To sysadmin or not to sysadmin... that is the question, whether tis nobler in the minde to suffer the slings and arrowes of outragious fortune, or climb to the top of the building with a fucking high-power rifle and scope. -- Greg "Twotone" Spiegelberg
recently a colleague at work prodded me (gently ;-)), saying she still looks forward to seeing my holiday photos...of which there haven't been any for too long.
well, i haven't been camping since last year's trip to haddon corner...but mid-september i took a short little trip to girraween NP, in the
granite belt region pretty much on the QLD-NSW border.
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I use strong crypto wherever I can, and naturally for email also. All email I send is either PGP signed or signed and encrypted with one of my keys.
If you receive email from any of my addresses without signature you
should doubt its authenticity!
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finally - two years after the last big trip there was an opportunity for another, not quite that long but still good little trip out west.
this time the tentative target was mainly queensland's channel country region, with particular spots of interest being currawinya national park, the burke and wills dig tree, haddon corner and diamantina national park.
not everything worked out exactly as hoped...fine, that's life. i still enjoyed it quite nicely, even if i did cut it somewhat short, to ten days.
here's what (little) i've got to show and tell about the trip.
click here for the rest of the story...
yes, i'm still here. no, you haven't missed any updates - there haven't been any: i guess i don't have anything to say, anymore.
elvis, who? i don't think there are many people left who care about that guy anymore. lots fewer will care about the fact that i, too, have left a building...and a town, and an area.
4 weeks and 4 days ago my house went up for sale, 4 weeks ago i signed the contract and today i've left both house and gold coast behind, for good. 16 years in the same house was enough.
until i find a new nice place for sale near my new workplace (archerfield and/or carole park) most of my stuff is staying in rented storage, an i'm staying at a friend's place...not quite a hobo :-)
you know you're officially an old fart when you see your daughter holding her daughter.
welcome, stephanie! may your stay on this earth be a good one.
..but just maybe they might mellow a bit, can't hurt.
i just read that the ACT has decided to legalise personal cannabis use; one of the odd things here is that the ACT is the last state you'd expect to make such a move, with a demographic dominated by politicians and governmental agencies.
the other odd thing is that the legalisation means not much, apparently, as you could still be charged under commonwealth laws. oh the convolutions!
i've just returned from a four week road/bush/camping trip not quite halfway around australia.
the plan this time was pretty mininal: let's travel to and through central australia! (off the boring main roads where possible.)
the idea was that i'd go at least as far as alice springs following the outback way, and bail out there if i didn't enjoy the trip; otherwise to continue on to WA via the great central road, and back from there somehow, either via the australian bight or the far north. clearly not an exceptionally precise plan; more an example of making it up on the go.
as you can see on the map above i did reach WA eventually, then opted for looping via the far north and got to broome and the timor sea, thus covering both sunrise and sunset beaches.
read on for some musings from my travel diary and some photos.
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If you are like me, relying on good old MH/NMH and mh-e and exmh to do your
mail, then you'll know that there are few decent solutions for synchronizing
your MH boxes between computers.
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recently i spent almost six weeks in austria: with family, friends and a bit
of work. it was a good trip but a little bitter-sweet, too.
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last year they printed 400 million 'new and improved' banknotes with a typo on them. nobody noticed for a few months, but then who cares about responsibility (or spelling).
i also suspect that there aren't that many companies outside the australian market that would proudly call their engine starter spray "start ya bastard" and market it for a target audience of 'frail people who are not strong enough to pull a start cord quickly enough'.
the last time i had to use a similar product must have been about 30 years ago, helping my dad to convince one of his his citroen gs/gsa to start...all of which were indeed bastards to get started.
apropos nothing: other australian things.
for my birthday i got a new(er) camera, a panasonic lumix dmc-gx85 with the standard kit 12-32mm lens; i hope that that upgrade gets me to produce More Better Pictures.
in the meantime i've also added a tele lens (14-140mm), which reminds my sister of the aardvark in the pink panther cartoons when it is at the the maximum zoom.
