Category: Technology

A Full House – 17 November 2016

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Tonight we would have a busier house as JIC and Sim were coming up for a flying visit.

Scamp was out this morning meeting one of her in-laws for coffee and I was charged with clearing up the painting room ready for JIC and Sim.  Of course, I didn’t do that, there were more interesting things to do like format one of the borked drives and test copy files to it to make sure it was working properly.  It was.  I also worked out how to get my Sony F707 camera working in IR mode again, more of which later.  Eventually I did get round to clearing up the room at least so that it looked like a room again.

When Scamp came back I drove in to Glasgow to see if Staples had a decent price for the 3TB backup drive I’d picked on the net.  They didn’t, but it looked like Argos in Cumbernauld of all places did have it, so it was back in the car then back to Cumbersheugh in the driving rain, only to find that the drive I’d earmarked had been sold.  Blast – well, I did actually say a different word which also started with ‘B’ but finished with a ‘D’ and had the letters ‘A,S,T,A,R’ and ‘D’ in the middle.  You’ve probably heard it, and maybe even used it before.  Not you Scamp, not you.  Anyway, I settled for the slightly cheaper 2TB version and payment made, new toy collected, headed back to the car through the rain.  That’s when I saw today’s PoD.  Cumbersheugh isn’t a pretty town, but it does a really good gloomy.  I instantly liked the shot with the little silhouette of an out of focus ‘wee wummin’ (remember ‘wee wummin’ from a couple of weeks ago?) in the middle distance.  It looked good in colour, but I guessed it would look even better in mono.

Right, this Sony F707 IR thing needs a bit of explanation.  If you look here, you’ll understand what it’s all about, maybe.  I’d forgotten all about it and the magnet trick, but today, again in the seridipity of the Internet, I chanced upon a more up to date post about exactly the same thing.  That got me started again, sticking an Infra-red filter on the F707.  A 720nm filter is virtually black to the naked eye, but  allows a narrow band of Infra-red light through and virtually none of the visible spectrum.  The Sony just pretended it wasn’t there, except for making everything have a red tint.  I think I prefer the results from the crossed pola filters.  There’s a bit better range of colour to them.  I’m intending to try it out tomorrow with some hoped for sunshine.

Popped in to the airport to pick up the travellers and then back past CITRAC signs warning of ice tomorrow.  Ice in Scotland in November?  Surely not.

Hoping for sun tomorrow.  Always!

Just an ordinary Scottish day – 16 November 2016

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16-nov

Windy, wet, sun and cold.  Four seasons, sort of Scottish.

Today was Scamp’s turn to have needles stuck in her and lasers fired into her too.  She had to go to the physio to get some treatment for her ankle.  Something to do with her Achilles Tendon, or Archimedes Tendon as I got it wrong.  Like me she wasn’t really all that bothered with the acupuncture needles or the laser and she’s got exercises to do to.  Only five reps, three times a day not ten, three times a day like I had.  That’s a bit unfair, I think.  Sexist or ageist or shoulderist or something.

When we got back, I went for a walk over to St Mo’s in the sun, but ten minutes later the sun disappeared.  I managed a couple of shots before the gloom and rain arrived again.

Spent some more time consolidating my photo collection and being side tracked just looking at the photos.  Attempted to use File Juggler which is supposed to be a filing assistant on the PC.  The best one apparently.  Filing on a computer pivots on the use of folders, as anyone who has work with Windows, OS X or Linux will know only too well.  Unfortunately after trying unsuccessfully for half an hour to move folders using File Juggler, I discovered this on the company website :

Question – Can File Juggler manage folders?

Answer – No, unfortunately not. File Juggler handles only files.
I plan to add this feature later.

This was followed by a link to a page that had nothing at all to do with File Juggler or the author’s apparent abortive attempt to implement this feature, which he seems to feel is not really all that important.  I’m guessing he’s never worked with Hazel on a Mac.  I got all my folders nested exactly as I wanted them in ten minutes flat using a script I’d written in Hazel.  Sometime you just have to leave the PC to do what it does and get the work done on a Mac.

