In the evening, to make his point, Bruno came back with another mouse. This time I didn't
let him in; instead Mona went out with him. When they came back, there was no mouse.
In passing, it's interesting to note a big difference between Bruno and Mona. Bruno is
immediately apparent when he sits on the windowsill in the dark. Mona is almost invisible.
This evening I saw Bruno and a disembodied eye, something like a Cheshire cat.
And with the exception of the Nokton (f/0.95, f/1.4, f/2.8 and f/4), up to three apertures:
f/1.4 or f/1.7 for the lenses that can do it, f/2.8 and f/4.
The results: almost useless. I did them hand-held in the assumption that it would make no
difference, but it did, very much so. Firstly, the monitor I chose (a 1920x1080 Acer) is
sensitive to viewing angle, and though it wasn't obvious to the naked eye, it made a real
mess of the images:
Then the fact that the images didn't line up, even for a single lens, meant that I couldn't
really compare the results at different apertures. And finally, they all seemed to perform
better than I had expected. Here the Super-Takumar at f/1.4, top left and bottom right (on
the left, with the 25 mm Summicron on the right):
The difference in image size is due to the difference in focal length. But that's a far cry
from what I experienced eight years ago, where the same lens comparison gave me (top left, here at f/1.4 and
f/8):
In particular, the Super-Takumar actually appears better than the Summilux at bottom right,
something that I didn't try on the previous occasion. Even the lenses that I expected to be
bottom of the list didn't compare that badly. Here the Cassar (Cooke triplet) at f/2.8, FED
at f/4, the Summilux at f/1.4 and the Summilux at f/2.8:
Yes, the Summilux is better at f/2.8, but I was expecting more of a difference. And of
course the Super-Takumar, the Cassar and the FED are all “full frame” lenses, so I'm just
sampling the inner, better part of their field of view.
So what do I do? Clearly I need better continuity, but maybe my idea of using text as a
comparison wasn't so good after all.
Part of today's investigations was to generate cropped images, as above. Not an issue:
ImageMagick does that. But
somehow I keep forgetting how, and the man pages don't help (I can't find a description of
“geometry” anywhere). OK, dig in my scripts:
OK, I can do that. But it doesn't work! After some searching I discovered
that convert is (now) sensitive to the order of arguments, and it seems that an
obvious geometry like 300x225-0-0 doesn't work. In the end I ended up writing a
new script with the payload
for i in $*; do
IMAGE=`basename $i .jpeg`
convert $i -gravity north-west -crop 600x450+0+0 $IMAGE-topleft.jpeg
convert $i -gravity center -crop 600x450-0-0 $IMAGE-centre.jpeg
convert $i -gravity south-east -crop 600x450-0-0 $IMAGE-bottomright.jpeg
touch -r $i $IMAGE-topleft.jpeg $IMAGE-centre.jpeg $IMAGE-bottomright.jpeg
done
But I should check jpegcompare-detail. It seems to be intended to do the same thing.
Mail from Stephen Rothwell today. Error messages from his name server
(ns1.ozlabs.org, one of my name servers):
2025-06-13T10:54:04.461783+10:00 gandalf named[32356]: zone lemis.com/IN: refresh: retry limit for primary 45.63.116.55#53 exceeded (source 150.107.74.76#0)
2025-06-13T10:54:34.471975+10:00 gandalf named[32356]: transfer of 'lemis.com/IN' from 45.63.116.55#53: failed to connect: timed out
2025-06-13T10:54:34.472173+10:00 gandalf named[32356]: transfer of 'lemis.com/IN' from 45.63.116.55#53: Transfer status: timed out
Oh. Yes, of course, it's not enough to update the zone. I also have to update
my named.conf, which was still pointing to the old address for ffm.lemis.com.
Now I have:
While I was at it, also added ns3.lemis.com (fra/ffm) to the list at
Gandi, not without pain. I must
remember that name servers in the same zone require glue records. The error message I got
doesn't really help:
ns3.lemis.com has no IP address but is a glue record
What it wanted was for me to create a glue record elsewhere in the menu tree. It could have
done so too and asked for confirmation, but why make things easy?
Saw an article today on DPreview: Six essential camera settings to improve your phone photos. Never mind that
“improve” and “essential” are not compatible, nor that I don't really use my phone for
photos if I can possibly avoid it: it might be interesting reading.
And of course Android made it impossible. There was almost nothing on albo, my Xiaomi Redmi Note 13, that
matched anything in the article. About the only thing that I found was the suggestion to
set the image format to the match the sensor format. But while searching through the maze
of twisty little menus, found this:
I couldn't get it to expand the text, though there's plenty of space. It should never have
been truncated in the first place, but I suppose that's modern. Pressing on the
icons does nothing. As far as I can tell, the whole purpose of the page is to change the
order in which these icons are displayed somewhere.
Jesse Walsh along today. I had wanted him to look at some stuff in the garden, but first
Yvonne wanted him to plant some self-seeding trees in the
paddock to the north-west of the house. After 3 hours we had:
Two Acacia melanoxylon planted in the same hole. Two eucalypts also planted together about 2 m away. Each of these trees can grow to
20 m, like the ones in the paddock to the west:
While taking the photos in the paddock, noted a number of other things. We're in the second
week of winter, but the Hibiscus rosa-sinensis “Uncle Max” still has buds and a flower that hasn't completely
dried up:
Yesterday's efforts made it clear that my idea of testing lenses with photos of text
on screen are probably not as good as I had hoped. But I've been there (many times) before.
Eleven years ago I used a ISO 12233 lens test
chart to establish that a lens I had bought was defective. How about doing that
again? The chart is
still available. Display on the TV (to avoid focus issues with being too close to the
screen).
And that will be a whole lot more work, to be done in the evening when there are fewer
reflections. Went to test. And once again I have issues with colour banding:
What causes that? It's clearly related to the TV, but it's not repeatable. In some cases
it shows up in the viewfinder but not in the final image. Maybe I should give up on the TV.
Much of this would be easier, except that I want to give Yana an easy and reliable way of measuring her lenses.
Time to roll over the log files on fra.lemis.com, which involves restarting the web
server. FreeBSD offers this functionality—I
think—with the service program, but it's straightforward enough with
the apachectl program:
=== root@fra (/dev/pts/0) /var/log/www 86 -> apachectl graceful Cannot 'graceful' apache24. Set apache24_enable to YES in /etc/rc.conf or use 'onegraceful' instead of 'graceful'.
=== root@fra (/dev/pts/0) /var/log/www 87 -> apachectl onegraceful Usage: /usr/local/sbin/httpd [-D name] [-d directory] [-f file]
...
Oh. Something has half changed apachectl to require intervention in the FreeBSD
configuration system. But onerestart (a command that doesn't exist
in apachectl) hasn't been catered for. Nothing for it: I must put this
in /etc/rc.conf:
apache24_enable=YES
The instructions say that I should write apache24_enable="YES", but that's
silly. rc.conf is (part of) a shell script, so the quotes are not necessary.
Mail from BUPA, my health insurer,
today: book an online appointment with a
doctor at any time. We needed that a few months back, but they were only available
some of the time.
But on searching I discover that we had already tried them, but couldn't get through. That was clearly
an incorrect URL. The one I have now leads to a registration form which presumably works.
At some point I want to get Mona sitting
on the window ledge in her Cheshire cat persona. It wasn't tonight—Mona didn't go outside—but I did get
Bruno:
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
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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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Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a
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