The Denon SACD player. See below. It’s in bits now.

Lovely morning so far. Lots of rain last night and it looks like we’ll get more today. Yesterday reached 23.5deg, the warmest July day for three years. Great, more please.

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Busy morning: I’ve had electricians, one master and one apprentice (who had to get up in the ceiling) to change the wiring on my dining area pendant light and install two LED downlights. I bought these new lights last summer but it had to wait until winter to install them as with a tin roof, it would be too hot up there.

So, lovely, the switching works now as it was intended to do on the original plans. The plan hadn’t been followed when the house was built – they’d wired the dining pendant lamp to the wrong switch. Now I can have just the pendant light on, or the new LED down lights only, or both. It’s such a bright sunny morning that I can’t see the effect yet, so I’ll have to wait for tonight.

The electrician said their rate is $140 an hour. Wow. The plumbers cost me $150 an hour a few months ago to install my new kitchen sink mixer. And he took the old one away – I didn’t notice at the time and I think that was a bit naughty. Anyway, this job cost $259 including a bit of cable and one lamp which had blown.

The main man had a strong British accent which he said was from Northamptonshire in the UK. Then he asked me where I was from (implying that I was from the UK too). Ha, no mate, I’m seventh generation Aussie and proud of it. But we do go back to the 13th century in England, Devon and Cornwall. I have the book to prove it.

Croft Castle  by David Merrett Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org

I’ve wanted to go to England for the last few years to see Croft Castle in Herefordshire and lay my claim to at least one brick, but this virus has put a spike in those plans for the foreseeable future. Even if travel was possible now, I wouldn’t dare to go to England. The virus is rampant there – world’s highest death rate per capita, more than 46,000 deaths. Ugh. So I don’t know if I’ll ever get to see our heritage now. Crumbs, I’ve been to the UK four times, yet I never took the trouble to see the castle. It shows the truth of  “do it now, or you may not get the chance.”

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The poor bloke was moaning and groaning – when I asked, he said he had a couple of broken ribs (probably cracked?) from falling off a ladder a few days ago. He was a mature guy, in his fifties I’d guess. Falling off ladders is one of the major risks for guys, I read recently, even resulting in deaths. Hmmm, I still need to get up on a ladder myself to replace another downlight. Yeah.

Then when the Silver Chain cleaner arrived an hour later, she soon started moaning too. She seemed to have rolled her ankle as she came to my front door. She finished my cleaning but said she’d have to drop the rest of her appointments and go home for the day. It’s a battleground here, I tell you.

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I’ve come across a bête noir word of mine, pre-prepared, as in pre-prepared sandwiches. I hate this. If it’s prepared, why do they need to add the pre in front?

Also, I’ve written before about starting answers to questions by starting with “So”. Almost everyone interviewed on TV or radio does it now, even doctors, scientists, highly qualified and intelligent people: “So, we have done experiments…”; “So, the budget deficit for next  year will be…”; “So, I attended the meeting last week…”; and so on and on. It’s another pandemic which has infected speakers from all over the world, even BBC people. So stop! It’s redundant.

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Now that I’ve got the Sony DA3000ES amplifier, bought some months ago and not yet in service, I’ve been wondering what to do with the existing amp, a Pioneer VSX323 AV amp. Lo and behold, an ad popped up on Facebook Marketplace two nights ago wanting to buy a good amp. I jumped in and answered him with my model and price.

He replied very quickly and said he’d take it, no haggling, could he come and collect it “tomorrow”, which would have been yesterday. Yes!, I replied and told him I’m in Butler.

Unfortunately he lives in Mandurah and he wasn’t prepared to come all this way. “What if I meet you in Freo?”, I said. Nah, won’t be up that way either. Lost the sale, unfortunately. I did consider doing the drive down there so as to grab the sale while I can. I don’t mind a drive like that, especially in the MX6. Maybe I should send a message again and say I could come on the weekend?

For sale, Pioneer VSX323 5.1ch, 100W per channel, four HDMI inputs, AM/FM tuner, all the inputs and decoders you can eat, $175. Excellent, 2014 buy, unmarked condition, no faults.

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My two second-hand buys earlier this year have not been trouble free, I’m afraid. The Sony amplifier seems to be OK except for one thing – the volume control on the front fascia. It’s an encoder type where it turns an optical disc with a sensor that counts pulses (just like your car radio and most other things these days). Turn it slowly and the volume goes up slowly. Spin it fast and the volume jumps up fast.

But mine only raises the volume slowly, if at all, no matter how fast you turn it. Funny, it seemed OK when it first arrived, this problem has only developed recently.

It works fine from the remote control, so that narrows the problem down to the area of the rotary encoder itself, not the circuit it feeds. I’m not afraid to tackle it but with the SACD player in bits at the moment, I don’t really want to be taking another front panel off, with all its screws. I might just put it in place and rely on the remote, which is what I’ll be doing anyway. The front panel knob works, it’s just slow and erratic. Of course, if I put it into service, I’ll never get around to taking it out to fix this fault. Hah.

The Denon SACD player is a bit more serious. The first problem is that it won’t play anything except normal CDs. It won’t read either Super Audio CDs (SACD) or DVDs, which it’s supposed to. The guy who sold it never mentioned that and I didn’t think to take an SACD to check. He did demonstrate that the Eject button wouldn’t work, though. No worries, I said, I’ll fix that.

But now I’ve found it’s not just that button, most of the buttons on the front panel are very reluctant to work. Again, I’m not fazed. In a case like this, power supply! It’s almost certain to be a power feed to the front panel is low, if not the main power supply.

I’ve got the front panel off (with a million screws!) and had a look and can’t see any burnt or swollen components, so I’ll have to find a ‘mini-tast’ switch (tast means switch in German) and replace the Eject one.

Meanwhile I’ve got the main power supply board out – it’s a lovely old style analogue supply with two big electrolytics and many smaller ones to check and replace. It’s a bit like changing the piston rings and valves in a car after a certain mileage.

In addition, I found the complete laser assembly for this model is available on eBay, so I bought one for ~$35 from the UK and it arrived last week. If the power supply “rebuild” doesn’t fix the fault, I’ll change the laser. The service manual was available from the web so I’ve got the full instructions, plus a test voltage to measure to test the existing laser. TBD – To be done. What did we ever do before the internet???!!

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I made a donation on the internet to the ALP campaign in the Eden Monaro by-election a few weeks ago, just  $20. Today I’ve had two paper letters, one from the ALP campaign manager there thanking me for the donation, and in a separate letter, a paper receipt.

This is crazy, I don’t want paper letters and all the rigmarole that entails. Someone had to fold those letters, stuff the envelopes, stamp and post them, then Australia Post has to sort them, transport them interstate and deliver them. It’s such a waste. I read them, then put them straight into the bin. I’ll have to email them and say, “Don’t waste trees, don’t waste time, don’t waste energy!” Just do things by email.

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Which reminds me, my land-line phone is still not working since the internet outage about a month ago. I’ve checked everything I can, and I’m paying for this service, so iiNet, fix it! Or maybe I should just drop the land-line. My mobile seems to be reliable enough these days. I went mobile-only back in the Trigg house in the late ’00s but it kept dropping calls so I went back to land-line as well. I’ve been reluctant to terminate it because I’ve distributed this 9562 xxxx number everywhere and I do want to be contactable. Who knows who will try to contact me, fail and not have my mobile number?

Funny how we always had paper phone directories with our name, number and full street address before, but they’ve gone bye-byes and there’s no directory for mobile numbers. Why? I think there should be.

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Which reminds me, I got a text message from the Commonwealth Bank yesterday telling me that $96 had been deposited into my savings account. Huh? It turned out to be from WA Seniors. It’s an annual goodie from the State government. Good stuff.

