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| Greg's diary |
| June 2018 |
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| Friday, 1 June 2018 | Dereel | Images for 1 June 2018 |
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More thoughts on induction cookers
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Topic: food and drink, general, opinion | Link here |
It's clear that I'm going to return the ALDI induction cooker. It's noisy, it heats unevenly, the lower power levels are time multiplexed, and the controls are irritating to use. But what should I be looking for in an induction cooker? Based on my current experience, I have:
I added the last two items a couple of weeks later.
Fitting into the kitchen cabinet relates to the terrible cooktop that JG King supplied: the the underside of the cooktop is too deep all the way to the front, so it is positioned so far back that I can't use the hot plate. The ALDI one I have amply fulfils this requirement:
Here the deep part lines up with the deep part of the gas cooktop. It's so far forward that it could easily overlap the front of the work surface. Putting it back still leaves ample space for big pans. In the second photo, the tape shows the middle line of the rear zones, about 5 cm further forward.
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Still, that's not that much. Thus the requirement that the big zones be in front.
What isn't as important? Safety features, like residual heat display and automatic off when there's no pan above the zone. Why not? Because all cooktops have them, so they're not important for making a decision. Of course, once I have made a preliminary choice, I'll check that they're there, but it's unlikely that I'll have a problem.
And then there are things that I really don't need, like a timer. It seems that just about every kitchen device has a timer, and with the occasional exception of ovens, I've never seen any use for them.
What can I find? Choice has a guide that includes 16 criteria, including one that I haven't quite understood: “Digital control readings give you temperature accuracy”. At first I thought that it's a good idea, but I suspect that they think a single digit 0 to 9 can give you more information than the 8 LEDs on my el-cheapo ALDI unit, which indicate a claimed power level (300 W, 600 W ... 2100 W). I disagree. The numbers just give a relationship, but not a power level, while the LEDs tell you at least a claimed power level. So a “digital control reading” is pretty meaningless.
OK, Choice have reviews too. But for that you have to be a member, which costs at least $23.95 for 3 months. I had taken out a trial subscription (for free) about 10 years ago (though the only reference I have to the matter here is was 6 months later), and I found it superficial. Nowadays I would probably be more likely to consider it misguided. In any case, I suspect that my $24 could be better spent elsewhere.
What else is there? There's consumerreports.org, from the USA. It, too, wants payment, which seems rather useless for devices that aren't on the market here.
OK, let's look at the market. Appliances Online have a web site that tells me none of the information I asked for above:
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And yes, the right-hand side of the display is truncated, maybe by an overly thrifty web programmer:
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Widening the window doesn't make any difference. An alternative explanation might be that he has clearly been so brain damaged by the smart of phones that he can't survive without a scroll arrow.
But look at how it's sorted: by best sellers and best reviews. I can also sort by brand name or price, or dimensions specified to the millimetre. And even then I get the impression that they're confused about the dimensions:
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OK, at least if I click on one of them at random, I can get some specs, right?
| Key Specifications | Brand | Bosch | ||
| Model Number | PVS675FB1E | |||
| Finish Colour | Black | |||
| Fuel Type | Electric | |||
| Cooktop Fuel Type | Electric | |||
| Cookware compatibilty | Please note that induction cooktops are only compatible with cookware made from magnetic material. | |||
| Cooktop Material | Ceramic Glass | |||
| Cooktop Type | Induction | |||
| Height (mm) | 51 mm | |||
| Width (mm) | 606 mm | |||
| Depth (mm) | 527 mm | |||
| Warranty | 2 Years | |||
| Warranty Note | Parts and labour |
How much information is there there really? Of course they're all electric, and they're induction. All I really have there are the dimensions, which match what I was looking for. How many of my questions does it answer? None!
One place I looked at was the German Stiftung Warentest. But that's not Australian! Yes, but it's free, and they do good test reports, and I don't really have much choice. Downloaded the report, and I'll look at it tomorrow.
In passing, I came across this reasonable overview. It includes the interesting information that if something boils over onto the surface of a Blanco Maxisense 3 zone induction cooktop, it automatically switches off the entire cooktop until dried. It seems that they think this is an advantage, but for me it says “steer clear”.
I also looked briefly at the Fisher & Paykel devices, which may meet many of my criteria. But they seem to use too much space for the controls.
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Names for kitchen devices
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Topic: language, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
While looking for induction cookers, I found this article, which comes up with the interesting concept “swapping a range for a cooktop”.
I've noted in the past the term “range hood” for what might better be called an “extractor hood”. But Yvonne had never heard the word “range” in this connection. And I couldn't give a precise definition either. It seems that in Australia, at any rate, it's an old, worn-out magic word. The OED defines:
Originally: a fireplace, grate, or simple apparatus used for cooking. Now: spec. a large cooking stove, having hotplates on the top and one or more ovens, all of which are kept continuously hot; (also, chiefly N. Amer.) any gas or electric cooker incorporating burners or heating elements and one or more ovens.
“One or more ovens, all of which are kept continuously hot”. That reminds me of the archaic coal-fired devices that some people in the United Kingdom so love.
Other words include cooking-range n. a cooking-stove containing several openings for carrying on different operations at once. (1849), and cooktop n. orig. U.S. a cooking unit with hotplates or burners, esp. one built into or on top of a cabinet.
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More house electrics
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Topic: general | Link here |
Our latest toy from ALDI is a “Solar Twin Head Floodlight”, their term for an external light with solar power and motion detector. Is it any good? Until I know, I'm not going to drill holes into the house to attach it. So I attached it to a fence post instead:
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And of course the toy screws that they supplied wouldn't tap into the wood, and I ended up with Yet Another stripped screw head requiring pliers to remove again:
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So I replaced them with real screws, and it didn't take too long.
Emboldened by that success, I turned to the power point in the kitchen, the one with the loose mounting frame inside. I had been dreading trying to put it back together, but to my immense surprise it worked very well, and it was all over and done with in a minute or two.
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Dinner with Margaret again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Margaret Swan is in town again for some “refined riding” clinic that Chris Marisma is holding at Unicorn Park in Clarendon tomorrow, so we had our weekly dinner a day early: sushi, which didn't stop Margaret from bringing and (mainly) drinking her own red wine.
OK, if you can drink red wine with sushi, you can eat wasabi with cheesecake, right? I tried it, and to my immense surprise it tasted quite good. Margaret tried it too and agreed, but then she drinks red wine with sushi. For some reason Yvonne and Chris didn't want to try.
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There are limits, of course. We came to the conclusion, for example, that no kind of mustard would work. But it's an interesting idea, certainly better I think than durian ice cream.
| Saturday, 2 June 2018 | Dereel | Images for 2 June 2018 |
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More curry laksa
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
I'm running out of pre-prepared laksa paste. Today I was left with several jars of this likely-sounding paste:
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Thai style laksa? That must be an invention of the last few decades to cash in on what is a Malaysian paradigm. Still, it should be OK. Used my standard recipe, which calls for 200 g of laksa paste for 3 servings. This was 230 g, but who cares. Made up the laksa, and only then, after tasting the result, did I read the label. The recipe calls for half a jar of the paste, 250 ml of coconut milk and 190 ml of water. No wonder my proportions of 1 jar of paste, 200 ml of coconut milk and 1100 ml of water didn't work.
But I don't see their proportions working either. There was more than enough coconut milk in my mixture (13%), but their recipe calls for 46%! The take-away message: it's much weaker, and doesn't taste much like laksa. And I have two more jars of it!
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More house photo pain
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Saturday is house photo day. Once again today I had pain with the photos; somehow it seems to be getting more complicated all the time. Spent some time investigating different issues, without coming to any clear conclusion. Last week I had suspected that the problem was related to my changes in processing, in particular using TIFF and Photomatix PRO, but today I got the same results with the old method.
I didn't get beyond this panorama (here from last week):
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This is taken with 4 or 5 images. 4 are enough, but when the sun is shining (as here) I take two images in that direction, one just for the sun, and one for the rest of the view. And today the panorama didn't close. I got this of the house:
That doesn't look that bad, does it? Well, not at first sight:
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Apart from the discontinuity in the roof, it looks remarkably good. But the house has developed another window, at the right. It should look like this:
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The issue here is that the control point detectors don't detect any control points between the two images that overlap at this point:
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This happens both with the cpfind and panomatic control point detectors. If I load just those two images, the control point detectors have no problem. What's going on here?
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STF: no thank you
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Taking the photos of the induction cooker for yesterday needed flash. OK, I have flash, at least six different ones. In this case, macro flash seemed to be the best choice, and the obvious one was the shiny new Olympus STF-8 that I got a couple of months ago.
But I used the Viltrox JY-670 Macro Ring Lite instead. Why? It's so much easier to use, and since the distances weren't changing, I didn't have to worry about exposure.
And that's really a nail in the coffin of the STF-8. It's so difficult to use that I can't really be bothered. What a waste of money!
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Stiff ear Borzoi
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Here's Nikolai:
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| Sunday, 3 June 2018 | Dereel | Images for 3 June 2018 |
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Power fail
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Topic: general | Link here |
Discovered another short power failure this morning, which had happened yesterday evening round 22:45.
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Scam mail gets more sophisticated
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Received in the mail today:
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I bought something from FarmVille games? No way.
But a second look makes things clear:
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“Costumer”? Not just misspelt: it should be my name, but they don't know that. And of course if you have a sensible mail system you can look at the envelope details:
That makes it clear, but you have to have a mail agent that shows email addresses. And despite the bugs, the message looks more convincing. I wonder if the reference to http://www.periodic-table-of-elements.org was deliberate or not; the site content seems unrelated to its name.
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More hugin problem investigation
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Topic: technology, photography | Link here |
Spent much of the day chasing down my panorama stitching problems. I had already noted that under some circumstances, I got no control points at all between adjacent images. But what was causing that? I tried:
Finally I discovered something that I had been missing all along: it was always the wrap-around image pair that didn't get any control points. Normally I load all the images into Hugin and run the control point detector, which does its job regardless of position. And typically the first and last images in a 360° panorama are next to each other. But the control points don't get detected. If I load the images in a different sequence, it's still the first and the last that get no control points. Bug!
