The photographs were taken in Helsinki on September 4th.
This morning I walked for 1 1/2 hours taking photographs of autumn colors. Yesterday I updated the iMac to macOS Sierra. It seems that Aperture continues to work in Sierra, even though there are some slight nuisances. I have got used to Aperture, and switching to another program would be quite a hurdle.
(Posting title is from the poem Girl on a Bicycle by Troy Garrison.)
Today I walked for 2 hours 15 minutes in Meiko, visiting six different lakes. There was still some snow, but mostly it was easy to walk, as the ground is still somewhat frozen. Swamps were flooded because of the melting snow.
I imported the photographs taken today to the new iMac using the built-in memory card reader. Now I'm starting to realize how fast the new computer is, importing the photographs happened in a fraction of the time needed on the old one.
While walking, I recorded a 4K video with the LX100, and imported it to the iMac. On the old iMac there was no hope of playing a 4K video, on the new one it didn't even challenge the computer.
The photographs were taken in Luukki on February 8th and 28th. I have taken photographs of this particular birch several times, as it is of somewhat unique appearance, due to witch's brooms, but now it has been cut down.
(Posting title is from the song Witches Brew by Katy B.)
This photograph was taken on February 14th in Tremanskärr swamp. I took quite a few photographs of this subject, but kept only this one.
The new iMac is now in use. Transferring files from a Time Machine backup of the old iMac happened without problems during the night. The first backup for this machine is in progress, and after that is ready I can say that we have a new iMac safely in use. The old one is still in use as well, but it may not be long until it totally breaks, or shows to be of not much use for anyone.
I'm a bit sad to say goodbye to an old workhorse. The old iMac has provided a lot of value during 7 1/2 years. It arrived with Mac OS 10.4.10 installed, and since then I have installed six major OS versions on top of the previous one: 10.5, 10.6, 10.7, 10.8, 10.9, and 10.10. Also, I have twice upgraded the memory, first to 4 GB and then to 6 GB. There have been some little hiccups, and accidents, for example a bookshelf falling on top of the iMac, but the iMac survived even that.
This morning I used the new iMac for going through the photographs - about 800 of them - that I had waiting for processing in Aperture. Even though there were a lot of other things going on simultaneously of the iMac, Aperture was almost impossibly fast compared to the old iMac. And the display was great, that is also something that has improved during the years.
(Posting title is from the poem The Subculture of the Wrongfully Accused by Thylias Moss.)
I have noticed that I often feel quite blue on Friday, and this is no exception. So, this photograph.
Today I'm getting the new iMac, but it will take quite some time to transfer the files from the old one to the new. Maybe tomorrow it will be in use, and the old one in the process of being phased out. It has showed lots symptoms of being at the end of its life. And 7 1/2 years is old for a computer.
(Posting title is from the poem Mac Flecknoe by John Dryden.)
The 7 1/2 year old iMac is finally at the end of its life. The screen turns black after using the computer for a while, and nothing else helps than a restart. There have been symptoms of problems for a while already, not to speak of the relative slowness of the computer. In fact, the iMac has had the longest life span of any computer that I have ever had, being in active daily use until now. And even the newest OS runs well on this system.
Yesterday I ordered a new 27-inch iMac, but it will probably take over a week for it to arrive, as I did some customisation to the standard configuration (3 TB fusion drive and 16 GB of memory). I hope the new iMac proves to be as durable as the old one. According to the specs the new one should be quite a lot faster, but given 7 1/2 years between these machines that is to be expected. In fact, it is somewhat surprising that the difference isn't much greater.
The photographs were taken on February 1st, which was a snowy day.
(Posting title is from the poem the library of t-shirts by Joanne Burns.)
Here are some more photographs taken in the dark, on January 2nd. Only later I realized that the third one might have worked as a 4K video, filming the water flowing over the damn. If people are watching fireplace videos, why not videos of flowing water.
I tried viewing a 4K recording captured with the LX100, but my iMac (7 1/2 years old) couldn't play the videos properly. Also, the iMac screen is rather small, only a quarter of the image fits on the screen if viewed at 1:1 resolution.
Soon I need to replace the computer. I had a look at the 4K iMac, but it is terribly expensive (for now), and I think 4K might need even more processing power that the current computers have.