But I’m not using that CBA account any more. It’s still active, but I’ve disengaged myself from that bank due to their unethical and bad behaviour.

So I got onto the web (yeah, as I said… ) and found their web site so I could change my bank details. But to look deeper, I had to log in, and found I don’t have a login. I had to try to create one.

I said “try”. It wants a lot of detail, including a passport type photo and all the other stuff. But when I got to login name and password (i.e. create one and enter it), I struck trouble. Their web form will not accept ctrl-V, paste, into the password box, nor will it let you see what you’re typing (only dots). Huh?  I use a password manager program (Dashlane) which has a password generator. This lets you copy the randomly generated password to the clipboard and paste it as required. But I couldn’t paste it into this WA Gov form.

Eventually I wrote the password down and manually typed it in, but without being able to see my typing to check that it was right. Then I found it wants another copy of the password and again, you can’t paste!  Aaaarrrgh.

Finally, I got it right and hit the complete button. Error. Please try again later. So I waited a while and started again. Same result, Error.

Fed up by now, I phoned the land line number. An elderly lady’s voice answered and after explaining the problem, she said she can’t take my new details over the phone, it has to be done on a paper form which she’ll post out to me. But she needs my new address to send it to (they still had my Trigg address and phone and old email address) so she took that down over the phone, with my mobile number. If she could do that, why do I have to fill out a paper form as well?

I asked about the error messages. Yes, she said, our web site has been crashing a lot lately. Probably because everyone’s doing what I was doing. Makes ya wonder.

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Similarly, I’m still waiting on DHL to collect the faulty Lenovo laptop for return to Sydney. It’s the end of the second week of emailing and waiting for instructions. I did get an email from DHL on Tuesday, after asking Lenovo to give them a prod, and I was told the pickup would be today. But no, Lenovo phoned this morning and asked what’s happening. I told her, and gave all the required numbers and she has rescheduled DHL to come tomorrow now. Two full weeks it’s taken. Meanwhile, they’ve still got my money and I have to sit here and wait for someone to come. Grrrr.

At least my friend is happy now. He was upset by the faulty Lenovo (it obviously couldn’t have been QC checked properly) and didn’t want to deal with them again.

The Lenovo laptop camera fault.

He saw a Dell of the same specs in JB Hifi last weekend and after talking to me about it (thanks, KG) he bought that instead. It was $100 cheaper than the Lenovo, too. Bonus. He had trouble setting Windows 10 up on it but took it back to where he bought it and they sorted him out, so he’s up and running on a brand new modern PC at last. His old laptop was running Windows XP, so was way out of date (20 years?). This new one will be a revelation.

The main thing he wants, and I have to agree, is that if you run Microsoft Word in Win10, you can dictate speech straight into it. It has speech-to-text built in. He wants that and I don’t blame him. I bought Dragon Naturally Speaking a few years ago to do the same, and although it works and is easy to use, I found my brain just didn’t seem to take to talking my thoughts. I find I can type at just the right rate to follow my thought-speech. Strange. My brain seems to run just ahead of my fingers, which follow my thought-speech. I guess I should give Dragon another try.

On the other hand, if I upgraded this PC from Win7 to Win10, which I should do anyway, I would have the speech recognition because I’ve got MS Word. Must do it.

Once you leave the coast around Cairns, the country rapidly becomes this dry, rugged landscape. Totally different.  This was 1987 – it’s probably all lush green now. 🙂   © PJ Croft 2020

Brrrr. It’s an absolutely beautiful day (ooops, I’d better remember to do my washing), but it’s chilly. 18deg and a clear blue sky.

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Aaaaw.  © PJ Croft 2020

I’ve finally got the Japan CD-ROM up to date and a couple of CD copies burnt, with a nice label and case insert, ready to go.

I originally made this in about 2004 and 2005 and some bits were missing, or the fonts had to be updated, and so on. Plus I’ve had to replace the original sound track because I don’t have the rights to use it. It was called Music for Zen Meditation by Tony Scott, an American jazz musician. I used to think about writing to him and asking permission, but never got around to it. It’s a great CD.

Instead I’ve replaced the sound track with “music” which was generated by a small program I used to have called Wind Chimes. It generated random computer music in any of about 50 different styles, such as tubular bells, wind chimes, astronomical sounds (Jupiter’s Rings) and so on. Because it’s random and computer generated, there are no copyright issues. I like it and you can always turn the volume down if you don’t.

I’ll post that CD out in the next few days.

PS: I’ve just done a search and Wind Chimes by Syntrillium Software is still available. Whether it will run on modern versions of Windows is doubtful. I’ve downloaded it and I’ll try it.

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I’ve just had delivery of another portable hard drive from Amazon. I reckon it’s a bit of a bargain, that’s why, after I bought one a couple of weeks ago, I’ve now bought another one.

It’s a Western Digital SSD 240GB for $48, and a Wavlink USB 3 enclosure, $14. Total $62 for 240GB – small, light as a feather, fast and USB powered. It’s so good that I may even order another one.

Crumbs, now that I’ve searched on Wavlink in Amazon, they make an amazing range of products. I suspect I may find other useful stuff. Hah! Pop goes the weasel.

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I read a lot of news about the Covid-19 virus every day, its effects on different countries, and it’s hard to feel optimistic about the state of the world right now.

Britain chose, by the narrowest of margins, to leave the EU. In the process, the British Labour Party fell in a heap and the public elected a bombastic, lying prime minister and government who don’t seem to be capable of dealing with the twin crises – the crash out of the EU without a trade deal and the virus at the same time.

As a result of Boris’s bungling, the UK now has by far the world’s highest death rate per capita and they are nowhere near out of it yet. It’s going to get a lot worse for them this winter and into next year.

It’s hard to believe that such a normally intelligent and capable country has fallen so far, so fast. The virus is crippling British industry at the very time when they need to be building themselves up to withstand the shock of leaving the EU. The British people don’t seem to have the courage or the morals to do the right thing in terms of testing and social distancing to bring the virus under control. As they head into the northern winter and flu season, it’s just going to get much worse. It will be a nightmare. Their death rate will go up and up and Britain will become even less of a world power than it has become. Very, very sad.

The United States – who could have known that the world’s most capable country could bungle the pandemic so badly? They are in crisis. Their infections are out of control and are getting worse by the day. Their curve is going up markedly (whereas ours flattened a couple of months ago and although it’s going up a bit now, we’re still in control). Florida alone, in the US, had over 12,000 new infections in a single day yesterday. That’s more than Australia has had in the entire pandemic period since January. Florida has 21 million people, Australia 25 million. We’re comparable in population, yet this US state has a Republican governor who seems to be as insane as Trump, who fights against masks and lockdowns and any control measures.

I have thought for years that America, as a country, has gone insane, and this pandemic has only proven me right.

In fact, it leads on to my next thought, that this pandemic has the potential to cripple America as a world power for many years to come, decades even. The Dump has already dragged them down to the point that most civilised countries don’t take them seriously any more. When their president tries to make himself look good by trying to reduce the rate of infection testing, this is so mentally unbalanced that other countries can only look the other way.

I can’t help thinking that China is going to be the big winner out of all this. I don’t suggest that they let this virus spread deliberately, but it’s sure working to their advantage by almost crippling their main adversary. They’ve controlled their infections in their own country, but I would bet that the party leaders are quietly congratulating themselves and planning their moves to exert greater world control.

While all this is going on, global heating and climate change is being forgotten, but it’s marching on regardless. I believe we’ve passed several tipping points, stages where irreversible changes have occurred which build on other changes to increase the effects of climate change. There’s no chance now of meeting the Paris Accords. Trump has seen to that by withdrawing from the agreement and doing everything he can to sabotage any climate mitigation measures he can within the US.