OK, due diligence time: try it with a different operating system, in this case Microsoft. Surprise, surprise! It works.
So what's the difference? FreeBSD? Or maybe my hugin configuration? I still don't know, but I have more information.
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Knight in shining armour
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Topic: animals, general | Link here |
Looking out my office window this afternoon, I saw an unusual sight:
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That's Chris Bahlo, of course, but she wasn't game to wear her (10 kg) helmet, which would have restricted her vision too much.
| Monday, 4 June 2018 | Dereel | Images for 4 June 2018 |
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More induction cooker pain
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Topic: general, food and drink | Link here |
Spent a lot of the day investigating induction cookers. The one that the Stiftung Warentest liked best was the Bosch PIB645B17E. But it has this silly multiple button control stuff, and seems no longer to be in production (the report is 4 years old). OK, I can find three Bosch cooktops on sale in Australia. What's the difference? From Appliances Online:
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The image requires clicking a couple of times to become readable. But it's not worth the trouble. The only differences it reports are minor differences in dimensions:
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They're all the same height, 5.1 cm (and thus, irritatingly, more than the 3.2 cm of the cooktop; is there a thinner part at the front? Why should they bother to report that?), but first two are 59.2 cm wide, 52.2 cm deep, while the third one is 60.6 × 52.7 in area. But the prices are $1,211, $1,623 and $1,295 respectively. And the photos look identical. After all, they're all black squares. Why should I pay over $400 more for a cooktop without a recognizable difference? And, in passing, why do they make cooktops with such minor differences in area?
In the end, downloaded the user manuals. And yes, there are significant differences, though they don't explain the price difference. The heating zone layout is completely different:
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And that's important if I want even heating. In passing, it seems that the “join together” functionality of the middle one is the explanation for the $400 higher price, though it's not clear whether that's due to marketing or technology.
What size zones do I need? Went out and measured the base (that's all that counts) of my biggest frying pan, the one that has problems with even heating. Only 26 cm diameter! And most would be happy with 18 cm.
OK, what about other makers? There's no further overlap at all between the Stiftung Warentest test and what I can find in Australia. The Fisher & Paykel cooktops don't look bad (nor cheap). But where are the useful test reports?
Another thing worth thinking about is the electrical connection. Most of these things require a 32 A circuit. Can our fragile “modern” electricity supply (total 50 A) handle that?
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The “stable genius” president
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
Recently a whole lot of reports are going round regarding Donald Trump's grammar and use of English, like this one:
To quote:
“I have never, ever, received a letter with this many silly mistakes,”
Really? Yes, not good grammar, but is it that bad? She should try answering questions on Quora for a while.
Now how about that photography? Does this look better?
Not much I can do about the sharpness, though.
| Tuesday, 5 June 2018 | Dereel | |
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More induction cooker insights
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Topic: food and drink, general, opinion | Link here |
So currently my tendencies are towards the Bosch or Fisher & Paykel induction cookers. But where do I find reviews? There are so few reliable reviews. OK, let's look at some less reliable interviews, like reviews posted by Joe Random Purchaser.
The problem with these reviews is that they're generally done by people with even less technical understanding than the review organizations, and they're frequently written after a unit has failed, and are thus more polarized than would be normal: some people are amazed and pleased by the advantages, the others annoyed by the reliability issues.
The reviews at productreview.com.au are typical, though there were rather fewer “excellent” than I would have expected. But one caught my eye:
We did so much research on this. It had a good review in Choice. We went to two friend's homes and cooked/listened to any potential buzzing noises - none (different brands than Fisher & Paykel). Then we had ours installed and it's "on/off" constant buzzing when it's on low to mid heat -- buzz buzz buzz. We called Harvey Norman to see what our options were for replacement as we were told this is normal for this brand just now over the phone - even though we ASKED specifically about this prior to purchasing. Right now we have a service call for Friday just to make sure nothing is wrong....but this is not looking good for us!!!
This is interesting for a number of reasons:
So what's the advantage? Certainly not the price, which is considerably more than the Bosch unit. My main concern was the controls, but I think the disadvantages outweigh them. The review contains a follow-up where the reviewer returned the Fisher & Paykel unit and bought a Bosch unit, and was very happy with it.
Somewhere I also heard about demonstration showrooms. I wonder if it's worth looking for one.
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Bosch: better quality
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Topic: general | Link here |
So should I buy a Bosch induction stove? I've always found Bosch to be good value. As if to prove the point, the Bosch dish washer, which has been behaving for the past month or so, came up again with the error E:15. Damn! But then, we had expected that, and the fact that it worked for such a long time ago was just luck. Now to look for a repairer. It won't make things easier that the problem is intermittent.
| Wednesday, 6 June 2018 | Dereel | Images for 6 June 2018 |
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Bank helps transfer
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
I needed to transfer some money yesterday, and after my fiasco six weeks ago, I was particularly careful. Instead of ANZ, I transferred money from my Bank of Melbourne account (it only works if I do it from home). Send a notification to the recipient? Yes, good idea. And better still would be to defer the transfer by a day so that she has the opportunity to check the transfer details before the transfer is performed.
So I did that, and contacted her. No email. OK, I suppose it made sense to not send anything until the transfer is performed. Sent her a screen shot and she confirmed yes, all is OK.
Today the transfer was performed, and I got two emails: a copy of the one to her, and my own copy. The copy sent to her included:
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What's missing?
They explain:
For privacy and security reasons, we cannot publish your account name and number in this email.
Somehow this is all wrong. Yes, security is important, though I can't see what privacy issues there are here: yes, the name of the recipient isn't in the message, but of course the email address is in the mail headers. And how can you breach privacy by revealing an account description to its owner or to the person who has just performed a transfer to that account? The whole concept of account privacy is security by obscurity, an old, worn-out magic word. They should be implementing security in other places. As it is, this message is borderline useless, and it certainly didn't help me confirm that the money had been sent to the recipient.
When will the banks grow up?
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Spraying weeds
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
For some reason I have a real aversion to spraying weeds, but today I finally got my act together and sprayed north and south gardens, some of the entrance in front of the shed, and the dog run, which needed it:
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New couch for the music room
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Topic: general | Link here |
After a surprising amount of discussion, Yvonne finally bought a couch that she had been looking at on Facebook. We got it into the music room relatively easily, where it has the great advantage that it leaves space on the left for some much-needed bookshelves:
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That compares to this photo of the old couch taken a couple of weeks ago:
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| Thursday, 7 June 2018 | Dereel | Images for 7 June 2018 |
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Household maintenance, continued
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Topic: Stones Road house, general | Link here |
We've been in Stones Road for over 3 years now, and it sort of tells: various things are failing, far faster than we have been used to in second-hand houses. Today the door latch to the main bedroom stuck. That's usually a sign of a broken spring, but first I had to find out how to take the mechanism apart.
That proved to be not too difficult, and when I removed the latch, it worked fine. OK, put back together. Dammit, it turned in the opposite way. Clearly the latches are designed to be adjustable to for left hand and right hand operation, and I had accidentally turned it over. How do you fix it? There are a couple of projections on each side, and one projected more than the other. But how do I change it? I still don't know. At some point I managed to get it the other way round again, so rather than risk more trouble, I oiled the thing and put it back, not even stopping to take a photo.
And then, just for the fun of it, the power point in the kitchen, the one that I replaced only six days ago, popped out again. This time it seems that nothing is broken: the screw heads were just too small, and they pulled through the body of the power point. I had used the old screws, so probably they were at fault. OK, I need to get an electrician to lay cable for the new induction cooker that I will buy one of these days, so he can address that issue as well.
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Excessive “privacy”: whose fault?
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Callum Gibson (who works for an international bank, not one of which I am a customer any more) took exception to my “privacy” issues yesterday with privacy with the Bank of Melbourne. He explained: yes, I asked the bank to send the recipient an email when the transfer was performed. And why couldn't they give the account number? Maybe I had mistyped the email address, and thus the accidental recipient of the email would get account details of somebody (name not specified). And they're not my “property” to disclose, nor the bank's.
Since when can I only disclose my “property”? But OK. Clearly there should be some check. Given that I can transfer money to an account, get the numbers wrong, and the transfer still goes through, it seems a little unbalanced. But no, I should read the Privacy Act, a law so private that I can't even find the text on that page. After going around in circles for a few iterations, I still can't find anything relating to bank account details. What I do find is the following list of “Sensitive Information”:
I suppose a lot here depends on what you mean by “sensitive”. I frequently refer to people's political or religious opinions and health, without feeling that I am breaching their privacy. And there's no mention here of date of birth, although that's the main way that people are identified in Australia.
Callum commented later that somewhere close to where I had been looking, there were references to “Common examples are an individual’s name, signature, address, telephone number, date of birth, medical records, bank account details and commentary or opinion about a person”. Doubtless he's right, but I didn't find it, and I couldn't be bothered to look for it. And somehow there's something strange about making things like names private. At the very least there should be different levels of privacy, and in the case I was ranting about, where the details have been shared, there's every reason to believe that privacy is not the issue.
After some time, though I have come to the conclusion that the whole law is too complicated. People can't understand it, or if they do, they can't remember it. And if Callum (or his bank) is right, it's unnecessarily restrictive and imbalanced. If I can't divulge somebody's account number, the very least a bank could do is check that a transfer goes to an account with a name loosely matching the name I specify.
In one point, though, Callum is right: this isn't primarily the bank's fault. The law needs simplification and balancing. Probably the banks are just erring on the side of caution.
