technology – dangermouse.net

Fixing broadband… and glasses. And some nice food

Friday was online games night with my friends. After a busy day of ethics classes, and going for a 5k run in between.

In one of my classes, since we were talking about the topic of Science Fiction, the idea of AI came up, and what sort of things it might do in the future. One kid said:

Whenever I talk to ChatGPT, I use “please” and “thank you”, to make sure it doesn’t turn against me in the future.

My 5k run was very fast. The day was cold, only 14°C when I did my run around 11am. It meant I didn’t get hot and sweaty, and I managed my second best time ever for the distance, with 26:18. I was very pleased with that.

After lunch I went to pick up my new prescription glasses for use when working at the computer. I mentioned on Tuesday that they’d put the wrong prescription in, making them for close reading instead, and had to change them. I tested them out at the optometrist and they felt better, being good for reading something held with my arm fully outstretched. But when I got home I discovered that they were still focused too close. I had to lean forward uncomfortably in my chair from my regular posture to see the screen clearly. I used a tape measure to measure the distance from the screen to my eyes. The optometrist had said that screen-reading glasses are set for focus at 60cm. Which I discovered to be roughly true, in fact it was closer to 55cm where I felt my vision was clearest. But then I sat in my normal computer posture and measured the distance from the screen to my eyes, and it was 70cm. By the time I figured this out, it was after 5pm and the optometrist had closed for the day.

We stayed in for dinner and I made frittata with mushroom and tomato. After that I played online games. We played Knarr, Welcome to the Moon, Jump Drive, FLip 7, CodeChains (a game one friend invented and implemented on a Discord bot; it involves linking pairs of words into chains and then everyone trying to guess the same word that is being clued by both words on either side of every link), Just One, and Word Traveller. A lot of short games for variety.

First thing this morning I phoned the optometrist about my glasses and explained the problem. I said I didn’t want the second pair that I’d left there yesterday made with the same prescription – I needed it balanced to focus an extra 10-15cm away. They asked me to come in so they could check my eyes with the proposed correction to ensure right distance.

So after my wife returned from the gym with the car, I drove over to the optometrist. They remeasured my eyes to make sure and got the same refractive error, then wrote a prescription for new lenses to set a focal distance at 70cm as I requested. They said they’d get my second pair made with the new prescription and when they are ready I can swap the first pair back for new lenses. Fortunately this is under warranty so it won’t cost me any extra!

On the way home I stopped off at the Italian cake shop to pick up a cake to take to my mother’s place this afternoon. I got a chocolate and hazelnut torte. And then after my wife got home with Scully from her dog grooming appointment, we bundled into the car for the long drive to my mother’s place.

We arrived just before 3pm. My mission was to configure their broadband Internet and VOIP phone, which had stopped working when we deactivated their previous ISP account, as I mentioned on Thursday. I prepared by printing out a bunch of configuration info from the new ISP.

When we got there, I checked the ports of the modem/router. The phone was plugged into the only VOIP socket. The broadband was plugged into the second of 4 LAN ports. I moved it to the first LAN port, and bingo, the Internet came on! I could browse websites and access my mother’s email. That was easy.

But the VOIP phone still wasn’t working. I had some configuration information to enter into the modem, changing the old ISP server and proxy settings and entering a new VOIP password. I tried this, but it didn’t seem to work. I fiddled around a bit with it, but after a few minutes decided to contact the ISP phone tech support. I chose the new ISP for my mother because I’ve been very happy with their support on my own account, and they were brilliant again.

I got a very helpful guy who did some remote diagnosis stuff and then asked what router I was using. I said it was one supplied by the previous ISP. He said it’s possible that the VOIP was locked to that ISP and I’d need to get a new router, but he’d try a few things first. After changing some settings fruitlessly, he put me on hold while he contacted a co-worker with more experience, and together they did more diagnostic stuff and we explored the modem/router’s advanced settings. Eventually he tried turning off the firewall and lo! The phone started working! Aha! The other guy said the router’s default firewall settings were extremely restrictive, and it wasn’t letting the VOIP port through. They asked if I was okay leaving the firewall off, and I sort of hemmed and hawed and said I’d feel better if it was on. So they went back into the configurations and set up a firewall pass-through for the VOIP port, turned the firewall back on, rebooted the modem, and voilà!

