Understanding the problems that I have been having with ExifTool isn't easy. Phil Harvey is
working on a fix, he says, but where does the real blame lie? So far we have established
that the problem only occurs with OM Workspace and DxO PhotoLab, and in each case with different
results. What about others? And what about using up-to-date versions of the software?
With OM Workspace that was simple: after lots of pain accessing the update server, it came
back and told me that the software is up to date. I know DxO isn't: it's release 5, and the
current release is 8. Out of recognition that I have been using DxO for over 10 years, they
have an upgrade price for me: $239.99. The normal price is $239.99. What do I get for
that? None of the annoyances appear to have been fixed, though they have even better noise
reduction. But that's not enough. Still, I can try it for 30 days without paying anything.
Oh. I did. And I can't do so again. OK, DxO, I'll wait until version 9 and try that. In
the meantime, what other photo software do I have installed on the machine? I only found
ACDSEE Gemstone Photo Editor 12, an old version with nothing remaining on their site, though
there's a video which
claims “Gemstone Photo Editor 12 is a multi-document editor with features like RAW
editing, layered editing, and artificial intelligence”. OK, fire it up. “Don't
recognize .ORF”. I gave up at that point, though maybe I should try again.
But I have so much other software on the machine. Where is it? The only one I could find
was Affinity Photo 2, but that
had expired. I couldn't find anything else. Time to make a list, helped by the fact that I did much
of the work 6 months ago.
My normal weight over the last few years has been between 87 and 88 kg. But a little over a year ago I was concerned that I was losing weight: it had dropped to
84.7 kg, enough of an anomaly that I talked to my doctor about it. He wasn't concerned, and
over the next few weeks it returned to normal
But now, for some reason, I'm putting on weight. Nothing to be alarmed about, but between
88 and 89 kg. Until this morning, where my scales told me that I suddenly weighed 90.1 kg,
the highest I have ever measured. Why? Weighed myself on Yvonne's scales. 89.1 kg.
What's wrong with my scales? It took a while to consider that it might be batteries. Yes,
AAA non-rechargeable cells, showing 1.41 V. OK, put in some more. Oh, no more.
Rechargeables? Yes. The scales were all over the place, going between 88 and 92 kg. OK,
put in some Nickel-Zinc batteries. They seem to work, though it's interesting to see how the brightness of the
display reflects the voltage of the batteries. But it's interesting to consider the
difference between these scales and the good old mechanical ones. The old ones worked as
long as they weren't damaged. Digital devices have so many potential sources of error that
it's really hard to detect them. Time for a second set of scales for comparison?
Grid power failure this
morning, the first in over four months. But the inverter cut out for at least 15 seconds,
possibly closer to a minute: I had time to walk into the garage and confirm the situation
before it powered on again.
Why? The only explanation I can think of is that the inverter was overloaded. Looking at
the inverter logs, this doesn't seem to be the case:
The power (purple trace in the middle) was out from 10:37 to 11:03, but the highest power
registered before the dropout was round 2.5 kW, tending less. It should handle 6 kW with no
trouble. On the other hand, how reliable are these graphs? They show a minimum
power consumption of 621 W while the inverter and grid were both out. It would only have
taken the air conditioner to decide to turn on at this point and there would have been a
spike over 6 KW.
OK, time to finally put that UPS back in circuit.
Oh. It doesn't work. Connect to power, turn it on and it grunts to itself a couple of
times before screaming incessantly, not responding to the RESET button (described as a
circuit breaker in the manual). Dead already? It's only 2½ years old! Conveniently it had a 2 year warranty. Somehow that purchase was
particularly bad. So I had to bring them up again without a UPS.
As it was, I had to restart hydra and eureka, not helped by cable
issues: eureka is normally not connected to a monitor, and I had forgotten which of
the two monitors had a cable to which of the four display outputs. Finally, after some
searching, found that it was the wrong one, but that the cable had come loose.
Bringing the systems up wasn't that difficult. About the only issue was
that hydra's syslogd wouldn't log to eureka. That seems to be related
to the fact that hydra was up and running before eureka was listening, and for
some reason syslogd had given up trying. newsyslog didn't help: I had to
restart syslogd.
Then there were issues with mouse buttons. My script to do it failed because it was looking
for a specific mouse. In principle it's simple:
This sets the thumb buttons (8 and 9) to button 2.
And of course my cold start HOWTO was out of
date. That's something that I really need to pay attention to.
But things still didn't work right! firefox hung after restarting.
Other profiles worked, but I wanted to recover this specific session. Lots of searching
before I got this popup:
Bloody Adblock! Far from blocking all
ads, it produces its own from time to time, and somehow this time it managed to break
things. Goodbye, Adblock, and good riddance! On Juha Kupiainen's recommendation installed
uBlock
Origin, which confuses things by claiming not to be an ad blocker. We'll see how that
works.
To add insult to injury, the messing around seems to have broken my firefox
configuration. Text sizes, once almost under control, are now all over the place. Maybe
it's really time to leave firefox and try to live with Chromium).
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
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