Salsa tonight.  Helping in a beginner’s class at 6.30 then an advanced class at 7.30.  Great fun as always.

Weather to get colder tomorrow.  Pack wooly jumpers, wooly hats, warm gloves and snowshoes JIC and Sim!

A Day of Surprises – 15 November 2016

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15-nov

Surprise No 1

When I woke this morning, just after 8am, the sun was shining.  It stayed that way too.  Now after the last two days we’ve had, that was a big surprise.  I checked all five of my photo backup drives and with a combination of them all, I can account for all the photos from 2000 to November 2016.  Not bad going.  However, one of the big old Western Digital MyBook drives looks like it’s a goner.  That is a great shame.  I’ve always thought WD were a really good make, but I suppose the ten or twelve years I’ve had it, it’s worked hard and sometimes there has been the occasional accident, so I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.  Soon it was time to leave the photos and go get my flu jag.  That’s jab to some people, but jag if you’re Scottish.

Surprise No 2

When I got to the surgery they were just calling my name.  That was lucky.  When I went to see the sister, I recognised her right away as an FP (Former Pupil) of Cumby High.  I couldn’t think of her name, but I remembered the face, because last night when I was browsing the photos in the oldest collection, I came upon the poster I’d made for Bugsy Malone, one I was really proud of, and here was the female lead from the show wearing a nursing sister’s uniform.  We got talking and she asked if I had any photos of the show, because nobody in her family had thought to bring a camera to the show.  I told her that I probably had, but it would take me some time to find them.  I couldn’t believe that was away back in 2003!  Anyway, she said she’d just give me a gentle wee jag.  She lied.  It was gentle at the time, but it’s aching now!

Surprise No 3

After I got back and found the said photos, hundreds of them as it turned out, I got dressed for the weather which was still bright, but cold and headed to Auchinstarry.  Walked along the railway to Twechar and got some photos in the sunshine.  I’ve still to process them, but by the time you’re reading this, they will be done with a bit of luck.  Walked back and took a long cut – the opposite of a shortcut  and walked the last half of the path along the canal.  Almost reached Smithston when a kingfisher flew out from my side of the canal bank, across the canal and down towards the marina.  I was too surprised to grab my camera which was switched off in my bag.  Walked along to where I thought it had landed but couldn’t see it.  Then to my amazement, it shot out of the far bank and continued down the canal and away.  It’s years since I’ve seen a kingfisher on the canal and I was beginning to think they had gone.  Since this one is at least a mile and a half away from my last sighting, I’m hoping there are at least two of them now.  I’ll be ready next time with the Nikon and the 300mm lens.

Weather forecast for tomorrow is wintry with rain, hail and snow predicted.  We’ll just have to wait and see, it’ll be a surprise!

Super Moon, Ordinary Day – 14 November 2016

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Not such a bad day today compared to yesterday. Thankfully, Scamp is feeling a lot better and I think a phone call this morning from Hazy helped too, that and looking forward to a visit from JIC and Sim has lifted her spirits. Still a bit cloudy with the occasional rain shower, but we had that in Lanzarote last week too. Having said that, the temperature differential is significant, nearly 20ºc .

Last night’s attempt to resurrect the damaged partition on the external hard disk ended in failure, as I expected it would. However PhotoRec which comes as part of the free TestDisk partition recovery suite managed to find all the photos in the damaged partition and, using it I also managed to download some of the photos to check that they were intact. It looks like most if not all of the photos are recoverable. The problem now is where to put them while I sort them back into their proper folders. Sorting them into the folders won’t be a big problem as the Hazel app on the Mac and File Juggler on the PC will manage that task with relative ease. The problem is that I now need (yet) another external hard drive to use as temporary storage while I do the filing. I might just bite the bullet and buy another external HDD and be done with it. Then I’ll format the old one and use both as a photo repository. It does make you think though, that a free program downloaded from the ‘net can search your hard disk and recover deleted photos even from a formatted drive. If a free prog can do that, what can dedicated forensic software used by police and other agencies do?

