We hadn’t named it, the ministry of fear

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The photographs were taken in Helsinki on September 4th.

This morning there was frost on the ground in open places. Nights are getting to be cold.

Yesterday I wrote that Aperture seems to be working on macOS Sierra, but it isn't quite so. I realized that importing photographs doesn't work right, only a small portion of the photographs are being imported. I had reformatted the memory card, but luckily a media recovery program managed to retrieve almost all of the photographs from the card, so my photographs of autumn colors were not lost. Apparently one needs to be quite careful when using Aperture. Maybe I should check whether Photos has grown into a suitable program, or try Lightroom.

(Posting title is from the poem Singing School by Seamus Heaney.)

I live on a needle of a branch

Lake

The photograph was taken by lake Kiiskilampi in Kytäjä-Usmi wilderness. Well, the place isn't that wild, as most of the forests are cultivated, with only one tree species such as pine. But lake Kiiskilampi is protected, inside a small nature protection area, and feels wild, with trees fallen into the lake, and dense growth of forest on the shores.

I just learned that Apple will no longer be developing Aperture, the program in which I'm processing and keeping the photographs. Before Aperture I used iPhoto, which was too unstable with the big photo library I have, and Aperture has performed better, even though the library has occasionally needed repair or even re-building. The digital workflow is rather easy to automate with Aperture, and with that I have been satisfied.

Apparently Aperture will be compatible with the next version of Mac OS X, and thus there is no urgent hurry to see a replacement. Adobe Lightroom seems to be the only contender.

But perhaps the new Photo app which Apple is promising would be robust enough to serve as a replacement to Aperture. However, I suspect that the new app won't be as good for workflows as Aperture. The biggest feature seems to be "iCloud integration", whatever that means.

(Posting title is from the poem On First Seeing a U.S. Forest Service Aerial Photo of Where I Live by James Galvin.)

Into another frame of space

Sign

Leaves

Boards

Crossing

Swamp

This is how it looks like to walk in Torronsuo swamp. A great place to visit, although a bit too far for doing it often.

Yesterday I upgraded one of the two Macs at home to OS X 10.9 Mavericks. I made a fresh backup, and a bootable installer on a USB stick just in case something goes wrong, but the upgrade was the most straightforward ever, no problems whatsoever.

The two Macs I have at home are six and five years old, and both are the oldest Macs of their kind which still run OS X 10.9. It is in fact a bit surprising that so old machines run the newest OS without problems.

(Posting title is from the poem Center by Josephine Miles.)

Away he’d streak, blue

Blue

Reflect

Heather

Here is a set of three photographs, they all were taken beside a lake at Vaakkoi on July 27th.

Earlier I wrote about my problems with getting a new battery for the MacBook, and all seems to be ok now. I got a refund through Paypal for the first purchase, and the second one works more or less as it should. Time will tell. At least the battery is no longer swollen, which made the MacBook bulge and prevented the trackpad from working.

(Posting title is from the poem Nude Descending by Alicia Ostriker.)

Immediacy is retro

View

Rocky

Rocks

Here are photographs taken at the top of Sallatunturit fells, where I climbed with the children. In the last photograph you see my new running shoes, the only ones in the shop that fitted my feet. I'm growing used to the color. I got a comment that the shoes are "retro style", but I don't remember this color ever been in fashion. But then, I don't follow fashion.

I got yesterday the new battery for my MacBook, from the second shop I tried. (I'm still discussing getting the refund from the first shop.) So far so good, have to see how it goes. The old battery had 207 charge cycles at the end, not terribly many, but it was quite swollen already, preventing the touchpad from working properly and making the bottom of the MacBook bulge. Now that is fixed.

There is still 1 hour 10 minutes left of the first charge, the endurance of the battery feels like luxury. The old battery lasted well under two hours in use.

(Posting title is from the poem Paragraph by Rae Armantrout.)

The brain, remember, is not foolproof

Bell 1

Bell 2

Butterfly

Well, I'm almost done with the photo book. There are 72 pages, as I managed to cut eight pages from the initial version. Still too many pages, but I'm getting tired of going through the book again and again. The title of the book is Climbing hills and fells: Vuokatinvaara and Sallatunturit, which is not terribly original but may suffice.

Right now the iMac is hot while running PDF conversions using Ghostscript. This takes some time: a) compressing the 170 MB PDF file to about 18 MB, and b) rendering individual pages as images to be imported into Blurb BookSmart software as full-bleed pages. I did this already once, but spotted a mistake, so I'm redoing the conversion.

I'm thinking of printing the photo book as hardcover, using ImageWrap for the covers, and ProLine uncoated paper. This is somewhat more expensive than the basic softcover, but as I have put something like 10-15 hours to making the photo book, not to mention the effort of taking the photographs, I don't mind.

Another thing is that the trackpad of the five-year-old MacBook Pro is no longer working properly, it doesn't register the clicks as it used to. This is really really awkward when trying to do some writing etc. on the computer.