(Posting title is from the poem Brand New Products by Linh Dinh.)
Until now I had been using the LX5 after rain, or before rain, not in the rain. Today that changed. We were on a late afternoon walk along the Vantaa river when rain started pouring. I have been a bit wary of getting the LX5 wet but the promise of photographs was just too tempting. But it was just a few drops of water, otherwise I kept the camera covered.
Yesterday I asked for help with the problem of iPhoto disk use growing and growing, and got an excellent suggestion to check out the various directories hidden inside the iPhoto Library folder. I should have checked this at once and not tried to rely on iPhoto being able to recover from the problems by itself.
Anyway, it turned out that since October, 2010, iPhoto had not cleared out the deleted photographs, despite appearing to do so when I had emptied the trash in iPhoto. So, iPhoto had kept hiding away each day almost 1 GB worth of unneeded photographs, eating up disk space at the monthly rate of 25-40 GB.
I didn't even try cleaning up iPhoto manually. Up at Apple Support Discussions (currently on mainainance, but there is a Google cache) I found a hint to use iPhoto Library Manager to rebuild the iPhoto Library. This worked perfectly, but rebuilding took a long, long time - and it ended in an error message. However, everything seemed to be fine, at least the number of photographs and events match the old iPhoto Library.
Anyway, free space on the iMac hard disk got up from 67 GB to 278 GB. Not to speak of similar savings on the backup disks as well. And the iPhoto Library is now less than a third of what it used to be: down from 308 GB to less than 95 GB.
That was quite a change! For quite a while I don't (I hope) need to stress about having too little disk space.
Update: The story continued...
First we had snow, then fog, now rain. Sorry to disappoint Mark who liked my less dark photographs, but this set is dark.
Also, returning to the topic of that posting, there was a new version of iPhoto released, version 9.1, which was promised to contain stability improvements. And also version 10.6.5 of Mac OS X was released, which contained speed improvements for iPhoto. So things are getting better I guess - and perhaps the occasional freezes of iPhoto are now fixed.
Did I make a hasty investment in additional memory when upgrading from 4 GB to 6 GB? Probably not - memory is always faster than disk, and it is in any case becoming a bottleneck on the iMac, which is now 3 years 3 months old.
Also, I got in a comment by Ssp a link to a funny web site of iPhoto failing to recognize faces, or in fact recognizing faces where there are none. This was done with the iLife '09 version of iPhoto - I guess the iPhoto version number was 8.0 in these images.
By the way, the Apple naming scheme of the iLife application is strange, using both years and numbers. So, the new iPhoto I have belongs to iLife '11 and has version number 9.1.
After looking at the funny examples, it appears that the face recognition has changed somewhat between the versions 8.0 and 9.0. At least I didn't get to use the feature in this manner. In fact, I got the feeling that face recognition works now more as an assistant, not in charge. I didn't get many false positives - actually, only one; on the other hand, there are plenty of faces which the program doesn't recognize even after teaching it a lot.
So, is the feature a gimmick or not? Well, it works to some degree, so that you get at least some faces recognized, and can thus browse galleries organized by faces. On the other hand, it would take a lot of work to finish the organizing, that is, to teach the program the remaining faces. So, limited success.
We didn't get the forecasted 5-10 cm of snow yesterday. Less than 1 cm was on the ground in the morning, and most of that has melted away by now. Instead of snow, we had fog today.
I have been sitting in a car quite a lot during the last few days, so here are a couple of more urban views, and also some foggy ones.
I promised to write some words about the new iPhoto 9.0, and here it is. Today I upgrade the memory on the iMac to 6 GB because of the slow performance of iPhoto - have to see if it helps. Anyway, I'm not alone with these problems: main memory seems to be the critical resource.
I have used iPhoto from Apple to organize my photograph workflow for several years. When I bought the iMac three years and three months ago, it had iPhoto 7.0 preinstalled. I didn't upgrade to iPhoto 8.0 when it came out, but now I decided to get the new iPhoto 9.0.
The Apple iLife '11 software suite is cheap, 49 euros for iPhoto, iMovie and GarageBand. Of these I don't use the other programs, only iPhoto, but this is a pretty good deal nevertheless.