For the rest of the day, I went to the gym and then for a swim. Really quite enjoyed it. Salsa and Kizomba tonight was demanding, but also enjoyable.

Today’s photo is of the ‘Supermoon’. Did look slightly bigger than normal, but nothing to get excited about.

Looking for sunshine tomorrow. Always looking!

Dreicher – 13 November 2016

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It’s a new word, dreicher.  It’s not in the dictionary yet, but with a few more days like today it will be. It suits the circumstances today.  It’s been dull and rainy all day.  I think we had the the house lights on all afternoon.

I was hardly out of the hose today.  Today’s shot of Mr Squirrel was taken through the kitchen window.  I spent most of the day trying to rebuild the partition table of an external hard drive that I broke a few weeks ago.  One of the old PCs is still struggling with the task as I write this.  I’ve not got a great deal of hope in it working, but it was my fault that broke it.  Luckily it was a drive that contained a backup of a backup of my photos.  It’s all about belts and braces.  I just checked today and it looks like I have about 15 years of photos in a variety of hard disks scattered around the house.  Maybe I should take the time to build just one more backup …  Or maybe not.

Scamp wasn’t feeling very well after lunch.  I think it’s down to too much light breakfasts.  What she needs is another week of fresh fruit followed by a fried breakfast …  Or maybe not!

Hoping for just a little light tomorrow with ISO speeds in three digits.

The Sound of Silence – 13 October 2016

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He came!  He actually came and within twenty minutes the aerial was down and dismantled.  The aerial man gave us back the sound of silence.  To paraphrase Stuart MacBride’s heroine Detective Chief Inspector Steel, “Seventy five quid plus VAT? My sharny 1 arse!”  This guy did the job and we thank him very much … we did pay him too.

Earlier in the day, Scamp met her aunt and managed to establish the identity of a great many people in a sixty year old wedding photo.  It made me think that in today’s world where so many of our photos, even wedding photos are not printed, how will we perform a similar task in the future.  Will we still be able to view those videos on their lovely shiny DVDs engraved with the movie highlights of today’s wedding groups?  Will the photos that are printed using ink on ‘archival’ paper last for sixty years?  Will the resolution of the full frame CCD be as good as the old fashioned 6×6 TLR?  Not a chance.  The other thing we need is to record the names and fit them to the faces of the people in those photos.  I realised too late, after my father died, that I’d lost touch with all those people whose faces I saw in the old photos.  They were also dead, but they had also taken their identities with them.  What I urge you to do is to record, preferably in ink and on paper, the names of the faces in your old photos, and if you don’t have physical photos, print them out on the best quality paper you can afford.  It’s not for you, it’s for the ones who come after you.  They are the ones who will be left scratching their heads after you can’t be relied upon to enlighten them.

Today’s PoD was taken on the east of Fannyside Moor looking towards Slamannan.  It’s a great place for Big Skies and this certainly was a big sky.  I like it because it’s a place where you can just watch the clouds rolling past without cars constantly zipping past.  The only traffic today was a lady on a bike who was riding a tail-wind.  I hope she had already cycled the head-wind part of the route and was on her way home.

img_3440-edit-flickrToday’s Inktober drawing was of the church in Cumbernauld Village and is a building I’ve been meaning to draw for some time.  It really is the most awkward shape with bits apparently added on at different times in its history.  The windows, especially seem to have been placed wherever the builder found a space for them.  Only the tops of the upper windows line up properly and some have lots of small panes of glass while others have fewer, larger panes.  In all, I was pleased with the finished sketch, probably even more so because I sketched it in the open air.  I’m not French, so why should I call it en plein air.  That’s just being a poser, or should that be poseur?

