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| Greg's diary |
| September 2016 |
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| Thursday, 1 September 2016 | Dereel | Images for 1 September 2016 |
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Rani: first mouse
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Got up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet, and I saw a shadow in the corner. It moved: a large, well-nourished mouse. How did that get there? I had left the outside laundry door open, and the inside door has such a gap under it that you could fit a rat through, not just a mouse. But to get there it must have gone straight past the cats.
Into the laundry to get Rani, who took one look at the mouse, chased it around the toilet bowl, got on the wrong side of the door (where only the tail was sticking out), but then inside again and caught it.
Took her back to the laundry to let Piccola see the fun. But Rani disappeared again, and I found her in the lounge room with the mouse, already dead—normally cats play with mice for some time, but then Rani is only half cat. But she didn't seem interested in eating it, from which I suspect that it was her first mouse. Took it back into the laundry, where Piccola quickly grabbed it. Went back to bed and to sleep to the sound of cats growling.
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16 years and going strong
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Topic: history | Link here |
Spring is here again! And sixteen years ago I started keeping my diary again, after a lapse of nearly 30 years. I don't regret it. What I do regret is the 30 year lapse. It gives me insights that I couldn't have had any other way. In particular, comparing what I wrote in the 1960s and what I remember is fascinating.
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Still more photo recovery
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
I'm not making much headway with my photo recovery, though I'm learning a lot as I go. Spent a lot of time today trying to make sense of these two photos:
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They're still not good. There seems to be no green at all in the first image, and nothing that I could do would help. The green slider on various software had no effect. It really seems as if all green is missing from the image.
How could that happen? Let me count the ways:
The puzzling thing is that this image seems to have no green at all. The other one did. So no one issue would be a complete explanation. But I'm still at a loss.
Spent a fair amount of time considering replacing the scanner. It's a 9 year old Epson “Perfection” 4990 Photo. What are the good scanners nowadays? The current best scanner (independent of brand) appears to be the Epson “Perfection” V800 Photo. What progress have they made in 10 years? They now advertise an Epson Dual Lens System, whatever that may be. Resolution is up from 4800 x 9600 dpi with Micro Step Drive™ technology to 6400 x 9600 dpi, still with Micro Step Drive™ technology. Maximum resolution (software interpolated) is the same at 12,800 x 12,800, optical density, bit depth and scan speed are all the same. About the only obvious improvement for me is that you can now scan 12 slides at a time instead of 8. But given the scan speed (nothing like what they claim), that doesn't make much difference. So unless there's really something wrong with my particular scanner, it doesn't seem to make much sense to replace it.
The other image was greatly improved by choosing the scanning parameters accordingly. But it still doesn't look right. Once again went looking for software to help me modify it. As I have noted, FRANZIS COLOR projects 4 doesn't offer many of the tools I want, but it does offer a bewildering number of colour effects. Put the image through that and came up with a number of singularly useless variants, including these:
Though I can imagine scenarios where this sort of thing could be useful, this isn't one of them. More and more I''m getting the impression that this PROJECTS software was a waste of time.
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The advantage of laptops over tablets
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I've been ranting for years about the disadvantages of mobile phones and tablets compared to laptops (or are they notebooks now): the biggest is clearly the lack of a usable keyboard. But it seems that Lenovo has leveled the playing field: they've introduced a new laptop with “versatile” touch panel keyboard.
What an idea! It seems that young users, clearly uneducated, are used to touch screens, so this is a natural. This article sums it up:
Officially it’s called the Halo Keyboard, and if you’ve ever tried to quickly type on a tablet’s software keyboard than you’ll be familiar with the experience. Only it’s a little nicer because the keyboard is separated from the display, so it doesn’t suck up screen real estate, and it has a pleasantly rough texture. It’s also got haptic feedback, which in the case of a touchscreen keyboard is sort of like sticking lipstick on the pig.
Surprisingly, all the people on IRC agreed. Often they consider me an old fogey who is not prepared to go with the times. But they're missing the point that I was just as refractory when I was young.
