Digital weapons and defences

Intriguing news this morning that a senior Kremlin figure who had been a patron of Putin's leadership  has broken with him over the war in Ukraine and left the country. A small sign of hope. All we need now is several more to do likewise publicly, and that could trigger a change that will result in an end to the war. Putin cannot survive unless he has united support, methinks. Meanwhile this terribly cruel conflict continues. The Russians are said to have lost about fifteen thousand soldiers. There are no comparable figures for Ukrainiansoldiers or civilians killed.

I went to the Eucharist at St Catherine's this morning, with ten others, then fetched this week's veggie bag before lunch. When I got home there was a small package in the post for me from my sister June. It's a small protective wallet to house bank cards with a safety lining that prevents anyone with the right device from reading the data on one's cards and using the information to steal from your bank account. Up until now my card wallet has had an aluminium foil lining, which also works, but wears had needs to be replaced regularly to serve its purpose.

I made a draft of next Sunday's sermon, then worked on next week's Morning Prayer upload and recorded the audio in the afternoon, with a break while the tuner worked on Clare's piano. Rachel has sent us a lovely video of Jasmine playing jazz piano at a school concert. We knew she plays saxophone, but I wasn't aware that she's been learning the piano as well. Amazing!

When Clare went shopping for some vegan products at Beanfreaks, she found out the shop had suffered an expensive loss of fresh stock due to a fridge breakdown or power outage, not sure which, so she asked me to go over to the Tesco supermarket on Western Avenue and see what suitable products I could find there. It wasn't easy to locate what I needed, but I was successful in finding all she wanted.

After supper, I watched more episodes of the Finnish crimmie 'All the sins', which did turn out just be be a prequel to series one. It turned out to be quite a complex essay on the turn of the new millennium, as a moment of change challenging traditional religious and social values, and the impact of the emergence of female leadership on community life in a remote rural area. It made me realise how much has changed in the past twenty one years and how much we've become accustomed to since the rise of the internet and the smartphone. Who could have thought back then that they'd become weapons of war in the struggle to control the information required to rule the world?

Smartphone takeover

It was an early start for a Monday morning, collected at nine fifteen for a funeral at Thornhill. There were just three mourners, one the solicitor handing the affairs of the deceased, another a former neighbour and the third was a fellow church member and contemporary, also 92, from Butetown Methodist Church. She told me their church was about to close and become a community centre, although there may still be a monthly service. So she was mourning at different levels. 

In conversation with the three of them beforehand, I learned the deceased had travelled the world in her youth, performing as a wing walker on bi-planes in post war years. They knew no more than that unfortunately. Sad to think nobody gathered stories of her adventures. She was widowed in her sixties and I guess there were no children or relatives to tell stories to.

Not long after I returned home there were two emails about Wednesday's funeral, one from the Funeral Director about the order of service, which I thought the next of kin making the arrangements would pass on after receiving and agreeing it with me. The other was from the man himself with a photos of a hand written list of funeral attendees for Track and Trace purposes. This will need sorting out so that Eileen the Verger can easily read it. 

After an early lunch, I drove Clare for an osteo treatment with Kay in Newport and walked for an hour while waiting in nearby Beechwood park again under cold grey skies. When we got back I walked for another three quarters of an hour in Llandaff Fields, to complete my daily quota, while the sun was going down. It was even colder than earlier and quite an effort to keep going.

At tea time, I received half a dozen photos of handwritten text of the eulogy. All were neat and readable but need transcribing correcting and turned into a script to read from. That took me an hour to do after supper. 

It's reported that 96% of the population of the UK are now said to own a smartphone. But do they use them? Demand for laptop and desktop PCs has diminished, and tablets as much can be done conveniently on a smartphone nowadays. If anyone can't learn how to write or email using a smartphone or tablet, then rather than take time to learn how to, photographing handwritten text to email is a convenient alternative. 

Optical character recognition apps for converting handwritten text photos into a digital text file can be quite sophisticated, but can be error prone if its quality is poor, and need as much attention as manual transcription. Speech to text is also evolving beyond anything that could be imagined twenty years ago, with the benefit of AI learning algorithms. Interesting times for consumers as much as techies.

I watched this week's new episode of NCIS and the news before turning in. More allegations emerging of socialising under lockdown in the prime minister's Downing Street office, also of islamophobia in the Tory whips' office. What a shambles.

Digital Camera Odessy

Much rain, and overcast most of today and yesterday, so I occupied myself with domestic tasks and sermon writing, with a walk into town and back for shopping when conditions eased. Somehow the days slipped by, and in the evening Dan Cruickshank's series of programmes on the Land of the Pharoahs made interesting watching. He's an engaging storyteller, and the landscape photography was breathtaking.

With time to spare for reviewing my recent photographs, I have discovered that images from my Sony HX50 have all acquired a blemish, which is visible in lake photographs. Lens cleaning hasn't removed it. At first it was in the bottom right hand corner of the preview screen, and I found that if I switched from 4:3 to 16:9 proportioned images, the blemish was covered by the sensor mask. Then the blemish appeared in a new more central position. Changing back from 16:9 to 4:3 revealed that the blemish had moved to a new position, rather than a second blemish appearing. I assume that a spec of dust has penetrated the lens barrel and has settled on the sensor or on an internal lens. I have no idea if it's possible to get it cleaned, it could cost as much as a replacement model.

A quick check through this blog revealed that I bought this camera in February 2014. It has been a constant travelling companion ever since. Assuming I didn't accidentally reset the image counter in that time, I've taken eight and a half thousand photos with it. I started with digital photography in 2001. Before that, I used a lightweight Olympus trip and a Practica SLR 35mm film camera for 20 years. The Practica used DDR made Zeiss lenses, and was the start of a brand loyalty that led me to Sony digital cameras in the first place.

The HX50 was my sixth compact digital camera, the longest I've had in continuous use. I had a succession of four in nine years until I retired, a period during which digital image technologies advanced rapidly and consumer camera prices dropped, offering more for less. Its predecessor, a Sony HX5, I lost on a bike ride through orchards near Alcanar on the Valencia-Catalunya border in September 2012. I bought a replacement for it next day in Carrefour, with an equivalent ten times zoom. I still possess it, but rarely use it since I acquired the HX50.

The story of my relationship with my bulkier Superzoom and DSLR cameras has unfolded over the past five years, and evolves much more slowly. For me convenience and portability have a much higher priority, and yet, using a camera phone, no matter how good its quality may be, I regard as a no alternative, last resort. I never feel I have the same control over a touch screen device, and that's the deciding factor.
 
   

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.