Tomorrow is unplanned as yet, but it will not include listening to the crows landing on that aerial or dreading the screech of it rotating in its rusty bracket.  The bracket is gone, the pole that held the aerial has been recycled and the aerial itself is in a skip.  I love the sound of silence.

  1. Befouled with dung.  Merriam-Webster ↩

Autumn – 5 October 2016

Posted on by Zogman

Earlier in the week there was mist in the morning and today I noticed that the leaves were turning, but I stuck to my pledge not to photograph the sugar colours and I stuck to my self imposed ban. As you can see, it was flowers that took the brunt of my photography today. It was a nice bright day with good directional light in the afternoon.

Those photos accounted for an hour in the late afternoon the rest of the time was spent farting about on computers. There’s probably a perfectly good verb for wasting your precious time trying to get the electronics inside the CPU and its various siblings to to do your bidding, but ‘farting about’ is an adequate substitute in my opinion. The less said about the detail, the better.

<Rant1>
Drove through horrendous traffic in to Glasgow tonight to get to the STUC building in reasonable time. Nearly knocked a bloke off his bike.

  • Doesn’t he realise that I own the road?
  • Doesn’t he know that I’ve got right of way simply because I could knock him down and kill him with my tonne of pretty coloured steel?
  • Doesn’t he know that the person on the roundabout has right-of-way?
  • Does he want to have “But I’m a cyclist, give me room” chiseled on his tombstone?
    </Rant1>

 

<Rant2>

After losing my temper with the world, the cyclist and Scamp we made it in to the STUC building for salsa class in time, only to find almost the whole building was taken over by an LGBTI group. What the hell does the ‘I’ mean? Isnae sure? It looks like it’s like Countdown:
Consonant, consonant, consonant, consonant, oh, better have a vowel. Rearrange them into a well known phrase or saying. Failing that, decide on a use for the acronym.

</Rant2>

Now mentally knackered after navigating through the traffic and physically knackered after two hours of salsa I’m writing the blog at 11.15pm because the person who runs the salsa class decided undemocratically to make all the classes start half an hour later. Some people are great at business, but are just not people-people, if that makes sense. After you ask folk if a change is ok with them and they tell you that “No, it isn’t”, then that’s the time to have a rethink, not just carry on regardless. That was probably rant 3.

img_3426-flickrI did manage to get a quick sketch done for Inktober 2016. It was a bit of a crash at the last minute, but it was completed. A partly blind drawing, that is you don’t look at the paper when you’re drawing, you just concentrate on the subject. I did correct myself once or twice, but for the most part it was blind drawing. It probably looks like that, but Inktober is not about skill and ability, it’s about putting pen to paper, daily.

Looking for a relaxing day tomorrow. May let the train take the strain. Hoping for even more late sunshine.

El Kaput – 2 October 2016

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2-oct

Short blog entry today.  Found that El Capitan wouldn’t access my storage area on the NAS drive.  Apparently it’s a known bug in El Cap, but nobody seems to want to fix it.  Apple don’t care and neither do Western Digital.  Each blames the other, but they keep taking the money from the punters.  Anyway, I decided to use my Carbon Copier and downgrade to Mountain Lion.  Back to safe ground again.  It worked – nearly.  Needed a bit of tweaking, but it did work in the main.  Some things didn’t work, the worst being Hazel. The app worked, but the rules wouldn’t load.  More work needed.  For once Apple hardware and software just didn’t want to work together.  You get kind of used to Apple products “Just Working”.  It comes as a shock when they don’t.  I’m back in business.  NAS drive works, but it’s like moving back a century.  Everything looks so much brighter in the future, in El Cap.

On a brighter note, I did get another sketch done for Inktober and tonight we went to salsa in the Garage and although we were late with the above problem solving, it was great fun.

