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:
Jesse Walsh along today for a couple of hours in the garden, getting rid of most of the
nasty weeds. There are still the grasses to go. He also finally removed the dead
Camellia that had really been
dying since we moved in here. I still don't understand why it declined and died.
Baked bread again today, something I've been doing
for over 17 years. I had been mildly
concerned by the apperance of the starter yesterday, but there was no obvious problem. The bread came into the oven 4 hours,
40 minutes after it started to rise, about normal. The only issue was that at the end I
couldn't get it out of the form! After much messing around, discovered that I had not put
in the paper as cleanly as I should have, leaving a black corner that fused to the form:
Pork and doùfu for breakfast today. I have
the recipe reasonably repeatable now. But maybe it's too much. How much do I need for
breakfast? 180 g rice (like today) or between 150 and 180 g of noodles. Meat (“protein”)?
Typically 90 to 120 g. Here I had 60 g of pork, 110 g of doùfu. And 40 g of bean sauce.
Does that add up? In any case, I think less would be good. Fixed.
ALDI have a competition running:
send in a photo of a receipt, and have a chance to win a holiday cruise.
For each $30 spent you receive one chance to win. Does that mean that you can submit a $100
receipt for three entries? And what date must they have? We have ALDI receipts going back
18 years. That could amount to quite
a few entries.
But we don't really want a holiday cruise, and in any case we're missing one of the
requirements for entry:
Yvonne bought a whole lot of asparagus last week, and we have
only eaten some of it. And of course she cut off the last woody bit, so I thought of a way
to use it up for breakfast. How about some fake noodle dish? It was abuout time for the
Shandong noodles.
Something like a fake phat si-io?
Ended up with this recipe:
quantity
ingredient
step
50 g
beef (“sizzle” steak)
1
garlic, light soya, oyster sauce to marinate
1
10 g
ginger
2
10 g
prawn paste
2
15 g
garlic
2
1
Thai chili (3 g)
2
100 g
egg white
3
30 g
asparagus ends
4
50 g
snow peas
4
40 g
prawns (4-5 g each)
5
100 g
chicken broth
6
16 g
light soya sauce
6
16 g
vinegar
6
20 g
fish sauce
6
8 g
cornflour
6
110 g
Shandong noodles
7
How was it? Unbalanced. I forget why I put in the chicken broth, but it didn't improve
things. The egg white was an afterthought: leftovers from Yvonne's mayonnaise, which uses only yolks. And
there was so much stuff there that I didn't taste the aparagus! There was also so much
stuff that I barely finished it, and I stayed anorectic for the whole day.
This morning's breakfast brings me back to another issue: how much do I need for breakfast?
Today for the most obvious time I had too much, and it would help explain my gradual
increase in weight, now just shy of 90 kg (BMI 23.9). Today the initially
unexpected 100 g of egg white didn't help, but I'm beginning to come to the conclusion that
I should eat:
Ingredient
Weight
“Protein”
150 g
Vegetables
80 g
Starch
180 g
(after cooking)
The starch is typically rice or noodles, each representing round 60 g dry ingredient. The
quantities will require refinement.
Out with a macro lens (30 mm f/3.5
M.Zuiko) to take some closer photos of the Disa bracteata that I had found
yesterday. I couldn't find it! But Yvonne found one
for me. And I found another. I think they're both different plants. Here's the first:
But the big issue was the distance. The 30 mm can focus close enough to a 14×11 mm area,
far smaller than I need. But even for the plant I need to get very close near the ground.
The photo above was the closest I got, and it was cropped from this image:
Calling Yvonne on the phone is always irritating: about one
time out of three I don't establish communication. Part of that is doubtless that Yvonne
hides her phone where she can't hear it, but I'm sure that Android is to blame for
some of it.
One thing definitely not related to Yvonne is that my phone blanks while I'm talking to her,
and when I'm done it stays blank: to get a display again I have resorted to turning it on
again. That can't be right. Can Google
Gemini help? No, it tells me to look for non-existent settings.
But I have been deliberately avoiding updating my phone software. Would it help? Not very
likely, but I should at least give it a chance. Now that I have more or less given up
configuring the thing the way I want, I can risk it. So I started an update.
Downloading the update ran all day! Was it trying to avoid overloading the net? The last
time I looked at it, in the evening, it was still running.
Somehow it seems that every man and his dog is bringing out new photo processing software at
a price that I can afford. So far I have:
DxO PhotoLab. Well, it's barely
a price that I can afford, and since they don't offer me, as a long-standing
user, any discount, it's unlikely that I'll buy a new version until they fix the
bugs I have been complaining about.
Affinity. That's
free, of course, but it's so bizarre in its world view that I'll put it last.
ON1 NoNoise AI. They
bombard me with emails, and unlike the other products so far, they show how to reduce
noise, even in batch. Maybe I should get over my aversion to CAPTCHAs and give them another chance.
