OK, I know what to do: load the images individually and join them one at a time. But it
didn't work! Firstly, it didn't find the images (specified on the command line). So I had
to climb trees to find the files. And when I loaded the first two and aligned them, I ended
up with this display:
OK, add my own. It didn't work! I couldn't position the cursor where I wanted it. It kept
moving somewhere else. Somehow the whole display is messed up.
OK, what happens with the old version on eureka? Off there and ran my script (which
runs pto_gen to generate the .pto file), and it worked perfectly. What's the
difference in output? I should take a look. The difference between the .pto files
may give me a clue.
And, of course, whose fault is this? Does this only affect the FreeBSD version, or is it a general
problem? My guess is that the not loading the files is general (“passing parameters on the
command line is evil"), but if other people had had so many problems with the fast panorama
preview, I think we
Jesse Walsh along today to do mainly weeding, but he also brought a “new” lattice to replace
the one that was falling apart (and which I forgot to photograph). Here's the new one:
Choucroute garni for dinner this evening.
I've been cooking it occasionally for over
23 years, and I continually find that the recipes have too much meat and too little
Sauerkraut. My first attempt
23 years ago had a ratio of 9 parts meat to 10 parts Sauerkraut. I had reduced
the quantities last year, and today I put in even less (1 part meat, 2 parts Sauerkraut), but
there's still too much meat. 40% maybe?
Is that really a result of the fertilizer? At first I thought only old leaves had fallen,
but this image comparison (with Monday) clearly shows that new growth is affected too:
Can an AI bot help? Google Gemini says
“no”, but points to iNaturalist and PictureThis. Well, no, it's too
polite to pointlink. I had to search for myself. And they're both mobile
phone applications! Well, iNaturalist is much more, but I had to install the app, take
the photo and then describe it on a glass keyboard. Not my thing.
And PictureThis? Full of spam when I started it, and when I finally got past that, it
wanted a credit card number. Another non-starter. About the most interesting thing
is part of its home page, which shows:
That's all that is shown. Why a text describing Frangipani (top right) along with a much
larger image of a Hibiscus rosa-sinensis? There may be a good reason, but on their home
page it's just plain misleading.
What about other bots? Claude. I couldn't move the image to its input field. OK, give it the URL of the
publicly accessible version. “Can't access file”. Why?
You're right to question that! Let me try fetching it again - sometimes the initial
attempt fails but a retry works...
I'm getting the same error - "Image content is not supported". This is a limitation of the
web_fetch tool I'm using, which appears to not support directly fetching image files from
URLs, even when they're publicly accessible. The tool is designed primarily for fetching
HTML pages and text content.
However, if you upload the image directly to our conversation using the attachment
feature, I'll be able to view and analyze it for you. That would let me tell you what's in
the photo, identify the plant if it's indeed a weed, and provide any other information
you're looking for.
How do I attach the image? Use the paper clip. No paper clip on my screen. At some point
it divulged that it could also be a + symbol. Aren't these interfaces inutitive? That worked, and I got some useful
information:
This appears to be Scarlet Pimpernel (Anagallis arvensis), also
sometimes called Poor Man's Weatherglass. The key identifying features I can see are:
Small, delicate 5-petaled flowers in a peachy-salmon/orange color
Purple or reddish center in each flower
The flowers appear to be about 1/4 to 1/2 inch across
Growing low to the ground among other vegetation
Small, opposite leaves visible on the stems
Scarlet Pimpernel is actually considered a weed in many areas, though it has quite pretty
flowers. It's called "weatherglass" because the flowers close up in cloudy weather or
before rain.
How about that! I had heard of Scarlet Pimpernel, of course, but
I didn't know that it was the name of a flower. And it's not even scarlet! And I had
thought that this would be some kind of Australian native.
VicRoads have sent me email. Not the
promised email confirming the registration of Yvonne's car,
but the information that they have a new and improved web site.
It certainly looks different. But it's still hard to navigate, and it has managed to forget
my password: I had to reset it. It looks as if passwords will go away soon anyway: now it
would prefer a passkey, which I
really must investigate.
And the site itself? It still doesn't supply information that I need, such as whether my
concession has been applied or not. Doubtless another ridiculously expensive upgrade that
does nothing useful.
Not quite 60 years ago I got my first
camera with electronics, an Asahi
Pentax“Spotmatic”. I
still have it. It looks exactly like the image in Wikipedia, down to the lens serial number:
As I commented at the time, the rearmost lens element protruded. This was what came to be
called the 8 element 50 mm f/1.4
Super-Takumar lens, and somehow the protruding element irritated me. When my father
also bought a Spotmatic 9 months later for the Asia
Trip, I discovered that the lens looked different, so I swapped it. That's the lens
in the image above, here from above:
This lens has seven elements, and the rear one (I think) contains Thorium, making it mildly radioactive.
I've just been watching a video about the various versions of this lens. I had thought that
the way to distinguish the models from outside was because it didn't have a click stop for
f/1.7, and also no marking on the aperture ring for f/2. But not all 7 element lenses have
that peculiarity. A more reliable way is where the infrared correction mark is on the
depth-of-field scale. The 7 element version has it between f/4 and f/5.6 on the scale, like
here, while the 8 element version has it to the right of the f/4 mark. It seems that the
change was made mainly for financial reasons, and the 8 element version was marginally
better. That's potentially borne out by the infrared correction. A pity I changed it.
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. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
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