How long do you cook noodles? I have a page about that, 40 pages long. And I'm constantly changing it: I'm currently at
revision 1.118. Today I ate the Jack Hua rice noodles, which I have been cooking for 5
minutes regardless of width. But today's were the thin 1 mm cut. Do they need as long? My
guess was no. Cooked them for 4 minutes, and they were fine.
I've now finished watching the acdsee Photo Studio videos. A total of 11 of them, including a 10 part introduction for beginners, of which
only 3 were of much use. How to use their database facilities. How to attach an image to
an email (excruciatingly complicated, even before their bizarre requirement of “Microsoft Outlook”). How to back
up your photos. I didn't even bother looking at that one, though maybe I should.
The other three were interesting for reasons that I hadn't expected. I get the impression
that the product derives from two separate products: “Develop” (“non-destructive”) and
“Edit” (“destructive”). In fact, they do very similar things, and neither is “destructive”.
The big difference seems to be that “Edit” uses layers and “Artificial intelligence",
while “Develop” doesn't.
Sadly for me, though, they haven't shown anything that DxO PhotoLab can't do better, with the possible
exception of lens distortion correction, which is based on lensfun. And that offers corrections for two lenses
that my current version of DxO doesn't support: the Voigtländer Nokton 25 mm
f/0.95 and the Sigma 150-600 mm. The latter is not not the same as my OM System M.Zuiko
Digital 150-600 mm, of course, but it's closer.
So: at least I have an idea of how to navigate the application now. What I need to find is
more about noise reduction.
The instructions said to soak for 6 hours and then boil for two minutes. But I
didn't follow the instructions: I just boiled them—for 75 minutes! That's some kind
of record, of course, but then I didn't follow the instructions.
They didn't change much. At the end of the time they weighed 673 g. OK, cook for 2
minutes. Completely hard! In the end I got them half-way al dente after—75 minutes!
By then they weighed 1515 g—most of them. Despite frequent stirring, they stuck to the base
of the saucepan:
So the pre-soaking made no difference at all. That's really a double record: firstly, that
they need such long cooking, and secondly that the instructions are so completely wrong.
I'm amazed.
I didn't expect the acdsee Photo Studio video about making backups to be very interesting, but I should
have at least looked at it. Followed up today. Yes, it is interesting, just not
very helpful. According to the video, to back up your files you need to go through multiple
menus, and back up the database and photos independently of another, thus making it easier
to make a mistake. And in the demonstration, the presenter backed up individual parts of
his collection—nearly a million photos—with different names! To make up for that,
you only need to do that once a month. At least he backed up to a different system, though
still in the same building.
My /Photos disk has nearly 2 million files. Admittedly, they're not all individual
photos. I'd guess round 450,000 photos in different sizes, with additional files
(“database”). And it gets backed up every night to one of two different disks. The other
is kept at Chris Bahlo's house, and we swap them once a week. Apart from the additional
security and protection against mistakes, it's also easier.
But then, this is Microsoft.
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.
