And, of course, she needs software to process the photos. OM Workspace is free, about what
it's worth, and I have old licenses for DxO PhotoLab 2, 3 and 4. But I couldn't find the downloads online—previously they
were available, but I couldn't find them. The only install image I had locally was for
PhotoLab 2, which Yana's laptop didn't want to know about.
Incompatibility? That was Microsoft “Windows”, right? Which version? Yana didn't know, and it looks so different that I wasn't able
to find the hardware information page. I have to assume that it's “Windows” 11, and the
difference in the menus is horrifying. But my guess is that the software was for a 32 bit
system.
So we installed OM Workspace and had great difficulty with it. For reasons that I don't
understand, the download took a couple of minutes to start. When it arrived, we couldn't do
much with it, at least because the view on the laptop was so difficult. So I updated the
version on distress, coming to the startling discovery that it no longer wanted to
know about network “drives”, a significant regression from the older Olympus Workspace. And
once again I had great difficulty getting it to do anything useful. They seem to have
engaged in that favourite Microsoft space pastime, changing the GUI to suit their underwear.
Why is it so difficult to work with Microsoft? The photo software is designed for it, and
over the years I have built workarounds to live with it. But today it became clear that
these workarounds weren't because I use FreeBSD, but because the Microsoft environment is so horrible. What does Yana do when she has
processed the photos? How does she give them names? Where are they? Much of our
searching today was to establish where the originals were (something
like C:\Users\yana\Pictures\OM Workspace) and where the converted
“exported” images were; on reflection
they were probably in the parent directory, but it wasn't obvious.
And what do you do then? In my workflow, they get put into a hierarchy of web pages. And Microsoft users? I'm really
out of my depth, but I'm beginning to understand why programs like DxO offer alternative
export functions, to Flickr for
example. And none that I know of offer the option of adding a title; if they do, my guess
is that it would need to be set individually for each photo.
A year ago today we picked up Mona. She has settled in well, in some senses. She still has issues with the dogs, though
today Elena was able to come up to her
(sitting on my lap) and sniff at her from a distance of only 1 or 2 cm. The only problem is
that she was supposed to be Yvonne's cat, and she spends most
of her time with me.
Yana's cat Squeaky has been here a couple of days already, and
caused a couple of machine loads of washing, but Yvonne still
hadn't seen her. Here she is:
It's clear: it's completely out of focus. The Exif data gives a focus distance of 17 to 22
cm, pretty much as close as the lens can come. But why? My guess was that it was taken
before the lens could focus, and the camera (the OM-D E-M1 Mark I) was set
to allow that, not helped by the fact that it was taken with remote control. So I turned
off the feature on the camera.
Why? I really don't know. The cameras were different, but both E-M1 models, and the lenses
were also different, but both PRO models. The workaround was simple: set manual
focus, since the distance won't change. But why is that necessary?
The other thing, mainly for Yana's sake: which perspective is
best here?
It's the same photo with a different projection. In the second one, the table looks
elongated and Yvonne has been pulled apart. Which is which?
It's cropped from these two renditions:
Last week I did some thinking about how much power my PV array generates on average and
came to no really clear conclusion, only that the offer I have is unreasonably optimistic.
Power generation is measured in terms of hours per day at nominal generation capacity, and
round here it's quoted at 3.5 hours per day: a 6.6 kW array should generate an average of
23.1 kWh per day over the year. My offer claims 4 hours (26.4 kWh).
But it occurred to me that I have quite good records: my current inverter tells me that I
have used 57,665.57 kWh of “green” energy since the system was installed, coincidentally
almost exactly 5 years ago. That's 31.49 kWh/day on average from my 10.8 kW system,
or 2.9 hours per day equivalent. A lot less than the claims, but then they're optimistic.
But that means that 6.6 kW system would generate an average 19.2 kWh per day—if the
panels were oriented correctly. Clearly the offer isn't worth considering. I'll be
interested to hear from the people and what they have to say.
The dryness continues, and even the little forecast rain hasn't arrived. Things are
correspondingly bad. I don't know how many of these roses will survive, despite irrigation:
Clearly the irrigation is part of the issue, but I'm no longer in a position to look at it
myself, and it seems to be beyond the comprehension of people who help me. Other plants are
also suffering:
How is it gaining access? Via the web browser? A bit of searching showed: yes. Apparently
it set a cookie to allow it to continue presenting notifications even when it didn't have a
page open. For Chromium, go to Settings / Privacy and Security / Site
Settings / Notifications and disallow them. In this case, I also deleted the
cookie.
I suppose that's normal nowadays, but it's the first time I've seen it.
Now opensubtitles.org have really
annoyed me with their spamming. How do I download the rest of my subtitles? Tried again
and got the usual
fetch: https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/download/s/sublanguageid-all/imdbid-2398016: Not Found
OK, can I download it from the web browser? No! First I need to select the language. When
I do that in the browser, I get a page that looks the same but has different links. And
then I was able to download the files.
Well, some of them:
...
imdbid-762006 148 kB 180 kBps 01s
fetch: https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/download/s/sublanguageid-eng/imdbid-738030: Not Found
fetch: https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/download/s/sublanguageid-eng/imdbid-737988: Not Found
Another check with the web browser gave me the message:
You are not logged-in. Try to login - this will help in most of cases
(not logged-in). subs_subtitle d IP: 121.200.11.253 exceeded. If you will continue trying to download, your IP will be blocked by our firewall. For more information read our FAQ or contact us, if you think you should not see this error. This deny will be removed after around 24 hours, so be patient.
OK, I can live with that. Presumably access from a different location would do so too.
Mañana.
Found an article in ABC news today
extolling the virtues of free video streaming. Nothing new to me: ABC themselves have
iview, and SBS has “on demand”. But they had a third one:
“Brollie”. OK, try them out. A fair
selection, including a number of Australian films. I have been looking for Sunday Too Far Away for some time, so it
was worth trying to download it.
First, though, another one that looked interesting: Mushrooms. Download went very quickly, but
I discovered that there were only 2¼ minutes out of 90 minutes, apparently in very low
resolution (though the video itself was 1024×768, presumably upscaled) and apparently only a
cropped part of the image. And no subtitles. Total loss.
OK, how about Sunday Too Far Away?
ERROR: [youtube] jIy4hcrXoKo: Video unavailable. This video contains content from Umbrella Entertainment, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds
Dammit, idiots, I'm in Australia, and you're an Australian company. Which IP address did you look at?
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/49) /Video/spool/Videos 114 -> host hydra hydra.lemis.com has address 192.109.197.129
=== grog@hydra (/dev/pts/49) /Video/spool/Videos 115 -> whois -h whois.cymru.com " -v 192.109.197.129" AS | IP | BGP Prefix | CC | Registry | Allocated | AS Name
4764 | 192.109.197.129 | 192.109.197.0/24 | AU | ripencc | 1991-05-01 | WIDEBAND-AS-AP Aussie Broadband, AU
The column CC (presumably “country code”) gives the location. So what are they thinking?
In any case, how about doing it the way they want, via a web browser?
What? They want to dictate which browser and operating system you use, and they don't
support Linuxat all?
Probably they've never even heard of FreeBSD.
Goodbye, Brollie. You should be ashamed of yourselves.
Não sou um robô? I know enough Portuguese to understand that,
but why Portuguese? In any case, I have my answer to “why not?”. I'm getting more and more
turned off by CAPTCHAs, though
it might have been interesting to see what terms they use for “crosswalks”, and what their
fire hydrants look like.
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.
Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a
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