I truly believe it’s too late. The Earth is headed for temperature increases of 3, 4 or 5deg which will devastate the world. I won’t be here to see it but I’m truly sorry for the young of today. If I had any influence, I would tell young people to stop having children, because their world is going to be awful. By that, I mean more pandemics with new viruses, massive storms, floods, endless heatwaves and droughts, fires, cyclones, loss of fish and animals, and global refugee crises on a scale far worse than we’re seeing now.

And global political crises leading to wars. I foresee military conflict. When people are stressed and frightened, they think they want strong leaders and we’re already seeing the results – madmen taking power; Trump in America, Boris in the UK, Orban in Hungary and the new ultra right wing government in Poland. Putin in Russia and Xi Jinping in China. Bolsonaro in Brazil. It’s frightening. I’m outta here. Include me out.

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A snap that worked. © PJ Croft 2020

Brrrrrr. By northern hemisphere standards it’s not cold, but by my standards it’s brass monkeys. It was only 17deg max yesterday and I’ve been forced to put on an extra layer of insulation on top. Still wearin’ me shorts and sandals though. Crumbs, a bloke’s got standards to maintain.

If the doctor was right about chillblains, I’ve got ’em on most fingers now. Red, itchy lumps. Just a few, you wouldn’t notice them. I was forced to use a steroid cream last night and it worked well, stopping the itching. I’m not sure about the chillblains explanation. They don’t look like chillblains to me.

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Like father, like son. The son of a former, very well known and remembered premier of Western Australia has outed himself as a liar after being exposed in a news article.

This guy, 30 years of age and a self described wealthy businessman, promoted an animal park he was developing in a NW town by saying he had bought and was importing two Sumatran tigers from the guy in Arkansas or Florida or somewhere who made a big splash in a Netflix show. Trouble was, when the reporter talked to the TV show guy, he denied the sale and said he’d never heard of this West Aussie.

So it turned out this local guy just lied to promote his business venture. Bare faced. At least he’s admitted it.

It should remind us that his father, when Premier of WA, was also partial to telling lies. He made promises to get elected that he never went close to keeping and in fact he came close to bankrupting the state treasury. He went from a balanced state budget with low debt from the previous Labor government to us being left with a state debt of $15bn which we’re still battling to reduce. He also said he was going to build a gas pipeline from the North West Shelf gas fields near Broome to Perth and provided figures at a press conference about it. But the reporters straight away saw errors in his figures and pointed them out to the premier’s face. He just stonewalled. It was amazing and so embarrassing. He denied the errors even though all the reporters could see them. So he was a liar too. As I said, like father, like son and like Liberal.

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ABC News 18 July 2020: “Seventy-three millionaires paid no tax in 2017-18, while Australia’s richest people live in Sydney’s Double Bay, on average earning more than 13 times the nation’s poorest, who live in central-west Queensland.” [Yeah, the rich are reporting artificially low taxable incomes because they’ve had all their dodgy deductions. The real ratio wouldn’t be 13x, it would be 50x or more.]

“There were 73 Australians who earned more than $1 million in the 2017-18 financial year that did not pay a cent of income tax, up from 69 the year before.”

Year after year, it’s the same – when you’re rich, paying tax is optional. Most choose the option of dodging tax completely. Their accountants grow rich themselves by devising complex schemes that skirt the law. In my opinion, this is criminality.

I know someone who thinks this is a game. He boasted to me about how he paid no tax because he “put everything through his family trust”. He boasted about “playing games with the tax people”. He denies it but I know what I heard. He wasn’t joking.

People who dodge tax still drive on the roads and freeways, use the airports, use the weather services and customs and border patrol, take their Medicare refunds, use the NDIS, want spouse and child allowances, want all the government payments they can get, but don’t want to pay for them.

Why is it that the government can’t devise laws which would force the rich to pay their fair share? It’s because they are great mates with the barons, with an eye on their own retirements or departure from parliament when they’ll benefit from the largesse of their rich mates. It’s a club. It’s large scale corruption and no-one is doing anything about it.

Except Michael West https://www.michaelwest.com.au/  I admire this guy tremendously. He is dedicated to exposing corruption and dodgy characters in politics and business, and he puts himself in the firing line of legal threats. As I say, this is the kind of person I admire. Tax dodgers? Low life.

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I’ve just been reading about transistors, billions of ’em. I’m sure you’ve heard of Moore’s Law, that the number of transistors that will fit on a silicon die doubles every two years. That prediction was made in the early ’70s and ever since then, it’s held roughly true, to the point where we reached 1 million in about 1990, 1 billion in about 2000 and we’re now up to about 50 billion. That’s 50 billion semiconductor junctions in an area of about 4x4cm max. Almost all the area of a CPU chip is taken up with the connecting wires and pins to the outside. All gold wires and gold plating.

This is territory where the interconnections between the junctions are around 7 nanometres in width. 14,000 would fit in the width of a human hair. Look at the line marked 10nm. That’s where the silicon chip interconnect lines are.

The wavelength of yellow light is about 600 nanometres! This is why the tracks can’t be seen by ordinary light microscopes. This is the size of bacteria and smaller than blood corpuscles.

That’s the second division here, between 1-10nm.

These lines in the silicon are so fine that they require the use of x-ray lasers to etch them. They are far smaller than the eye can see and smaller even than light microscopes can resolve. They require scanning electron microscopes to see. This is fantastic technology, and there’s far more to it than the average person knows. The book I read recently, Exactly, by Simon Winchester goes deeply into this.

People have been predicting for years that we’re reaching the limits of Moore’s Law, that we simply can’t fit any more semiconductor junctions onto a chip. Well, guess what. Some researchers have developed new techniques that break the barrier again. Hah, since I started writing this I’ve lost the article that led me to it. More to come… 🙂

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Do you know about M-Disc? Do you want 1,000 year durability of your backups? I do.

I’ve known about M-Disc for a couple of years and I’ve just got into it. I’ve just bought an LG external DVD drive which plays CDs and DVDs and records normal DVD-Rs, both write-once and rewritables. But these work by the laser in the drive heating a dye layer on the DVD, changing its reflectivity. Because it’s an organic dye layer, it can change over time and these discs are not guaranteed beyond about 10 years.*

The laser in an M-Disc drive, on the other hand, is a bit more powerful and actually burns the pits into the surface of the disc so that it’s permanent. By permanent, how about 1,000 years? That’s long enough for me.

Expensive? How about $24 for the drive and $30 for a box of five 25GB discs? I call that good backup value.

I have about 50,000 images on my hard drive, not all mine but most are. I consider them priceless. If I lost them I’d be distraught. I’ve got them backed up in a few different ways including the “cloud” (ASUS servers in Taiwan) but that requires internet access to retrieve them. I’ve also got a couple of portable hard drives but spinning disks are going to fail at some point in their life (right at the very end, actually). Solid State Drives (SSDs) have no moving parts but have a finite number of read/write cycles to them.

No, I’ve got all these but I’ve ordered three boxes of five M-Discs and I intend to save everything important to them and store them off site somewhere. For posterity? Who’ll care?

The other thing to do is to put the images into books and I’m doing that, but it takes a lot of time. Each book costs about $40 for 14″x11″ hardcover, 20 pages. That’s not bad too as they’re very accessible, but they’d burn in a fire.

* Back in the early 2000s I was using rewritable DVDs extensively and I was buying an unknown brand from BigW at about $5-10 each (? probably a lot less – can’t remember). I was a little worried about their durability, but now 20 years later, they continue to work fine. I can’t recall ever having a problem unless they got physically damaged. You can have a win.

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Speaking of images:

The colours on my screen are glorious.