We tested the phone, dialling out (to my wife’s mobile), and in (from my wife’s mobile) and it worked with no further problem. Phew! The tech support was really good. They had two of them on my call for over an hour, and they were determined to find a way to get it working without me having to go buy a new router. So kudos to Aussie Broadband – highly recommended if you’re after an Australian ISP.

We left my mother’s place later than we’d expected, and got hungry on the way home. We decided to stop at a place soon after we got off the freeway and back into Sydney’s outer suburbs (still half an hour drive from home). We went to Kipling’s Garage Bar at Turramurra, a place we’ve been to a couple of times before. We had a few tapas-style dishes to share, including arancini balls, and pulled duck with sesame chips:

And roasted cauliflower tacos:

Also some backed haloumi and for dessert a sticky date pudding. All really good. Then it was a drive back home for the evening.

Remote diagnosing broadband

Today was mostly routine. Ethics classes in the morning and evening. I made pasta for dinner in between the evening classes – just a simple pesto with broccoli and pine nuts. I took Scully for a long walk at lunch time. Thankfully the weather was much nicer today than yesterday, with sunshine and temperature almost up to 19°C.

Here’s a view from the walk, looking over the HMAS Waterhen navy base, out over the upper harbour and Parramatta River:

Down by the water, on the nearby civilian marina, I spotted this little black cormorant:

They’re moderately common around the water regions here. Further along the cove was this damaged yacht, which is definitely not common. It wasn’t here last time I walked the same way. I presume it must have been damaged in the heavy rain weather last week. I don’t expect it’ll be here for long – the authorities like to keep this area pretty clean.

In other news, I got a call from my mother, using her neighbour’s mobile phone. Her Internet and VOIP landline were down. I recently switched her to a new ISP to save money, and the old account was cancelled yesterday, and now I’m thinking that the fact that it was working for the past week was only because it was still connected to the old ISP, not the new one, an I need to go over and reconfigure the modem or something. Which is inconvenient since she lives an hour’s drive away. So I’ve made arrangements to go over on Saturday. It’ll be easier than trying to talk her through the configuration over the phone.

Fixing? the clock

So, after yesterday’s weirdness with my bedside digital clock/radio, today I tried to address the problem by taking the device apart. I unscrewed the four screws on the bottom, and pulled the case off. It was easy to locate the wires leading to the speaker, and I snipped them so that the radio could not play any more. Then I reassembled the clock and plugged it in, to see if the digital display would still work.

It did! So I put it back in the bedroom, plugged it in, and turned it on. I set the time to the correct time, which was 2:05pm at the time. But strangely the display segments in the first two digits were kind of half lit, looking like a digital 18, with the 2 showing brighter. It’s never done anything like that before. Anyway, I left it, thinking that’s probably good enough.

When my wife got home from work, I said I’d fixed the clock, and I went in to look at it. And now it was displaying the time in 24-hour mode! 17:30 instead of 5:30pm. And the weird thing is that the clock doesn’t even have a 12/24 hr mode switch. I didn’t know it could even do 24-hr display mode!

I just went in now to have another look. Now instead of 8:25pm, or even 20:25, it’s displaying 0:25, with one segment lit before the 0. It’s the 7-segment display AND of “1” and “2”. It’s trying to display a 2, but the first digit is only a half digit capable of showing only 1, since the clock doesn’t have a 24-hr mode.

Well. I have no idea why it’s trying to display 24-hr mode, but at least I can understand what the display means and read the time.

The rest of the day I wrote up a lesson plan for the new week’s ethics topic, on “Strengths and Weaknesses”. I had one class tonight, but only one student showed up, and I ran out of questions before the end! I had to make up a few other things to talk about to fill in the time. Hopefully it’ll go better with more students.

I also made a comic and walked Scully, taking her on a longish walk around the harbour shore. The day was warm, but overcast and humid. Tomorrow will be even hotter, a last blast of summer.

Spooky happenings

Our clock radio in the bedroom started blaring out radio at 6:07 this morning. Since I haven’t used the alarm (or radio) function for probably over 10 years now, I had no memory of where the controls were, so I had to turn the light on to see. Despite switching the radio off several times, it wouldn’t turn off! And then the digital clock readout started switching erratically between the correct time and 0:57. Eventually I had to switch it off at the wall plug to get it to shut up.