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Microsoft buys GitHub
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
News of the day: Microsoft has bought GitHub, a framework for free software repositories. Why? The conspiracy theories abound:
| Friday, 8 June 2018 | Dereel | |
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Trimming Borzoi's claws
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Topic: animals | Link here |
Yvonne was trimming the dogs' claws again today, and coincidentally she came across this:
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Furniture prices
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Topic: general, opinion | Link here |
After getting the new sofa bed, we have space for a couple more bookshelves. But where do we get them from? Books, it seems, are no longer modern, and neither are the shelves. In the past we paid round $100 for a chipboard shelf 90×180 cm in size. The cheapest that I could find today in Ballarat were from Officeworks for round $230. How prices have gone up!
But then I looked at IKEA, where we bought the last ones. 10 years ago they cost $99. Now they cost $70! They'll even deliver them for me—at a price: $250. For that, it might make sense to visit IKEA again.
| Saturday, 9 June 2018 | Dereel | Images for 9 June 2018 |
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Investigating hugin workflow
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
So why does Hugin not create control points between the first and the last image in a stack? Bruno Postle had assumed that it was because I had invoked cpfind with the --linearmatch parameter. But no, I hadn't, and I had also done it with panomatic. So whatever it was, it's not that simple.
So this is beginning to look like real debugging. Not an easy thing to do with a GUI. But we can run the programs individually (a huge advantage). But how? cpfind wants a project file to already exist. How do I create that? Found details on this page, unfortunately somewhat out of date: use pto_gen. The man page isn't encouraging. It refers to an obsolete program (match-n-shift), and some of the parameters aren't described adequately:
What's that? Where's there a list of the projections? Never mind, I'll look for them later. Let's try it:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/15) ~/Photos/20180609 30 -> pto_gen C/e-from-house-?.jpeg
Huh? I didn't mention anything about stacks, and there's only one lens involved here:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/15) ~/Photos/20180609 31 -> exifx C/e-from-house-?.jpeg | grep Lens
OK, let's look at the project file it generates. I had already created one with the GUI (this happens when you read in the files). But they looked quite different. Here's the one created by pto_gen, omitting a number of commented-out parameters:
And here's the diff from the GUI:
Clearly reading the files in to the GUI does more than just run pto_gen, and that explains some of the additional information. But there's a y parameter in the i lines, and that looks very much like yaw. But how did it establish that? And where is the lens information? How much of the rest is important? I need to learn to interpret the project files.
That's about as far as I got today. I now need to do at least:
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Cassoulet again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Cooked a cassoulet today, the first for a long time. Looking at the recipe was interesting. I wrote it nearly 12 years ago, and I haven't updated it much. Somehow it tasted too dry today.
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Dinner with Pene
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Topic: general, food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Pene Kirk along for dinner tonight, the first time in a while. The disappointing news is that she's closing her vet practice: she wants some time for herself rather than for other people. As usual, had a lot of fun.
| Sunday, 10 June 2018 | Dereel | Images for 10 June 2018 |
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Easter eggs
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Yvonne has run out of eggs! A good thing we get them locally, from MJ Wisbey down Ferrers Road, so off in the afternoon. I seldom get out of the house, so I came too.
Not quite your typical supermarket eggs:
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I had thought that they were duck eggs—that's what MJ normally sells—but it seems that these are hen eggs.
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The Hawkes visit
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Topic: general, animals | Link here |
Visit from Anke and Paul Hawke this afternoon. Yvonne knows Anke from some rider group, probably on Facebook: she has some connection with Arne Koets, and is clearly a good rider herself. So of course they went out and discussed Carlotta, who showed herself from the best side:
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They stayed the night, giving Yvonne the opportunity to serve Königsberger Klopse (Anke is from Hamburg, somewhere behind Blankenese). Pleasant evening, interesting people. I suspect we'll see them here again some time.
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Trump: a step too far?
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
Donald Trump thinks he's on top of the world ahead of his historical meeting with Kim Jong-un. His behaviour at the G6 summit in Charlevoix was atrocious, and it looks like he's doing everything he can to destroy the western world as we know it. One photo that summed it up was this:
That's impressive enough, especially with Shinzo Abe's poker face, but of course people had to improve it:
I would really relish it if Kim were to walk all over Trump in a way that Trump didn't realize until it's too late.
| Monday, 11 June 2018 | Dereel | Images for 11 June 2018 |
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Recovery day
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Topic: general | Link here |
The Hawkes left relatively this morning, just after breakfast. It's been fun, but it was also quite a weekend, and we spent most of the day recovering.
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All eyes on Singapore
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Topic: politics, history | Link here |
Tomorrow Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un will meet in Singapore for what will, one way or another, be a historic event. Even Yvonne watched some of the news coverage on TV.
I saw different things. Singapore was once something almost like home, but that was half a century ago: my parents really did have a house at 79 Grange Road from 1972 to 1975. Now I hardly recognize the place. Maybe this photo shows the difference:
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That was taken on 20 September 1968, not quite 50 years ago. Where is it now? I think this Google Maps image best shows the location:
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There's nothing in common there, of course: the location is roughly here, based on the one building that is still there, the old post office:
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That now seems to be the Fullerton Hotel. It's visible from a closer perspective. Here first a panoramic view to give the feeling:
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And in the second image there's a match with my photo of 50 years ago. At least the columns at the entrance are recognizable, as are the little turrets on either side:
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How things have changed! Then it was open sea (I was on a tramp steamer from Singapore to Kuching). Now it's all reclaimed and heavily populated land, and hardly anything from my childhood is still there. And there are things there that I don't recognize at all, like this one, the Marina Bay Sands hotel, where apparently Kim Jong-un spent some time today:
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That brings back to me that it has been over 13 years since I was last in Singapore. How time flies when you don't fly!
| Tuesday, 12 June 2018 | Dereel | |
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Historic summit in Singapore
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Topic: politics, history | Link here |
So Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un have really met face to face, and, as I had expected, the meeting was a “success”. I watched much of it live—even Yvonne took time to watch it. I wonder how many other people did. Strangely, I can't find any statistics.
What information did I get out of it? Nothing of earth-shattering importance. I had guessed that Kim could speak at least reasonable English, but his puzzled expression in the one-on-Un (as somebody put it) time with Trump, and at other times, suggests that any English he has is very basic.
And the result? This statement with the usual formulations, but also:
Reaffirming the April 27, 2018 Panmunjom Declaration, the DPRK commits to work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
That's a good start. It'll be very interesting to see where we go from here.
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Induction cookers, rethought
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
It's becoming time to return the ALDI induction cooktop. What will I replace it with? The week before last I came up with a list of requirements for an induction cooktop. Now I've had time to look at real world cookers. What do I find?
Of the ten items I originally listed, I have not been able to establish two at all, and I discover that I had missed an important one altogether: power regulation should be by pulse width modulation, not on/off switching. This could be the most important of all (though I haven't decided yet), and it's also one that I have only had answered indirectly, by a negative review.
So what do I do? Bosch seems to be the best, but I can't find what kind of power regulation it uses, nor if it will fit into my kitchen cabinet, nor what power connections it needs. It doesn't have easily recognized cooking zones, and the controls are just as complicated as on the ALDI cooktop. The ALDI stove cost $300, and the cheapest Bosch costs round $1,100. Why not just stick with the ALDI?
That didn't take long to understand: the Bosch has different sized cooking zones, it can produce much more power (3.7 kW as compared to 2 kW), and test reviews suggest that it heats considerably more uniformly. So the biggest issue so far is if it will even fit! Aren't “specifications” useless?
| Wednesday, 13 June 2018 | Dereel | |
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The lull after the storm
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Topic: politics, general, language, opinion | Link here |
In the last few days I don't seem to have done anything at all. Why not? Nothing much has changed, and it's not apparent where the time has gone. My best bet is that I'm spending too much time following international events, notably of course the Trump—Kim meeting in Singapore.
Or was that Singapore? Yes, the country is right. But the meeting took place on Sentosa, an island just south of town. And an interesting (ominous?) thing that nobody seems to have mentioned is that when I was a lad, the island was called Pulau Blakang Mati.
What's that? It's a Malay name, and the first indication is that the name is old: “belakang” is the modern spelling. And it means “behind” in many senses. “Pulau” is “island”—no surprises there. And “mati” means “dead”. So dead behind island? Island of the dead behind? Backwards death island? Those are my guesses, but nobody seems to have come up with a good explanation. The Wikipedia etymology has no better ideas. Maybe the suggestion that the winds are dead behind the hill makes sense.
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Bookshelves!
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Topic: general | Link here |
Last week we established that we had both need of and space for a couple of bookshelves in the “music room”, currently almost impassable for junk on the floor. And local shelves started at round $230, and IKEA started to look attractive at only $70—plus transport, of course. So we were planning for another trip to Melbourne to pick some up.
But then Yvonne found a pair of used shelves for sale somewhere on the web. $40 the pair. OK, usually there are a couple of drawbacks buying used furniture, but for that price we can put up with it.
Yvonne picked them up today, and I put them in the music room, here on the left:
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It wasn't until I took the photos that I noticed that the colour is different. Clearly they're IKEA shelves, and not only are they much cheaper, they have also been assembled. The difference in colour is not important. The other side of the room is much worse:
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Now I just need to tidy the place up and put some books into the shelves. That also involves a change of name: library rather than music room, now that most of my musical instruments are in the lounge room.
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Dangerous world leaders
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
Statista came out with an interesting statistic today:
It's interesting to note the differences between the US Republicans and Democrats. The latter consider Donald Trump to be the most threatening. My view too, though I hadn't expected any majority in the USA to agree with me. On the other hand, Kim Jong-un is pretty harmless in my eyes. And the bipartisan differences in opinion on Iran and Israel are also very interesting.
| Thursday, 14 June 2018 | Dereel | Images for 14 June 2018 |
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NBN: Failure!
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
Interesting statistic from Statista today:
Yes, I've had my issues with the National Broadband Network, and I still do. In particular, reliability is really not acceptable. But the other three main reasons don't apply to me at all. I don't know any cheaper service, and I don't know a faster one. What is faster than 50/20 Mb/s down/up? What is even available? And at what price?