I’m remaking my Japan interactive slide show from around 2005. I must apologise to my reader to whom I had promised a copy – I found glitches in it and had to remake it, which has taken some time, but it’s almost finished. Next week I hope.

The software is called PTE-AVStudio (previously PicToExe). It’s a Russian team and from fairly primitive beginnings 15 years ago, it’s a polished product now and very easy to use. Wnsoft – there’s a free trial version – the full price is US$139 which is not cheap, I admit. I started years ago so all my purchases are upgrades.

Isn’t that a lovely shot? It could be a Flemish artist painting. It’s the fleet of Dutch sail ships which are still active, but in fear of loss to bankruptcy due to lack of business. Picture: The Guardian

A real winter’s day today, a bit of sun early but lots of good rain and clouds now at 2.30pm. Not cold, but quite humid. And now steady soaking rain at 3.10pm. Lovely.

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I’ve just been reading an advisory notice from CHOICE about this brand of hand sanitiser:

Although the label says 70% alcohol, tests show that it only contains 23%. Does the company apologise and withdraw it from sale? Nope. They dodge and twist, prevaricate and dissemble. Pressure from Choice seems to be working.

In their article, they warn against hand sanitisers that don’t evaporate, don’t smell like alcohol and leave your hands feeling greasy. Guess what I’ve got:

Both these fit that description – they don’t smell like alcohol, they don’t evaporate and they leave my hands so greasy that I have to wash them off under the tap. I don’t really want to use them. The left one came from my pharmacy and the turquoise one came from Aldi. Will I complain? I don’t know. The labels say 70% alcohol but without a test, who’s to say.

I think I’ll see if they fit another test – do they burn, as alcohol should. Tune in for the next exciting episode.

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To me this dodgy sanitiser is just another example of dirty business from companies we were urged to trust by former PM John Howard in the 1990s when enterprise bargaining was the thing. He told us we could better negotiate 1-on-1 with our employers rather than collectively through our unions. Hah! Time and time again in this present time, employers are engaging in “wage theft”, underpaying employees any chance they get, defying awards, withholding pay unlawfully, dismissing employees without their entitlements, putting out faulty products as in this case, you name it, businesses are doing it.

Obviously not all companies and businesses are doing the wrong thing, but neither were the scores, hundreds of unions. You never heard about the good unions such as the APESMA, now known as Professionals Australia and it includes:

• Association of Professional Engineers Australia (APEA);
• Professional Scientists Australia (PSA)
• Professional Pharmacists Australia (PPA)
• Professionals Managers Australia (PMA)
• Professional Architects Australia (PAA)
• IT Professionals Australia (ITPA)
• Collieries’ Staff and Officials Association (CSOA)
• Translators and Interpreters Australia
• Local Government Engineers Australia (LGEA)
• Professionals Contractors and Consultants Australia

These are all “unions” by definition, yet according to Liberal Party ideology, they are all bad by association. It’s pathetic. Right wing blind ideology, pure and simple.

My union was the PREI when I joined it in the early ’70s, the Professional Radio and Electronics Institute. In the amalgamations of the ’80s, it became the CPSU, TCA (Technical, Communications and Aviation) Division. I hated that CPSU acronym. Communist Party of the Soviet Union! Surely they could have chosen a better name, but we were stuck with it. I was involved in union affairs then and I’ll never forget the warmth of my reception in the Perth and Sydney offices. The union people were great.

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I love electronics! This is a complete video camera with wi-fi transmitter and battery glued to the back of a beetle. It weighs 0,25g so the beetle wouldn’t even know it was there. The camera can even pan under control from a smart phone app. Fantastic.

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That reminds me, I said a couple of weeks ago that I had uninstalled the government’s CovidSafe app from my phone as it was said to be ineffective and insecure.

Well, I’ve since read that it’s been quite extensively revised and should now be safe enough, so I’ve reinstalled it again. Although for a program that we’re assured doesn’t track our movements, why does it ask permission for our phone’s location data when you install it?

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It’s remarkable how WA is so free of the fear and restrictions of Victoria and NSW, and the rest of the world due to this virus. We really are an island-within-an-island as long as our borders are closed. But although I don’t fear the virus (much), I do fear for the future. It looks as if this isolation will last a very long time, I mean years. It’s very hard on small businesses in this state.

On the other hand, maybe this could be the push this state needs to develop more industries and manufacturing. We have all the resources we need, especially cheap power both from solar and wind, and natural gas from the North West Shelf. Sure, gas is getting a bad press for its potential methane leakage, but these are problems that can be solved.

We have a large skilled workforce itching to get suitable work. Money is available at the lowest interest rates ever. All it needs is some courage and good ideas, and there’s no lack of the latter.

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I’m about half way through the Einstein biography I mentioned a few postings ago. The author is Walter Isaacson, publisher Simon and Schuster. All I can say is wow! This is so well written, yet so detailed and well researched. Everything is footnoted. He must have spent years putting it together.

The amazing thing is, as well as being a good writer, he goes into quite a deep level of the physics and seems to have a good understanding of the subjects he’s writing about. You can’t gloss over Einstein’s work (and the other amazing physicists and mathematicians of the time). If you want to talk about relativity, space-time, unified field theory, tensor calculus and quantum mechanics, you’d better know your subject or you’ll be dismissed as trivial. This author knows the subjects. I am so impressed.

I’m up to the early 1930s with Einstein arguing strongly and with conviction against quantum theory. It’s strange that a man who had to fight against sceptics who questioned and campaigned against relativity (time is not constant, clocks run slower, measuring rods get shorter etc) himself became a sceptic of this new theory that was also so hard to accept if you believed in a constant universe. I’m only half way into a 550 page book but I believe he never accepted quantum theory to his grave, even though all the great minds know its truth, however bizarre it is. Great book, recommended, although you’d better like physics. It could be monumentally boring.

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Isn’t that magnificent? The Statue of Liberty Nebula. © Martin Pugh

It’s a finalist in the Royal Observatory Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition Astronomy Photographer of the Year This is just one of many beautiful photos. Have a look.

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Fremantle Jail, April 2008, Canon G9  © PJ Croft 2020

Started out grey and raining, turned out blue sky and sunny. I had sheets out on the line overnight for a fresh rainwater rinse 😉 but they were nice and dry by 2pm. One had fallen on the ground. Ugh. But these are paving slabs so it wasn’t dirty.

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I forgot to mention – I fell out of bed again last night. Or I should say, I threw myself out of bed. At 1.20am.

I was having a dream where some guy was a devil in human form. He was menacing and about to attack a woman I know – no, not you dear. He was unclothed from the waist up and had his back to me and was standing over this woman, ready to do something bad. I came up from behind him and tried to wrestle him away and that’s how I came to wrestle myself onto the floor. OUCH! My knee was grazed on the carpet. I didn’t know what had happened for several seconds, still half in the dream. It’s lucky I don’t hit my head or face on the corner of my bedside cabinet.

Then I had to get up off the floor. Lucky I’ve got my Grandpa Rail, a seniors’ hand rail screwed to the wall. I struggle to lift my weight now, but I managed after a while.

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I’m just reading the news about the release of the “Palace Letters”, the letters between Sir John Kerr and the Queen leading up to The Dismissal in 1975. Many people alive now wouldn’t remember that damnable incident, but I do. I was 28 at the time and living in the flat in North Beach Drive, Tuart Hill. I can clearly remember listening to ABC radio one afternoon for a live radio commentary about what had happened and what was going on.

For anyone who doesn’t remember, the Labor government led by Gough Whitlam had been going through a series of scandals and political struggles with the Liberal-Country Party opposition led by Malcolm Fraser. There’s no doubt there was a degree of incompetence in some of Gough’s ministers, including Rex Connor, the resources minister, involving a loan of up to $4bn, a huge sum at the time (it’s a party order of Red Rooster now), from a middle eastern source.

