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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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:
$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.
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.
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.
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:
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):
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.
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 mm zoom (better than the lens on the expensive camera) that fits on no
fewer 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?
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):
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.
After writing up yesterday's diary, I synced it to the web servers as usual. But I couldn't
establish communication with fra.lemis.com.
Why? I've had transitory issues with rsync in the past. The system wasn't down, nor had it spontaneously rebooted: I had
a top window watching activity, and all was normal, How about another shell session?
Nope:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/15) ~/Photos/19670503 478 -> ssh fra ssh: connect to host fra.lemis.com port 22: Connection refused
OK, I also had an existing normal shell session running. Take a look
at /var/log/messages:
Nov 3 13:16:06 fra sshd[8967]: fatal: accumulate_host_timing_secret: encode ecdsa-sha2-nistp256 key: string is too large
Nov 3 13:16:10 fra kernel: pid 8975 (sshd), jid 0, uid 0: exited on signal 11 (no core dump - bad address)
Nov 3 13:30:10 fra sshd[9503]: error: Fssh_kex_exchange_identification: read: Connection reset by peer
Nov 3 15:11:45 fra kernel: pid 851 (sshd), jid 0, uid 0: exited on signal 10 (no core dump - bad address)
Oh. That was shortly before midnight here, certainly nothing to do with me. It looks for
all the world like some external action has caused sshd to crash, though with some
delay. Restarting the service worked, and there were no further issues. But it's a
concern.
Yesterday's playing with PhotoGlory produced some interesting results, but there's more that I could do with it. One of my
oldest photos is of my grandfather Robert Francis Herbert, presumably taken on demobbing
after the First World War. Based on an inscription by my mother on the back, I've assigned a guessed date of
September 1919:
In principle it's not bad as it is. But that smudge at the top left should be removed, and
how about colourizing it (run the cursor over an image to compare it
with its neighbour)?
Yes, an improvement, but not a dramatic one. And how about setting the size? I looked in a
number of places, but came up with nothing. The only surprise was that when I enlarged the
preview image, the stored image also approximated to the size of the original: 4670 x 5882
became 4562 x 5746, only marginally smaller. Is that the only way?
OK, take a look at some other photos of Besut and Pulau
Perhentian taken in the mid-1950s:
In principle, the colours are not bad: Kodachrome keeps its colours well. But
let's see if PhotoGlory can't improve them (run the cursor over an
image to compare it with the original):
Oh. Not what I expected. The first one, and maybe the second, are arguably slightly
improved, though they're still darker than I would have hoped. The third? The big
difference is that the flame has gone grey, similar to the red turban on Sunday. And the last also has put out the flame, and to boot it has been
inverted! It's not the only one: three of the six images have been inverted. Yes, there's
no orientation information in the scans, and it's easy enough to invert them, but why change
the existing orientation? I can only consider that a bug.
So, not much progress. It's certainly not the magic bullet that I had hoped for.
The good news is that ithe second order colour casts are gone. But so is almost all
of the colour, including the “cake”! What do I do next?
And removing noise? PhotoGlory seems unable to help there. In fact I still haven't found
any software that can significantly reduce noise in an image. Did a bit of searching,
bringing some surprises: some panoramas that I can't identify, dated 24 December 2000 and taken with a camera that
identifies itself in the Exif data
as Nikon E900:
I've never had that camera. I had suspected Daniel O'Connor, who was there on that day, and
who in the past has dabbled in panoramas. But no, not he. It took me a while to discover
an author in the Exif: James Proctor, a name that I can't find in my diary.
Finally I found an image that cries out for denoising:
That was taken with my Nikon
Coolpix 880. It wasn't normally that bad, but I had lightened the background. The
original was much better (again run the cursor over an image to
compare it with its neighbour):
I think that the processing improves the image, but at the expense of extreme noise. How do
I get rid of it? Asking Google Gemini brought some interesting results. In order of decreasing desirabilty, they were:
DxO PhotoLab. Oh. I have that,
of course, and I use it a lot, but I hadn't considered it for denoising. It only
occurred to me later: Gemini is confused. Denoising raw images is excellent. But this
is a JPEG, and I haven't had
any useful results there at all.
Topaz Photo AI. Oh. They
have gone the other way and dropped all one-off purchases, though Gemini hasn't
discovered it yet. Sorry, Topaz, not interested.