ACDSee. I have that already, but that's
Gemstone 12, and here they're talking about version 15, again with confusing product
descriptions. If I buy “ULTIMATE”, I get Gemstone 15 for free, which looks like a way
of saying that Gemstone 15 is part of “ULTIMATE”. As they say in German, „ULTIMATE ist
das Letzte“. Can it reduce noise? So far they don't emphasize it.
PhotoGlory have brought out a new
version, less than 5 months after I bought the previous version. Is it worth it? Most
of the updates, like adding more versions of text, are uninteresting. About the only
improvement would be the batch mode.
So: so far it really looks like I should give ON1 a chance. But it's so much work!
I've been looking for ways to charge the Nikon D1 battery, but not much else. I
hadn't even looked through the viewfinder! Since it's a DSLR, that's not a problem. I've done it now:
small and dingy, even by DSLR standards. But what should I have expected? It was one of
the very first APS DSLRs.
The lens is a
different matter: I can fit it to my current cameras. With a focal length range of 70 to
210 mm it comes close to the Olympus M.Zuiko
Digital ED 12-200 mm f/3.5-6.3, itself not the best lens in the stable.
How about some comparison shots? One image each at 70 mm and 200 mm? How hard can it be?
Hard. The lens was on Yvonne'sOlympus OM-D E-M5 Mark III, so I borrowed that, along with her tripod. The tripod decided to have a stuck central
column, and it was too low. OK, get one of my tripods and set it up. And the lens was
heavy enough to twist the ball mount, but I managed to tighten it. But I couldn't focus:
the E-M5 Mark III has focus peaking, but I didn't have it set up. OK, give up, get my
Olympus OM-D E-M1
Mark II and try there. And by the time I had taken my photos, I didn't have time to
process them.
Mainly to get rid of the asparagus, changed plans and ate asparagus and prawns. Once again Yvonne liked it. Could I improve on it? No, she says, but she's easily
pleased. I had already increased the sauce, but there still weren't enough noodles. Time
for minor updates.
Into Ballarat this morning for
a six-monthly blood test. Nothing unusual except for one thing: after the test, the
phlebotomist gives you a
piece of cotton wool to press on the incision. Why? I had always thought that it was to
stop superficial bleeding, but it proves to be more to avoid bruising. So this time I kept
the pressure on for two minutes; at least there was no bruising, which has occurred
sometimes in the past.
Some years ago I answered a question about GUIs with the comment “we don't believe in
changing the appearance of our GUI along with our underwear”. So often software updates
change the appearance of the GUI, and in the most cases there's nothing you can do about it.
This has particulary irritated me with Linux distributions. My own desktop layout has been
evolving for over 35 years, and I don't want it changed.
As it happened, it was an improvement: the icons had been reduced in size, leaving space for
many more. That's what I had wanted initially, but there's no way that “Android” could have
known that. Choice would be a good thing.
"SMS positioning" is a feature, primarily associated with Xiaomi (MIUI) Android phones,
that uses SMS messages to help locate a mobile device.
Purpose: It's typically used as a secondary or backup location method when GPS positioning
is unavailable, inaccurate, or when the primary location service is failing.
Mechanism: It works by using text messages to transmit or confirm location information. On
Xiaomi devices, it is often tied to the SIM card activation and the "Find My Device"
service.
Context: Most commonly, you will encounter the term "SMS positioning" when you see an
error or notification related to SIM card activation on a Xiaomi phone (e.g., "Couldn't
activate SMS positioning"). This is usually the phone trying to verify the SIM's location
for its proprietary services.
That sounds pretty useless, especially since I always have GPS enabled, but relatively harmless modulo SMS
cost. And how do I disable it?
Apart from that, to my immense surprise, the screen blanking while talking on the phone now
stops when I remove the phone from my head. I really hadn't expected that. So in general,
the update was a success.
Yvonne's phone is another issue. Once again I couldn't call
her! Not for the first time, it worked again after rebooting, so it was clearly a software
bug. Can an upgrade help? Maybe. We'll only find out if it happens again.
This upgrade progressed very differently. The download was faster, but then it spent an
eternity unpacking the archive, displaying dire warnings as to what would happen (brick) if
the operation were interrupted. Enough battery? Yes. But that was only because the
percentage shown repeatedly jumped and then stopped. And then it told me that it had
installed MIUI version 14.0.4.0
from March 2023! Update?
Yes, dammit. Several more hours, and it upgraded the phone to... 14.0.4.0! At least it
didn't try a third time.
While I was at it, tried hirse, my old Redmi 9T that is just fine except for
telephony. And exactly the same thing happened! So clearly it's a bug in the update
procedure. But that doesn't surprise me. The only thing that surprises me is that people
put up with such buggy devices.
