|
| Greg's diary |
| recent entries |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Sunday, 12 July 2026 | Dereel | Images for 12 July 2026 |
| Top of page | ||
| next day | ||
| last day |
|
Better photos?
|
Topic: photography, animals, opinion | Link here |
Yesterday's kangaroo photos were really not spectacular. How about a better choice in better weather?
That looks better, but is it really sharp? Maybe it's not such a good idea to take photos like this at full aperture. And is the blur on the fence line due to focus, camera shake or lens problems? The bark of the tree in the background at the left looks better, but still not good. And there's chromatic aberration that could be corrected in postprocessing if I had software with the right profiles. There, too, I should make comparisons. DxO PhotoLab is pricing itself increasingly out of the market, even for people like me who have purchased multiple licenses.
|
More weeding
|
Topic: gardening | Link here |
Jesse Walsh around to weed the garden today. It was necessary: it took him 4 hours.
|
Identifying focus mode
|
Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
As planned, modified my PHP scripts to include focus mode in the Exif information. That proved to be surprisingly uncomplicated. But performing the changes wasn't. Something has changed my Emacs php-mode, and now I get // as comment delimiter instead of /* ... */. And the comment column has changed. This is presumably because of a version update, but it shouldn't change what I have set, and I wasn't able to find a way to fix it. In the end, after much searching and cursing, went back to my 11 year old eureka, where things still worked.
Why does this have to be?
|
Sensor readout times
|
Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Today I saw an article about the best modern “mirrorless” cameras, “full frame” of course. An interesting detail was the sensor readout time, ranging from 37 ms for the Panasonic S1R II to exactly 10 times as fast for the Nikon Z8.
That's an issue that has interested me in the past. There's a big difference between the readout speed of the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark I and the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II, as demonstrated by these rolling shutter experiments of a rotating fan:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
And that's related to the sensor readout speed So what information do we have? Nobody registers the sensor readout time, but it's directly related to the maximum shutter speed for electronic flash, which is 1/13 s for the Mark I and 1/60 s for the Mark II. That means a readout time of under 77 ms for the Mark I and under 17 ms for the Mark II. How much under? Hard to say.
I haven't measured it for my current OM System OM-1 Mark II, but my guess is that it's faster: it also relates to the maximum frame rate for “continuous shooting”. And that's something that DPReview has on its comparison page .
Oh. They have “upgraded” their web site. Apart from this horrible reverse video, something that is annoying me more and more, they have removed all that information! Instead there are commercial things there that are of no interest whatsoever in this context. What a pity. I think they have just put the last nail in DPReview's coffin. And for me it means that I will no longer link to them, at least not until they fix the site.
More searching brought me to this page. Not as good, but at least I get some information. The maximum rate on the OM-1 Mark II is 120 frames per second, and on the Z8 it's 30 frames per second. That's interesting for a couple of reasons: yes, the shutter speed and the readout are sequential, but I'm sure that in each case they assume a high shutter speed (say 1/8000 s), which adds up to a total time of 3.75 ms for the Nikon or 15 ms for the OM-1. That leaves the rest of the time for the readout, which gives a readout time of less than 8.3 ms for the OM-1 or 30 ms for the Z8. I'm happy to believe that the real time is less, but why the discrepancy?
| Monday, 13 July 2026 | Dereel | Images for 13 July 2026 |
| Top of page | ||
| previous day |
|
Scales pain
|
Topic: food and drink, technology, opinion | Link here |
Time to make a batch of Penang laksa today. Nothing unusual: take the paste, tamarind and petis udang, add water to 1600 g.
But things aren't that simple. First, I didn't have enough petis udang. I needed 40 g, but I only had 30. Use that anyway? No, I only needed one portion of laksa today, so 8 g would have done it. But for the fun of it I tried without, and in fact it didn't make that much difference.
The real problem is that my scales are very inaccurate („vage“ in German), and I know that to get 1600 g in my 578 g pot I have to weigh 2200 g, and not the expected 2178 g. And after bringing to the boil and measuring again, the displayed weight had dropped to 2167 g.
OK, measure out 5 portions of 320 g each. But after measuring 4, there was only 296 g left! That's a total inaccuracy of 46 g (2.7%)!
That's enough. Buy some new scales, braving eBay to do so. Scales measuring up to 5 kg in 0.1 g increments? Probably the last digit is inaccurate, but that's more than enough. Only $9.99! OK, follow to the detail page and have to select a “color”. The scales I was looking at cost $56.49! Only a previously unmentioned cleaning cloth costs $9.99 (a hefty price in itself). When is eBay finally going to do something about this? This is just plain misleading. Advertise scales, offer a cleaning cloth. At the very least some kind of downvote should be possible, and eBay should remove such misleading offers. For me it's a reason to avoid the sellers zeeah85 and Exotic-Treasures81.
Much searching. If I had been working at the rates I used to charge, I could have paid for a number of different scales. As it was, I finally agreed on a “postal” scale weighing up to 40 kg in 1 g increments, along with useless (to me) things like price aggregation, for $32.16:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
That's a bit over the top, but still cheaper than the other one I saw, and my hope is that the “postal” would signify a certain accuracy. We'll find out.
In the meantime, I choose PayPal every time because I don't trust eBay, who always recommend a different payment method. Today, for the first time in a long time, PayPal didn't recognize me on my “device” (teevee.lemis.com) and wanted to send me a confirmatory email. OK, fine.
But it didn't come. Checking my mail logs, found:
Jul 13 18:46:57 eureka postfix/smtpd[75599]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from www.lemis.com[45.32.70.18]: 550 5.1.1 <pally@lemis.com>: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in local recipient table; from=<service@paypal.com.au> to=<pally@lemis.com> proto=ESMTP helo=<lax.lemis.com>
pally@lemis.com? That's an old, worn-out email address. Where did they get that from?
|
Landscape change
|
Topic: animals, general | Link here |
The new owners of the property on the corner of Bliss Road and Stones Road (the “schoolyard”, since there really was a school there in the 1880s) have done a lot of work on the property. One just occurred to us today while walking the dogs: the garden arrangement that we have admired has changed. Here last October and now:
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
Part of the difference is that last October some of the bushes were flowering, but more to the point, all the bushes under the central tree and a number in the foreground have been removed.
|
More Emacs pain
|
Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I have a number of Emacs macros that I use to write this diary. One of them creates the framework for an article:
<?php pubdate ("2026-07-14T02:26:23+00:00"); ?>
<?php texttopic ("c", ""); ?>
<p>
</p>
<?php endtopic (); ?>
But at random, the indentation is incorrect. Why? I can't find out, but I have discovered that it only happens with the latest and greatest Emacs on hydra.lemis.com, while on eureka it works correctly. Why am I having so many problems with software upgrades?
|
ALDImobile gangs up on us
|
Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne's pre-paid phone tariff needs topping up. Not a problem: go to http://www.aldimobile.com.au/, select the correct phone and “Recharge”. Select the tariff and send.
Submitting order...
And it stayed that way all evening, despite a few retries an hour or so apart. Do I have to call them on the phone? That way madness lies.
| 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 “blog”, and there is deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle for third-party content. But I welcome feedback and try to reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise I'll assume that it's OK to do so. |
| Greg's home page | This month | Greg's photos | Greg's links |
| RSS 2.0 |
|