My best bet is that a lot has to do with the RSP. Earlier this week I was talking with Paul Hawke, one person who complains about performance, particularly during peak hours. Who is he with? Telstra. And in their case, I know where to point the finger.
Strangely, that's not what other people on IRC see. Many consider it a deliberate attempt by the present Australian government to destroy the NBN. Yes, it's true that the current government opposed the NBN, and they castrated it in order to make it cheaper ($50,000 million instead of $42,000 million), but did they really want to make it fail? They could have done that in much cheaper ways. One again my friend Bob Hanlon comes to mind: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”. The "cheaper" solution showed how well they were in control of the situation.
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Huevos a la tigre revisited
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
It's been a while since I made huevos a la tigre, mainly because it's a significant amount of work. Last night I made enough for four portions—I thought—and ended up with an amazing amount of stuff. I must have been hungry when I wrote that recipe, which included a total of nearly 450 g of ingredients, not mentioning the eggs, including 180 g of potatoes. I think half that is a better quantity. Ate one portion and froze the rest.
Here are the ingredients I ended up with after reconsidering the quantities:
For eight portions.
| quantity | ingredient | step | ||
| 800 g | potatoes | 1 | ||
| 400 g | onions | 1 | ||
| 40 g | garlic | 1 | ||
| 200 g | chorizo, cooked and sliced | 1 | ||
| oil or fat to fry | 1 | |||
| 250 g | tomatoes | 2 | ||
| 150 g | capsicum | 2 | ||
| 35 g | salt | 2 | ||
| 320 g | peas (40 g per portion) | 3 | ||
| 16 | eggs (2 per portion) | 4 | ||
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Ashamed to be Australian
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Topic: politics, opinion | Link here |
So today (13 June in New York), the United Nations General Assembly voted about the Israeli murders on the border to Gaza. 120 countries deplored the “excessive use of force”. 45 abstained, and 8 opposed the motion.
Which 8? Israel and the USA, of course to start with. I didn't see them all, but the other 4 I saw on the video were Australia and three small Pacific nations dependent on Australia.
Shame! This is not my government. Are economic ties with the USA so important that they are prepared to sanction cold-blooded murder?
In passing, how do you find the votes for a UN resolution? What I found on un.org was this report and a voting records search page, which appears to be designed as an intelligence test, and so far I have failed.
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Music room → library, day 2
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Topic: general | Link here |
Spent a considerable amount of time unpacking things in what we'll now call the library, though I came across 3 random bassoons and a clarinet that I have had for nearly 60 years in the process. I also found an amazing number of cassette tapes, audio, video and computer backup, and an expected number of vinyl records. Here's what it looked like by the end of the day:
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| Friday, 15 June 2018 | Dereel | Images for 15 June 2018 |
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Garden flowers in early winter
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Topic: gardening, opinion | Link here |
And here we are into our third winter in Stones Road! Today was middle of the month and time for the monthly garden photos.
Winter is the time where autumn meets spring. The roses are still flowering, but so are the first of the spring bulbs:
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Strangely, the Narcissus started flowering before the Snowdrops.
In addition, the Solanum lycopersicum (better known as tomatoes) are still going strong:
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The tomatoes will probably not ripen on the vine, but barring a severe frost I can pick them and let them ripen inside. I already have a number which are just waiting to be eaten. It looks as if we still have at least a month's supply.
We can tell that it's winter though, because the Arums have started flowering:
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And despite my concerns, the Senna aciphylla is really flowering more obviously at this time of year:
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I've been keeping my eye on the Alyssum in front of the house since they suffered so badly from lack of water in the summer. They're still there, though not as good as last month:
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The Anigozanthos that we planted in the island in front of the house seem to have died—maybe the soil was not porous enough. But the red one that the Marriotts gave us when we moved in has long recovered from Sasha's attention and is now flowering happily:
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Our Banksia integrifolia tree has been growing quite happily, and it's now the best part of 3 m tall. But no flowers—until now. Now we have three, if you count the first two growing out of the trunk:
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I wonder how they'll continue.
Some late summer flowers are finally giving up, including the Cannas and the Buddleja, though we still have a couple of Canna buds:
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The Hebes have also almost completely finished, but there are still a couple of odd flowers:
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To my surprise, the Carpobrotus have been flowering sporadically for some time. Maybe it's a leftover of the dry spell in the summer:
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I wonder how that will continue.
The flowers we bought in Pomonal in the spring, the Grevillea bronwenae and the Eremophila nivea, are doing well, better than for a while, as is the prostrate Grevillea that we bought some time ago:
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And the newly planted Lavender and Lilac are doing about as well as can be expected:
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Our Staghorn fern has had an accident largely unrelated to the season. After nearly 10 years, the board to which it was attached has rotted away:
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I'll have to find out how to remount it.
And finally the Westringia fruticosa are starting to flower more profuseley and look like bushes:
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| Saturday, 16 June 2018 | Dereel | Images for 16 June 2018 |
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More Hugin pain
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
House photo day again today, and once again I had difficulty with the control point detectors not wrapping around. Last week I managed to work around it by adding the first image a second time at the end of the stack, but that didn't work today. Here two examples:
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Clearly the first image is completely broken. At first the second image looks OK, but suddenly we have gained an extra bird bath and horse trough (the black thing in the background):
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In the end I gave up and ran the control point detectors on euroa, my Microsoft laptop. That, too, had its strangenesses: by default there are these strange vertical line detectors, which in my experience work very badly, and once again I couldn't find out how to disable them. I was able to simply remove the control points and realign, and that worked, but it begs the question: if this setting is not visible, is there maybe a different setting that isn't visible that causes my problems?
But it also confirmed that the issue is related only to the control point detectors: I could take the output of euroa's control point detectors and process it further on eureka. Somehow this problem requires so much background information to solve.
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ALDI kitchen stuff
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Yvonne was in town today and brought back some stuff from ALDI: a frying pan suited to induction, and these strange “Crêpes”:
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They look particularly strange, but so are the instructions:
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What's missing there? The quantity! If it takes 8 to 10 seconds (6 to 8 kJ) to heat one crêpe, it will take 6 times as long to heat all of them.
On the positive side, they specified the power of the microwave oven. And sure enough, it took about 15 seconds to heat two of them at 1199 W to the point where pressure built up in the plastic tube.
But they tasted like they looked. They were tough! That's the last time we buy them. Spent much of the evening looking at recipes, but it looks like a lot of work.
The frying pan proved to be almost identical to one I bought last year, with one exception: it doesn't work properly. The (ALDI) induction cooker has no problem with the old one, but it can only recognize the new one from time to time. Back it goes.
| Sunday, 17 June 2018 | Dereel | Images for 17 June 2018 |
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Investigating Hugin workflow
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
So why does Hugin not create the correct control points, only under FreeBSD? I've established that the same program, based on the same sources, works as expected under Microsoft.
I have a number of hypotheses: there could be some weird configuration issue, there could be a bug in the code that doesn't bite under other systems, but does under FreeBSD, or potentially there could be a bug in FreeBSD itself.
Of those, the source code bug seems most likely. This used to work, and I “haven't changed anything”, but more particularly I've looked for and tried to eliminate configuration issues. And while FreeBSD doubtless has bugs, it's unlikely that any would be so specific as to cause this kind of problem.
On the other hand, there is one big difference with FreeBSD: the C compiler (and related C++ compiler) is clang, while just about everything else uses gcc. So something like an uninitialized variable could uncover this kind of bug.
How do I go about investigating? First I need to understand what I'm doing. I've already established that I need a project file, which is created by pto_gen. But what does it mean? Went out looking, and asked on the developer's list. Thomas Modes, one of the Hugin developers, pointed me at the unlikely documentation: http://hugin.sourceforge.net/docs/nona/nona.txt.
Huh? nona is just one of the programs that use the project file. From the man page:
But that's misleading. nona transforms the projection of individual images and applies masks. It's not clear if it does anything else, but for the final panorama you need enfuse.
Off to look at the documentation, now nearly 4 years old, but Thomas assures me that it's complete and up to date, apparently conforming to libpano13.
Spent some time working on a description of the project file, making some progress. Only later did I note that the original document is really not a complete description of the project file: in particular, neither the c (control point) or v (variable) lines are described. But at least I'm beginning to make progress, and I've started a case study to go with it.
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Truth in advertising photography
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Topic: food and drink, photography, opinion | Link here |
Last week ALDI had various kitchen tools on offer, including this one:
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The time I have spent chopping onions! Just what I need! Now admittedly, I've tried this kind of thing before, and it hasn't worked. But this one clearly shows an onion being pressed (and not crushed), and nice, clean onion pieces falling below.
The truth is different. I had to press with as much force as I dared; any more would almost certainly have broken something. And what did I get?
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The onion was crushed, and nothing fell into the collection basin; it all hung through the cutter. And when I scraped it off, I had roughly a third of the onion, in large, uneven, crushed chunks:
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How did they get these nice photos? They faked it, of course. But why? Clearly it goes back.
In passing, it's worth noting a basic design flaw:
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The top is hinged, so the pressure on the vegetables is at an angle. Given the other problems, that's not so serious, but it would have been possible to make it press from above—just remove the hinge, for example.
| Monday, 18 June 2018 | Dereel | Images for 18 June 2018 |
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Many Hibiscus
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Topic: gardening, photography, opinion | Link here |
By coincidence, and despite the cold weather outside, both our indoor Hibiscus bushes are flowering relatively profusely:
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Is that a good photo? What about this one?
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They're both the same photo with different projection. The first is the conventional “wide angle” view (rectilinear projection). And it shows why extreme wide angle lenses are so strange. The second is the image unchanged from the lens (fisheye). The big difference is in the walls: in the first image, they look straight, while in the second they look curved. But at what a price! The pots at the bottom of the photo are now oval, and some of the flowers have been really distorted. In the fisheye view, things are more normal.
But there's more. Here's the same thing again with a cylindrical projection:
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Sometimes I think that this might be the best all-round projection for extreme wide angles.