Finally got round to processing yesterday's comparison photos. Here they are, without any postprocessing beyond
geometry for the Olympus M.Zuiko
Digital ED 12-200 mm f/3.5-6.3, taken at 70 mm and 200/210 mm (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
Why is the last image so much darker? I think it's the fault of the camera, not the lens:
it asked for a much higher shutter speed, and I don't know why, resulting in an exposure
fully 1.6 EV less than
the Olympus. I was expecting the Nikkor to be fuzzier, at least because of the fungus, but
the exposure rather
The Nikkor at 210 mm looks considerably better, but it's still fuzzy at 70 mm. And the
colours are more washed out one way or another. In addition, the field of view of the
Nikkor at “70 mm” is considerably narrower than the Zuiko. Still, it's interesting to
compare.
Mail from the CFA today. Fire danger season starts in the middle of the night (“0100 hours”) on 24 November.
And they included a silly countdown timer that counts down by the second. Who needs that?
So my next step in photo software is ON1 Photo ROAR. Started downloading to distress, not an easy task. This time
it didn't ask me to identify US fire hydrants, but clicking “Download” didn't get me very
far. A look at C:\Users\grog\Downloads showed a new file
called Unconfirmed 669184.crdownload. But Microsoft didn't want to open it. How do you identify it? crdownload
probably does so in a Microsoft context, but it's not very big, only 114 kB. How about
loading it again in case it was truncated? Yes, this time it's 64 MB. But more to the
point was the file that cropped up in the DIR listing:
Clearly ON1_Photo_RAW_2026.exe is what they wanted me to install. How was I to know
that? Why didn't they start it automatically, like most Microsoft software? Ran it and
watched it find all sorts of files that it had no business looking at:
34.1 Mb/s maximum, and a minimum at the time of 25.5 Mb/s! That's not bad for a 25 Mb/s
link. Was it really ON1? I was installing Android software at the
same time, but Microsoft's task manager showed:
I was expecting some surprises after the Android updates of the
past couple of days, and of course I got some. In fact, they weren't as bad as I had
feared.
First this silly SMS positioning. It costs money, it's very inaccurate, and I can't disable
it. Once again Google Gemini to my aid.
The first was over the top: disable Find My Device. But Find My Device could
be useful, and deactivating it seems not to be necessary. The second made more sense:
Go to Settings.
Tap on Apps > Manage Apps.
In the search bar, type "SIM activation" or "Xiaomi SIM activation service."
Tap on the relevant result.
On the app info page, you can try two things:
Tap Clear data or Clear cache.
Tap Notifications and turn OFF all notifications for this service.
But following “GO TO SETTINGS" did no such thing. It just took me to App Info, and I had to
fight my way through a menu to find the nearby devices permission and set it to what it had
been prior to the update. Not a smooth update, and as helpful as most things related to
KardiaMobile.
I'm in the process of installing a significant amount of software on distress, the
Microsoft ThinkCentre that I
use for photo processing. When did I last back it up? Fighting my way through to the
control panel just tells me that I should be backing up to the “Cloud”. No mention of backing up to
Real Disks. I once set it up to do that. Is it still in place? I couldn't find out. But
looking on eureka:/dump showed that yes, it's merrily backing up once a week, most
recently to the horrible
pathname /dump/distress-Microsoft/DISTRESS/l /dump/distress-Microsoft/DISTRESS/Backup\ Set\ 2025-10-27\ 104305/Backup\ Files\ 2025-11-10\ 092607/
So I finally have a version of ON1
Photo ROAR on distress. Checking my network statistics showed that I had
downloaded 41.3 GB of data yesterday, the highest in a long time, compared to a daily
average of 17 GB. A good thing I have unlimited data. In the Good Old Days (1992) that
would have cost me about € 9,000,000.
And the text is so tiny! Surely it must be possible to increase the size. Yes, it's set to
“small” on a 4K monitor. Set to “large”. I had to restart the program, and it didn't want
to go. Just stopping it took about 30 s.
On restarting, much of the text was barely large enough. Still, time to take a look at its
denoising capabilities, using this image as a first attempt:
What's all that stuff on the left? “Presets”, apparently unrelated to the image. None of
them mention the buzzword AI. But on the right I have “Noise and Sharpening”:
That looks nothing like the display on the video, more like what I found with Affinitylast week, and which I rejected because it was complicated and the results were
inadequate. Tried playing around with the sliders, to little improvement. And then I
noticed a “Version” selection in the display. 2020 or 2017. Not quite what I need.
Back to the video. Not ON1 Photo ROAR, ON1 NoNoise. I had thought that ROAR included
NoNoise. My mistake. Select Download, and again neither the download nor the promised
email arrived. Instead I got a message from them saying that I hadn't tried to start ROAR.
