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| Saturday, 20 March 2010 | Dereel | Images for 20 March 2010 |
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Another day spent almost entirely with photography. I had hoped to take fewer photos than last week, when I made a number of mistakes, but in the end I took more—a total of 201 photos, and at the end of processing I had 4185 MB of photos in my source photo directories and 105 of web pages.
Was it worth it? I don't know. Here are two views. In each case the first is a slightly overexposed single image (the middle of my set of 5), and the second is the blended HDR image.
There's no doubt that the gradation of the HDR images is more pleasing, but the slightest wind makes them unsharp, as is particularly evident in the second image. I can't make up my mine what to do.
More looking around the garden. Sue Giddins and her mother had looked in briefly yesterday, and the mother looked at our Hibiscus and pronounced them magnesium deficient because of a couple of yellow leaves:
Yes, there's something wrong there, but it doesn't look like magnesium deficiency: it's mainly on one side of one leaf, and the others look happy enough. Turned it over and found White fly, something that we thought we had seen the last of years ago in Wantadilla.
Took a look at our surprising dying petunias, which are now looking even worse than last week. Noted black spots on them, and they're sticky, so I assume that this too is the result of some insects. It's probably too late for the petunias, but we can try. Yvonne had to leave for an unplanned shopping trip, so got her to pick up some magnesium sulphate (or Epsom salts, as Yates prefer to call it, presumably so that gardeners aren't scared by using chemicals) and another sprayer—they only cost $10 nowadays, so it's practical to have one full of each kind of spray.
We also seem to have problems with another plant nearby, a volunteer Wattle (presumably an Acacia pycnantha). We've seen this before in Wantadilla too: our super gardener Ben Henderson piled mulch up to the base of the trunk and allowed fungal infection. And yes, once again the mulch was a bit close to the trunk. Pulled it back; hopefully the tree will survive.
One of the few things that seem to be relatively worth while growing in the garden is garlic. We didn't plant them. They were there when we arrived, and after digging them out from under the Osteospermums, they grew well. Now we have some of the biggest cloves of garlic I have ever seen, over 40 times the weight of a small clove of garlic:
| Sunday, 21 March 2010 | Dereel | Images for 21 March 2010 |
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Since 00:00 on 19 March 2010 I've been on a clear channel on IPStar. It's not difficult to determine when it started. The “TCP speed” value has doubled:
I've also not had any disconnects, though that's not a very reliable statistic: I've had up to a week without dropouts before. But my ISP is talking about keeping me on the clear channel, which might have some advantages. Tried speedtest.net again, which wasn't very conclusive. It showed speeds round what I'm supposed to be getting (about 1 Mb/s), while previous tests gave ridiculous values of up to 11 Mb/s downlink speeds. But it still claims that I'm in Dortmund, Germany, and gives me advertisements in German.
More playing around with my new file system, and managed to coalesce things quite a bit; I should be in a position to switch over soon. Yes, I'm being very cautious, but with good reason. Even as it was I managed to delete some files accidentally. I think I have a bug in mklinks where it might delete files from the destination directory even if they're exactly the same file (same directory entry) as in the source directory. Fortunately I found out in time and was able to restore them from backup. But it's a worry anyway.
It seems that there's new firmware for my Mecablitz 58 AF-1 O digital flash unit. How do I install it? According to the manual:
The flash unit's firmware can be updated through the USB port and adjusted to the technical requirements of future cameras (Firmware Update).
For more information, visit the Metz homepage at www.metz.de.
Of course, there's nothing on the home page about firmware update. And the firmware update page says nothing either. All I find is the ability to download a file called MB_58_AF_1_Olympus_V2.1_GB_Win.exe, and they don't even tell you what to do with it when you have loaded. As you might guess (but not reasonably assume) by the name, it's a Microsoft executable. So to update the firmware you need a Microsoft system, it seems (and a USB cable, which Metz doesn't supply with the unit). Score 1 against Metz for supplying only Microsoft executables, and 2 against them for worse than useless documentation.
Chris along for dinner in the evening. More silly photos:
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.
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