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More Hugin case study
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
Continued with my investigation of the Hugin project file today, finding more and more details that aren't in what documentation I have. The result was a significant update of the case study. Things I have found so far:
But running the control point detector (cpfind) was the most surprising. Here the differences between the GUI and doing it standalone:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/28) /photowork/Hugin-build-eureka 88 -> cpfind -o e-from-house-0-e-from-house-3-cpfound.pto e-from-house-0-e-from-house-3.pto
Those matches! 23 matches between the first and the last image!
Comparing the .pto files confirmed it: the control points were all there, and I was able to process the panorama further from that point.
That still doesn't identify the bug, but it gives me not just a workaround, but a better way to do things. Currently I do:
I could easily get Hugin to run pto_gen and cpfind from the Hugin script, which would eliminate steps 2 and 3. Potentially I could also stop it from changing white balance and exposure for each image. Yes, I still need to load the .pto file, but that's relatively quick.
But that's one issue. I still need to understand why the current “Align” function only gives me matches between adjacent images.
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Which induction cooker, iteration 4711
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
On Wednesday at the latest I need to return the ALDI induction cooktop. What should I buy to replace it with? I had been tending to the Bosch PIJ611BB1E, but today I finally found some details about how to install it: it doesn't have the lip at the front like the ALDI cooktop, so it would have to go back at least as far as the current gas cooktop.
What can I do? I could remove the batten running under the work surface. Despite everything that JG King says, it seems to have no structural function. But there's a door stop on them. What effect would that have? There's another one at the bottom:
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And then there's the issue with the power. I still can't find out what kind of wiring I need. With the current one, I know I can get by with the wiring I have, as long as I don't use too much power. I can also connect one of the two inputs to the oven, which might mean that we don't need any additional ($$$) wiring from the main switchboard. Can I do that with Bosch? They're keeping that information very close to their chests. And I'd be quite upset if I had to spend $1000 more for something that still annoyed me.
| Tuesday, 19 June 2018 | Dereel | Images for 19 June 2018 |
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Max Lehey: Requiescat in pace
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Topic: general | Link here |
I've been meaning to visit my uncle Max and his sister Frieda for at least two months now, and I keep postponing it, at least because I wanted to visit them both on the same trip, and they live over 200 km away from each other.
Today Frieda called up: the problem has simplified itself. Max died in his sleep last night. He had just turned 90 years old.
Damn! Apart from the sorrow about his death, that's another case where procrastination has irreversible consequences. I wasn't overly close to Max, but I had always admired him for his cheerfulness and—as I see it—happy way of life. In that respect he was an example to us all.
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Happy anniversary, FreeBSD
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Topic: technology | Link here |
In the morning's mail today:
The first one an insider joke. 25 years already! How time flies!
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Lunch with Lorraine
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Topic: general, food and drink | Link here |
Off to Lorraine Carranza's for lunch today. I had been putting off the invitation until after I visited Max and Frieda, but clearly that wasn't a good idea.
This time I took a camera (the Olympus E-PM1) and took some photos.
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She has a really nice view to the north, the real “Grassy Gully” after which the road (some distance away) is named:
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She has also picked up some antiques since we were last there. There's an organ, about 100 years old:
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We still don't know what the purpose of this one was:
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Snipe blunder
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
I've been looking at the M.ZUIKO DIGITAL ED 75 mm f/1.8 lens for a while now. Not the most versatile lens, but I can see a use for it. But the cost is high (new prices round $900), so I have been waiting for a cheap one to come by for under $500.
Today was the day: one appeared on eBay starting at $399. OK, bid up to $499? No, I could get an automatic 5% discount, so I could offer up to $525. Did that via JustSnipe, and then went off to lunch with Lorraine.
Came back, and the lens had sold for $515. But not to me! After much searching, JustSnipe admitted to an “Error #20000”. Thanks, JustSnipe. That's the last time.
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More Hugin investigations
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Topic: technology, photography | Link here |
More playing around with Hugin today. Yesterday I used the GUI's “Align” function, but there's also the option to run it directly. My guess was that the difference was due to using “Align”, so today I used cpfind. Surprise, surprise! Only adjacent control points.
So how was this cpfind run?
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/28) /photowork/Hugin-build-eureka 92 -> ps aux | grep cpfind
OK, let's run cpfind against that project file (/tmp/ap_res6w6ICm /tmp/ap_inprojv8AcxR, and yes, it was still there). I got all the control points!
But wait. What about that --multirow option? Try it with that. Yup, it suppresses the control points beyond the neighbours.
Why? According to the man page,
What I'm getting here is the result of --linearmatch, not --multirow. And that's not the documented behaviour. But I tried it with the Microsoft version, and sure enough, the behaviour was the same. So now I have:
Still, it's clear now that I'll have to do some code reading. It's interesting to note that --multirow comes directly before --linearmatch in the man page. What if it's like that in the code too, and somehow a break; got lost?
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ALDI return day
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Topic: general | Link here |
Time for lots of things to go back to ALDI:
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That's the induction cooker (at the last minute I decided to return it after all), a frying pan that, despite claims, doesn't work with induction, two mixing bowls that Yvonne thought could serve as Chinese soup bowls (they're too big), a “stock pot” (i.e. saucepan) that is in fact perfectly OK except that it's not the size I wanted, the dicer that just doesn't work, and the range hood that I bought at the same time as the induction cooker, and which I decided was more pain to try than the advantage that it promised.
| Wednesday, 20 June 2018 | Dereel | |
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A new disk for teevee
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Topic: multimedia, technology | Link here |
I'm collecting a lot of video files on teevee that I don't want to erase. And the file system is getting full:
=== grog@tevee (/dev/pts/3) ~ 23 -> df /spool
So I bought a 6 TB drive to replace it. I'm gradually getting the routine of this:
Put the disk into a different machine as a second disk, in this case the old tiwi.
Partition as the disk in teevee, with the exception of the larger last partition:
=== root@tiwi (/dev/pts/0) ~ 385 -> DRIVE=ada1
=== root@tiwi (/dev/pts/0) ~ 386 -> gpart create -s gpt $DRIVE
=== root@tiwi (/dev/pts/0) ~ 387 -> gpart add -s 64k -t freebsd-boot $DRIVE
=== root@tiwi (/dev/pts/0) ~ 388 -> # Install boot loader. Note that -i is the partition number
=== root@tiwi (/dev/pts/0) ~ 389 -> gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr -p /boot/gptboot -i 1 $DRIVE
=== root@tiwi (/dev/pts/0) ~ 390 -> gpart add -s 83886080 -t freebsd-ufs $DRIVE
=== root@tiwi (/dev/pts/0) ~ 391 -> gpart add -s 30g -t freebsd-swap $DRIVE
=== root@tiwi (/dev/pts/0) ~ 392 -> gpart add -t freebsd-ufs $DRIVE
=== root@tiwi (/dev/pts/0) ~ 393 -> gpart show $DRIVE
Run newfs. In the case of the /spool file system, which needs significantly different parameters, first get the newfs line from dumpfs on the old machine:
=== grog@teevee (/dev/pts/7) ~ 6 -> dumpfs -m /spool
The size (-s) is incorrect for the new file system, but I can just omit it to use the rest of the disk. And of course the device name needs to be checked too.
Mount the teevee file systems via NFS on tiwi and copy the files:
I did these in parallel. Why --delete-after with the root file system? I had started the first time with tar instead of rsync.
All went well, and when I came back after dinner the root file system had been copied. But what did I see with /spool? Can't copy file: file has vanished!
Looking at what had happened was sobering. Here's what I had some time before dinner:
=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/3) ~ 23 -> df
But now I had:
=== grog@tiwi (/dev/pts/3) ~ 23 -> df
2.7 terabytes of data lost! How could that happen? The log from copying the root file system gave the clue. After completing the sync, I had:
I had made not one, but three blunders:
The first blunder was the worst. If I had mounted the file systems sanely, nothing would have gone wrong, and in principle --delete-after makes perfect sense. But as it was, I had deleted more data than I had ever seen (in total) before about ten years ago.
Set to restoring the backup. I'll have to download the rest over the course of the next few days.
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eBay blunder
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
eBay has had some good discounts recently, coming up to the end of the financial year. In particular, they had 20% a whole selection of household appliances from The Good Guys. I had wanted to buy a new freezer, and the Good Guys were one option. 20% off made them by far the best deal. OK, go for it: select “Buy It Now”, enter the discount code, and press “Pay Now”.
WRONG, FOOL! First you need to press “Apply discount”. And as it was, without so much as a by your leave, I paid the full price, $309.80 too much. Grrrr!
Yes, this is PEBKAC, but the web page could have told me that I had outstanding inputs, like so many others. But there's nothing for it. Contact seller, please cancel, and I'll buy again with the discount.
But of course the only way to contact the seller was by “email”, in other words a web form. Filled that out and then spent a lot of time trying to find a phone number, but no, they're not even in the phone book! I can contact individual branches, but that's all.
OK, call up eBay and see if they can apply the discount. No, sorry, no way, says June. But since it was at least partially their fault (though I don't think she completely understood the details of what I told her), they could give me a discount voucher for $310 (why not $309.80? I got the feeling that the decimals were too complicated). Applicable to a single payment (not necessarily purchase) in the next month. Under the circumstances, that sounded like the best option, so I took it.
Later in the evening, though, I got a reply from the Good Guys. Yes, they had cancelled the order, before the discount expired, so I bought as promised with the discount. And I still have the voucher for $310! I have eaten my cake and still have it.
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Communicating with old fogeys
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
Mark Newton came by on the IRC discussion about the fridge purchase, and brought a valid point:
why on earth would they want to pay people to sit in call centres?
I suppose that makes sense, but there should be a way to contact people in emergencies. In this particular case it wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't been for the fact that the discount expires tonight. He went on to say:
people older than about 50 spent their formative years where the only way they could interact with a company is via phone, and that's the vector they expect. People younger grew up dealing with companies using the web. Over-50s are a small enough minority that it's not worth investing in people and systems to cater for them; if they change their behavior, they stop being a minority at zero cost to the supplier.