I’d intended to sleep for another hour, but this woke me up early and I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I’ve been wandering around in a bit of a tired daze today.

I searched online for a replacement digital clock for the bedroom. I need one with a red display, since that’s the least disruptive at night when trying to sleep. But most of the ones I could find have white or green displays, which are just too bright and bad for night vision, or unlit LCD displays. I did find some with red displays, but they were all giant displays for people with bad eyesight. I don’t need a 40cm display for my bedside clock! And they’re all battery powered, rather than mains powered. I don’t want to deal with batteries.

It seems like a simple red digital bedside clock is something that nobody makes any more. I might have to trawl second-hand stores looking for one. Or maybe tomorrow I’ll try opening the current one and seeing if I can disconnect the radio and maybe with luck the display will keep working.

Other than dealing with that, I had 5 ethics classes online, plus three hours in at the university doing Data Engineering tutoring for the students on their assessment project.

Tomorrow… hopefully I can sleep in…

Dealing with tech issues

I had a couple of annoying tech issues today.

A few days ago I logged into my University of Technology Sydney account to check my email there. I found, to my surprise, an automated transcript of a phone message, left by the project manager of the Standards Australia photography committee. This confused me, because I never gave Standards Australia any contact details related to the university. They have my direct mobile phone number, and should be calling that. I don’t even know if there is a UTS phone number that is supposed to be able to reach me – I don’t have an office there, and as far as I know I haven’t been assigned a number there. SO this was a big mystery.

Today I emailed the project manager about something else, and mentioned that I was surprised to find a phone message from him at UTS. I asked him what number he called. He replied and confirmed that he’d tried my mobile number (though didn’t quote the number). And he just tried again, but it diverted to a message bank. My phone had not rung at all.

Now I was worried. I couldn’t even imagine how this was happening. How had someone calling my mobile been diverted to a UTS message bank without my phone even ringing? Was this happening to everyone who tried calling me?? HOW??

I got a friend to try calling my phone to see what would happen. He got through – my phone rang and I answered it. No diversion to a message bank at UTS. I went back to the project manager and asked him again specifically to give me the phone number he had called, and to check SA’s records to see if any other number was listed by them on their systems.

A few minutes later my phone rang, and it was the project manager! He was confused too. I stepped through the sequence of events with him, asking him to state what number he was calling. He said they only had one phone number for me, my mobile number that he’d just called, and that he just used Microsoft Teams to place the call…

And that’s when the shoe dropped. He had MS Teams place the call, so he wasn’t actually entering a phone number. I use MS Teams routinely at UTS. I was describing all this to a friend in a chat window at the time, and I said the guy was using Teams to place the call, and he said, “Ohhhh…. Okay, it was all weird and inexplicable before, but now it suddenly makes sense. Yeah, Teams will screw up stuff like that all the time.” Presumably what was happening was he opened his contacts in Teams, hit the “phone call” button, and Teams decided that since I have an account at UTS, it should direct my call there, instead of, you know, to my actual phone number.

I mean, that explains what must have happened, but why would Teams do such a stupid thing? Who on Earth thought that use case was a good idea? And presumably this is going to keep happening unless the project manager actually picks up the handset and dials my number manually. Ugh.

Anyway, the second issue I had was with Numbers (the Apple spreadsheet). I had a bunch of cells with date values in them, which I wanted to format just to display as months. I had them formatted as “January 2025”, but wanted to change them to “Jan 2025” format to save some column space. So I selected the format drop-down list and was confronted with the following:

As you can see, every option under the sun, except the one that I wanted! Fortunately this was not as serious an issue as the phone thing, because I created a custom format and got what I wanted.

The other main thing about today was the weather. Wow. It was really hot. We got up to 43.3°C in parts of Sydney, although near the coast it was a few degrees cooler, but still around the 40°C mark. But then at 4pm a storm rolled in, dropping the temperature a good 15 degrees in just a few minutes, strong winds blew in, and the clouds unleashed heavy rain and hail. We got some hail at my place, but my wife reported that where she works, just half an hour’s walk away, there was a lot of hail, blanketing the ground in a white layer like snow.