Kizomba tomorrow

A day in “The Toon” – 30 September 2016

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30-sept

It’s been a while since we just went for a wander round Glasgow, a flânerie, just stravaigin, so today we remedied that.

Up (fairly) early and out into the rain to get the bus to Glasgow.  Planned the day in Cafe Nero and then headed down Bucky Street.  Did a wee detour into the recently reconditioned Apple shop to see what this new OS Sierra looked like.  Decide it was alright, but nothing much to write home about.  Maybe you need to get down to the nitti-gritti of it to appreciate just what wonders it offers, but there’s not much chance of that any time soon, so we left.

By the time we got down to St Enoch’s square the sun was coming out and lighting up the new entrances to the underground.  Needless to say I managed to get some shots there.  After that, it was a bit of shopping for both of us separately for once.  All the shopping was making us hungry and I’d just the place. We went to a fairly new pizza place, Paseano Pizza.  It was judged a success by both of us.  The pizzas were good, if a little soft underneath, and the alleged 175ml of wine was generously poured.  That in itself helped us say “We’ll be back.”

Wandered up to Sausage Roll Street and I visited Waterstones while Scamp risked the tortuous labyrinth that is Watt Bros.  We’d considered having another wee drink to seal the day, but then decided that we should just head for home.

Overall, a very satisfying and relaxing day in “The Toon.”  Ye cannie beat it, honest, ye jist cannie.  It was a lovely day.  Heavy showers but lots of sunshine to make you forget the wet bits.  Good company as always.

As always, the photos look much better and larger on Flickr.  Click on the mosaic or here to be transported there.

Oh yes, I’ve removed the August gallery and replaced it with the much more interesting Skye September gallery.  Do go and have a wee look.

Tomorrow we may do the same in another town, and then again we might not.  That’s us, rebels without a clue!

The Day After – 25 September 2016

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25-sept
I’d planned on having a lazy day with little or no driving and that’s exactly what I got. It was a sunny morning then the rain came and went off and came on again and went off and so it continued all day, so at least I didn’t drive.

I frittered away most of the day on trying to install an upgrade to Windows 10 on the Linx. It was never meant to go on these little tablet computers, but I’ve never let that stop me in the past. The problem is that the main ‘drive’ only has 32GB bare, so once windows is in, there’s about 20GB left. The installer needs 16GB and there’s no way on this earth that I can get that amount of free space on the drive. It just wasn’t meant to be, but to quote Mr R, it’s now become a ‘wee challenge’. After spending most of the afternoon on it, I think I may be nearing a solution, but just in case, I’ve made a backup of the working system. I’ll probably make another backup tomorrow with a different backup prog. Belts and braces, that’s me. It felt good to go through all these hoops, something of a reality check. You get so blasé about installing upgrades without a second thought on a Mac. It’s nice to know that with all it’s bells and whistles, Windows 10 is still a piece of Microsoft junk. Nothing ever works on it. All these whingers who write copious bleating complaints about a Mac OS that slows down their computer want to have tried installing Windows on a home-built PC. Then they would know about grief. Windows 10, puts you back in the driving seat. Just the seat mind you, there’s no engine and they forgot to put in the fuel tank. The wheels are available as an optional extra. Steering wheel? You mean you were thinking about controlling it? No way!

I did go out into the open air in the afternoon and shot a few birds, photographically speaking. Mr Grey was over at St Mo’s so I had to go over and annoy him, then there was this little robin who looked so solemn and downtrodden, maybe he was taking time out from updating his laptop too. Then there were some jaggy things. Thorny branches. Maybe it’s just the way I’m feeling, but they seemed to sum up my mood today.

Tomorrow we’re hoping to go swimming in the morning and then I’ve got the physio in the afternoon. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll return to backing up and updating my PC with Windows 10 Anniversary edition. It’ll be crap like the rest, but I’ve got to give it a chance. Then I’ll go back to the Mac to get some real work done.