The Liberals always thought they were the natural party to rule (still do) and Malcolm Fraser hatched a plot, there’s no better word for it, for a coup to take over government. He persuaded the Governor General, Kerr, to dismiss the Labor government using the so called “reserve powers” of the British Queen, our Head of State. And he did it, on 11 November 1975. I remember it well. November 11 is Remembrance Day, of course, where we remember our war dead each year. What an appropriate day.

It was a damned outrage and remains so to this day, a bloody stain on the Liberal Party that they can never be allowed to forget. All three protagonists have died now, Gough, Kerr and Fraser, and you can’t libel the dead, so despite Fraser’s late in life conversion to more progressive “liberal” views, he remains a traitor as far as I’m concerned, to be damned in history as the leader of a coup! Kerr was just a fool, unfit for this office. He also died in disgrace. He never lived it down, to be reviled by true blue Australians who think we should control our own affairs as a republic.

Anyway, the point of all this is that Kerr wrote a couple of hundred letters to “the Palace” and the Queen while he was hatching this plot. He must have written them almost every day which just shows his insecurity, in my opinion.

These letters are in the Australian National Archives in Canberra but have been embargoed for 30 years. We have not been able to see them.

The embargo period ended in 2012, I think, but the director of the archives still refused to release them to a researcher, Professor Jenny Hocking of the Australian National University. It’s a long story, told here. She had to take the case to the High Court to get a ruling that they are not private correspondence and must be released.

But even now, National Archives of Australia director-general David Fricker delayed releasing them for 45 days, until today. Why he is so determined to hide them, only he knows.

Finally, today, they have been released and they show that Kerr spoke mostly to Sir Martin Charteris (he died in 1999), the queen’s private secretary, and they show that this guy was giving advice to Kerr about whether he had the authority under Australia’s constitution.

So this unelected official in London, who was not an Australian citizen and would not be eligible to sit in the Australian parliament, was leading Kerr in his views. Views which resulted in the success of Fraser’s coup. Gross interference from London in Australia’s affairs, leading to the dismissal of a legitimately elected Australian government.

It was an outrage then and it remains so. The Liberals are forever stained with this monstrous coup. We should never let them forget it. Shit, it makes me angry.

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Some more pics from the Canon G9 I used to own:

Hay St, Perth, April 2008  ©  PJ Croft 2020

April 2008. This is dominated by a huge apartment building behind it now.

Perth, St George’s Tce, April 2008.  © PJ Croft 2020

Perth, April 2008  © PJ Croft 2020

North Beach, April 2008  © PJ Croft 2020

Blue Mood.   May 2008   © PJ Croft 2020

Blue Mood II   © PJ Croft 2020

There’s a story behind these pictures shot on Charles Riley Reserve, North Beach on 1 May 2008.

This was my dog exercise area for more than 20 years and I used to carry a camera pretty often. On this day, I’d just received a new lens for my Pentax K-5, a Sigma 10-20mm (still got them both, lovely combo). I was walking around the ovals on a glorious late autumn afternoon carrying this camera and lens, taking shots of all the colour, as shown in the bin shot and the sporting equipment. There were school kids everywhere, using the sports stuff – that’s why it was there. I took a lot of shots, including some of the kids in their colourful gear.

I went back to my car and was loading the dogs and my gear in the back when two guys came and stood in fairly threatening poses, one each side of me. “G’day mate. The women [mothers of the kids] have noticed you’ve been taking photos of the kids. What’s it all about?”

I was pretty shocked at this attitude, as you can imagine. I just said I was trying out this new lens and taking in the colourful afternoon. Then I showed the guys the pictures on the camera’s LCD, pointing out that with such a wide angle lens, the figures in any shot are very small. I also said I walk here very days and had been doing so for 20 years or more.

The situation relaxed and I was able to disengage, but bloody hell, I was shaking. They had been accusing me of being a pervert, taking photos of young kids. I was very, very upset. It’s not something you ever forget.

In subsequent days I researched the legal position, and legally I was perfectly within my rights. Anyone is entitled to take photos in a public place and if people are in the photos, the photographer does not have to have permission, unless the images are to be used for commercial purposes. If you are in a public place, you cannot object to someone taking your photo or recording video of you.

I printed out a card stating these legalities (there are more) and carried it in my wallet for a few years. I haven’t had any trouble since, but I’m always conscious of my rights when I’m out photographing. No-one should accuse me of anything and should expect retaliation if they accuse me or give me trouble. I know my rights.

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One of my buys from the Wish web site was a set of diamond grit coated circular hole saws. For about $10 I got a huge range from about 6mm to 50mm diameter drills. Diamond grit, eh?

I’ve just had to drill a hole about 16mm in diameter in the plastic cubby bin for my car, to take the extra cigarette lighter socket. Plastic. Should be easy with these diamond saws, yes?

Hah. Bulldust. Getting it started was difficult enough as there’s no centre drill bit, but eventually I got it going. But I drilled and drilled until my arms couldn’t take it any more. I reckon I got about half way through this plastic, about 1,5mm thick, but the saw just seemed useless. I wasn’t getting any where except to make a shallow circle. I had to use a mini grinder with a finely tapered bit to drill a series of small holes around the perimeter and then grind the joins out. Success at last, but I’m not too impressed with this diamond saw. They’re meant for concrete. I wouldn’t like to try it. But they were so cheap, even if I get one use from them, it’ll be worth it.

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Still no word from DHL as to when they will be collecting the Lenovo laptop. This is taking a long time. Too long.

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Shot with Canon G9  Nov 2007. See below. © PJ Croft 2020

Blue skies, warm air, luvverly. More please. But good rain all this week, we hope.

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Aaaarrrrgh! I said a couple of day ago that I’ve found my old Photobook projects so that I can update them and order more copies. Well, that was then, this is now. The one I’m working on crashes the program every time I try to get beyond page 6. I can’t proceed.

I’ve only been changing the font size and paragraph spacing (leading) so I can’t see why this would be causing a problem. OK, maybe if I start a new instance of the old file and see how far I get by only making a few small changes every few pages? I’ll try that and report. Trying to find the cause of crashes like this is very hard. I’ve rebooted and no other program is running. I’m on Windows 7 so Microsoft won’t be interested since support has finished. Oh well, battle on.

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I’m still on Win7 because a few years ago, when MS were offering free upgrades to Win10, every time I tried to upgrade I got an error message with an obscure code and couldn’t proceed. This was after the gigabyte sized download had occurred. I was still on ADSL at that stage with a slowish download (250Kb/s I think) and a download limit.

I tried multiple times and tried to follow the instructions on the MS forums for this known problem, but nothing worked so eventually I gave up. My Win7 was working fine, so I’ve stayed with it.

The free upgrade period ended so that sealed the deal. But now I’ve found an article that shows how you can still get a free Win10 upgrade, even now. But step 1 is “Ensure that your BIOS is up to date.” I’ve downloaded the latest BIOS from Gigabyte (my m/b is 2013 and has never been updated), but I’m hesitant to do the update, knowing that these things can go wrong. I guess it’s time to bite the bullet and do it. Tomorrow, OK?

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I’ve mentioned the Lenovo laptop I bought for my friend, that turned out to have a faulty camera (the laptop, not my friend). I first emailed them about it last Monday, asking to return it for a refund.

They sure weren’t in a hurry. It’s taken an average of 48 hrs for a reply to each of three emails I’ve sent, but finally they’ve agreed that I can send it back and they are even going to pay for the return freight courier, DHL. So now it’s all repacked and I have to await an email from the courier to arrange a pickup day/time. The wheels grind, but exceeding slow.