So really only Luminar Neo and ON1 remain in the running. I haven't had spectacular results
with Luminar Neo. I've used ON1 in the past without being convinced, but that's 8 years ago, so OK, try ON1 with a free trial. But the file didn't download. Try
again on distress, where it was to be installed. Log in, fill out all the details
and was presented with a CAPTCHA. Sorry, ON1, you're out of the running. Looking back, this closely resembles my
experience last time. And this time I didn't even get as far as finding out whether it
would run.
But ON1 was the bottom of the list, Affinity is there too, and I have it installed. Found a
way to reduce noise, along with a convenient video. The video showed one of the great
weaknesses of Affinity: it was for version 2.0, and it jumped all over the place, to an area
that no longer exists in version 3.0! No worry, there are alternatives, involving creating
extra layers, choosing values for a number of sliders:
That's not exactly what you want to do with dozens of files. But no need: it doesn't work!
As far as I can tell, manipulating the sliders made no difference!
So where do we go from here? For this one photo I could go back to the original and try
from there, but I do want to have the background. Luminar's still there, but I don't have
much hope. What I really need is a program that will automatically remove noise. And so
far that doesn't seem to exist.
When did the seller post the camera that I bought on Monday? eBay kept telling me that
it hadn't been posted yet, but Australia Post gave me more plausible information, that it was posted on Tuesday. But
eBay stayed that way until I found this morning:
From ebay@ebay.com Wed Nov 5 23:42:10 2025
Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2025 05:41:59 -0700
From: eBay <ebay@ebay.com>
Subject: 🚚 Order update: Nikon D1 Camera Body And 70- 210mm Lens Please Read Description
Estimated delivery: Wed, 05 Nov - Mon, 10 Nov
Well, that's optimistic, isn't it? Sent just before midnight and expects delivery the same
day? And why should I read the Description? That's a link that they could have included in
the message. Never mind, 40 minutes later, still in the middle of the night, they had the
wonderful news:
From ebay@ebay.com Thu Nov 6 00:21:32 2025
Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2025 06:21:20 -0700
From: eBay <ebay@ebay.com>
Subject: Your package is now with its carrier!
Estimated delivery: Wed, 05 Nov - Mon, 10 Nov
That's particularly optimistic. Posted in the middle of the night, delivery yesterday!
Checking showed that the item had been somewhere between Melbourne and Ballarat at the time. Never mind, a third
message:
From ebay@ebay.com Thu Nov 6 10:32:13 2025
Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2025 16:32:01 -0700
From: eBay <ebay@ebay.com>
Subject: Delivery attempted: Nikon D1 Camera Body And 70- 210mm Lens Please
Read Description
Australia Post just missed you.
Delivery attempted: Thu, 06 Nov 08:27 Local time
Well, no, eBay, Australia Post never tries to deliver parcels to me. At the specified time
the item was in Delacombe and
marked for transport to the post office, where it arrived at 10:27.
But they do this every time. Why? They've been round for over a quarter of a century.
Surely they could have got their act together by now. Still, they ask a question: “How
useful is the email?”. Useless, of course, and that's what I said for the first email. But
I couldn't give a similar feedback for the second message: they only allow one feedback per
day! Why? Do they even care?
Yes, the three on the right are Four Thirds system form factor,
but the one on the left is a 24×36 mm sensor, and the Nikon is roughly APS format, between the two.
The lens is one that I got five years ago. The camera won't stand up straight with the 70-210:
Normal details: Nikon D1,
serial number 5022707. Nikkor 70-210 mm f/4.0-5.6, serial number... Oh. I can't find it.
Where could it be hidden? Sent off a message to the FacebookNikon Collectors group, also
asking about the batteries: I have three, all discharged, but no charger. What can I use
instead?
But no replies came. A bit of searching around produced this message:
What's that? After following the “Learn more” link I still don't know. But by chance I
found a more obvious answer: it's waiting for moderator approval. Why didn't Facebook tell
me up front? And what does it have to do with Community chats, whatever they may be?
Apart from that, of course, looked at the camera. Like the Olympus E-1 next to it in the photo
above, it's an early camera with amazingly complicated interlocks. Two covers and a button
just to reveal that it does, indeed, have an CF card (512 MB) in it, and that I need to
fold over another lever to finally remove it.
