Stephen White along today with his apprentice Mitch, primarily to fix the issues with the
RCD and UPS. While they were
at it, they also installed a couple of outside power points and took a look at the antenna.
To my surprise, there's quite a complicated masthead amplifier up there:
Stephen is not an antenna expert, and he doesn't have any signal strength equipment, but with the help of my Zuiko Digital
ED 70-300mm f/4.0-5.6 I was able to get enough of the amplifier to identify it. It's
a DIGIMATCH 10MM-UA30P:
That's quite an impressive device. I've complained about Jim Lannen in the past, and
there's another complaint coming below, but he certainly didn't cut corners with that
amplifier. A pity the reception is still so bad.
Unfortunately the web site doesn't want to know about it, presumably because it's last
year's model. But they have a very similar model, the 10MM-UA30PDF:
Even from the original, it's clear that it has adjustable gain. It also has a dedicated FM
output on the left, not connected. No wonder we have no radio reception. I suppose I'll
have to get a dedicated antenna specialist in to fix things up.
Apart from that, they came up with a good solution for the UPS. Despite my concerns, Jim
had laid a conduit between the shed and the garage that could only hold two cables, and
there was no space for a third. How do we separate the UPS and the other consumers in the
garage? I had thought of relocating the UPS into the garage, but Mitch, the apprentice,
came up with the idea of an RCD mounted inside a power point, so that could work for the
rest of the shed, while the UPS remains in place without an RCD in front of it. Total time
10 minutes. He seems a brighter spark(y) than most.
So Jim finished the power point installation with the connecting cable not connected. How
could he have missed that? I find it completely amazing. You could almost think that he
did it deliberately.
And finally, another small mercy: two switches in the toilet, one for the lights, one for
the (very noisy; thanks, Jim) fan. What a relief!
My photos of the antenna were taken with a couple of telephoto lenses. The second was taken
with the Zuiko Digital
ED 70-300mm f/4.0-5.6, severely reshaped and cropped:
The “equivalent focal length” (the focal length that would be needed to fill the frame with
that image) of the last image (natural size on the web page) is 4608 mm. This is an Olympus OM-D E-M1, so the
corresponding focal length for a full-frame camera would be 9216 mm. It's amazing that I
can read anything at all.
Finally decided to buy the photo stacking
software that I discussed a
couple of days ago. The good news: since I'm not in Europe, I don't pay
German Value-added tax (currently
19%) so instead of 69 € I only had to pay 57,98 €. And while paying I saw this:
That should be translated as “After confirming your order, you will be transferred to a
protected web site, where you can enter your credit card details”. But there's a typo in
the text: “protected” is „geschützt“, and not „geschätzt“, which means “valued”. Mildly
amusing in itself, but there's a story behind that: decades ago Fritz „Fliege“
Jörn, Tandem's publicity man,
wrote his texts so that they could be printed
on Qume Sprint\5 daisy wheel printers, which
used non-standard wheels where ä and ü were transposed compared to the then-standard. And
the funniest misunderstanding was exactly geschätzt/geschützt.
Mail from Adam Kranzel today about DDR3 RAM
compatibility. He pointed at this page, which describes “high density” and “low density” RAM configurations. I
had found many more. This one explains the difference:
All low density 1GB modules are made with 16 chips (8 chips on each side) using 64Mx8
device. All high density 1GB modules are made with 16 chips (8 chips on each side) using
128Mx4 device.
1 GB? Who uses 1 GB DIMMs any more? And there's the clue. Adam's reference was written 7
years ago, and here I read:
It may have something to do with memory density, but that's an old, old, old issue from a
few years ago and hasn't actually been an issue in a few generations.
That was written two years ago. It seems that the oldest Intel chipsets that supported
DDR3, such as the P35 Express, had
difficulty with high-density RAM configurations. The support page for the
Thinkcentre M71E 3132A8M confirms that it has an H61 Express chipset, which this page tells me was introduced in 2011.
So: so far it seems that there have been issues with Intel compatibility in the past, but
they're no longer relevant. Am I right?
Three days on and I still haven't made up my mind about new memory for dischord. Got
an email from Tim Bishop, who pointed me at this site selling DRAM specifically for my machine. I suppose that's some kind of
guarantee, but the site has a big problem: no 8 GB modules.
More reading brought me to this page, really relating to MSI products. But this got me thinking:
High density RAM is usually very slow anyway and are typically lower Binned chips too
hence they are slow and tend to have a very bad compatibility rate! (stick to X8 types 8
chips per side 16 total low density units)
That makes sense. The “density” (chip configuration) in itself doesn't make the chips any
more or less expensive. There must be some other reason why the “high density” chips are
cheaper, and speed or reliability are obvious candidates. And none of these offerings
specify the timing parameters. So independently of whether the cheap chips are compatible,
it seems reasonable to spend a few dollars more and buy reputable chips.
What choice do I have? Checking various sources, I have:
On the face of it, Megabuy offers the best price, and that would be true if I could go into
the shop and buy it. The same applies to MSY, whom I passed in Geelong only 2 days ago, but
I've stopped buying from them anyway. But Megabuy price themselves out of the market with
their ridiculous freight charges. For a couple of DIMMs it should be under $2. And the
last one, from eBay seller fr2242, is a well-known name and comes with $3 off the second
chip, so it's only $10 more expensive than the cheapest offering. It also does no harm that
the seller has 100% positive feedback, so I bought from them, which should also have the
advantage that it'll be here early next week.
There are other Australian suppliers like Megabuy. GameDude had marginally lower prices. But to find out
the shipping, I had to enter my complete billing information and navigate
a CAPTCHA. Sorry, people, if you want my
business you shouldn't go out of your way to make it difficult for me.
Off with Yvonne and the dogs
to Ballarat today, I with Nikolai to the Eureka Village
Hostel. Round again with Linda, and gradually both Niko and I are getting used to the
routine. So are some of the residents. One in “House 1”
(for dementia patients) followed us as
far as she was allowed before being escorted back; another (Bill) accompanied us the rest of
the visit.
Two weeks ago there were
fewer people there than four weeks
ago; today there were even fewer. This time Yvonne had fewer too, and we were both
finished after 45 minutes. Took the dogs back to Bill and a couple of smokers who were
sitting outside; it's nice to see just how much it makes their day.
Lately I've been subscribing to the RSS feed
of 43rumors, mainly to keep up to date with
new photographic equipment. But today I got another article claiming that DxO had released a new version of
DxO Optics “Pro”. If that were the case, I should have heard about it from DxO. Still, there's an easy
enough way to check—just ask the running program:
That's clear and straightforward enough. And wrong. Going to my customer account, sure
enough, there's a new version, and I can get it for a reasonable price. And it seems that
far from being a rumour, 43rumors are behind the times. I had already received mail from
dpreview, but deleted it because it's HTML
only. It contains another report with a link to DxO's own announcement. So why didn't DxO tell me? And why does the old version claim to be
up to date?
Should I buy it now? They haven't told me, but it seems there's a $20 discount on it,
probably to the end of the month. But I'll wait a week or two to see if they come up with
further discounts. In the meantime I can use it without restrictions for a month.
Downloading failed again! Clearly this is at least the fault of the web browser—I
should try ftp next time—but it happens continually with DxO. Again I downloaded it
to www.lemis.com and copied it from there. I wonder why it keeps failing.
Upgrades can be fun. Where did all my settings go? In fact it kept most of them, but I
still had to copy some configuration information, and there's a good chance I have missed
something. They claim that their noise reduction system (“PRIME”) is now “a new version of
PRIME that is better and faster than ever.” I suppose everything is relative, but
on dischord the current version takes about a minute per image. Possibly to
emphasize the speedup, they've changed their startup slogan from “Pushing the limits of
your patience camera” to “Reveal the RAW emotion”. Ugh.
Edwin Groothuis wants to cook a rendang,
something that has never been completely successful for me. Off to check alternative
recipes and found this one in “500 resep lazaaat makanan Indonesia”:
Preparing for dinner tonight, Yvonne sent me a link to a
recipe on Buzzfeed. I hardly bother with recipes on the web; so
few of them seem worthwhile. This one wasn't too bad, but not what I was looking for. But
in the noise around the recipe I saw a link “Can We Guess Your Exact Age With
These Food Questions?. That's so stupid that I had to try it. Basically it was a
test of my (almost non-existent) fast food preferences. Which pizza? Which burrito? Which
doughnut (no option to say “I don't like doughnuts”, and no plain doughnut)? Only one sane
choice: “how do you like your steak cooked?”.
And the result? My exact age is 31. But the funny thing is that the user comments show
that, though it was no more accurate for anybody else, most responders took the blame on
themselves rather than on the test. The astrology syndrome again, I suppose.