Manual download, back to C:\Users\grog\Downloads, which showed me:
Oh. Not only NoNoise, but two more copies of Photo_ROAR. It seems that they have severe
performance problems, maybe because of the amazing amount of data they send. The promised
email did arrive, only about 20 minutes after I had given up.
OK, install NoNoise. Please prove that you're not a robot and identify all fire hydrants.
Simple, there are none. Fire hydrants are hidden in the ground. But on a hunch, tried
using Chromium instead of firefox. Still the CAPTCHA, but this time it took my word for
it when I said I wasn't a robot.
Then start NoNoise. Once more tiny text, this time to accept the license. 80 characters in
5.7 cm, abuot 0.7 mm or 1.8 pt. It wasn't just because of my 4K monitor. They have
deliberately reduced the size:
That's ridiculously small on any monitor. Why do they do that?
Another heavy download, this time only about 5 GB, ”downloading required models”.
That's what they said. Did they mean modules? While I waited it displayed, without asking,
asking, another image of Big Jim McGibbon, and using ridiculous amounts of CPU time:
When it had finished loading, it continued processing Big Jim, and I couldn't find a way to
stop it. Where's the requested task bar entry? Wasn't there (yet? Maybe it was planned
for tomorrow).
There was also something strange with the display. Now I had Big Jim full screen, but the
display frequently iconified and deiconified a second or two later. But finally I was able
to select my photo.
No, not so. I have never been able to save any image with ON1, and this one was last saved
by “Perfectly Clear“ on 6 November.
Still, select OK and see what it does. “Process not responding”. Yes, that doesn't
surprise me.
Finally it processed the image with the “e AI Model 20...il” method:
But how do I save it? Fool, it's not “save”, it's “export”, and that without “tariffs”.
But it wanted to save at 1200 px. OK, try it. “Please set destination”. Oh, the tiny
window is so tiny that it only has space for 7 characters of the folder name, and
you still need to Cho...... the file name:
What does file type P...p mean? Click to find out: Photoshop. But I was able to
select JPEG and get a result that
closely resembles the original (again, run the cursor over an image
to compare it with its neighbour):
Which is which? The first is the original. The second has rearranged the noise at the
back, darkened the background—exactly what I didn't want—and also sharpened the foreground.
So: is this of any use at all? Probably not. I had hoped to take advantage of their
batch capability to change a whole group of photos at once, so playing around with the
settings is not appropriate. But in this specific case I should at least give it the
opportunity to process the original out-of-camera image to see if it can improve on what
DxO PhotoLab did. But I'm quite
disappointed.
My problems with font size on ON1 softwareyesterday weren't limited to ON1. It seems that there is no software that takes the
display dimensions into account. Why? In the Bad Old Days display were uniform enough to
almost allow selection of font sizes by pixel, but even there there were issues. Now there
are display ranging from 20" to over 40" and with between 1280×720 and at least
3840×2160 pixels. That's a difference in pixel size of between 0.0272" (0.7 mm) and
0.0045" (0.114 mm). For a 7×9 character that's a width varying between 4.8 mm and 0.8
mm. And the latter is illegible. And yes, I'm using the old pre-metric units, since they
have established themselves everywhere in this context, even in France.
But modern monitors report their dimensions. Why go by the resolution? Quadrupling the
number of pixels on a monitor gives better resolution—I noticed that on my photo
processing—but it should result in halving the size of the text. Why doesn't software go by
the size of the display? If it can't access it, at least by the size of the window? Web
browsers like firefox and
Chromium allow you to set the text size, but I haven't found a way to get either to resize the
text in the frames. Why?
What is Colossus? I
had heard of it, of course, and knew that it came as close to being a computer as anything
of the time. But today I finished watching a rather long YouTubevideo by one of many Chris Shores. It's quite interesting from a number of points,
including the role of the British Military in keeping it secret. It gave a vague overviw of
how it worked, but somehow not enough. To my surprise, the Wikipedia page contains a lot of
detail.
And YouTube? There's so much stuff there, not only computing, and some of it is good.
Should I look at more of it?
We've had our new dishwasher for over four months. Right from the word “go” I had problems loading it. It's clever
and take up to 14 “places”, where the old one only took 10 or 12. The problem is that
it's their settings, made of things all a little bit smaller than what we have. The
result is not space savings: it's lot of wasted space.
As if that wasn't bad enough, the baskets are designed to be hard to fill, and the dishes
are very frequently dirty after “washing”, particularly the plates. My guess is that this
is the result of putting them too close together. I've tried to work around that by putting
dinner plates and side plates alternately:
I took the first photos of the dishwasher without flash at 3200/36° ISO , mainly because I
didn't expect it to be very effective there. But I was wrong, and to my surprise the photos
with flash looked marginally better. Here available light on the left, flash on the right:
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