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Thursday, 10 September 2026	Dereel	Images for 10 September 2026
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Another renaming

Topic: general, multimedia

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Donald Trump has this obsession of changing names to “America”, apparently in the misguided assumption that this automatically means “USA”. Thus the Gulf of Mexico (clearly in America) became the “Gulf of America”, and Lake Ontario became “Lake America”, at least in the USA.

But some people have seen the writing on the wall and reacted pre-emptively. The TV programme South Park has seen the writing on the wall, and is now called South America.

The truth about 9/11

Topic: politics, history, fiction

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It's coming up to the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the USA, and the whole world is talking about it. There seems to be less emphasis in why they chose to do this, killing themselves in the process. We will see how they choose to observe the anniversary in Iran.

But this anniversary is different. The greatest US president of all time has got up on his hind feet and claimed involvement. Does anybody believe him? Of course not.

But he was involved. Matin Tatari, my old friend from my student days in Hamburg, was involved in the attack, and he has told me in private about the background of the attacks. Trump, then active in real estate, was annoyed that there was a bigger building in New York City than his own Trump Tower. It must go! It's not clear whether he knew that there were other buildings in New York that were also bigger than Trump Tower, or whether he had intended to remove them too.

And who better to do it than a group of Islamic terrorists who would kill themselves in the process, thus avoiding any possibility of them testifying against him? And of course the date was symbolic: 911 is the US American emergency phone number. I wonder how long it will be before the truth comes out. Just recently Trump mistakenly referred to “7/11”. Most people thought that he was confusing it with the US department store, but that was really the date that he had decided on the plan. And for once he was not primarily trying to extol himself: he was trying to divert attention away from his real role in the event.

Bread again

Topic: food and drink, opinion

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I've been baking my own bread for 18 years, 17 of which used sourdough. But our eating habits are changing. In those days we would get through a 30 slice loaf in a week or two. Now we eat various kinds of bread. Yvonne eats almost no home-baked bread, and I only eat a couple of slices a week. I baked my last loaf on 20 April 2026, nearly 5 months ago, and the sourdough starter was already looking weak. Replace it? It no longer seems worthwhile. How about using yeast? The twins came up with a surprisingly detailed recipe which looked similar enough to mine to be plausible. So today I tried that.

quantity	ingredient	step
15 g	dry yeast	1
5 g	sugar	1

990 g	rye flour	2
180 g	wheat flour	2
60 g	caraway seed	2
20 g	salt	2

1000 g	water	3

Most of the quantities are the same as previously, but there was less water. The twins had wanted 910 to 960 g of water, but my last loaves have used 1085 g. Today I started with 1000 g and found it sufficient; I later noted that years ago my water quantity was round 955 g, so the Gemini quantities look appropriate.

The other difference were the baking times and temperatures. In the past I baked at 220° for 20 minutes, then 170° for 80 minutes. Gemini wanted 240° for 15 minutes and then 200° for 35-45 minutes, and to use a temperature probe to determine the end (98-100°).

How did it go? I didn't think to take photos at the beginning, but towards the end it looked like this:

https://lemis.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/grog/Photos/20260910/big/Bread-3.jpeg

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And how about that, the temperature hit 98° just as the hour was up.

That's just barely light enough; I had worried that it might burn. But it disproved my concerns that it might not rise enough (claimed by Gemini) and that the yeast would no longer be active enough. It was 2 years out of date; I found 2 other packets that expired in November 2004 and April July, but I threw them away.

Friday, 11 September 2026	Dereel
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Unwise use of memory cards?

Topic: technology, photography, opinion

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I have many strong opinions, and frequently they're in conflict with those of the general public. That doesn't mean that I won't reconsider, and I frequently read articles just to understand where they're coming from. But I need a good reason to change my opinion. For example I have access to my web site from my mobile phone, and when cooking I can access the recipes there. But I frequently go to my office and look at the recipe there rather than the more “convenient” alternative of looking at it on my phone in the kitchen.

Why? Using the phone is not more convenient. I can't think of any other reason.

And then there's the question of camera memory cards. Maybe my view comes from the relationship to film: you put a film in your camera, take your photos, remove the film and have it developed. Now I read them in to a computer, of course. How many photos can you take in a day? I think my personal record might be 500 or 600, corresponding to about 10 to 12 GB of data. I have 32 GB cards in my cameras, along with an additional 64 GB card in my OM System OM-1 Mark II, though I have almost never used it.

Today I read of a new series of cards, with capacities from between 512 GB and 4 TB. What do people do with such ridiculous amounts of storage? Boast? 4 TB corresponds to 200,000 images on my cameras. If I took continuous photos at 5 shots per second, it would take 40,000 seconds, about 11 hours, and the shutter would stand a good chance of failing. Reading in the data from my camera would take a few days. I can only assume that the end users use the memory cards as archival storage, something definitely unwise.

Then I saw the name of the maker: “Wise”. And that brings me to a different rant: “Wise”, the unwisely named money transfer service. I suppose I should thank the storage maker for showing how unwise the choice of name is.

The first mow of spring

Topic: gardening

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Paul Donaghy along today to mow the lawn. To my surprise, the lawn mower started: in previous years the battery was flat after the winter break. But the cutter blades are blunt. Somehow there are always problems with lawn mowers. Paul tried to remove them, but the bolts were too tight. Sometime before the next mow is due.

More ACDSee videos

Topic: photography, technology, opinion

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It has been nearly 3 months since I bought acdsee Photo Studio Ultimate, and I still haven't got round to using it. I tried some of their videos last month, but didn't get very far. Spent some more time today, starting from the beginning of their videos to be on the saft side. They have a 9 part beginner's introduction, but the first 3 episodes don't even mention how to process an image: they're all about their database facilities, such as they are. There's certainly nothing that persuades me to change my approach to sorting photos.

And then there's this term “non-destructive” and also (by inference) “destructive”. What do they mean? I had always assumed that “destructive” meant that the original was permanently changed. But they're using it in a different manner that, I suspect, is just wrong: somehow the terms are reversed. “Non-destructive” looks more like “apply the changes to the original”, and “destructive” like “make a new image from which you can't return”. And then, fresh in this definition, they describe how to apply metadata to the original.

Somehow the whole concept is wrong. For me file processing (not just images) involves one or more input files, processing software and one or more output files. The input files remain unchanged. The output files are created. Is this so complicated that photographers have to come up with new terms which they themselves sometimes don't understand? After all, developing a raw (sorry, RAW) image file to a JPEG file fits my definition perfectly, and presumably no software overwrites the raw image with the JPEG version.

The proof of the bread

Topic: food and drink

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Sliced and ate the bread that I baked yesterday. It looked surprisingly like the sourdough bread, though it seemed more uniform in texture, except from one place where it seemed not to have been mixed properly. It tasted more strongly of caraway than I remember, but then I realized that I had put in 60 g instead of 40 g of caraway. In principle, a success. And then I found that I had increased the water to 1000 g five years ago today, mainly as an experiment. Maybe I should put less water in after all.