OK, I'm over 50—way over 50. How old is Mark? He could be in that age group, or close to it. But on reflection, no, I don't usually like to communicate by phone. I'd far prefer email, and I've ranted about that in the past. It's just on athis occasion, because I needed an immediate response.
Thinking further, people in my age group spent their formative years without the option of getting very much done by phone. 50 years ago I spent many fruitless journeys to people's houses to see if they were there. Either they didn't have a phone, or it didn't occur to me to call them. And if you wanted to do any kind of business, you had to be physically present. It wasn't until I returned to Australia 21 years ago that I discovered I could get some business done by phone. But it's interesting to see that a means of communication has come and gone in that time.
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Investigating cpfind
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
OK, why does cpfind --multirow only find control points in adjacent images? Took a look at the code. My guesses weren't very accurate.
Firstly, this is C++, not C, so processing options is an order of magnitude more complicated than a simple switch statement. But round main.cpp(399), I found:
Admire that };, of which there are many. But clearly I didn't have both --linearmatch and --multirow. Looked a bit further and found the processing for multirow, but like everything in C++, it is so convoluted that you need to know all the internals before you start. Gave up and sent a message to the developers' list. We'll see what happens.
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Happy anniversary, FreeBSD
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Yesterday, I was told, was the 25th anniversary of the naming of the FreeBSD project:
But no, it seems that the time was based on a message that David Greenman sent:
So, like the first datagram over the ARPANET, it really happened on the following day based on UTC. So another day to celebrate!
| Thursday, 21 June 2018 | Dereel | Images for 21 June 2018 |
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teevee, the day after
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Topic: multimedia, technology | Link here |
Into the office this morning, and found that restoring my video files for teevee had completed. OK, put the new disk in teevee and see what happens. For once, everything Just Worked. All I had to do was re-download what images I could still find (some had expired). That proved to be round 50 GB, but what's that nowadays?
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Huevos a la tigre again
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Another attempt at huevos a la tigre today. The biggest issue I now have is what to serve them in. I want two fried eggs, not one, and somehow the pots I have seem cramped:
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A new lens
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Topic: photography, technology, general | Link here |
So I have a discount voucher from eBay for $310, though I was able to cancel the sale and buy the freezer with discount. I have my cake and I've eaten it!
Am I still entitled to the discount voucher? They didn't say anything about what would happen if the seller accepted the return, though I had mentioned that I had asked for a return. Still, consistency was never an eBay virtue, so the sooner I apply the voucher, the better.
On Tuesday I missed out on buying a lens (M.ZUIKO DIGITAL ED 75 mm f/1.8) on eBay. I had sniped $526, but the snipe had failed, and the lens had gone for $515. There was another one going, but he wanted a starting bid of $550—or offer. OK, offer the $515. Got a counteroffer from him for $530. That sounds reasonable enough; after the voucher, it would be $220.
Set to pay. No mention of the discount on the page. No, I'm not going through that again. Get eBay to call me and walk me through it. Yes, this time I don't need to enter the code there, just two pages further on after I have already committed to buy it.
As I was just thinking, consistency was never an eBay virtue. What a mess these people are! But yes, I got the item for $220. Somehow I think that, financially at any rate, this experience has compensated for my annoyances with eBay.
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cpfind issue
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Topic: photography, technology | Link here |
Response from Thomas Modes on the Hugin mailing list today. It seems that the issue was a bug with fisheye lenses, which would explain why nobody has reported it before. He's committed something, but I can't be bothered to test it yet. He didn't say what good --multirow is, so I'll just ignore it.
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More baked beans
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Another lot of baked beans today. I think I've given up on putting beef stock powder in the beans, so the current ingredient list is:
| quantity | ingredient | step | ||
| 750 g | dried white beans | 1 | ||
| 400 g | onion | 2 | ||
| 75 g | oil for frying | 2 | ||
| 480 g | tinned tomatoes (800 g can) | 3 | ||
| 25 g | tomato purée | 3 | ||
| smoked ham skin to taste | 3 | |||
| up to 500 ml | water (to cover) | 3 | ||
| 45 g (total) | salt | 4 |
How long do you cook? These are the same beans as I used for cassoulet two weeks ago. Then I was surprised that the beans only needed an hour's cooking, and here I had written 4 hours. But after two hours they were barely cooked, as I discovered a little late. So one hour for boiling, at least 3 hours for baking it is.
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Steak and kidney pie
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
It's been forever since we last made steak and kidney pie, so long that I had forgotten that I had a recipe. In the last couple of days I've researched again and basically come up with the same recipe as before, except with onions and without liquid. And this time I cooked the meat before making individual pies.
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How long? And at what temperature? Joy of Cooking says 350° F, whatever that is (proves to be about 177°). But that was far too hot. I turned it down to 160°, still too much:
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Cooked for about an hour, by which time it was cooked but rather dry. My original supplement of water to 10% of the weight of the meat sounds like a good idea.
So is putting them in individual pots:
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How much salt? I'm coming to the general rule of thumb that in this kind of food (meat or vegetable based, cooked) I should put 2% by weight of salt. The recipes I found in the books either completely ignored salt, or just said “add salt and pepper”. Last time round (I now discover) I used 10 g for 750 g of meat, and this time, to be cautious, I used 20 g for 1.5 kg meat. That's about 1.3% each time, and it wasn't enough. Next time I'll do 2%.
| Friday, 22 June 2018 | Dereel | Images for 22 June 2018 |
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Winter comes
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Topic: general | Link here |
The last few days we have had mild frosts (ice on the grass), but today we finally had frozen water:
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One of the most interesting things I've found from having an infrared thermometer is how different temperatures are in different places. The ice was only about 1.5 mm thick, but I measured a very constant -2.7°. Elsewhere I measured down to -4.1°, but the weather station, 3.5 m above the ground, registered a minimum of 1.8°.
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Improving Hugin processing
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Topic: technology, photography, opinion | Link here |
So now I have a better understanding of how Hugin processes panoramas. Spent a bit of time playing around with my Hugin script, and after a few surprises added:
What were the surprises? The first time round I got some really poor control points. After a bit of investigation, it proved that running celeste_standalone is really necessary to clean up cloud images and similar. In the past I had thought that it was pretty ineffective, but that was because every time I ran it, it had already run. Also, the last program is called autooptimiser, and not autooptimizer.
The good news is that I have found out (I think) how to stop Hugin from changing colour and exposure. These are done by parameters to autooptimiser, so simply omitting them solves the problem—almost. I have still found minor differences in the image parameters that I need to investigate. But at any rate I can now automate all my processing up to positioning, maybe masking, cropping and stitching. The next step is to do this for all panoramas so that I can just stitch one after the other.
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Transfer speeds in relation
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Topic: technology, multimedia, opinion | Link here |
In the past I have done my backups for teevee to an external USB disk. It made sense to connect it directly to teevee—I thought. But though the disk can handle USB 3.0, teevee can't. It proved much faster to connect the disk to eureka with USB 3.0 and back up over the (1000 Mb/s) Ethernet.
As a result, I now have round 24 TB of total storage attached to eureka:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/29) ~ 21 -> df -c
There's another 6 TB on teevee, but it can't see eureka:/photobackup.
| Saturday, 23 June 2018 | Dereel | Images for 23 June 2018 |
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New freezer
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Topic: general | Link here |
Phone call from The Good Guys in Ballarat early this morning to tell me that they wanted to deliver the new freezer today. That's surprising for a couple of reasons: firstly, it was Saturday, and secondly the web site had told me that the item was not available in Ballarat—that's the only reason I arranged for delivery.
Still, it was too late to change the delivery method—maybe. But I didn't think about that on time, so shortly after noon Shane showed up with the freezer.
No surprises with the freezer itself: it's pretty much identical with the two we already have, including the positively infuriating slider mechanism for the baskets. Nothing seems to have changed since we bought the first one, probably about 18 years ago. But it's the only game in town—the only other freezer in this size range is from Westinghouse, and they're too polite to put in baskets. And this way, at any rate, I didn't need to repack the baskets, just put the old baskets in the new freezer.
What to do with the old freezer? It still works, and we might get a couple of hundred dollars for it, but after our recent experience with dish washers it sounded like a better option to keep it for emergencies, including not only failed freezers, but also sudden influxes of deep frozen food. So it ended up in the garage:
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That's not the best way to put it: my car is positioned in a way that prevents opening the door. If we use it, we'll have to rotate it 90° clockwise.
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New Hugin workflow
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Topic: photography, technology | Link here |
House photo day again today, and the first time that I used the new Hugin workflow. It worked mainly, but for some reason (almost certainly a bug in the Hugin script) it didn't save the project files. I'll need to look at that.
Other things that could do with improvement are the wait while it does its thing, and the fact that my renaming doesn't quite work: pto_gen checks the source of symlinks, and uses the original name. Maybe I can get the thing to create all project files in place and just copy them to the build directory.
| Sunday, 24 June 2018 | Dereel | Images for 24 June 2018 |
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Truffles!
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Margaret Swan's truffle farm is gradually producing its first truffles, and she sent one to us:
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So of course our Saturday dinner (exceptionally postponed until today) had to include truffles. Chicken?
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Noodles?
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No, no truffle in the courgettes. But it didn't stop Chris making a snide remark about the state of health of the chicken:
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For my records, the chicken was cooked at 180° with aluminium foil over the breast until the last 30 minutes. It weighed 2.15 kg, which according to my rule of thumb meant that it should have taken between 108 and 118 minutes to reach 80°. In fact it only took 94 minutes.
Why? Chris noted that it tasted juicier than others, and I had noticed just a faint tinge of pink in the joint of the legs. So probably I didn't position the temperature probe properly. I have been putting it in the breast up against the breastbone, but possibly I had put it too far back, where the meat is not as thick. Next time I should remember to put it up close to the wishbone.
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Zwerchhau?
