Monday, 13 May 2024	Dereel
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Latest AAMI nonsense

Topic: general, opinion

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Yet another email from AAMI today, technically in response to my message of 29 April. They enclose a purported assessor's report that is interesting for a number of reasons. In particular, it doesn't describe any damage! I think that it's time to read “Brave New World” again. I recall something about Epsilons that might be relevant today.

Understanding ACDSee

Topic: photography

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What does ACDSee Gemstone Photo Editor 12 do? What can I do with it? There are plenty of videos, of course, and today I took a look at some.

I still don't know what it can do. The ones I looked at show navigating their menu system and some of the normal things, like changing gradation. But they start in the middle! Yes, I have established that I can start the thing and load (“import)” photos. And apart from the basics, what can I do with them? Remove background seems to be standard now. Can I use it to get better results with my kangaroo photos, or maybe the Christmas photo last year? Hard to say. It will require still more playing around to find out. The good news is that the license is permanent, so I'm in no hurry.

Tuesday, 14 May 2024	Dereel
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Breasts with sculpture

Topic: animals, general

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Larissa has joint pains again, and today Yvonne took her to Pene Kirk for an injection. On the way home, in the middle of nowhere between Rokewood Junction and Cape Clear, she found various things to give away on the side of the road. She brought back this wooden sculpture, about 35 cm high:

It seems to emphasize the breasts and nipples; everything else is much less detailed.

Mona and Bruno: still not there

Topic: animals, opinion

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Somehow it's taking longer than I would like for Bruno and Mona to adapt to each other. Bruno keeps chasing her and jumping on her. I can't make up my mind whether he just wants to play with her, or whether he resents her, but I wish it would be over.

Power outage!

Topic: general, technology, opinion

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While watching the news on TV this afternoon, there was a “beep” and the TV and tiwi, the driving computer, powered off. Nothing else, including the microwave ovens and lagoon, Yvonne's computer, which were on the same circuit, didn't. It must have been a power surge, lasting less than a second.

Damn! I must do something about that. Waited for it to come back. It didn't. And of course the display remained blank. I really need to do something about that; the TV is connected by HDMI, but the machine comes up looking for the DVI interface, which wasn't connected.

Into the office to get a monitor to connect to the DVI cable which I had hanging out for exactly this purpose. But the display remained dark. Was it trying to talk to the on-board output? Took out the machine and took it into the office, where I discovered that hydra had also reset. Damn! But first things first. Connect it to a DVI display and discover that it's waiting to mount a file system on hydra. And hydra is waiting to mount a file system on tiwi. Typical deadlock. Fix that, but while I have it there, let's fix the display issues. Yes, I could set the display to the display card, but there was no way to tell it which output to use. Connect up an HDMI link to test that. How I hate HDMI! Somehow the connectors are designed to only fit if they're exactly lined up! How I hate the fact that every monitor has different connections, usually pointing down to make it more difficult to insert. It took me 5 minutes just to insert the connector. And then I discovered that it was the wrong one!

Finally I got it in and confirmed that it worked. Nearly an hour! High time that we finally get some surge protection in place. And a lesson not to cross-mount at boot. I can do that later.

And the default display? It seems to be related to this particular machine, a ThinkCentre M91p with 6 GB memory. It's somewhat underpowered, and it replaces teevee, which was an M93p with 8 GB, and I can expand that to 16 GB or more if necessary. And it doesn't have these display issues that the M91p does. So my plan is to migrate back to that sometime. It looks like this “sometime” should be soon.

But why no display on the monitor when I first tried it? My guess is that it had tried the DVI output, found nothing and given up altogether on a display, rather than checking what else was there. If I had power cycled it, there's a good chance that it would have worked.

And hydra? Up and running, but of course the X configuration is all over the place. I need to look at that again.

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 a day or two after I write it.

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