Mail from PayPal today with some policy updates
and the good advice not to follow any links in their messages, but to type in the
URL! Yes, it's possible to have a disguised link, but the idea of cutting and pasting
doesn't seem to have occurred to them. And then they provide links anyway—which do exactly
the kind of obfuscation they're warning about (real URL at bottom left):
It's cold and miserable at the moment, and in addition Yvonne had a cold and spent all day in bed. I don't usually get colds, but somehow the general
misery of the situation washed off on me too.
Sλmsung seem to have a desire to perform their
recall action outside normal working hours. Last week they wanted to send somebody by
after dinner on the Queen of England's birthday, and today Peter wanted to come at 8:00, a
time when I normally am just thinking of getting up. Managed to put him off until 9:20. He
arrived, took the cover off some of the electrical distribution, and pointed out the
problem:
It seems that the area can get very moist, and this connector can then start to burn,
setting fire to the machine. Looking at it, it's amazing how many things are wrong: apart
from the fact that it's not moisture protected, it's apparently a connector to the motor, as
evidenced by the thick wires going out. But the input wires are an order of magnitude
thinner. That looks very dubious to me. In addition, it suggests that the connectors are
made of a potentially flammable material—most of the surroundings are metal. And I wonder
if the moisture in the affected machines is due to condensation or leakage. As the “after”
images shows, this thing is right next to the cold water input:
It's been nearly two years since I
started my current panoramic views of the garden, and in that time lots of things have
changed. In particular, at the time I was using
out-of-camera JPEGs, and now I process my
images with DxO Optics
“Pro”. The difference in appearance may be at least partially due to that. Here the
verandah two years ago and now:
Spent quite some time reprocessing the images with DxO Optics “Pro”, but the
difference wasn't that pronounced. Here a comparison, first the original from two years ago
and then today's processing. Move the mouse over each image
to change it to two others:
The difference isn't nearly as pronounced as I expected. Quite possibly part of the issue
is that at the time I exposed all the images in the same way, like the instructions say, and
I thus lost a couple of EVs of dynamic range.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. I try to leave the pages here for two days;
you'll find them all in the archive, so if I fall
behind a day or two, you may find more here. Note that I often update a diary entry a
day or two after I write it.
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.
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
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