How many pages is that? Very difficult to say. There were a number of distinct phases:
1963: Small format diary, about A5, one page per day.
1964-1967: Larger format diary, somewhat larger than A4, one page per day.
1968-1970: Various larger formats, free format, somewhat less than 1 page per day.
2000-June 2007: Relatively short entries, sometimes only a couple of lines, maybe about
⅓ to 1 page per day
July 2006 to now: much more detail, maybe 2½ pages per day.
And then of course there's the medium. In the 1960s it was paper, and from 2000 on it was
machine-readable. In each case, from the perspective of the present, the number of pages
depend on the browser and how you have set it. But I've done a couple of print previews,
and come up with, for the month of November:
Year
pages
1963
20
1967
34
1969
25
2002
9
2006
24
2007
47
2012
77
2017
72
2020
75
2021
89
2022
78
My guess is that I could reckon 30 pages per month in the 1960s, 25 pages from 2000 to 2007
(when I retired) and 75 since then, for a total of 18630 pages (2730 + 2025 + 13875). But
that's not all, just the two large contiguous chunks. I've also written up other days,
either at the time or later. Each entry in the diary source starts with a PHPdaytitle invocation, so I can
count the days:
That's about 30.83 years, so I could increase my already inaccurate guess to 19,145 pages.
How does that compare with other long books? It seems that the longest work of fiction is
“Marienbad My Love” by Mark Leach, which according to this page has 10,710 pages, or “The Blah Story” by Nigel Tomm, which according to this page has 7,312 pages and is thus considerably longer than “Marienbad My Love”, whose page
count they're too polite to mention.
But my diary isn't fiction. What about the Oxford English Dictionary? It wins: the second edition (the last one printed) had 21,728 pages. Still, I seem to
be in the same ball park.
That's a lot of stuff, and clearly it points back to Friday or Saturday last week. But
what? Considerable discussion on IRC, during which Callum Gibson suggested
cgibson: probably NFS
That made sense. What do we have mounted? I tend to use df rather than mount
to show mounted file systems, but this time it didn't help:
Oh. Why can't I umount it? And while I'm pondering that, why is the daily run
hanging on a dead NFS mount? Spent some time discussing things, during which people came up with a number of
tools which I hadn't thought of. Of course rebooting teevee unstuck things.
I wonder why I mounted teevee's root file system on bde.
How about that, the spring wasn't colder than average; it was pretty much average,
but both the minimum and maximum temperatures were milder than in other years. But of
course the rain was much more. The rainfall numbers here are from my weather station and are somewhat on the low side; the
real rainfall for spring was
I've been looking at Luminar photo
processing software for 4 years now, and I've never found a good reason to install it. But it came close.
In April this year I considered it to fix the artefacts in this photo and others that I
took at the same time:
At the time I discussed the issues in some detail, and also the confusion I had between
their two products “Luminar AI” and “Luminar
Neo”. The reviews were also not overly encouraging, so I left it.
But now is the black season, it seems: It's been Black Friday for the past 10 days or
so. Skylum (the company that makes Luminar)
offered me Yet Another special offer for Luminar Neo. OK, is that the one I want? Off
looking. It seems that there's no mention of Luminar AI any more; potentially they have
merged them into one product, which makes a lot of sense.
So: off looking for tutorials, once again finding nothing of use. Documentation of any kind
is clearly not their forte. Is it even worth trying? One review suggested that the “remove
power line” tool works quite well up to a point, and presumably it could do a good job on
the fence lines.
OK, let's try. I have a 30 day money-back period, so I should really try it out in that
time. Off to buy it, in the process discovering that they honoured the discount
code SHOTKIT15 that I had picked up from one of the reviews.
Apart from the interesting detail that Skylum from Ukraine is really Shinyfields Limited in
Cyprus, there's nothing of
interest. Not even an obvious way to page down!
Then it went off installing over the net, giving no indication how long it would expect it
to take. Mañana.
Over the last few weeks I've watched a number of videos about cooking Malaysian street food,
including KL Hokkien Mee. There's not
much there that really excites me, but they did use more liquid. I've also bought some real
Hokkien noodles, so today I tried something new. The main differences were:
Ingredient
Old
Today
Chicken broth
20 g
48 g
Light soya sauce
20 g
33 g
Dark soya sauce
20 g
14 g
Caramel
15 g
21 g
Cornflour
12 g
15 g
Those are details, of course, and as a result the dish didn't look very different:
And in fact it didn't make much difference in taste. I can't see any particular advantage
in using fresh KL Hokkien noodles instead of bucatini, which are also much cheaper.
About the biggest surprise was that the sauce was so thick, though I used more liquid and
less cornflour.
OK, work round the typical Microsoft space pain, create a new
directory /Photos/1-Skylum, link the photos to it (for the fun of it I used the raw
images, which it claims to handle), and start:
That's a minimalist view. Where's my photo? I called it Kangaroos-47.jpeg, but the
original (translated from the Makejpeg file) is orig/48140390.ORF. Not on that
page. You need to scroll down, though I haven't found a scroll bar yet. And where's the
file name? It seems that if you hold the mouse over an image and wait a couple of seconds,
it will pop up. That's painful, but I can work around it when I know.
OK, work my way through the menu. First, get rid of the post in the foreground (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
That looks good, better than what I got with other programs. OK, now for the star trick:
remove “power lines” (again, run the cursor over an image to compare
it with its neighbour):
That's quite impressive, but there are still issues. The line between the kangaroo heads is
still there, and I had to remove it manually. And the line above it has been removed, but
the replacement isn't quite right: there's a dark mark round where the line used to be.
Still, not bad for a first attempt. Save the file.
How? There's no File menu, nor anything similar. Finally I found a way: select the
“exploding box” menu at top right, which offers “Share”, which can then either send it by
(e)Mail, connect to a device (whatever that may be) or access a “folder”:
And yes, that worked. In the process I have learnt yet more bad language.
More processing. Try to saveexport share again. “Folder” was greyed
out and didn't respond. It seems that I was in the wrong menu (Erase instead of “Develop”), though potentially there are other
details that I haven't learnt yet. After selecting that, it worked, and saved the second
file in a file that annoys any self-respecting shell script:
-rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 2,316,621 2 Dec 10:12 48140390.jpg
-rwxr--r-- 1 grog wheel 2,340,890 2 Dec 10:22 48140390 (1).jpg
OK, this is my first time, and I got results surprisingly quickly (in fact considerably
faster than writing up the experience). The results were also somewhat washed out (first
image, run the cursor over an image to compare it with its
neighbour)
But that's probably at least in part due to my choice of raw image without any enhancement,
which possibly indicates different or non-existent lens distortion corrections. It also
seems to show a different cropping of the raw image. Still, the software does seem to offer
promise.
Last month I turned my attention to an album that my father created probably 70 years
ago, showing some of his work up to about (my guess) 1961. There were also a number of
loose negatives in the album, as well as a number of loose photos.
Today I tried to scan the negatives in. Most of them were 35 mm, cut in strips of 3:
But what is it? Is this the “Ideal Home” for which he won a prize in 1960 or 1961? I can't
find any reference to the competition on Google, but the third image suggests that it was on
public display.
I can't scan them! They're in a rather unusual 6 × 4.5 cm format, and the scanner software
doesn't understand them. I also haven't found a way to just do a raw scan.
Only the day before yesterday I grumbled about the low “spring” temperatures. But now
it's summer, and all that has changed. Temperatures ranged from 11.5° to 34.1°, 3.3° higher
than any time in spring, and reminding me that we really need to overhaul the
sprinkler system.
In the process, found a new app for my mobile phone: BOM Weather,
from the agency that doesn't want
to be called BOM. OK, just what I need. It gives me a forecast for Dereel, just like the web site does (second image):
Now isn't that nice? Now I have a choice of forecast. How do they manage that? I can
sympathize with them having difficulty forecasting weather in the current situation, but how
can they come up with temperatures that depend on the platform?
Despite the weather Jesse Walsh showed up, planted most of the walking iris plants and
continued on the succulent bed, which now looks almost presentable. Here two weeks ago and
now:
Another warm day today, a high of 36° (or 31° or 32° according to the Bureau of Meteorology). I really need that irrigation.
Turned on the tap. No water!
Start the pump. No reaction. That's normal if it's already primed. Is it?
Another Diaxette showed up in
my eBay saved searches today, slightly
cheaper than the one I bought six months ago. Nothing special: it's pretty much identical to the one I bought,
though there are differences between models: Cees-Jan de Hoog has one with a serial
number that differs by only 3 numbers from mine (900139 and 900142), but his has a different
shutter.
Unsurprisingly, the serial number of the one on sale today is considerably different:
875088. But clearly Voss didn't make a million of these cameras, and the serial numbers
suggest that only the last 2 or 3 digits are actually the serial number, and the ones at the
start have some other meaning. That would give the serial numbers 88, 139, 142. Is that
plausible? I wonder how many were really made.
The other thing of interest is the depth of field indicator. At f/16 it shows a hyperfocal distance of about
14½ feet (yes, it doesn't show metres at all—neither does Cees-Jan de Hoog's camera—but
it's about 4.4 m). But for a hyperfocal distance like that you'd need a circle of confusion of 30 μm.
That would limit resolution to 800×1200, considerably less than I'd expect. Maybe it's
reflective of the capabilities of the lens, which is really not very good. But I should
compare the markings on other old lenses. Other lenses I have have hyperfocal distances
between 3.8 m (Schneider Xenar) to 4.8 m (Super-Takumar, Nikkor). My other Cassar also has
about 5 m. They're all 50 mm lenses, so with the exception of the Xenar they all seem to
have about a 30 μm circle of confusion; the Xenar is closer to 40 μm (600×900).
Another interesting thing about the shutter. It runs from only 1/25 s to 1/200 s, but it
seems that it can be set to just about any time between those limits; the 1/50 s and 1/100 s
seem to be only indications.
Much mail from Skylum today, extolling the
uses of Luminar. And I wondered: they
keep referring to Ukraine in
their materials, but what do they really have to do with it? The company is in the
USA, and there's no
domain skylum.ua.
But a bit of searching helps: In a blog
entry I read:
Skylum was founded in Ukraine, and the majority of the team is here.
But the croton was looking very unhappy. We had planned to repot it, but that didn't
happen, and what was left relatively quickly lost a lot of leaves. Can we propagate them?
This
article says yes. So that's what I did, even before getting photos of the old plant.
What we have now is:
Somehow Luminar shows itself from two
different perspectives. On the one hand I'm almost bombarded with suggestions about how to
do clever things. But they're not what I'm looking for right now. On the other hand, I
still want to process my kangaroo photo.
Last time I just went off and played around, and I had surprisingly good results
under the circumstances. But they weren't spectacular, and today I tried working on the
background image on tiwi, effectively the same photo cropped. This time things
didn't go as well. In particular, the “remove powerlines” didn't work At All. After
expending considerably more time than on Friday, I was left with this transformation (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