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Topic: general, language, opinion | Link here |
Chris Bahlo has found a new mediaeval pastime, sword fighting with longswords:
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Of course, not everybody took her seriously:
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But the real reason that she mentioned the issue this evening was because of a linguistic issue. Fighting with longswords is very different from fencing, which I learnt at school. The language of fencing is old French; the language of longswords is early modern High German. And though the words are recognizably German, they're not easy to understand.
The one that puzzled Chris (and us) most was „Zwerchhau“. What does that mean? We know „Zwerch“ from the rather strange German word „Zwerchfell“, where „Fell“ means a pelt. That word means “diaphragm” in the anatomic sense. But that's the only occurrence that we know. And „Hau“? There's a verb „hauen“, meaning to strike, but no corresponding noun. The closest that we could think of was „Hieb“.
But things get curiouser and curiouser. There's no verb corresponding to „Hieb“. There's „heben“, to lift (think “heave”), but that doesn't fit: a Hieb is a blow, like hauen.
OK, nothing for it. A dictionary must here. Not surprisingly, „Hau“ is the noun from „hauen“, a hit, cut or strike. It goes on to mention specifically swordfighting:
2) hau ist fechterausdruck: wann du die häwe von oben, überzwerch oder von unden gegen deines widerparts obern theil herführest. J. Sutors fechtbuch 37 Scheible; daselbst die composita schedelhaw, oberhaw, dempfhaw, schielhaw, hüfthaw, halshaw, füszhaw, handhaw u. a.; mit kreuz- und mittelhäwen. s. 34; Fasolts blindhaw, den ober- und unterhaw, mittel- und flügelhaw. Garg. 188b; geübt in waffen zum hau oder wurf. Claudius 7, 19.
The dictionary entry is also old; it seems that it was written in 1870, before German orthography had been standardized (Duden, 1880). But it's interesting because of the word „überzwerch“. OK, what does „zwerch“ mean? How about that, it corresponds to the modern word „quer“, roughly “across” or “transverse”.
OK, so we strike transversely. But what happened to „Hau“? And how (sorry) does it relate to „Hieb“? It seems that „Hieb“ is derived from „hauen“, though it's not clear why, just that it appeared in the 17th century. But it, too, is used by swordsmen:
2) hieb ist namentlich fechterausdruck, von dem kunstgerechten schlagen mit der waffe gebraucht: auf den hieb auf einen los gehen, caesim aliquem petere. Steinbach 1, 707, vgl. lufthieb, sauhieb; ha! ha! der hieb der sasz! H. Heine 16,
But that's only one of the terms. It seems that there are 5 „Meisterhaue“ (master cuts in English). The others are:
| Word | my first guess | meaning | comment | |||
| Zornhau | anger strike | Strike of Wrath | ||||
| Krumphau | bent strike | Crooked Strike | krump → krumm | |||
| Zwerchhau | Crosswise Strike | zwerch → quer | ||||
| Scheitelhau | (hair) part strike | Crown Strike | ||||
| Schielhau | squint strike | Squinting strike |
On the whole, I seem to have done relatively well. That doesn't explain why the strikes (cuts? hits?) are called like that, but maybe I'll find out in a couple of weeks: Arto Fama will be coming to Ballarat, and I had the crazy idea of getting some video of him, something like this:
| Monday, 25 June 2018 | Dereel → Napoleons → Dereel | |
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New lens
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Topic: photography | Link here |
My new M.Zuiko Digital ED 75mm f/1.8 lens arrived today, so off to Napoleons to pick it up.
What do I do with it? Put it on a camera to prove that it worked, then put it aside. It'll come in handy, but I don't see it being used that often. It does have one superlative: according to DxOMark it has the best results of any Micro Four Thirds system lens that they have tested.
In passing, it's interesting to note that I have three of the four best lenses that they have identified, though I didn't consult this page before the purchase of any of them. The fourth is the Leica DG Nocticron 42.5 mm f/1.2, which I don't really need. It's interesting to note that all of these lenses have wide apertures (f/1.7, f/1.4, f/1.2 and f/1.8 in order of increasing focal length), and that they claim that the best results are wide open in each case. Is there something in their testing method that favours wide aperture lenses?
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Which microphone?
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Topic: multimedia, photography, opinion | Link here |
I have made the mistake, it seems, of offering to take videos of the sword fighting in two weeks' time. Based on recent experience, my sound equipment is not up to scratch, as this video amply demonstrates:
What I need is a pair of wireless lapel microphones. Where do I get them? To my surprise, that doesn't seem to be modern. Even the term “lapel” is an old, worn-out magic word. Nowadays it's Lavalier, apparently named almost after Louise de La Vallière.
And where can I get them? After a couple of hours searching in different places, I couldn't identify a single setup that would connect multiple wireless microphones. They all seem to be designed for a single microphone. And the prices vary wildly, from round $20 to over $1000. About the only obvious issue I could find was that some of the cheaper ones have too limited a range. Clearly I have opened a can of worms here.
| Tuesday, 26 June 2018 | Dereel | Images for 26 June 2018 |
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Depth of field revisited
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
While scanning my old photos, I've noticed significant focus issues, like this one, taken in August 1971:
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That's my cousin Mick, still with hair, also with my Edixa-Mat Reflex D. But it's out of focus:
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It was taken with my Asahi Pentax “Spotmatic” with the Super-Takumar 50 mm f/1.4.
Why is it out of focus? It's not because I forgot to focus: I just focused on our mutual cousin Gillian, on the left:
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What aperture? No idea, but I didn't pay that much attention to the aperture in those days: set a likely shutter speed, turn aperture until the light meter showed correct exposure, and shoot. Probably it was relatively wide. But the real issue is that this happened at all. With my modern Micro Four Thirds system cameras, it's pretty much a thing of the past.
Until today. Of course I had to take a couple of photos with my new M.Zuiko Digital ED 75 mm f/1.8 lens:
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Nothing special, right? Wrong. Looking at the first, then the second photo, I have:
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Only one of the animals is in focus on each image. There's that shallow depth of field again! Of course, nowadays I can merge them with Zerene:
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That works well, though the images don't quite line up, and clearly there's some unsharpness in the mid-range. But it doesn't handle the areas very well where the images don't overlap:
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Still, it's nice to know that Zerene can handle situations like this, lining up images that are really quite different.
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The future of telephones
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Topic: general, technology, opinion | Link here |
By chance I saw the display on my second phone today, the one connected to the published phone number: “Messages waiting”.
I have this phone on automatic divert to voice mail, which has done a very good job of discouraging the eternal telemarketeers. But MyNetFone should send me email when a message comes through, and it doesn't. Several messages from Linda Swift next door, wanting to see Graham Wallace, the farrier who came along (and went) this morning. And then a call from an unrecognized mobile number. No message, just the phone number. OK, called back, got voice mail. Left a message, and a few minutes later I got a call back: it was Graeme, Linda's husband.
Why a mobile number? I hate calling mobile phones. Tough: the Swifts have given up their landline, and a mobile phone is all they have. But why?
Somehow we're diverging. It's not that I have an ingrained hate of mobile phones: I got my first mobile phone, a Motorola Brick, in mid-1990, long before just about anybody else I know. And at the time the advantages outweighed the disadvantages. But after nearly 30 years, sound quality is still an issue, and of course they're more expensive to run. I can call landline numbers for free in Australia, and calls to Germany cost $0.019 per minute—but only for a landline. Mobile calls to Germany cost $0.06 per minute, and to Australia they cost $0.20 (the minimum)! So I can speak for 10 minutes to a German landline and spend less money than a simple call to an Australian mobile number.
So why have the Swifts given up their landline? They're not the only ones: more and more people are giving up their landlines, requiring us to spend money calling them. The reason is simple: the rental for landlines. Telstra charges $27.50 per month line rental, which includes almost no calls. And despite the Internet, people just haven't twigged that there are cheaper alternatives. We spend $8.33 per month on rental and landline calls, and last month our bill was round $10. But most people also have mobile phones, so it's cheaper just to use that.
The call was basically to tell me that they had changed their number; it seems that Gordon had visited Linda anyway, so that problem was out of the way. And Graeme told me that he had also sent me a message with the same information. A message? How? He doesn't have my email address. Ah, a telephone message. Voice mail? No, SMS (as I discovered; he didn't have any other word than “message”) to my mobile phone (the one for which I write on my business card “only when instructed”). I checked later: no message, at least not under “messages” on the phone. Could it be hidden elsewhere? Or does Graeme have my old mobile number?
Somehow we're going different paths. Why should I mess around with a hard-to-manage mobile phone when I have a better alternative? But nowadays I find that even Aussie Broadband requires a mobile phone for authentication, like the Bank of Melbourne did two months ago.
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Mushrooms and jewel boxes
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
It's mid-winter, and various mushrooms are popping up, like here:
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And I've had a Camellia seed on my photo table for some days now. It looks like it's in a jewel box:
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| Wednesday, 27 June 2018 | Dereel | |
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Smart phones: easier to use!
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Topic: technology, general, opinion | Link here |
I got a rather surprising response to yesterday's article on phones on IRC today:
That blows my mind! How can a (smart) mobile phone be easier to use than a conventional phone?
It's worth considering how we got here. I can identify at least 6 different phone technologies that I have used in my lifetime:
Phone with (almost) no dialling methods:
We used one of these in Kota Bharu in the mid-1950s. All connections went via a manual exchange
A phone with a real dial:
Press button phones:
Now we're getting more modern, of course, but the same method was used with old, non-electronic phones. And there's a point to be made there: the interface remained the same.
Cordless phones. No need for a new photo here: the previous phone includes a cordless phone.
Conventional mobile phones, here a Nokia 2110, like the one I had 21 years ago.
Here things are starting to get more complicated. How do you access the menus? You need to learn, and in this case it's not made any easier by the fact that the menus seem to be in Finnish.
Smart phones, here my Samsung I9100, which they call Galaxy S II as well, but never in the same sentence:
For somebody uninitiated, the smart phone is completely confusing. How do you operate it? Potentially you could say the same about the dialless phone, but that's easier to explain: “lift the receiver and wait until somebody talks to you”. The smart phone has at least the learning curve of having to switch it on.
But let's look at how to operate each of these: as mentioned, operating the dialless phone is a matter of lifting the receiver, putting it to your head in the correct alignment and waiting for a response. The putting it to your head in the correct alignment applies to all these devices. In each case but the first, you also need a phone number, and it helps for the dialless phones too.
Things are a little more complicated with the next four kinds of phone. You need to enter the number. That's all you need for conventional phones, but cordless phones and conventional mobile phones also require you to press a “connect” button, usually marked with a green phone emblem.
And the smart phone? I'm not convinced that they're all the same, and I forget the smart I went through with the iPhone that I had last year. But for the Samsung:
I've deliberately shown beginner's issues here, but even for experienced users, it's more work: you still need to turn the phone on (bring back from sleep), select the phone app and maybe the keypad. There's no up side: you have todo everything you do with other phones as well
So why does AlephNull claim that landlines are harder to use? My only guess is what I said:
AlephNull wasn't the only one. I was also told:
Well, yes: pretty much last time I used a phone. In the nearly 30 years since I started using mobile phones, coverage has improved, but sound quality hasn't, and on Saturday Sean, the delivery driver who brought the freezer, called me from the middle of Ballarat with coverage so poor that I could only just understand him. And I also recalled the last time. I had really bad landline coverage, By coincidence it was the 18th anniversary of the US destruction of Hiroshima.
Clearly mobile phones are here to stay. But why make exaggerated claims about them? And if even well-educated computer people think that the status quo is good, how will things ever improve?
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Microphone search, day 3
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Topic: multimedia, photography, opinion | Link here |
More searching for microphones today. It's really not easy. For once, YouTube videos help, in particular this overview from Tony Northrup:
I've seen Tony's videos in the past, and I found them so-so. But this one is good, and gave me a lot of things to think about, including the option of using a smart phone to record the sound. It seems that synchronization is not the issue, but of course you don't get to hear what the sound is like until you're back home processing things. If it turns out to be sub-optimal, it's too late for another try. He also recommended some specific microphones that are available second-hand, and what to look for.
But where do I get these microphones? They're surprisingly expensive, even second-hand, but even so I don't want to add another $50 to have a set sent from the USA. And multiple wireless microphones seem to be something that almost nobody has thought of. Finally I found a Boya BY-WM8, which fits the bill, and which I can get for round $300.
Is that the best choice? More searching, and found another Northrup video:
That's for the Saramonic UWMIC9, and Northrup did a good job of explaining the advantages and disadvantages. It costs a good $100 more than the Boya. What do I get for that? This video made it very clear:
There's a world of difference in the sound quality! I hope this isn't a deliberately faked comparison, but gradually I'm running out of time. Ordered one from Digital Camera Warehouse, the company from whom I bought my Olympus OM-D E-M1, and it should be here in a few days.
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20 years of digital cameras
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
I missed an anniversary last week: on 17 June 1998 I bought my first digital camera. How times have changed since then! It's worth comparing the resolutions:
| Date | Camera | Resolution (MP) | ||
| 17 June 1998 | Casio QV-5000 SX | 1.21 | ||
| 22 October 2000 | Nikon CoolPix 880 | 3 | ||
| 5 November 2004 | Ricoh Caplio R1 | 4 | ||
| 19 March 2006 | Nikon Coolpix L1 | 6 | ||
| 23 August 2007 | Olympus E-510 | 10 | ||
| 12 May 2009 | Olympus E-30 | 12 | ||
| 3 December 2014 | Olympus E-M1 | 16 | ||
| 23 February 2017 | Olympus E-M1 Mark II | 20 | ||
Certainly the pixel race has slowed down.
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ALDI single induction cooker revisited
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
ALDI has their single zone induction cooker on offer again. I have one already, but I bought one anyway. Why? The energy output of my current one is so imbalanced that I wondered if there's something wrong with it, and I wanted to compare.
What is new is the packaging:
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Professional, indeed! But more interesting are the claims that it can handle pots with diameters of up to 26 cm, and that it has temperature settings of between 60° and 240°. It turns out that the latter, at least, was in the instructions for the old one, but I didn't notice at the time.
Tried it out. It confirmed one thing: there's no individual defect with my cooker. The new one is pretty much identical, in particular just as aggressive in its heating as the old one. “600 W”, also called “90 °”, is hotter than the middle burner on the gas stove. And the next lower setting, “300 W”, not called “60 °”, is so cool as to be useless. Still, it's worth confirming.
I've had my induction cooker for nearly two years now. You'd think that they would have considered making some very necessary improvements.
| Thursday, 28 June 2018 | Dereel | Images for 28 June 2018 |
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Knights in shining armour
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Topic: general, animals | Link here |
Chris Bahlo has even more mediaeval armour, and today she set off with Yvonne looking for new exploits:
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Getting the armour on took its time:
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The armour weighs about 100 kg, and even mounting the horse is difficult:
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Yvonne later told me that the 100 kg included the content, in other words Chris. That no longer sounds overly much; I would weigh in at 90 kg without armour.
But finally they were off:
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Now if Chris had only stopped frowning!
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Learning video basics
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Topic: photography | Link here |
I don't take much video, and it shows. I tried to take some while Chris was putting on her armour, and I made a blunder that shows that I'm really a still photographer:
But surely there must be a way to rotate this stuff in post-processing.
| Friday, 29 June 2018 | Dereel | Images for 29 June 2018 |
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Huevos a la tigre, next mod
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Topic: food and drink, opinion | Link here |
Huevos a la flamenca are made by baking the eggs on top of a vegetable foundation. My attempts in that direction were less than successful: the egg was either partially raw, or took on a leather-like consistency. My “solution” was huevos a la tigre, with fried eggs.
But there are other possibilities, including microwave ovens. Tried that today: first heat up the foundation, then put eggs on top and heat again. How long? I guessed 2 minutes at 600 W, but after that the whites were still partially raw. Another 2 minutes at 600 W. No longer raw. They weren't leather-like yet, but a little overdone:
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Still, an improvement. Next time I can try for 3 minutes, assuming something else doesn't falsify the equation.
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Exposure compensation: what sign?
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Topic: photography, opinion | Link here |
Interesting question on Quora today: what does EV do? It seems that the original poster confused exposure compensation with EV. OK, that's easy enough to clarify.
But in the process I realized something that I hadn't noticed before: exposure compensation has the wrong sign. The larger the EV, the less the exposure. So increasing exposure should have a negative sign. And it doesn't. + means more exposure. So basically you get the total EV value by subtracting the compensation from the base EV value. I went looking for examples in my bracketed shots, but the cameras don't store the brackets as exposure compensation.
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Rotated videos: fixed!
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Topic: multimedia | Link here |
Not surprisingly, it didn't take long for people to tell me how to fix yesterday's rotated video problem. Callum Gibson was first, mentioning solutions based on ffmpeg. I know mplayer better, so tried that:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/9) ~/Photos/20180628/orig 767 -> mplayer -vf rotate=2 46289008.MOV
Now to write a script for it, not helped by mencoder wanting a choice of audio codec out of an unspecified list.
| Saturday, 30 June 2018 | Dereel | Images for 30 June 2018 |
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Panorama workflow: complete?
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Topic: photography, technology, opinion | Link here |
More work on my panorama workflow today, mainly to do more of the alignment work with scripts, so that at the end I just needed to tweak the panoramas, mainly mask, align and crop.
That took its time, of course, but it seems to be worthwhile. My overall workflow now is:
Take photos, three images per view bracketed at ±3 EV, offset by about 1.3 or 1.7 EV more exposure, in other words, typically +1.7 EV, +4.7 EV and -1.3 EV. The sequence is determined by the camera. Some images taken with the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 8mm f/1.8 Fisheye PRO, others with the Zuiko Digital ED 9-18 mm f/4.0-5.6.
Process the images as described on my photo processing page, which is currently in need of updating. Normally I save
the converted images as JPEG, but in
this case I save them as TIFF images. I
use the “DxO Standard” profile preset, and for the fisheye I have to turn
“distortion correction” off, because DxO can't distinguish between distortion and
projection.
Rather than use the contact prints page (which would work, but is tedious with 111 odd images with similar sounding names), I use an awk script to generate the Makejpeg file. This is enclosed in a Makefile target housephotos that also creates a separate file Makehouse in case there are other photos for the day. The images are put in subdirectory C with names like:
Here the numbers 0 and 1 (and many more) identify the sequence in the panorama. This step also updates the /grog/stones-road/exterior.php web page with the current date. The extensions +1EV and -1EV are leftovers from the days of the E-30, when that was the maximum exposure compensation I could get with three images. The names are almost invisible, so I haven't bothered to change them.
Run the files through Photomatix (a Microsoft program running on one of my Microsoft boxen via Samba) using the script HDRmatic. This converts images 3 at a time, and then returns the result to the C directory:
Run H, a new script whose name and contents will probably change. It creates project files for each group of photos (in this case with a name like garden-nw.pto). When it is done, it invokes Hugin. And here I do the manual stuff and stitch a panorama in TIFF format. Currently I wait for stitching to complete before moving on to the next panorama, but I think I can change that.
When I'm done, I stop Hugin, and H converts the output files to JPEG. I could have stitched a JPEG file directly, but, Hugin doesn't believe in experts, so it would call the output file garden-nw.jpg, and also I have two sets of Exif data that I want to merge, from the source files (most of the data) and the output file (mainly containing information on projection and field of view).
Run the images through Ashampoo photo optimizer (another Microsoft space program).
Finally create a web page with the files and sync to the external web site.
The interesting thing is how much smaller the new H script is than the old one:
=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/27) /Photos/Tools 65 -> l H*
I had originally planned to update the Hugin script, but it had so much old cruft in it that I had difficulty understanding it. Somehow shell scripts are not easy to read.
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