Why do I want to remove it? It fits my Nikon Coolpix 880, with which I
wanted to take a photo some time back before discovering that it didn't understand cards
over 1 GB. It also had a photo on it:
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/15) ~/Photos/20251106 546 -> mdir -s e: Volume in drive E has no label
Volume Serial Number is F0F3-7854
Directory for E:/
But then it was taken at 1/4 s on a camera without any stabilization, so it's not
surprising. It also appears to have been taken with the lens I got. Sadly, though it has
Exif data, it doesn't appear to
include serial numbers. It does include a time zone offset, though: UTC+11:00. And
presumably it tells me how long the camera hasn't been used, though at that time there was
nowhere worth mentioning with that time zone offset: DST had finished at the beginning of the month.
Presumably the user had forgotten to reset the date.
The CF card also gave me a chance to take a photo with the Coolpix 880, which hadn't been
used even longer To my surprise I found a battery, and was able to take a photo that at
least confirmed that the camera still works:
Now why did I want to take photos with it? Some comparison, clearly, but which? And in
passing, it's likely that the last image I took with this camera was even before 2006: I
replaced it with the Ricoh Caplio R1 almost exactly 21 years ago, on 5 November 2004, and
I don't think I used it after that.
I'm getting more and more frustrated with computers. It's been long enough: they should
Just Work. By chance I found this entry in my diary for 6 November 2005, 20 years ago:
I think the time for playing around with software is over, and now I want reliability.
Certainly the hardware is more reliable. But the software still has its issues.
Now I have a couple of answers from the FacebookNikon Collectors group,
unfortunately none of much use. One told me where the serial number of the 70-210 mm f/4-5.6 AF Nikkor lens was, on the back of the aperture ring. But it wasn't there on this lens. Took a couple of photos of the area:
The dirt on the last photo looked like it might cover a serial number. But no, no luck.
Cleaning it off wasn't easy, but it was clear that it didn't cover anything.
The lens looks genuine enough, and it's strange that there's no obvious serial number
anywhere. I thought that there might have been another ring round the surprisingly bare
looking front element:
But no, other images look the same, like this one from somewhere on the web:
So for the moment I don't have anything to go on. Maybe I'll find a Nikon user with a newer
camera who will be able to get the info from the Exif data—if it supplies it.
And the batteries? Also no help beyond “you can buy chargers on AliExpress”. But that doesn't make
sense, first because it costs (minimal) money, and second because the batteries could be
beyond hope. About the best information I got was from this page, which also makes it clear that you shouldn't try to charge NiMH batteries with a LiIon charger.
Since we have been letting the cats out, I have been keeping an eye on where they are.
Today I heard a noise from the laundry. That would be Mona eating. Out to check.
Not Mona. To my surprise I found a rat in the feeding area. It disappeared immediately, of
course. But what we do about it? How do we catch it?
I'm ending my search for the serial number of my 70-210 mm f/4-5.6 AF Nikkor.
Nothing seems to work. About the only possibility is that it does report its serial number
in the Exif data, so if I find
somebody with a modern Nikon camera, it might divulge its secrets. But while looking for
it, took these photos:
The second and third images (close-up) show considerable fungus on the front element,
something I have almost never seen. But the second image also shows a completely unexpected
gradation of the lens barrel. I haven't been able to fix it, but why is it like that at
all? The first image was taken with studio flash, the second with available light to get an
accurate view of the fungus, which is barely visible in the first photo. My best guess is
that the barrel really was lighter than the rest of the scene. One to put in my “fix this
photo” collection.
I'm baking less bread lately, since we've found
other things to eat as well. But today was the start of another batch, and I discovered
that the starter, now nearly 4 months old, was looking less than perfect:
Turkey breast roast this evening, from ALDI. I've made it in the past, and it surprised me by taking exactly as long as the
packaging claimed, 90 minutes at 170° for a 1 kg roast. The only issue was the browning.
Last time it looked like this:
I had already intended to leave it open (without aluminium foil) for longer than
recommended, and this time I started after 60 minutes, changing from even heating (2 on our
oven) to grill (8 on our oven), keeping the temperature constant at 170° (something that the
oven always resets). It only took 20 minutes to brown nicely, so next time I can start
after 70 minutes:
Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a
“blog”, and there is
deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle
for third-party content. But I welcome feedback and try to
reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do
send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate
whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise
I'll assume that it's OK to do so.