...is that there's lots of space.
we've got 25 million human inhabitants, but less than 500 000 live outside the coastal areas (the yellow area on this map from amazing maps)
you don't have to drive very far inland to get away from everybody.
for somebody like me who can stand humanity in small doses only that's a pretty good thing.
a bit over a week one of my 6 255w solar panels on the roof decided to develop an earth fault, the inverter sensed that and stopped power generation altogether.
an inspection indicated that all panels are on the way out, not just one. these 'znshine' panels are clearly not much good; they lasted just 8 years, and the warranty is pretty useless: '5 years for faults and defects' and '25 years for output degradation but only if that's your sole problem'...so for all practical purposes '5 years'. meh.
fortunately the solar sparkie that i talked to (who did a good job for my neighbours recently) offered some second-hand better quality for a very good price, and now there are 7 renesola 250w panels on my roof and i'm happy again.
keith and i spent last weekend on fraser island, setting up two of the new weather stations for fido:
these are located at orchid beach and at cathedral beach;
with four stations most of the eastern, ocean facing side of the island is now covered. two more stations on the western side (at kingfisher bay and wanggoolba) will follow in the next three months.
things worked out pretty well and we did find a few hours for sightseeing, too; here are a few photos.
to capture the size of some of the big trees i experimented with my phone
to get a vertical panorama (up, up and lean baaaaaack),
and while not perfect it doesn't look too bad :-)
...you disregard the docs saying 'this requires at least two people' and you
figure out a hacky way to make it possibly all by your lonesome - even though
you do have a friend or two who could have helped you. *sigh*
click here for the rest of the story...
for me A$970 paid for all of a three week, 4922km, camping/hiking/sightseeing/road-trip south along the great dividing range.
2/3 of that went for 420l of diesel (my car is reasonably economical even with the brake parachu^W^Wroof top tent in place), and the remainder covered (national park and other) camping fees, some grocery shopping and a few coffee and cake breaks. i mostly camped in cheap or free places and somehow i can't bring myself to eat out even when i'm on the road (at least when travelling solo), which should explain the low cost.
i've long wanted to see more of australia. being off work right now makes this the perfect opportunity to travel, except that the season is not ideal for visiting central oz (late summer/early fall is both hot and normally the rainy season); furthermore the current drought makes the inland regions a bit less appealing than usual (ie. many creeks and rivers are bone-dry, fire bans in many national parks and so on).
so i decided that i'd tag along the great dividing range towards the south, visiting most of the higher areas on the way - for the views, the hiking and a bit of cooler weather. the tentative plan also included visiting the victorian alps and possibly the great ocean road as well, but that part of the plan went up in smoke - lots of nasty bushfires in victoria, pretty much exactly where i wanted to go - so the eventual southernmost goal shifted to mt. kosciuszko, the highest hill in oz.
here is the whole trip as a single track;
read on for photos and more details.
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well, this is australia so it's not edelweiß but flannel flowers. the leaves have exactly the same texture though! these were observed at yuraygir national park, on a hilly headland maybe 500m from the beach.
as you might tell from this i've been camping a bit; read on for some more
photos and a bit of a report.
click here for the rest of the story...
not the least because conny gives me these cool gifts, like she did
this christmas: a whole box of well-selected shirts from roadkill. most are even wearable in polite company :-)
today i did a little time travel (a 15 min drive across the border to NSW, where the timing sucks but the alcohol licensing apparently doesn't), and bought austrian beer at aldi:
it's quite obvious that australian beer prices are mostly driven by very high taxation, when aldi can make a profit selling the far travelled egger märzen not that much dearer than local(-ish) beer: the egger goes for $5 per litre, whereas aldi's nice kiwi low-carb goes for $4.42 per litre (that's aldi prices, the other booze 'discounters' are nowhere near except for headache generators like xxxx gold...).
...but i find that 15w40 and nail polish remover goes really well with my salad.
i'm going camping tomorrow, and i like reusing containers (well-cleaned containers...). obviously i also like making silly labels with my label maker.
after reading my recent post about my new car one of my austrian friends asked for more details; not exactly surprising as utes like that are not exactly common in austria.
so here are some more photos and phacts.
for comparison here is a photo of my old subaru outback, an average length station wagon ('kombi'). the colorado just fits into the garage, ie. iff i drive up to and carefully bump into the wall. stock length is 4.9m, add about 25cm for the bull bar on mine.
stock weight is about 1920 kg (cf. 1460 kg for my previous car, a forester), but this one lugs around a bull bar, winch, canopy and dual battery; installing a lift kit is very much in planning.
it's got about 120 kW and lots of torque thanks to the turbocharged diesel; agility is...well, this is not a race car. it doesn't feel underpowered but there's the inertia of 2 tons of car.