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Speaking of Microsoft, the new Flight Simulator final beta is being released on 30 July. But they’re calling it a ‘closed beta’, which presumably means only approved testers can get it. Frustrating. It’s supposed to be terrific, a big leap above all previous versions and I’m definitely going to buy it. I own the last big version from around 2007 (I think) so it’s been a very long wait. I’m no pilot (take off, fly a little bit, crash!) and that’s why I never put much effort into it before, but this new version has long flights programmed into it, requiring no skill but providing fantastic views from all over the world. That’s for me. I just hope it serves meals and free drinks too.

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My lime tree is fruiting like mad, more fruit than I can use. I’ve juiced a couple of dozen and frozen the juice into cubes, but I’ve put a few cubes into drinks and urrggh, even when frozen, it’s sour. Plenty of flavour but I’m not rushing to use them. I wonder what else I can do with fresh limes?

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Canon G9   Photo DPReview.

A photography web site I visit nearly every day wrote about the Canon G10 camera yesterday, saying how much he liked it. It reminded me that I used to own a G9 and there’s a funny story about it.

Canon G9   November 2007  © PJ Croft

Around 2009 I think, I sold mine to a friend. He took it on a drive to Victoria with his teenage son (no border restrictions in those days, no sir). They camped at various places on the way there and back, with campfires and tents.

When he got back he brought it to me to show me an odd artifact on the pictures, like a worm in one corner. Yes, literally like a small, fleshy worm in the bottom right corner of each picture. Weird, yes?

He explained a bit sheepishly that one night while camping, he’d gone to bed in the tent and this problem became noticeable next morning. He said he’d taken the battery out the night before and had left the camera on or near the grass in the tent with the battery door still open. It seems this worm had crawled into the battery compartment and got through a small gap into the interior of the camera, onto the image sensor! I said, weird, yes?

So the question was, what to do about it. I said the camera is unusable as it is, so you’ve got nothing to lose by letting me have a go at taking it apart to see if I could get the worm out.

So over the next week or two I proceeded to try to dismantle the camera so as to get at the sensor. I proceeded very slowly and carefully, one step at a time and got quite a way in, but I just couldn’t get any further without major dismantlement, beyond what I felt I could do. So I put it all back together for him, fully working, as good as new except for the worm. In the process of all this, by the way, I got a couple of good belts from the flash capacitor! Ouch! That flash capacitor retains its charge even when the camera’s been off for quite a while.

We mulled it over for an hour one morning and my friend took it across the table and proceeded to take it apart as I had done, but when he reached the point where I had stopped, he just kept going regardless of the risk of damage. And that’s the way it went. I was wincing at the cracks and crunches as he prised things apart, trying to get at that sensor. It was as if he was out of control. determined to get there or bust.

Well, it was bust, I’m afraid. I wasn’t going to offer any more help (or criticism) and he couldn’t get it back together, so exit one camera. All for forgetting to close the battery compartment door.

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Me in 1996 while I was living and working in Jakarta. That’s the housekeeper at my lodgings, Tini. She was so nice, couldn’t do enough for me, especially when I caught typhus. I mention this as I remember how fantastic Indonesians are (in Bali and Java anyway, all I know). If you get a chance to go, don’t hesitate. You’ll love Indonesia.

Another beeeyootiful day. Only 15C max, they tell us, but the sun is warm when you’re in it. I’ve been to the doctor this morning and one thing i showed him was two small lumps on the side of the right hand ring finger which get as itchy as hell if I scratch them. He told me they are chillblains! I haven’t had those since I was a boy. I  remember getting them on my ear lobes and pinnae in cold weather. They dried up and the top layer peeled off in those days.

This morning he showed me that it’s poor blood circulation, shown by whiteness under the skin on that side of the finger and other parts of my hands. Remedy – either massage your hands, or wear gloves, or buy warming pads, the type where you mix two chemicals together in plastic to get an exothermic reaction. It hardly seems necessary, it’s not that bad.

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My visit was to see the results of my 3-monthly blood tests and the news is not good. My HbA1c is up to 10, whereas I’ve had it down as low as 7 (good control) a year ago. My cholesterol is also up from around 2 to 4. That’s still under the “bad” line, though. The answer is very obvious, eat less, lose weight, exercise more. I don’t understand the cholesterol change. I never normally have any trouble with that. I mentioned that in the past few months I’ve been following web advice to take a teaspoon of MCT Oil, Medium Chain Triglyceride. It’s supposed to boost your energy levels. I hardly noticed anything so I’ll pour that down the sink.

I feel my diet is OK. I never eat junk food, I usually only eat two meals a day (skipping lunch) and what I eat is healthy stuff. But, too many carbs, including beer, and too much sitting. Yeah, writing these posts. I may have to quiet down.  Ha.

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Beijing 2014   © PJ Croft 2020

Taking her lunch home? Joking – anyone who loves dogs is OK with me.

Huh? Say again?  Beijing 2014  © PJ Croft 2020

China is a worry. I have nothing against the Chinese people, but their government is a Communist Party military dictatorship and they show repeatedly that they  are bare faced liars, hypocrites, oppressors and their word can not be trusted.

They said today that Australia must stop interfering in their affairs (i.e. Hong Kong) and breaching international law, yet they’ve shown no respect for the 1997 agreement with the UK government and the HK people. Anyone should have known this would happen. The Chinese government simply cannot be trusted or dealt with on a normal level. They breached international law by their annexation of the South China Sea islands, yet despite the ICJ ruling that it is totally illegal, they thumb their nose at us.

We’re in a difficult position. Australia, and Western Australia in particular, is hugely reliant on the Chinese buying our iron ore. Hugely! Any disruption to that would cause massive dislocation here.

That means we have to grit our teeth and be as polite as we can, while still standing up to them. It’s not easy, given the slanderous bile coming from the Chinese embassy in Canberra.

Surveillance of Chinese students here, industrial spying (and every other kind), insertion of Chinese agents in political organisations here (especially Liberal Party groups), one Chinese member of our federal parliament whose loyalties are questionable, political donations to MPs and party functionaries (in expectation of influence, of course). The list goes on.

The clear message is, China is an enemy of Australia and is not to be trusted in the slightest.

What gets me about the Chinese government in all these tactics is that they don’t have an ally in the world, except maybe North Korea. Every country in Asia would oppose them in any conflict. I shudder to think of a military clash, but even though China has 1.4bn people and massive nuclear armed forces, India has 1.3bn people and massive armed, nuclear forces too. Add in this country, Australia, which although small, has some pretty potent firepower and it’s well trained and led. Then add Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, Japan, South Korea, then the US and Europe and you have a very powerful counterforce. China would be mad to start anything. The problem is, they are mad.

The other thing is that history shows that oppression and evil never wins in the long run. How long the long run is, who knows, but the two world wars showed the way. Throughout history every attempt by tyrants to rule the world loses in the end, usually with the tyrants’ death.

Not much point in thinking or talking about this, is there?

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There’s a good article by Paul Keating (former Australian PM 1993-96 and the best PM Australia has ever had, in my strong opinion) in The Guardian today about the Superannuation Guarantee Levy. This is a scheme introduced by Mr Keating which started in 1993 with a small levy on employers of 1% of the employee’s salary to go into a superannuation fund for the employee’s retirement. The levy was to be slowly increased by 1% each year to a maximum of 12%. The whole idea was to take the load of age pensions off future governments and to give the employees a better income for their retirement.

It also had the effect of building a large fund to be invested on behalf of the employees in Australian businesses and enterprises. That fund stands now at around $3trn – that’s three trillion dollars.

Of course, in 1993 the employers objected mightily and predicted the sky would fall. In fact, nothing of the kind happened and the levy reached 9% while I was still working in 1999. But then it stalled when Liberal governments got in. Now it’s supposed to start moving up again, by 0.5%. Again, the right wingers are saying it’s the wrong time.

