While walking the dogs, saw a motorbike head for the Swift's house next door. I didn't
recognize the bike, and there was no way of recognizing the rider. But my guess was right.
Graeme Swift:
ALDI had a new mandolin on offer on Wednesday, not for
the first time. I have two already, but they're not adjustable. This one is: it can be set
from 1 mm to 9 mm, which should be enough for anything I need. I had already bought one
before, and though it was “professional”, it was uselessly flimsy, so it went back. This
one is not “professional”, and it works well and can also cut the crinkle-cut potato slices
in the image above.
How do you find out how to crinkle-cut potatoes? Trial and error. They go to a lot of
trouble to take enticing-looking photos for the packaging, but the “instructions” show a
couple of hard to understand photos in black and white. That and the instruction text
didn't help at all. If they can't write good documentation, they could at least take photos
that are as good as the advertising photos.
I can read the IPA with some difficulty, but particularly the vowels give me trouble. How do you
pronounce /ˈhʊɡɪn/? The /ʊ/ is some kind of u, but which? Off searching for
something that can read IPA to me as it should sound.
What I came up with was IPA Reader, which
claims to do just that. But it lies. It offers dozens of different voices. How many? It
hides the list, so it's not easy to count. And each voice seems to have its own
interpretation of the sounds, including (in this case) “hagin”. A pity; the idea is good.
One of the problems with my weekly house
photos is the sun. The Olympus M.Zuiko
Digital ED 8 mm f/1.8 Fisheye PRO that I use is remarkably resistant to
flare, but it's not perfect. When
the sun is shining, it can be in the image. In summer at noon it can be above the image, so
it's as simple as holding my hand above the lens to avoid direct sunshine on the front
element. But at this time of year it's always in the image.
Without any precautions, things can look like this:
This is a particularly difficult image because of the shade area directly below the sun, but
the problem exists to a lesser extent in all panoramas. I work around the issue by taking
two images, one with the sun and one with my hand in front of it. The flare is particularly
evident in the shade (run the cursor over an image to compare it with
its neighbour):
But while processing my photos yesterday, I discovered that I had left a part out of the
panorama altogether. I could have gone back and tried again, but as it happened Bruno had walked across the field of view, and I
had three images of him:
So I didn't want to do that. Instead I recalled something I did 13 years ago, where I patched the sky from somewhere else.
In principle it's simple: mask off the sun, load another image (any image) with the
sky in view, mask off the rest, and move the sky where the sun was, and stitch. But the
interface has changed in 13 years, and the instructions from then are no longer correct.
Here in more detail:
Remove the sun image (image 0 in this stack). Here before and after (run the cursor over an image to compare it with its neighbour):
Find an image from which to copy the sky. Hold the Ctrl key down and run the
mouse across the image in the Assistant. It highlights the images. Here image 3
(red) is appropriate:
The biggest issue is that the sky is not as uniform as it could be. But if I know that I'm
going to do something like this, I can take images better suited for pasting into the
panorama. I wonder why I stopped 13 years ago.
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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