[Below is the text of a sermon I preached at our church on Sunday morning, 9th July 2017.]
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. Years before that I had owned a Sinclair Spectrum which connected to a TV and used a cassette tape for storage and loading programs.
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:
There are plenty more tutorials and videos out there, but these are good places to start.
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. It was cross-platform and did the job but it was fairly slow to process a single image let alone a folder full.
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.
When I was a kid I was heavily involved in and interested in photography. It was the type of interest that would get me out of bed early whilst on holidays to be in place before the morning sun would rise. Often our holidays were taken in late autumn or very spring and there would be a fog around our holiday haunts. My father was the lead - having been involved in black and white photography for decades. When mum and dad built their house in the late 1950s, it included a purpose-built darkroom.
When you buy a camera that can accept interchangeable lenses, you’re not so much just buying a camera as buying a system.
Why? With little exception a Nikon body will only accept lenses made for it, and the same for Canon, for Pentax, for Sony, for Olympus and so on.
Some lens manufacturers such as Tamron and Sigma make lenses to suit a range of bodies, but those still have different mounts to the others. A Sigma lens made for a Pentax won’t fit on a Canon, and vice versa. Sure, you can buy adapters that will allow some lenses to be used on other bodies, but they work with varying (read ’limited’) success.
One dessert I can distinctly recall from my childhood is bread and butter pudding. The best bits were the bread that had sat on top of the baking custard - they had the flavour of the custard but a more substantial texture because they had been on top. The sultanas were acceptable, but optional in my view. Those sultanas that had managed to breach the surface were quickly dispatched to the bin because, in my view, there is little that is supposedly edible that could taste worst than a burnt sultana.
On a recent visit to Sydney I came across a newsagency that sold items that seemed to be of a higher quality or calibre than your standard, run-of-the-mill stationery items. I found a stand that contained a range of Blackwing Pencils. Blackwing are either iconic or cultic (depending if you like them or not).
This particular newsagency had a range of Blackwings including the standard, 602, Pearl and the 725. I opted for a Pearl and set of replacement erasers. The Blackwing Pearl has been sharpened but is yet to be put to any significant work.
After a bit of testing, fiddling and pondering I’ve decided to opt for Hugo as my CMS. It’s flat file, a single executable, multi-platform (which only needs to cover GNU-Linux and Windows in my stable), lightweight, well documented and has a swag of themes.
We’re ready to roll…