Midsummer tech sales

Wednesday, I celebrated the St Catherine's midweek Eucharist, did some domestic errands, and not much else. We have warmer weather now, making life more comfortable and relaxing. I didn't get out and walk, as I should have done as curiosity led me to explore how best to take a good crisp close up photo of a piece of silver jewellery created by Clare from pieces of scrap silver fused together. She'd posted a rather blurry picture of her latest oeuvre on Instagram, using her phone, and I wondered if I could do better. It was less than easy, whatever camera or lens I used as I don't have a macro lens for this purpose. Although the closeup range of the cameras I have is fairly good, the ability to focus on a small object below 10cm reduces with a conventional lens. 

I settled for using my prime lens on the Alpha 68. I need to make more of an effort to use it and learn more about what it does best. Without any zooming capacity I find it rather narrow and restrictive for anything except portraiture, but then the majority of my photo interest is landscapes, urban and rural. Adjusting lighting helped to bring up the detail, but pinpoint accuracy while focusing hand-held with manual or auto focus, was elusive. Another time I must try mounting the camera on a tripod, and use a timer setting to hold on to the optimum sharp focus and distance.

Thursday, the longest day, no locum duty, so I took a walk with my Lumix LX5 camera to capture progress on the Central Square development. The pavements immediately surrounding the the BBC HQ are still being laid. There's been some activity on the bus station site next door, although I am not sure that and ground breaking work is yet under way, presuming that foundations will need to be dug to support the frame of the apartment building above. The steel skeleton of the HMRC building is nearing completion. It's an impressive sight.

I then visited the CBS office to catch up on the current difficult situation confronting the business, and on my way out og town, called into John Lewis store, whose electronic clearance sale has started. Not that there's anything I really need, or could make a case for buying, but just for interest. I met another old geezer just like me, ogling the hardware on offer and contemplating a purchase he knew he didn't really need. An extravert Chinese lady accosted me with questions about some of the low cost bargains, as she and her husband needed a device to Skype her son in Hong Kong. She know nothing about why there was such a range of bargain prices or the reason for it. I wondered how she'd get on with a Windows 10 machine once she got it home and working. But, I helped her to make a decision on a bargain 15" HP device, before she started chatted up the sales assistant and obtaining a further mark down on the already discounted kit.

There was one very recent and expensive Chromebook on display which I fancied, but now that I've discovered I can get a replacement battery for my immaculate Toshiba Chromebook CR104, whose battery life now is a third of what it was when I bought it two years ago, it's hardly worth considering a replacement for my everyday workhorse. It's far superior to any Windows 10 machine. There were several really cheap Windows 10 netbooks on offer, which could be run more efficiently with Linux instead. Indeed I have a laptop which I consider converting every time it annoys me by taking an age to open and update. But again, it is worth the effort?

Thanks to a cloudless sky it's been light this evening almost until bedtime. Summer delight.

  

Upgrading - various

Wednesday afternoon, as I was going into the office, I bought a prime lens to go with my Sony Alpha 55. No telephoto capacity, just a set focal length F1.8, much like my old Praktica SLR film camera. In fact the 49mm UV lens filter from the Praktica fitted the new lens, although sadly it's acquired a scratch and will only be temporarily useful. This kind of lens works best for portraits and landscape. I shall enjoy exploring how to use it, having got used to variable focal length lenses on all the different digital cameras I've had over the past 15 years. I can't believe it's that long since I started to abandon 35mm film photography.

Thursday was broadband upgrade day - at some time unspecified, the line would drop, and then restart and it would all happen some time before midnight, as the TalkTalk upgrade letter said. It was a day when there were several work matters I needed to deal with and be on-line for, thankfully the old speed link was stable and uninterrupted until just after two. By then I'd done all I needed to do. It was much later in the day when I got around to unpacking the new router and installing it. 

Happily it started up quickly and was soon delivering a much smoother service in getting the household devices all on line without IP address clashes. I say smoother rather than faster, as I've formed the impression that Windows 10 computers still load programs with a degree of latency, more than one would expect for faster modern day computers. Once fully loaded the speed is obvious, but while they load an assortment of internet checks are being made. How I wonder are really necessary? I think it is presumed that people will leave computers permanently on with programs open, or else configured with a pre-load feature operating at boot time, to give you a quicker program start, but a longer wait from switch on to first use. 

It used to take four or five minutes to get a computer system up to speed. Windows 10 gets you to a login screen in under ten seconds, unless inconveniently updating at the time. This always seems to happen to me when I'm in a big hurry to get started. How impatient we've become! Loading programs and work files, brings the time from switch on to starting work down to a minute. In the early days of home computers, there were office suites of programs etched on ROM chips, were extensions of the ROM based operating system. You were ready to find the work file you wanted in seconds from switch on. The nearest matching device for speed today is a Chromebook with fast broadband, though less so when off-line. Such systems are limited in scope, but great if your needs are limited. A good smartphone or tablet always on even when charging, is also quick to get you working, though I'm not a virtual keyboard fan, and prefer a traditional computer to work on. Other devices get used mainly for media consumption.

Today is Kath's birthday. We exchanged messages and greetings in Spanish. They're staying in Toledo on their way home from Sta Pola. I've been enjoying the smooth and uninterrupted quality of broadband access. As at work, this takes a certain tension out of doing what you have to do, as well as reducing delays - except to the imagination, which works at a pace that's not time dependent. After lunch I went for a stroll to Llandaff Fields with prime lens equipped camera to see what I could see and record. I take pleasure in enjoying the bigger picture, landscapes and townscapes are what I look for. The prime lens challenges me to look at detail. Its range of focus gives you a sharp clear subject set in a de-focussed background, so you need to think carefully about what you're looking for in a picture as well as what you're looking at. 

I stopped and had a coffee in Cafe Castan. So glad it continues to flourish, ministering food and drink to park visitors. It's a real enhancement to the locality, and the staff are friendly. Then, late afternoon I went into the office for a couple of hours, and found myself with the task of completing the re-install of Windows 10 on the new Acer desktop PC. It crashed badly and had to be reverted to factory settings, Windows 8.1, then 148 updates had to be made before it could be accepted in the queue for upgrading to Windows 10. 

This dragged on for days, leaving Ashley un-confident about whether or when he could use it, so I finished the job and re-configured it, turning a short visit to talk business into a long one machine minding, so I got home late for supper, resentful that these processes don't always function as smoothly as intended. I never found out why this PC's crashed in the first place. It might have been something simple, sync or an email attachment failing to find an app to open it, locking up the system and leaving the machine useless until it drops into sleep mode. The on/off switch tell tale is so dim, you cannot tell whether it's off or in sleep. At that stage, a wrong move may have caused damage that confounded the various system repair and recovery options. There was no success in recovering settings data stored in OneDrive either, hence the need for a hugely time wasting factory reset.

After supper, we settled down together in front of the TV and watched 'The Last Quartet' a fine film about the middle aged members of a string quartet, thrown into crisis by the impending retirement of one of its members, based around the sublime music of Beethoven's last quartet. Wonderful.