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Protecting the roses
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Last week I discovered that our new roses need protection from the dogs. How? It's also pretty windy there, so it made sense to put some plastic foil on the fences to protect them. Surprisingly, everything went well:
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Planted the other older rose with unspecified name in place of the “Red Lincoln”, which is on life support in the nursery:
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And our last rose of winter is now the first rose of spring:
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Still more flash pain
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
I've been having problems with on-camera flash for ever. One of the best things I have done is to put cheap studio flash units around the living areas, bouncing off the ceilings: set the camera on manual and you're away. No shadows, good exposure, like this image taken this morning:
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That should work just as well with on-camera flash. I can use bounce on my meacblitz too. But somehow the unit and the camera conspire to make the images second rate.
This evening found Rani lying with Sasha and Leonid, coincidentally in almost exactly the same position at the photo above. No time to turn on the studio flashes, so grabbed the mecablitz and away:
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Not too bad? This was direct light, and clearly there has to be drop-off in the distance. But look at the exposure! 1/60 s at f/2.8, so that there was no way to get everything in focus:
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Why does it do that? There seems to be no way to tell the camera to use the flash as the primary source of light, just “fill-in”. Yes, I could work around this by setting aperture priority next time, but it would still give me 1/60s. Somehow manual exposure is the only way.
| Friday, 2 September 2016 | Dereel | Images for 2 September 2016 |
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Fighting telemarketeers
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Topic: general | Link here |
The telemarketeers keep coming back. Some seem to have recognized that not displaying phone numbers is a good indication of being a spammer, and they display something instead, in many cases an invalid number. Today's was formally valid, however: 0400359937. But there's still this tell-tale silence when you respond.
For the fun of it, I answered this day.
TM: Good Day Sir, how are you today?
Me: What's your name?
Justin: Justin.
Me: Ah, good, I was expecting your call. So this G20 meeting. You're preparing to kill the Russian and German delegates, right? We'll take care of the French and the Chinese.
Justin: Wait... I'm not sure you understand.
Me: OK, you don't need to be that careful. I know who you are. Give me a call again when you've done the job. Goodbye. click.
I don't know what he thought, but it made me feel good.
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Focus stacking, next attempt
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Spring is here, and the trees are in flower, notably the wattles. Today while walking the dogs I broke off a flowering twig from a blackwood and tried taking photos.
It's still not easy. I keep forgetting that to take focus bracketed images with flash, you need a speed of 1/13 s or less, because it takes that long to read out the sensor. So my first series was completely black. Getting the start point is also not easy, and it seems that focus peaking is highly dependent on distance. Managed an almost acceptable image with both extension tubes:
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The flower head was about 7 mm in diameter, and the magnification onto the sensor was about 1.43:1. At this distance the aperture (f/11 in the case of these images) becomes v/27, so I'm only getting about a sixth of the light that the exposure meter tells me.
What do we need to make things easier? At the very least it should be possible to specify a focus range, not just start focus, and rather than this almost meaningless “focus step” parameter there should be a maximum circle of confusion between the individual images. It would also be nice for the camera's exposure meter to have a studio flash mode to measure just how much light comes through the lens.
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Cats getting on better
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Topic: animals | Link here |
A few weeks ago I wondered whether we had done Piccola a favour or not by buying Rani. Piccola seemed to avoid Rani a lot of the time. But gradually things seem to be getting better:
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Hopefully things will stay that way, and not like this:
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More mystery flowers
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Spring is coming, and I've found yet another flower I can't identify:
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It's some kind of creeper, and the flowers are about 2 cm across.
| Saturday, 3 September 2016 | Dereel | Images for 3 September 2016 |
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The right language for the job
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
My recent work on old photos makes it clear that I need to have images that aren't listed on the pages. For example, the image 19650803/small/Norm-1.jpeg has moved to 19650804/small/Norm-1.jpeg, and I've renamed 19640828/small/KL-8.jpeg to the more descriptive 19640828/small/Bank-Negara-Malaysia.jpeg. But I can't just remove the old names, because search engines keep looking for them. On the other hand, I don't want these names to show up on the page.
Each page has an associated file photolist.php (for hysterical raisins, since they're just a list of the file names and dimensions) which I use to build the page. My current idea is to add a further data column to flag those images that shouldn't be displayed. OK, not a big problem. Back to the Makefile for the web pages, where I found old, mouldy and obscene shell script snippets:
I suppose this redundancy is left over from code that once made sense, but this is ridiculous. And it indicates to me one of the big issues with shell scripts: they're so brittle. Time for a better language. PHP?