I have used the new iPhoto only for a short while, so there is not much to report yet. The upgrade went quite ok, although it was time-consuming, as iPhoto includes a new database format which takes quite a while to get generated. (I copied the old iPhoto folder as a backup in case something went wrong with the update.) There was a small 9.0.1 update from Apple, which I installed right away.
The old iPhoto has been quite slow sometimes when importing photographs and organizing them. I haven't found the speed much different in iPhoto 9.0.1, although some things are snappier. Overall, about the same. On the other hand, I have taken relatively few photographs during the last days, so there hasn't been a need for lots of editing or organizing. Also, it may be that iPhoto will speed up - there may be still some initial indexing going on.
However, every so often iPhoto seems to freeze completely for some time, not responding to anything. I checked the memory use, and it was 50-100% more that I have been seeing with iPhoto 7.0. This made me decide to upgrade the memory from 4 GB to 6 GB on the iMac. The cost for the 4 GB memory stick was 105 euro, not bad.
One of the "new" things in iPhoto 9.0.1 is face recognition. I think this was present in 8.0 as well, but it never tempted. However, it seems to be useful, at least to a limited degree. It took over one hour for iPhoto to go through the photographs looking for faces; fortunately this happened in the background.
It was interesting to "teach" the program to recognize faces. I studied this topic years and years ago, in a seminar on neural networks organized by Erkki Oja. Thus it was interesting to see how this works now in practice. I have no idea whether iPhoto uses neural networks at all, but the principle of learning is the same.
It seems that iPhoto will only list those photographs in the faces gallery where it is sure enough about its decision. So, at least for now, there aren't that many photographs which it has managed to link to the names given as input. Also, for some reason iPhoto seems to have learned some faces much better than others. Maybe some faces are easier to recognize that other. Also, when children grow their faces do change, and this is probably a challenge to the program.
Also, interestingly, some photographs which had been lurking in some obscure corned of the iPhoto database turned up thanks to the face recognition feature. Maybe these were in the wrong folder or something, but it was nice to see new discoveries. And I think having such automatic organization of photographs is the way to go, provided it doesn't disturb too much the ordinary use of the program.
All in all, face recognition, even in this limited form, is quite interesting to explore. The other features I haven't yet explored much, but the program seems to be simple enough to use, and not too much different from 7.0, which is a good thing.
There is a bit more eye candy, which may be one reason for why the program sometimes seems to be a bit slower. The editing tools have been reorganized in a way which I like. Also, the full-screen browsing and editing mode works well, although there is some learning in the keyboard commands.
All in all, an ok update to the program. I hope the performance gets better now that there is more memory in the iMac.
Here are two photographs from Sunday, and one from Saturday night.
I seem to have stumbled on an upgrade cycle, namely I upgraded iPhoto to version 9.0, and discovered that the new version eats up memory. (I'll make a separate posting about iPhoto 9.0 at some point - it is not all bad.)
Thus, I went ahead and ordered a 4 GB memory stick which would allow 6 GB of main memory in the iMac. Not too bad, as the cost was only 105 euro, and this is something I thought I would do anyway at some point. Having on the iMac six accounts which are in use all at the same time taxes the memory quite a lot.
But still, I don't like to mess with a machine that works. More often than not some other problems appear in a while. Fortunately there is still plenty of space left on the hard disk, so there is one thing less to worry about. - Well, have to see how the memory upgrade goes.
Do you have a current backup of your photographs and software? Luckily I had.
During the weekend I lost all files on the iMac at home, due to filesystem corruption. This happened when I needed to move the computer to another room, and it didn't start up any more. Before that the iMac had been running over 38 days in succession without problems.
Luckily I had a backup, which was less than one hour old, on the Time Machine backup disk. Long story short, after initializing the disk, installing Mac OS X from scratch and copying all data (over 500 GB of it) from the Time Machine backup disk, we are back to normal. (This took over four hours.)
Now everything works. All settings are the way they were and all software and files were preserved as they were.
But a small worry is nagging: perhaps the problem will reappear?
On the other hand, the computer seems faster, which may be due to a "fresh" Mac OS X installation. The previous system was upgraded from 10.4 to 10.5 to 10.6, always on top of the previous one. Than may have been one reason for the problem.
So, now that I have been warned, I'll be even more diligent about backups.
Here are three photographs taken today, when the sun had set. A clouded night as has been so often lately.
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