The problem is, for employers there’s never a right time. I was active in the union in the 1990s and I remember the National Wage Cases well. Every increase was vehemently opposed by the employers. Even when business conditions were the best in many decades, they predicted that any increase in employee wages, however small, would ruin them. It was so predictable.

Paul Keating points out all the fallacies in his article, including that one of the loudest opposing voices is David Murray, chairman of AMP. That company was shown to have committed serious breaches of ethical behaviour, amounting to some criminality in the 2000s and onwards. Their management, led by Mr Murray now, lost me almost all my $20,000 investment in AMP shares. Their management for the last 30 years has been abysmal. Time after time they were led into rotten investments by their top management until the shares fell from around $20 to their current level of about $2. What a fool I was to think they were blue chip. So Mr Murray can just shut up.

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I mentioned my Edifier computer speakers a few days ago as being marvellous for the money. I got an email from a local computer firm referencing these – these are the big brothers to my desktops. They’re still quite small, but big enough to consider using them for main hi-fi speakers, having an amplifier of 120W per channel built in. They are wireless too and remote controlled. The only problem is, $1039 per pair. I must admit I would like a pair!

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I forgot to mention – War of the Worlds on SBS last night, first two one hour episodes. Phwoooaaar, I loved it. This is my kind of program. I was tense and uptight, it was that good. It’s a silly story, of course, an attack from space, but it still makes a great story.

And it was all the better for being a European TV production. No stupid Yanks. I’m hooked.

Mt Bromo, Java 1989.  See below.   © PJ Croft 2020

Brrrrr, my fingers are cold enough to hurt. It’s only 15degC in the house, not very cold, but even so, I’m a bit chilled. It’s probably the music I’m listening to that’s chillin’ me.

It’s Rüfüs, a Sydney band that I quite like. It’s not music I’d normally listen to but one of their music videos was playing on a TV in a hotel room in Bali a few years ago (wow, time flies!) and it imprinted itself on my mind. I’ve bought a couple more of their CDs recently. I’m listening to Du Sol, Solace Remixed. It’s a bit doof doof but I can stand it. 🙂

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In the photo above, the guy is standing on the rim of Mt Bromo, the volcanic crater (and so was I, taking the photo). The mountain in the background is another volcanic cone, Gunung Batok, I think. Anyway, I was prompted to post my photo because the Guardian did a photo essay yesterday on a ceremony by Indonesians on Bromo and I was shocked at how badly littered it is now. Indonesia’s Yadnya Kasada Festival in Pictures, The Guardian

Yes, I climbed all those 200 nice clean steps. My photo 1989

This was recent.   © Juni Kriswanto/AFP/Getty Images

Unfortunately, hordes of people, no litter bins and how would you clear the bins anyway? It’s become a trash heap.

© Juni Kriswanto/AFP/Getty Images

I’m so glad I got there when I did, 1989.

Boy, that was a great trip. Perth to Bali for a few days to unwind, bus to Gilimanuk at the NW tip of Bali, bus ferry across the strait to Banyuwangi on Java, then continuing by bus and small van with drivers to the small village which was the access point to Mt Bromo.

The horseman and pony to take us the ~kilometre to the rim, just after dawn.  © PJ Croft 2020

We woke before dawn and walked down a long slope in the pre-dawn mist to the sand plain, where we took horses (ponies) to the crater rim in the background. I lost a good Swiss Army knife there somewhere.

The horsemen and their ponies waiting for us for the ride back.  ©  PJ Croft 2020

You can see the steps up the crater. Quite a gloomy place, at times.  © PJ Croft 2020

I’m there, the solo figure standing on the rim of an active volcano. No guard rail in those days. It was fine.  © PJ Croft 2020

This was such a great trip I could write a book about it, and I have, but it’s too expensive. Maybe I’ll do another one. I seem to have a lot of spare time these days. You too?

These were the staff at the guest house. Yes, I had a good time!  1989

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Speaking of music:

Abba
Biblical title of honor, literally “father,” used as an invocation of God, from Latin abba, from Greek abba, from Aramaic (Semitic) abba “the father, my father,” emphatic state of abh “father.” Also a title in the Syriac and Coptic churches.

There you go. And you thought the group’s name came from their own initials. This definition came from the Etymological Dictionary http://www.etymonline.com. As its name says, it shows the etymology of words, how they are derived or came into use. I find it excellent whenever I’m not sure of a meaning or how to use a word. Recommended.

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How did I get there? I found an article in The Guardian today on Johannes Brahms 1833 – 97. I’ve rediscovered his two piano concertos. Wonderful music, in particular the second (slow) movement from the piano concerto no. 1. It’s become an ear worm but one I don’t want to dislodge. I hear it in my head at any quiet time and wake up with it still there in the morning.

My feeling for Brahms before I read this article is that of a German composer who is good enough to be one of “the three Bs” (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms) but never quite makes it compared to the big two (not forgetting the big M, Mozart). My feeling about Brahms is “grandeur, majestic music, very serious, never lightweight”).

From the Guardian article: “Brahms’s works rarely feature among lists of the most well known classical tunes. But then his music never aims at instant effects; he never bothered with the distraction of opera, and he generally avoided religious music.”

That’s where I saw the word liturgical and looked it up, which led me to Abba, and the rest is history, as they say.

I’m listening to the Piano Concerto no. 2 at the moment. Phwooaaar.

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I’m rather pleased at the moment because I’ve rediscovered something else. In the past eight years or so I’ve made quite a few Photobooks of various kinds, mostly of my pictures but especially, two books of the Croft family history.

Late last year I was sending some old photos to my cousin Lisa in California and mentioned these books. She’s very enthusiastic to have copies, but when I went to the Photobook web site to order more copies I found my orders from a few years ago had not been saved, so I thought I’d have to redo them from scratch.

Voila, yesterday I discovered that the templates are stored on this computer, so I’ve been able to reopen them and bingo, ready to reorder. Of course, this gives me the chance to fix things.

One thing I’ve discovered while composing these books is that you’re never finished. There are always small typos, missing or extra punctuation marks, things which could have been said better and so on. It shouldn’t take me long to fix these and then I can place orders. The composition from this computer is sent over the web to the company in Melbourne, from where it gets sent to the printers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, who do the job and send the packaged book to me in Perth. Turnaround time is pretty reliably 10 days. Or was before the corona-virus.

In this case, I hope I’ll be able to put the addresses of my cousins’ (two of them) in the US and have them sent directly there.

Which leads me to the next book project. It’s amazing what you find when you rummage (there’s a word I must look up in the Etymological Dictionary) around in your folders. I’ve found several chapters of something I started some years ago, my memoirs. I’d forgotten that I got a lot further than I thought, so this is my next book.

Except! Photobook are very sneaky. Once you’ve composed your book in their software, you can produce page proofs but they aren’t high enough resolution for you to print your own book on your own printer. They want your money, you see.

So for these memoirs, I really, really should continue in my word processor and then copy and paste the text and images into a Photobook project. That way I could produce a printed book But it would be far too expensive. Their prices are about $30 – 40 for only 20 pages. Extra pages are somewhere around $1 per page. I did a book about 10 years ago and kept adding pages to total about 110. I ordered two copies and each one cost about $230 I think. Lovely book, and I’ve still got it on my shelf, but what was I thinking?

No, compose in a word processor and publish to a PDF file. That costs nothing to produce and you can distribute it on USB sticks, or if you really want paper copies, you can take the PDF document to a printer and get a bulk deal.

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Which leads on to “My Life and Times at TVW Channel 7”. I’ve virtually finished my contribution to Ron’s book project, but he only wants 2,000 – 3,000 words and four pictures. Ron, mate, no can do! Mine is 8,000 words and climbing, with dozens of pictures. I can’t dumb 33 years and hundreds of pictures down to your puny idea.

