When I was young my parent’s house back onto bushland. This meant that the shortage of neighbours was more than offset by the availability of firewood. Often on a weekend we would have a barbeque for lunch (generally on a Sunday, Saturday was golf day). Standard fare was steak, sausages, tossed green salad and sauce. Almost invariably the steak was cooked to within an inch of its life - well, a few feet into death, really.
No further commentary needed
I’ve been running this site for a couple of months now and wanted to implement some form of footnoting. When I write, I tend to include a lot of text in parentheses (just like this) as they indicate a side thought. An alternative way of rendering that side thought is via a footnote1 I’d come across a site also created in Hugo by But She’s a Girl which had quite elegant footnotes.
In my last post I spoke about some hobbies (ie. interests) I have had over the decades. One such interest was bromeliads. I had a collection of around 30 different species of broms from around 6 to 8 different genera. The genera included Aechmea, Vriesia, Tillandsia, Billbergia, Cryptanthus, Neoregelia and Nidularium. Many of my broms were identified species, but some were mongrels or unidentified. Here’s a selection of the now ex-collection1:
In my 50+ years I’ve had a range of interests. Some fleeting, some have remained for years, some have come and gone. It used to disturb me a little - why couldn’t I be interested in something and stick with it? Why would my interest wax and wane? These days I don’t worry about it - I just go with the flow and follow what interests me. A number of years ago I came across two descriptions for people like me: “power hobbyist”, and “a collector of hobbies”.
[Below is the text of a sermon I preached at our church on Sunday morning, 9th July 2017.] Philippians 2:12-13 Worked Out When was the last time you worked out? For some it may have been this morning, last week, maybe years ago, and maybe never. But the real answer depends on what I mean by “working out”. Is that physical activity at a gym, or could it mean any physical labour?
Over the years I’ve tried many different distributions (distros) of Linux, running a variety of Desktop Environments. I bought my first desktop computer back in 1995. It was extortionately expensive for what you got. Around $3,000 if I recall correctly. It came with Win 3.1 (soon upgraded to Win 95), 8MB of memory (yep, you read that right), a 540MB hard drive (yep, again), a 3 1/2 inch floppy drive and not much else.
In my previous post I was extolling some of the benefits of darktable such as cross-platform (Linux/Mac preferred), fast operation, comprehensive processing, etc. I also indicated there is plenty of online support to fasttrack understanding the software. Here are just a few resources I’ve started with: Robert Hutton’s youtube tutorials are an excellent start! Cambridge in Colour has a straightforward summary of digital image workflow. Jim McCormick has a nice summarised darktable workflow.
For the last four and a half years since I’ve owned a digital camera that can store images as raw files, I’ve needed a method of post-processing these images to produce jpgs suitable for general viewing/sharing/wallpaper. My camera, a Pentax K-30 came with a program called silkypix. I tried it and discarded it early on in the piece. I then looked to other free solutions and came across rawtherapee. It came with a bit of a learning curve but it served me well for a number of years.
My new Sigma 17-50mm zoom lens arrived earlier in the week. I was out of town travelling for a few days and today was my first opportunity to give it a whirl. First impressions? It’s fairly heavy (a little over 500 grams, from memory). It has a large hunk of glass at the front. It’s quite fast to focus. Images seem crisp and clear. The zoom is nice and precise, not sloppy.