A few hours later now and several storm cells have come through, dumping heavy rain and splitting the sky with lightning and thunder, separated by calmer periods. The temperature now is below 20°C, which is a nice respite from the heat.

Tonight I started this week’s new ethics class topic, on “Opinions vs Facts”. I spent the morning writing up the lesson plan. The class went well, with some very interesting and nuanced discussion from the kids on the differences and similarities between opinions and facts in various tricky contexts.

New content today:

No nuts!

I learnt a weird new fact about Italian today while watching an Italian YouTube cooking video.

There’s no word for “nut” in Italian.

The language only has words for specific types of nuts: walnuts, almonds, peanuts, hazelnuts, etc. In a sense, this is logical, since most of the plant parts described in English as “nuts” are diverse and botanically and anatomically unrelated. A bag of mixed nuts in Italian is called a bag of frutta secca, which literally means “dry fruits”.

Rewinding to this morning, after I did my two ethics classes I backed up my iPhone and then went into the city to the Apple store to buy myself a new release iPhone 16. My current phone was an 11, so six years old, and the battery life was really starting to degrade noticeably. In fact for the walk I did on Tuesday I started with a fully charged phone, and it was almost empty by the time I got home. So I decided it was a good time to upgrade.

I traded in the old phone for partial credit on the new one. I got an iPhone 16 Pro model, with the superior camera. I take a lot of photos, and the extra telephoto focal lengths are the biggest feature for me. When I got home I spent some time checking out the camera features and I’m pretty impressed. Also the new camera control button is pretty cool and should be extremely useful.

I had to restore the phone from my backup, which went smoothly, but took some time. My old phone had a leather case which I liked. but I noticed the cases for the 16 only come in silicone, which I dislike the feel of, and polycarbonate plastic, which seems tacky to me. Also the case doesn’t allow the phone to lie flat like my old one did, due to the protruding camera lenses on the back. That was one of the main reasons I had a case on the old one. So I opted not to get a case at this stage. I’ll see how I go with the naked phone for a while before deciding if I want a case or not.

New content today:

The great MediaWiki upgrade

I ticked off a major to-do task today!

I finished porting to Obsidian the major chunks of my private wiki that I wanted to be absolutely sure I had backups of. That took most of the morning.

At lunchtime I took Scully for a long walk. I had a couple of things to do that could be combined into a single walk in the same direction. Firstly, a friend had reported that the hospital near me had large bins of COVID rapid antigen tests available, for anyone to come and take, free of charge. Another friend recently caught COVID and is in the recovery stage, but still testing positive, and has run out of tests. I said I could walk up to the hospital and get some, and he asked if he could arrange a contactless pick-up from my place, so he didn’t have to go into the hospital while infected.

The second thing was that the main light in my kitchen had been on the blink. It’s a fluorescent tube light and was starting to do that annoying thing where it takes 30 seconds or more to turn off after you flip the switch. I’ve replaced the tube before, but this time I wanted to actually remove the fluorescent fitting and install an LED replacement light. I thought I’d have to get an electrician in to replace the entire light fitting – but recently I discovered that a company makes an LED “tube” that fits into the fluorescent fitting, with no rewiring required. So I wanted to go to the hardware store to buy one of those.

Fortunately, the hospital and hardware store are near each other, so I took the chance today to go on an expedition to both. And as it happens that walk takes me past a decent pie shop that I don’t go to normally, so I took the opportunity to grab a vegetable curry pie and a spinach/feta roll for lunch. My friend was right about the COVID tests – there were three large tubs full of them, boxes containing single RATs. I was a bit self-consciously grabbing a half dozen when a nurse came out and said, “Get a bag, fill it up, take as many as you want.” So I grabbed another ten or so. They expire in a couple of months, so there’s no real use taking dozens of them, but I certainly now have enough for my friend and some spare in case we feel sick in the next couple of months.

And on the way home from the hardware store I popped into the nearby electrical appliance store to book a site inspection for my kitchen, to get a quote for installation of an electric induction cooktop. We currently have a gas cooktop and I’ve been thinking for a while of replacing it with induction. The store needs to do an inspection to make sure our fuse box and power supply are adequate, and also check out the details of removing the gas line for the cooktop and wiring in the induction cooker. So they’re coming next week to take a look at that. Once we have a quote for the installation, I can go ahead and start looking at models and select a new cooktop (assuming the installation quote is reasonable).