(as in sewing, not faecal matter)
believe it or not, but i do actually own a sewing machine - and i can even operate it (if not exactly well).
it's a relatively old elnita 150, and the only electric bits in it are the motor and the light bulb. i do admire the mechanical design of mechanical sewing machines: two cam drums, a comb full of cam followers, a few levers, a bunch of springs. in this machine that's enough for 15 different stitch patterns.
however, mine doesn't get used often. today i wanted to prep it for some upcoming fiddly fabric work, only to find out that it would only zig spastically, not zig and zag.
after applying occam's razor to isolate the involved ziggy bits it turned out that the issue was just stiffened old grease and/or insufficient lubrication: one follower lever had gotten too sticky to return properly when released. for zig that one gets pushed but for zag it needs to return under spring tension, which it didn't do reliably.
the solution was trivial; a bit of fresh light oil, some soaking
time and vigorous exercise of the mechanism and it's all working
again. me happy :-)
following up on an earlier post, here are a few more reasons why 3d printers are both cool toys and useful tools.
i live in a pretty humid climate, and using vacuum storage bags (for things like spare blankets and pillows) is quite important; but the dyson vacuum that i inherited from my daughter has this nice-but-unhelpful clicky connector that sucks because it doesn't suck -- there's no flat interface that you can press against the bag valve.
so i spent a little time on designing and printing a sucker adapter (in PETG because i wanted to do more testing with the material).
or this one, from earlier this week: the built-in cupboard in my
hallway has a broken door catch (cylindrical post in the frame,
claspy catch on the door) and i couldn't find any even remotely
similar replacement at the (sole remaining :-( ) hardware chain.
however, calipers and persistence and one failed test-print later i've now got a parametric model and an actual replacement part that works.
on the last photo you can see my newest mod to my printer, a mk52 (clone) magnetic heatbed. the print surface is PEI on a removable sheet of spring steel, which is held to the actual bed and heater by many strong magnets. when your print is done you take off the steel sheet and flex that, rather than prodding and prying with spatula/chisel/knife.
so far it works pretty well, but the bed is made from PCB/fibreglass and prone to warping. i haven't fully bolted the bed down (like official prusa does it) because i like the ability to level things manually, but i may want to change that later; for now i've setup 7x7 grid level compensation with my smoothieboard clone and that takes care of the imperfect flatness.
i'm now driving what might conceivably be called a chick magnet car
-- with the understanding that the magnetic attraction is confined to within
the cabin, and the repelling forces work all over the outside. net
result: it'll take a woman of superhuman persistence to actually come close...
click here for the rest of the story...
(beagle as in 'beaglebone black', which is not a dog by any means)
almost exactly three years ago i built a minimal-budget online weatherstation for fido, john sinclair's fraser island defenders org. that station was installed at happy valley and it's been working pretty well ever since - well enough that we followed it up a few months later with another station which ended up at eurong.
both of these were build on a shoestring budget, and for the second i used the same fairly yucky 'authentication' chip setup on perfboard and hacksawed 2mm 2x10 pin connector, and everything was housed in a really ugly fashion inside a weatherproof box.
recently fido got a budget together for four more stations. about two months ago we started acquiring the bits and pieces for these stations, and this time i decided to make everything a bit nicer and easier to assemble.
this new litter of beagles will be housed decently: i designed and 3d-printed a custom enclosure that attaches to the back of the weather station console. thanks to the odd geometry it was a bit annoying to print but the resulting four dog houses look good and work really well.
this time i've also decided to 'design for manufacturability' (bwuahaha - translate: i wanted less messy manual soldering and no connector butchery). this meant switching to a different pic microprocessor, an 8-pin PIC16F18313, and making a printed circuit board with keyed connectors to make everything a bit more fool-resistant.
the 16F18313 is a little powerhouse, and i found it amazing how much functionality microchip crammed into this chip (datasheet for the 16F18313: 471 pages. 16F88: 228). at au$1.31 it's also much cheaper than the older PIC16F88 i used for the first two stations, and thanks to freely reassignable pin functions it's much easier to route a single-layer pcb for that processor.
but getting it to actually work was immensely painful: none of my infrastructure would deal with this fairly recent chip. my version of xc8 wouldn't compile for it, pk2cmd would not program it (nor would mplabx talk to my pickit2). lots of swearing and fiddling later i've got a working PK2DeviceFile.dat for that chip, and proceeded with the pcb making.
after a little time with eagle (and a brief detour to build a small drill press for drilling the circuit boards) i made these four boards in the most pedestrian fashion possible (read: using the toner transfer method). soldering on the smt connectors was easy, using solder paste. and everything did work the first time round :-)
in about a month the four stations will get installed on fraser island and i'll post an update when they're live.
you can find the updated code for the new pic and the board design (in eagle format as well as printable image) at https://github.com/az143/davis_weather.
...except that one is not a homeomorphism but rather an example of subtractive manufacturing.
i must say they look very unimpressed with whatever human caretaker that had this attack of the math hahas.
i have lots of reasons!
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