (really pour boiling water over them) for 45 seconds and drain. Put in bags. Straightforward enough, except that this time the total increased from a somewhat generous 1025 g (nominally 1000) to only 1338 g, an increase of 30%. In my cooking page I had 44%. Is that due to the fact that I didn't boil them this time? I won't find out until I actually cook with them.
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Understanding food prices
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Prices seem to have increased generally over the last few years. Since we cook all our own food, we're less concerned, but it's good to keep an eye on the prices. And they're thoroughly confusing. I've already noted some of the confusion, but there's more. Over the last couple of months we have bought:
| Ingredient | Weight | Price | kg price | Date | ||||
| Chicken thigh fillet | 888 g | $2.56 | $2.88 | 10 May 2015 | ||||
| Chicken thigh fillet | 1 kg | $13.90 | $13.90 | not purchased | ||||
| Chicken thighs, with bone | 2 kg | $6.89 | $3.45 | 21 May 2015 | ||||
| Chicken breast | 1 kg | $10.99 | $10.99 | not purchased | ||||
| Chicken breast (special) | 1 kg | $8.99 | $8.99 | not purchased | ||||
| Chicken breast “schnitzel” | 500 g | $7.99 | $15.98 | special, not purchased | ||||
| (Bomba) Rice | 1 kg | $13.50 | $13.50 | 8 May 2015 | ||||
| Lard | 500 ml | $22.95 | $49.60 | 23 April 2025 |
These are from two different suppliers (ALDI and Woolworths), and clearly some of them are specials, but why the amazing price differences? And somehow the ridiculous prices for Bomba rice and lard make things even more confusing. I've left out the price for saffron (starting round $5,000 per kilogram) because it wouldn't have made sense.
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More web server observations
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
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 1 26 0 35M 9288K lockf 1 0:08 13.55% httpd
Part of the overnight cron jobs. Nothing to worry about, and sure enough, the load dropped.
That's still interesting, though. I removed the robots.txt on lax yesterday, and nothing has changed much as a result. Has my redirection trick helped? It seems so:
On 20 May 2025 you had a total of 11615530 hits.
Top 20 hits:
366193 /grog/diary-dec2006.php
230197 /grog/diary-dec2006.php?dirdate=20061226
99418 /grog/diary-dec2006.php?dirdate=20061223
66067 /grog/diary-dec2006.php?dirdate=20061205
51274 /grog/diary-dec2006.php?dirdate=20061213
50341 /grog/diary-dec2006.php?dirdate=20061211
That's actually more than the record that I had last week. And again it seems that diary-dec2006.php is the favourite, this time with 843,490 hits in the top 20, only marginally fewer than on Friday. I wonder what the fascination is with that month.
Apart from that, I've become aware of a couple of articles discussing the unruly bot issue: AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt and Quoted in Ars Technica’s article on tarpits for AI crawlers, which refers to the first article.
The interesting thing is that they name one of the bots: ClaudeBot. Is it attacking me? Of course. Here on fra, which still has the restrictive robots.txt:
=== root@fra (/dev/pts/2) /var/log/www 46 -> wc -l www.lemis.com.log
240298 www.lemis.com.log=== root@fra (/dev/pts/2) /var/log/www 48 -> grep -i claudebot www.lemis.com.log | wc -l
50205
That's 21% of all hits. A more general search (with possible false positives) gives a very different view:
=== root@fra (/dev/pts/2) /var/log/www 47 -> grep -i bot www.lemis.com.log | wc -l
154271
That's 64% of all hits.
And on lax? The log file starts on 15 May, a whole week:
=== grog@lax (/dev/pts/1) ~/www.lemis.com 7 -> grep ClaudeBot /var/log/www/www.lemis.com.log | wc -l
28807=== grog@lax (/dev/pts/1) ~/www.lemis.com 8 -> grep -i bot /var/log/www/www.lemis.com.log | wc -l
600164=== grog@lax (/dev/pts/1) ~/www.lemis.com 9 -> wc -l /var/log/www/www.lemis.com.log
11928471 /var/log/www/www.lemis.com.log
That's much less! Clearly I need to look at things, including how my stats job counts things. But the bottom line seems to be that I'm weathering the storm relatively well.
| This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have a horror of reverse chronological documents, so all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days, but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry a day or two after I write it. | 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 welcome feedback and try to reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise I'll assume that it's OK to do so. |
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