Back home after the lunch walk, I launched headlong into the main task of the day: Upgrading MediaWiki. The installed version was 1.24.1. The latest version is 1.40.0. But the upgrade documentation said you can’t upgrade directly from versions lower than 1.35. So I had to do it in two steps: upgrade 1.24.1 to 1.35.11, and then upgrade 1.35.11 to 1.40.0. I was a bit daunted before I began, but the steps were fairly straightforward, and there was no real difficulty at any stage. It was just a matter of doing all of the steps carefully. I started with dumping the wiki pages to XML, and also backing up the entire database, before changing anything. From there it wasn’t too bad, and I was pleased when the update script ran successfully (on the second try – I had to add a configuration line to the settings file) and the 1.35.11 version seemed to be working. Then I repeated the whole thing with version 1.40.0, which went a bit quicker because I knew what I was doing this time.

It took most of the afternoon, but I did it! And the reason was so I could upgrade my web server from PHP 7 to PHP 8, hopefully without breaking MediaWiki. The 1.24.1 version had broken when I tried switching the server to PHP 8, which was the whole reason why I needed to do this upgrade. So the last step was switching it over to PHP 8… and it works! Phew!

And I was done in time before my three ethics classes tonight, on the new topic of “Media Bubbles”. They went pretty well. It’s a complex topic for 10-12 year old kids, but they all did really well with it.

New content today:

Intro to Intro to Machine Learning

Today I worked on a presentation for the university Data Engineering course I’ve been tutoring this semester. I felt there was a bit of a gap in the course material. The first few lectures talk about types of data, experimental collection of data, basic statistics (such as mean, standard deviation, etc), plotting and presenting data, and fitting data (linear regression), and hypothesis testing.

And then the next lecture is a guest lecturer from MathWorks who comes in and talks about using MATLAB to do machine learning. It’s a large jump in complexity and depth of material, and I feel like many of the students are left a bit floundering like they’ve suddenly been thrown in the deep end. There’s no set up of the context or motivation for machine learning, or what it’s actually trying to do with the data.

Last lecture I spoke with the professor about this and he agreed with my idea of adding a bit of introductory context material to set up the machine learning content. We actually have an opportunity to deliver this because for the next three weeks we just have project sessions where the students show up to work in their teams and ask us questions if they need any guidance. We do the same thing in the Image Processing course in semester two, and there we’ve had a “bonus material” lecture at the start of one of those session. (Last year I did this, talking about the science and engineering of photography.)

So today I made a short presentation (just 9 slides), that we can give to the students on Monday. I set up the problem that we want to solve – classifying things by examining measurements—data—about them. I give examples to show how general this problem is and the wide range of important applications. Then explain why it can be difficult and how we can approach it in a data analytical way. And then how we can apply automated algorithms to do it in various different ways. Which leads into the machine learning examples that they did in the aforementioned previous lecture.

I tested it on my wife and it only took about 15 minutes. (And she now has a better understanding of the context of machine learning than most people!)

Also today I started work on writing a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips. I hope to get that done in time to photograph Lego on Tuesday morning.

The forecast rain hit today – it was much cooler than yesterday. But still we managed to set a new record for number of consecutive days in Sydney with maximum temperature 20°C or more. Looking at the Bureau of Meteorology records, it looks like 193 consecutive days – the last day we had a maximum below 20°C was 17 October, 2022. The forecast for every day in the coming week is at least 22°C, so the streak will probably extend past 200 days.

New content today:

Getting into Obsidian

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I’d downloaded Obsidian and wanted to try it to see if it could replace Microsoft’s OneNote as my main note-keeping application. I started using it today, and I’m liking it so far.

I created a single vault which I’m planning to use for all my stuff – after doing a bit of searching and reading on the merits of one vault versus multiple vaults. I started making notes and folders and organising things, and it’s all very intuitive and suits my preferred means of organising things in hierarchical folders. I’ve started transferring some things from OneNote, and the folder structure works well. I haven’t done any linking yet, and have just started to apply a few tags, neither of which are available in OneNote (at least on MacOS – I seem to recall using links to other OneNote pages in Windows many years ago). I think they’ll be useful, but I need to get used to them and look for places to apply them to take advantage of their organisational capabilities.

