egeiro

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. I wanted something similar. BSAG pointed me in the direction of Bigfoot but while I was looking into that I came across references to littlefoot and barefoot which are a little more lightweight and/or vanilla.

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”. I really like both descriptions - I have a collection of hobbies (even though I hate the word “hobby”) and I would call myself a power hobbyist.

[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. 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:

• 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.

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.