Started rewriting the script in PHP, which was instructive in itself. But the further I went, the more doubts I have. How do you extract the dimensions of the image to build photolist.php? In the script it was things like:
That's four external processes right there. In PHP it's cleaner, but still not good:
I still need an external program to get the dimensions. And PHP's system() call irritates by echoing the output of the command to the terminal (stdout? stderr? I haven't checked). And maybe other programming languages, such as python can extract the dimensions directly. Can I bear revisiting it?
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Fixing HDR4 Projects gaudiness
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
I still haven't found a way to persuade HDR Projects 4 to produce images that aren't ridiculously gaudy. I can alter each individual image, but the whole idea is to batch process the images, and the “save preset” function doesn't seem to include the corrections.
Today I tried a different approach: I first convert the raw images to TIFF with DxO Optics “Pro”. Today I set saturation down by 30 points (whatever that may mean in absolute terms) and processed that. It seems to be an improvement, though it's not that obvious looking at direct comparisons. I'll have to keep an eye on the matter.
How photo software annoys me!
| Sunday, 4 September 2016 | Dereel | Images for 4 September 2016 |
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Alternatives for huevos rancheros?
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
In our continuing quest for alternative breakfasts (which I think we should be calling brunches), it occurred to me that huevos rancheros have a number of similarities with Indian food. Is there a way to put an Indian touch on the dish, or maybe just find a similar Indian dish?
While trawling, discovered that even the normal recipe is very much up for discussion.
Yvonne likes them so much because of
the guacamole avocado purée
(no chili for Yvonne), but it seems that it's not part of the canonical recipe. And looking
through the photos on line showed approaches that are very different from mine. This page looks interesting for variations on the normal recipe, and this one might have some ideas if I
could get beyond the horrible popup in the middle, which I can't get rid of: “Enjoy
this blog? Please spread the word :-)”. OK, people, here's the word: it drives me mad!
Please get rid of it.
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More photo software
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
I'm still looking for a photo software package that I can use to recover my slides. Today I came across Lightzone and installed it. Like all software, it requires getting used to, and it has a less than average awareness of directory structures, but there seem to be a number of knobs that I can use, and possibly it's worthwhile.
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Descaling the coffee machine
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
For a few days now my coffee machine has told me it wanted to be descaled. Why? Scale is accumulation of calcium and magnesium compounds from the water. But we have rainwater, and it's free of them. Tell that to the designers—please. In their infinite wisdom they have decided that the thing needs descaling anyway.
And how? Put a 1.5 l container under the outlets. How? The design is such that almost no such container fits. In the end I balanced a saucepan on the cup platform, one just small enough not to tip over, and let the thing run. It wants descaling fluid, of course, but there's no way it can check for it, so I just used water.
What a mess! No warning that the water outlet (which I don't use) will spray in whatever direction it's pointing, though I could have guessed that. And the force meant that water was sprayed all over the place anyway. The whole thing took about 20 minutes. And all that for a completely superfluous operation.
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Rose protection: failure
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
The plastic foil we put up on Thursday didn't last long:
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I had half expected that kind of problem, but not that it would all come apart at once. As expected, the foil tore around the cable ties:
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What now? Thicker straps might be one option. Yvonne wants to use baling twine, which would not look too good. Time to see what I can pick up at the hardware shops.
| Monday, 5 September 2016 | Dereel → Ballarat → Dereel | Images for 5 September 2016 |
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Dentist again
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Topic: health | Link here |
Off to the dentist today for a checkup after the extraction three months ago. Slight displacement of the wisdom tooth behind it, about 0.5 mm. Is that serious? I'm off to see Leela in another 3 months; we'll see how it looks then.
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Clocks or iPhone covers?
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
While in town, off to buy a wall clock for the kitchen. Yes, we've had one for ever, but now that the dining room has migrated, we want one in both places.
I couldn't find one! The electrical department at Big W had hundreds of different mobile phone covers, but something as boring as a wall clock just doesn't sell. Similar situation elsewhere.
O tempora! O mores!
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GPS navigation accuracy
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I've ranted in the past about the accuracy of my GPS maps. In particular there's a good route home from the west of Ballarat, via Bowes Road. Even Google Maps gets it almost correct. Here's the relevant part of the journey. Coming south there's a turn south-east into Bells Road, then back south west into Sebastopol-Smythesdale Road and almost immediately south into Bowes Road:
