travels and images

WEEK 32 2018

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Saturday 11 August 2018

Saturday - Hot.

The Perseid's are this week, I'll have to get out and take a look. I need to clean things up out there too. For meteor watching you just need your naked eye and a comfortable chair - I'm not sure where my outdoor chaise chair is, one of the storage containers I suppose. It's a new moon, so it should be a good show.

I brought the scope in from the storage a month or two ago, and have been meaning to check out Mars in the evening sky. I have some isopropyl alcohol and will try to clean the dirty eyepieces. I'll plug the little portable power pack in for the Byer's gear tracking so I don't have to run a cable outside. One less thing to trip over.

The foot is a bit better, I can put a shoe on loosely with old thing socks, and work for a couple of hours, as long as I pop some aspirin to keep the swelling down.

Friday 10 August 2018 Friday - Hot.

A friend of AH has some clean steel barrels he is apparently giving away. I said I'd take a couple - they could come in handy for a couple of projects.

AH towed over S's old 1946 Allis-Chalmers tractor - he pulled it with the 1965 Ford 2500 that he recently got going (new brakes and seals and lots and lots of vehicle fluids). The older tractor needs a starter.

He needs the space in his back yard, having recently acquired a couple more vehicles. We just put it by the Mercedes.

I need to bum a new stapler off of them - mine is failing after all the screening work (it's probably 20yo too) - and I have so screen installation left to do still. I can't put screen on the remaining frames until I have a stapler. I'll see them Saturday or Sunday.

Left to right, broken tractor, broken Mercedes, broken Probe.

His tractor has some sort of grading attachment, and he said he can come by when the winds let up and grade a new road to the back yard that doesn't pass through the front yard. We are only talking an inch or two of dirt and brush.

Thursday 9 August 2018 Thursday - Hot. Not too humid.

Wednesday 8 August 2018

Wednesday - Hot. Low humidity though.

Working away on this and that.

A friends mother wanted to use Uber, but couldn't figure out how to get the app. So I used her iTunes account and downloaded it for her. Now to see if someone who can't figure out the app store can figure out how to use Uber...

Tuesday 7 August 2018

Tuesday - Hot, about 104F, despite predictions of 107F. The smoke kept the temperatures down. Low humidity. A very red sun at sunrise.

I spent a couple of hours painting a window frame, and gluing together another. These are small and simple and didn't take too long. The hardest part was finding two straight 5' lengths of 1x3 pine out of four already hand selected pieces of 8' lumber.

After an hour the paint was dry enough to let Budd into the garage. He loves the 100F+ heat in there, and today he was particularly happy because there was a small lizard running about. I didn't get Budd out of the garage from noon until 6pm, he was that engrossed in stalking.

I gave up on true automation of the image processing. I spent about 12 hours since Thursday trying to get it going, and am unwilling to spend any more time. Much like the entrail-reading of trying to get the C routines working with Objective-C on separate threads, getting Python scripting (white space and tabs is important!) or Scheme scripting ("the world's most unportable programming language" - Wikipedia) to work correctly just wasn't happening without major effort and time delays.

[This is a matter of what John Cook would call Bicycle Skills. I've been meaning to learn Python, but haven't gotten around to it.]

I'll list what I did instead, just for chuckles.

I reverted to my Unix background, using several tools, and essentially piped the output from each into the next.

First GIMP, with Import-As-Layers to get all of a set of images in (there are four sets of 36). Then use the rectangle select tool and select the interior of the images first layer. Then under Color use the Hue-Saturation option and set saturation to -100. Then select the next layer, and repeat...36 times. If you do things properly the mouse focus and keyboard focus are separate and can be used in the different control panels.

Then, because despite there being an import-as-layers tool there isn't a symmetrical undo or export-layers-as-separate-images option, I exported again to an Open Raster format. This is essentially a 7zip folder with the layers in it as separate images.

The MacBook Archive tool didn't recognize it, of course. ( The 7z format has been around since 1999, and has been in the public domain since 20008: Apple, currently with a market cap of over 1 Trillion dollars can't be bothered to spend the resources needed to host more than one archive format.)

I had to download UnArchiver (free) and use that. It in turn creates a folder containing another folder called "Data", and that in turn has the images, as PNG files...with the layer names stripped and the files numbered in reverse. This was some sort of GIMP thing and couldn't be changed.

So then I used the OSX Rename command, with Format, and renumbered and renamed the files in the style and order that I wanted.

I repeated this tool chain four times, because there are four different resolutions to deal with.

That was my afternoon.

Monday 6 August 2018

Monday - Hot. About 105F, but the low humidity meant that I could mostly keep the a/c on low. The office was a bit warm in the afternoon however. They are predicting 107F for tomorrow, which will be horrible.

Not much smoke, thankfully.

No work done on the new window screen frames. Or the cooler bearings. Still trying to recuperate from the Sunday night issues.

Worked on the app for a bit. Dave's Batch Processor is apparently just for Windows. I thought I'd run it on the MacBook, but maybe it was on the old Win7 partition? I plugged in the Win10 laptop to charge, and I'll try that tomorrow. Now that I think about it I don't know that it can apply a filter to just a portion of an image, which is what I want.

I fiddled around with the python-fu and script-fu bits of Gimp, without much luck. It's hard to get excited about learning a new scripting language just for this. There is also GAP and GMIC, but again I'm not sure they can do what I want.

I looked at running scripts from the command line to run Gimp in a batch mode, that might be do-able.

It's odd and annoying that one can't record a macro in Gimp, it seems like a no brainer. The artsy types aren't going to learn python...

Book #32 was The Grave's a Fine and Private Place (Flavia de Luce #9), by Alan Bradley. It was more like the original books with the hoydenish Flavia, but the plotting and pacing was a mess - not much in the way of detective work that pays off. This was a library e-book, so I'm not out any money, but it could stand some improvement. Bradley must be getting up there in age, in his 80's or 90's? He does start to expound a bit on the other characters, Dogger and Flavia's sisters, but that doesn't actually go anywhere.

Sunday 5 August 2018

Sunday - Hot.

Did some shopping in the morning, and some weekend chores around the house. I found a pair of old worn out thin socks and by loosening my laces was able to get my foot in some sneakers. But it ached quite a bit afterwards. And I can't yet kneel to do stuff like stapling the window screens and painting them.

I also did some laundry - I was running out of "painting" clothes.

On Saturday I had already mopped the kitchen floor - it really was due.

R finally got the old Mercedes here - he said the guy actually had trouble finding the place and went out past 110th street, before turning around and coming back. But it was an easy unload from the fancy flatbed, and the driver actually helped us hand push it into place, so no big deal.

I said that R was welcome to park the other dead(ish) Mercedes alongside, but he demurred.

Started feeling bad mid-day, and had kind of a bad night. Not sure what happened there. Tired and nauseous.

Picture of the Week

HMS Comfrey, K-277, in Halifax

Corvette K277, HMS Comfrey (Pre PG-86 USS Action)..

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