Ron is complaining (on Facebook) that no-one is sending in contributions, but maybe his conditions are too tight. I can’t do average – if I do something like that, it will be my best and that means I don’t fit his criteria. Sorry Ron, to do as you require, my contribution would be bland and generic. Nope.

Anyway, I might do mine as a Photobook, but expanded to be an Engineering History of TVW. After all, I was there from the days of valves (tubes or ‘toobs’), then the start of the first transistor equipment, then the first ICs, then the birth of the microprocessor, LSICs, full blown computers and PCs, analogue everything, then digital everything. I lived through it all. I’m busting to write about it.

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I must thank the people who are starting to follow this blog from different parts of the world. I seem to be notified of a new follower every few days now, with occasional very nice comments. I thank you very much. I hope you find the blog of continued interest.

I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong but I cannot find the widget that lets me show Followers on the blog title page. I suspect I have to upgrade to a higher cost plan to get it. I’ve thought about paying for the next level but haven’t seen the need yet. Maybe.

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Aaaah, it’s warmer now that I’ve got the air con going on heat. It’s a bright sunny day so with solar power, the air con should be running off the panels at no cost. Similarly, dishwasher and clothes washer. Solar power, best thing since… solar power.

Jogjakarta 1989    © PJ Croft 2020

Brrrrr, bit nipply. My washing’s on the line. I think it might dry, if I keep my eyes open and bring it in before it rains again.

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A few days ago I said I’d uninstalled the CovidSafe app from my phone because it has proven useless at what it was designed for. Not one person has been traced out of the six million downloads in three months.

This article: CovidSafe The Flaws (The Saturday Paper) bears me out. A guy called Jim Mussared, an expert in web software, having worked at Google on their site reliability team, looked at the app when it was introduced and immediately saw flaws.

“The day COVIDSafe launched, it took just four hours for Mussared to confirm his suspicions, and worse. Not only could the app be made to recycle the identifier, but it also broadcast the phone’s model and name along with it, transforming it into a “beacon” for anyone looking.”

He tried to contact the government departments responsible but got nowhere:

“At 1.19am, he sent his first email to an address listed on the Department of Health website to handle privacy inquiries. There would be no reply.
“It took eight days before Mussared spoke to someone at the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA), after he tried any department or organisation with a connection to the app, including the CSCRC. He describes the period as like “yelling into an empty room”.”

I’ll leave you to read the article, but the essence is that the Australian Government paid more than $1m for an app that not only doesn’t work, but was full of holes for hackers to exploit and broadcast your phone’s ID to others with the means to exploit it.

Yet when this guy tried to alert the government “experts”, he got nowhere. They don’t want to know. Depressingly familiar, yes? I wouldn’t be surprised if he isn’t pursued by ASIO or some other government cop force as a whistleblower or something.

If there’s any good news, it seems the app has been updated with proper security now, but it doesn’t automatically update on your phone. You have to download it again and reinstall it. Will I? Maybe. How pathetic. The bungling that goes on within government defies belief, and it costs us millions and billions of $$$. It doesn’t inspire confidence.

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I know it’s not Bali, it’s Java.    © PJ Croft 2020

News today that Covid-19 is rising fast in Indonesia, and Bali is not immune to it. It’s going to be a long time before I will dare to venture there again.

I know someone who sold his villa in Sanur before all this corona virus started. Lucky man! I suspect the prices of villas for foreigners will be on a steep downward slope now.

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More later. Nap time.

Mt Bromo, Java, 1989

Lovely blue sky out there, if a little rainy at times, and nippy. I suppose if I wore something over my T-shirt I might not feel the chill so much, but that would require me to get moving, something I try to avoid. 😉

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The saga of the Lenovo laptop continued yesterday. I phoned Lenovo support and after a short wait I was answered by a very nice Philippino sounding female voice. It turned out that yes, she is Filippina but resident in Malaysia, don’t know where. Her name is Jhoesly, pronounced Joshly. Very nice.

After I told her the problem, she got me to download and install a program called LogMeIn which, with a code she gave me, allowed her to take control of the laptop and do things just as if she were me. It was uncanny, seeing the cursor/pointer moving around on the screen, all controlled from Malaysia.

Anyway, she could bring the camera up and see the fault for herself – the blob (she was searching for a word to describe it for her report and I said, just call it a blob. I don’t think she was familiar with that fine English word.)

Finally she invoked a complete restart from scratch, which took some time because you have to go through all the Windows 10 setup steps. That meant she lost control and so we ended the support call after she initiated a case number and got my order number and so on.

Needless to say, after the long Win10 setup process, the fault was exactly the same. So I sent a fairly long email to Lenovo Support in Sydney (I assume that’s where they are) with a screen grab of the camera blob and asked for a return authorisation for a full refund. Copy to Keith.

So far I’ve had a fairly prompt acknowledgement of my email, but nothing more, which is a bit annoying. It’s been 24 hrs now. I’ll send another email saying, “Please respond” and see what that produces.

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Back to the problem of the Honda not revving when I put my foot on the accelerator – what did we ever do in the days before Google? (Answer: took it to the service station, or the service station mechanic would come here in the case of an immobile vehicle, maybe… )

Anyway, a search on Google for Honda MDX no accelerator response brought up plenty of listings. Obviously this is a fairly common problem.

The answer is that Honda uses a Throttle Position Sensor (TPS) and this often goes faulty. It seems to happen when the car has not been used for some time (my case) and produces symptoms just like mine, either no throttle response at all, or rough running, or poor idling. One listing said it has a battery in it which is not user replaceable and has a life of about 5 years, and that the TPS should be replaced every five years. A battery?  Seems a bit incredible.

There are plenty of YouTube clips showing how to replace it and warning of the high cost of getting a dealer to do it. It looks straightforward so I did a search and found the part is available from AliExpress in China for A$50 plus $10 freight plus GST, about $67 all up. So I ordered it at about 9pm last night and was surprised to get a reply email about 30 mins later to say that my order has been processed and the part is being dispatched. At 9.30pm!

I just have to wait now – maybe next week for delivery? Lucky I have another car … or two.

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Meanwhile, I’ve finished making up the adapter wiring to match my Pioneer A/V radio to the Mitsubishi and it’s ready to go in. But first I have to stick the digital antenna to the windscreen and thread its cable down the left A pillar, behind the dash to the radio position. It seems difficult, so I’m hesitating, but these things often turn out to be easier than you think they’ll be. Just do it!

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All the time I’m sitting at this PC and writing this, I’m listening to music on a pair of “computer speakers” I bought a couple of years ago when they were “on special” and which have turned out to be marvellous! I’m a hi-fi nut and I’ve been listening to good loudspeakers for many years – KEF, JBL, Tannoy, B+W, Wharfedale – so I reckon I know good sound when I hear it.

These computer speakers are bloody lovely! They’re a Chinese brand, Edifier, which is a bit embarrassing. Chinese speakers? Well, I’m happy with these.

They have a 20W per channel amplifier built in and you can stream audio to them using Bluetooth if you want to. I don’t.

Clean, uncoloured sound, a surprising amount of bass, all the volume you’ll ever need, for $149 the pair. Since that includes the amp, it’s a bargain. You can still buy them from Altronics but not at that bargain price I paid. Recommended.

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Speaking of Altronics, I need to go there now to buy a cigarette lighter socket to add to the Verada while I’m installing the radio and all the guts are out. The socket in this car is in the arm rest cubby hole and that’s too far from the dash for me. I’m not lighting cigarettes but I’m feeding power to my GPS and it’s too far for the cord. I need a socket further forward. I’ll do it today.

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