I also turned my vault into a git repository, and pushed it to Github for version-controlled backups. There is an option here to use Obsidian Git, a community plugin which provides Github integration into Obsidian. The issue I have is that I’m not sure exactly what Obsidian Git provides, and if it’s anything I can’t just do on the git command line. Specifically, I was wondering how git would interact with the fact that Obsidian can rename and move files. If I just commit changes in git, will it know that a file has been renamed (thus maintaining its version history), or will it assume the old file was deleted and a new file made with the new name? (A friend of mine tells me that git is smart enough to figure out if a file has been renamed.) Ideally I’d use “git mv”… but if I actually go into the Obsidian vault and do that, will Obsidian know what I’ve done or get confused? Is Obsidian just a viewer/editor layer on top of the vault, and it will show me whatever I do in the vault (using another program like git), or does it need to keep track of changes in there itself? I don’t know.

Ad secondly, does the Obsidian Git plugin just add a bunch of buttons to the Obsidian UI so you can do git operations from the UI rather than from the command line? Or is it actually intercepting Obsidian operations like renaming a note and issuing “git mv” commands and stuff like that? The documentation gives no indication either way. If it’s the former, than I’m just as good using the git command line, since I’m comfortable with that. Anyway, this is a relatively minor issue, which I’m sure will become clearer as I use Obsidian more, and learn by trial and error.

The other thing about today was that it was very rainy. My wife took Scully to work this morning to give me free time to photograph that batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips that I wrote yesterday. After doing that, I went to pick up Scully and go get some lunch, and it was cloudy but I didn’t really expect any rain. However when we got to a shopping area where I planned to grab something to eat, it bucketed down, very heavy rain for about half an hour. I decided to get a table at an Italian place and have pizza for lunch, since it was one of few places where I could sit out of the rain with Scully. It was still raining steadily, though less heavily, when we were done and had to walk back to the car, so we got a bit wet.

And tonight I started the week’s new ethics topic, on UFOs (really more of a critical thinking topic, this one!).

New content today:

Trying Obsidian

Today was fairly mundane: did a 2.5k run, wrote and assembled a Darths & Droids comic strip, worked on brief outlines for future ethics classes (one on Movies for the younger group, and one Colonisation for the older kids), taught three classes.

Last night I started watching Dune (2021). I seldom have time to watch a full movie in one sitting, instead splitting them in half over two nights. And given Dune is a long running time at 2.5 hours, it’s been sitting in my to-watch list for some time now, but I finally decided to tackle it. I’ve never read Dune, or seen the prior movie version, and the only things I knew about it were the name of Paul Atreides, and that there’s a planet with a desert, giant worms, and Spice. So there was a lot of exposition covering stuff that was new to me. In fact, the first half of the movie seemed to be almost entirely exposition and teaching me background stuff that I may need to know when the action actually starts. And then I only found out today when I told my friends that apparently this Dune movie is only the first half of the novel, and a sequel is being made which will cover the second half! Anyway, I’m enjoying it so far.

The other interesting thing I did today was decide to try using Obsidian and see if it’s a good solution for keeping my notes in. I’m currently using Microsoft’s OneNote, which I quite like and have extensive notes in, but Obsidian’s use of plain text files and independence of Microsoft’s cloud sync are appealing, and I understand it also has hyperlinking and some other features that I will find useful.

I’m using OneNote for two very different sorts of notes:

long term notes that I add to and edit occasionally, that I want organised in hierarchies and links, and that I want to have saved safely without necessarily needing the ability to access from mobile;
short term notes such as shopping lists, or lists of things for travel such as hotel addresses, or scripts for comics that I’m working on, which get edited and erased a lot, and which I want to be able to sync and access from mobile (and even by my wife from her phone too, for the case of shopping and travel lists).

I’m thinking I’ll try migrating the former to Obsidian and using Github as a change tracking repository, while leaving the latter in OneNote, which it seems better suited for. I haven’t started doing this yet – I need to play around in Obsidian a bit first and learn how to use it.

New content today: