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| Greg's diary |
| November 2025 |
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| Saturday, 1 November 2025 | Dereel | Images for 1 November 2025 |
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Tweaking KL Hokkien Mee
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
My version of KL Hokkien Mee is relatively stable now, but there are things missing, things that some people consider essential: greaves (chu yau cha, 猪 油渣) and dried sole or anchovy powder. If I could get the greaves more easily, I would use them. For the flounder, people suggested powdered ikan bilis, and I tried that in the past with no enlightenment. OK, today I'll try it with a number of fried whole ikan bilis.
Not an enlightenment. Yes, I could taste it, but it didn't improve things.
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More camera pain
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Topic: photography, animals, technology, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne wanted me to take some video of her and Samba today. She even gave me her camera (Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark III with the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-200 mm f/3.5-6.3, more than capable of taking the videos.
But the zoom ring sticks. And so the zooming looked jerky. OK, get my camera (OM System OM-1 Mark II with the M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100 mm f/4.0 IS PRO). And for some reason I had remapped the video button, so I had to select video. No problem, except that Yvonne decided that she didn't want to use the clip.
Inside and remapped the buttons. Later the dogs found and killed a lizard:
But I couldn't focus on it! The autofocus went through its usual searching, but it couldn't confirm sharpness. More playing around. Autofocus was set to cat recognition, which also seems to work for horses. Not for lizards?
Much more searching. Turn off cats? Set different focus points? Nothing worked. What else can I do? Compare lens on the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II, where it worked and focused perfectly. But I still couldn't focus with the OM-1. And finally I saw a little display in the viewfinder: AF Limit. Both that and the issues with video must have happened during my experiments while birding in September, and I must have turned on AF limiting while searching for the “record video” button.
I've had this camera for nearly a year, and I still can't control it.
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Affinity? Aversion!
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
What do you when somebody offers you something potentially useful for free? Take two of them! OK, there's only one Affinity on offer, but why not install it?
What pain! First I had to make a choice:
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OK, I can assume that x64 and ARM64 are pretty standard. For me it's x64. But what's the difference between MSIX and MSI/EXE? Chose the latter. It downloaded a lot of stuff, but I had to run it myself to install. And then I got
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“Getting the system ready for install...”. That went on for over a minute. Finally:
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Log in? I'm already logged in, and I had to be to access this free software. OK, do it again. A minute later, “are you sure?":
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Yes, dammit. Do you want to communicate with us? Yes, of course. Please wait while we check your license. Dammit, I have logged in twice, it's free software, and if you want to restrict things you should have checked the license before allowing a download. OK, yes, go ahead. And of course it accepted the license.
And then nothing. No indication of how to start the thing, nothing on the task bar.
Searching through the bowels of distress brought me a link to the program app.
Finally start it. Something tiny pops up, changes to a different window and crashes again.
Repeatedly. It seems that the second window might have been something like “enable crash
report”, but it stayed on the screen for less than a second.
OK, where's support? Much more searching, finally with the aid of Google Gemini. Fill out the obligatory form stating the version of the software. Affinity 1.0 or 2.0? No, this is Affinity 3.0. But the form doesn't know that. Sent off a message anyway with the helpful information that it could take 24 hours, but we're used to that at this end of the world. Will I hear back? I'm not holding my breath, but I'm left wondering if Affinity isn't too expensive. Could this be Affinity's inimitable way of saying “I don't like being run via rdesktop”?
Interestingly, Affinity has been bought out by Canva, who are located in Sydney. So to a certain extent it's Australian software. It doesn't make Australia look good.
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Cameras on eBay
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
So I'm vaguely looking for use Nikon D1s on eBay. Today there was one with a zoom lens on auction for $70, something I should keep my eye on. And then this one:
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$670 postage! You could buy most old cameras for that! Are they planning to hand-deliver? And a camera in tatty condition for over 30 times the going price? I've seen nonsense, but this is worse than anything I remember.
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Academia? Analogy? Comic?
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Academia.edu is particularly active asking silly questions like “Did you write Treasurer?” and wanting me to pay to find out what confusion they have. But lately they're on a new tack:
34 N 31-10-2025 To academia@lem Academia.edu (2103) N Your paper "The Complete FreeBSD,..." is now an analogy
37 N 01-11-2025 To groogled@gma Academia.edu (2102) N Our AI turned your paper "Closed Source Fights..." into a shareable comic.
What's that? No idea. Follow the link and they just offer to do it again with some unrelated document.
Somehow artificial intelligence has it easy if natural intelligence is at this level.
| Sunday, 2 November 2025 | Dereel | Images for 2 November 2025 |
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Affinity: too expensive?
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
To my mild surprise, got a message from Affinity support today: use a very roundabout way to find a file C:\Users\grog\.affinity\Affinity\3.0\lessons.json and remove it. Then disconnect from the Internet and restart.
OK, disconnecting from the Internet is a problem. What happens if I just restart? It works! Well, at least it got past the crash phase, and I was able to select automatic crash reporting—I think: the next time I looked, the settings page looked completely different.
And did it create a new lessons.json? Of course. I had saved the old version to compare. And there was no difference! So what went wrong there?
I've spent a couple of days now trying to install and understand Affinity. How do I use it? Once again I couldn't find out. Give up with Serif, ask Google Gemini. And it came up with three videos: the first was a “beginner-friendly” tutorial, 18 minutes long. After 8 minutes I still hadn't heard anything that related to photo processing. OK, the second, an absolute beginner's guide, 27 minutes long. And once again it was bizarre structure, and after several minutes I didn't even know if it could do what I wanted. On to the third, “Editing RAW Photos in the New Affinity | First Look”. The shouting irritates me, and I already have a program that does a good job on raw images, but at least it talks about processing photos. Watched it for a while, but it didn't give me the kind of overview I was looking for: how can I change the images? I should continue watching, but I've spent several days so far looking at the product, and I can't even process a photo! And looking back, my first attempt failed because it doesn't like rdesktop. Does it now? How do I know? But it seems that free is too expensive for this kind of product.
So what do I want? A recipe book? That's not bad for a start; afterwards it is good to understand the structure, but first I need to know if it can even do anything that my current software can't. And that's so obvious that it should be in all the advertising.
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Glorious renditions
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
OK, since I was looking at it, what can PhotoGlory do for me? Apart from the few photos that I experimented with four months ago, I haven't used it. Try my photos from the Asia Trip in May 1967, specifically this one, which before conversion looked like this:
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No useful improvement. Probably it's not bad enough: clearly it doesn't need colouring, but I had hoped that it would tidy up the sky, but there was little to see there. Still, the colour and overall gradation was improved (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
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It's interesting to see what it did to the branches of the tree to the right of the road, and the man in the red turban holding the sign on the left (something that I had never noticed before) has suddenly got a grey turban. And one thing it did do was to greatly reduce the size of the image, from 3850 x 2591 to 1024 x 689, a 14 fold reduction. It did have various suggestions of how to recolour the image, but that wasn't the main thing. Clearly a lot more experience is needed to do things the way I want. But at least I was able to get some result, a big difference from Affinity.
| Monday, 3 November 2025 | Dereel | |
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Nikon D1
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Topic: photography | Link here |
So I put a snipe on the cheaper of the two Nikon D1s that I had been looking at on eBay, and got it for $82, about 3.6% of the price of the camera I was ranting about on Sunday, or 12% of the postage for that camera. What do I get? An old camera with a 70-210 me zoom (better than the lens on the expensive camera) that fits on no less than 9 of my existing cameras, 3 (discharged) batteries and no charger.
So how do I charge it? I don't really need to, since I don't intend to use it (much), but it would be nice to find out whether I can or not. And of course there's more to research about the camera itself. Why only 2.7 MP when other sources (which I can't find, of course) claim that the sensor has nearly double that? More to research. And does the camera have a storage card in it?
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Still more photo software investigations
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
I've more or less come to the conclusion that Affinity isn't for me, like I have done a couple of times in the past. But PhotoGlory still seems useful. I just need to understand how to fine-tune it. They show many ways of removing remaining blemishes on images, but not how to remove incorrect changes such as the branches on this cow picture (run the cursor over the image to compare it with the original):
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Still no solution. And I still haven't found out how to stop it reducing the size of the image.
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Lizard? Turtle!
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Topic: animals, photography, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne found Larissa playing with something in the driveway this afternoon. A relatively large turtle, now on its back (thanks, Lara). She put it in the succulent bed in the garden, where Lara couldn't get at it, and she didn't take a photo. When I heard of it, out to take a look. The good news: the turtle was alive, and had wandered off. The bad news, of course: no photo.
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More camera pain
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Seen somewhere today, originally from Gary Larson
It still doesn't make up for the lack of turtle.
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