I did a lot of searches on the net, and finally it turned out that the culprit is the swollen battery, which lies below the trackpad, preventing it from working properly.

Then there was the question of buying a replacement battery. Searching the net, I found several shops selling relatively cheap replacements. And here I must - rather embarrasedly - report that I was apparently caught by a scammer, who had put up a shop looking like a real deal.

I made a payment through PayPal, and in the receipt there was mentioned someone called "lin feiyun" instead of the shop name. Only at this stage did I start to question whether I'm being swindled. The domain name of the shop is "http://akku-kauppa.com/", and I really should have been more careful. But maybe I can get this sorted out via Paypal. In any case, it seems that the battery type may also have been a wrong one, as the specs didn't quite match.

Well, I found another shop selling a battery looking like the real deal. This was more expensive, but at least I got a real confirmation of my order, and the shop seems to be working as it should.

The photographs above were taken while returning back home from Lapland.

Update: The photo book is ready, and I ordered a copy from Blurb, going all the way to hardcover, ImageWrap and Proline Pearl Photo version, which was rather expensive, but "made for use in high-end photo books" was just hard to resist. Usually Blurb has been rather fast in delivering the books, so it may be that it arrives before August 13 which was the estimated delivery date.

I uploaded the book to Scribd also, so it is available for viewing from two places:

• Climbing hills and fells: Vuokatinvaara and Sallatunturit (18 MB PDF file)
  
  • Blurb version available
    

(Note: I first uploaded to Scribd the original 170 MB PDF file instead of the Ghostscript-compressed 18 MB PDF file. I re-uploaded to Scribd and updated the link to the more compact version.)

Another thing is that the second shop from where I looked for a replacement battery for my MacBook send a message that the battery will be shipped today. Seems to be ok. Of the first shop I haven't got yet any response.

(Posting title is from the poem You Would Know by Marvin Bell.)

And I would love you all the day

Bicycle

Street

House

Snow

I have had some trouble with the Panasonic LX5. The click wheel doesn't seem to work at all any more, so I'm unable to change aperture, exposure compensation or manual focus distance. Not so good. And today the camera froze completely, none of the controls worked at all, not even the on-off switch, so finally I had to take the battery out of the camera to get it back into working order.

I managed to upgrade the memory of my Mac to 8 GB today, which seems to have given it a boost in performance as well. I bought the memory from OWC, as it was about 40% cheaper than the euro prices. And OWC has nice videos of how to do memory upgrades. This helped a lot, it was almost trivial to do the upgrade after watching the video. "Show, not tell", as they say.

I wonder whether it would be possible to open up the LX5 and clean the click wheel? I think the problem is caused by dirt getting inside the camera.

(Posting title is from songs from The Beggar’s Opera by John Gay.)

And he hears the rough winds blowing

Blue

Field

Hay

Strawberry

Myosotis arvensis

Yellow

Bursting

Seeds

Today I re-installed Aperture on the iMac at home, because I couldn't get it to update to version 3.3, which has been available for a while. I deleted the old version, and downloaded Aperture again from the App Store. Now I have version 3.3.1.

Starting up Aperture after the update took some time (and some processing is still going on as I write this). There is a new structure to the Library, which is now compatible with iPhoto. I do hope Aperture is now more reliable than what I have experienced with both iPhoto and Aperture earlier.

The interface has changed a bit, and there are some new features, copied from iPhoto to Aperture. But the changes are relatively minor, one should get used to them quickly enough. I experimented a bit with the new controls, but the best thing is that Aperture works as it should: it allows efficient automatization of the workflow.

See here and here and here and here and here what problems I have had with iPhoto and Aperture.

By the way, I did the same thing with 1Password - deleted and reinstalled it from App Store - and that cured the problem of accessing 1Password data from Chrome on my iMac. But on another Mac the problem still persists, I'm not able to use the 1Password extension properly with Chrome. Oh well...

But lets discuss cameras. Namely this seems to be a week for rumours, and one of the rumours concerns the Panasonic DMC-LX7. Apparently tomorrow morning there should be an announcement from Panasonic giving the details of the LX7, the successor to the LX5.

Thanks to Andreas and Art for the info on this, pointing to 43rumours and Engadget. Apparently the LX7 should have a MOS sensor, a 24-110mm f/1.4-2.3 lens, Venus VII picture engine, and a 3-inch display. The specs for the lens make me doubt the rumours, that would be quite a camera if this would be true.

And then there is the question of whether the new sensor would be really an improvement over the old one. I had to look up what MOS means, apparently it is rather interesting imaging sensor technology, used in the micro 4/3 cameras.

Well, maybe we see tomorrow what the LX7 looks like. It could mean serious competition to the Sony RX100 and the Samsung EX2F. (And Samsung apparently just dropped the price of the EX2F.)

Lastly, about the photographs... After dinner I went for a walk with my daughter to the Petikko forests. There was a lot to be seen, after the rainy day.

(Posting title is from the poem A Leak in the Dike by Phoebe Cary.)

Any help on iPhoto disk use growing uncontrollably?

Up

Street

When I installed Lion (Mac OS X 10.7) on the iMac, the free space on the hard disk was at 110 GB. Now the free disk is disappearing, and I think iPhoto is to blame. There has been a decrease of 50 GB in the free space within a couple of weeks. (An a similar increase in iPhoto disk use.)

I have a bit more than 24,000 photographs in iPhoto, and the iPhoto folder consumes 307 GB. This doesn't hold - of most photographs there should be just one copy, and a miniature.

I tried fixing the library, but iPhoto got stuck at 95% completion level. I tried this a couple of times, with the same result (even after iPhoto had been going on for hours).

I haven't had other symptoms, except occasional slowness of the program. But I would like to get the disk space back. Any hints?

Is Mac OS X Lion (10.7) good - or very good?

Leaf color

The photograph shows how it is out there: hot, hot. I have grown tired of the heat.

This time I'm not writing about photography, but about operating systems. If you are not interested in IT or Macs, you may want to skip this.

I have been using the new version of Mac OS X 10.7, aka Lion, since Wednesday, installing it on a four-year old iMac. The minimum requirement to have is a Core 2 Duo processor which the iMac does have. The maximum for memory on the iMac is 4 GB, but I have installed 6 GB, which seems to work well with Lion, even though it is not officially supported.

The best source of information on Lion has been the detailed review written by John Siracusa at Ars Technica. It has 19 pages of well researched information. There you find a lot of helpful hints on how to actually use the new features, and what is under the hood, including the dirty little details about the filesystem etc.

The price of Lion in App Store is 24 euro, and you can install it on all Macs you own or control, which is a very good deal for a major OS upgrade. And even though I had some worries about installing an OS without having it on a physical media, things happened without any hiccups.

How this is done technically is discussed in detail by John Siracusa, and it was rather interesting, as also the fact that there is a hidden recovery partition on the disk after installing Lion. (And if one really needs to have the OS on a media, it will be available in August on USB sticks.)

Lion should be more robust in terms of recovering from errors, and also against malware. This is very good news. There are a lot of improvements, many of which are under the hood, but some also visible to the user. As an example, you can now use full-disk encryption, which is great for those traveling with laptops.

The Lion upgrade seems to do quite a lot of cleaning up on the disks, as the amount of free disk I have on the iMac increased from a bit over 80 GB to well over 100 GB. (I'm comparing the situation when the systems have been started up and one user is logged in.) So, even though some disk space was taken by the hidden recovery partition, it didn't matter in the end.

I suspect what happened is that the Lion upgrade managed to do a good house-cleaning exercise of the old system, which had been upgraded from 10.4 to 10.5 to 10.6, directly on top of the old OS. It is in fact quite surprising that there haven't been any problems on the iMac caused by the cumulative software updates; the safest way would have been making clean installations each time.

Well, lets get back to Lion.

The visual appearance of the OS has changed quite a lot, mostly towards a more subdued look. There are some glaring exceptions, such as the iCal and Address Book applications, both of which are on the ugly side.

In addition to the new look, there are a plenty of new things, many of which are borrowed and "macified" from iOS devices (iPhone and iPad). As an example, by default the scrolling direction (if you use a scroll mouse) has been reversed so that it follows the way how you use your finger on a touch screen. This requires two or three days of getting used to. (Or then you can return to the old way be deselecting an option in the Mouse preference pane.)

Some things are missing completely, such as ability to run PowerPC software in emulation (Rosetta). Also gone is the Front Row application used for watching movies etc. This was a bit of a negative surprise, as the children have liked it, but I suspect they learn soon to cope.

One of the biggest positive surprises has been the new version of Mail. After some initial confusion I have grown to like the new three-pane view, and there are nice touches everywhere. It is also fast, fast.

I have been using Microsoft Outlook (the Mac version) for a while, but now I think I'll return to Mail, as it seems to have evolved well past what Outlook can do. Some issues may crop up, but I think this is worth trying out.

I don't like the way iCal looks like in Lion. It seems too loaded with needless eye-candy, but I suspect I'll learn to live with it. I hope the Exchange compatibility has improved. (Mac version of Outlook isn't so great either.)

Speaking of mail, David Pogue wrote a nice item about it. His Lion review is also worth looking at, although it is nowhere as detailed as the Ars Technica one.

The general feeling of the system is that some things have evolved, some things have changed radically (usually for the better), and some things have taken a step back. (Nothing major so far.)

Apple seems to have a vision of how the OS should be like, borrowing heavily from the iPad and iPhone, but also allowing users to return to the old way, or just to not use the new features.

I suspect that whatever comes after Lion, things will evolve quite a lot. The iCloud service is probably a key direction Apple wants to explore next.

So, in summary: Lion does roar, despite the occasional cough here and there.

Roaring Lion (Mac OS X 10.7) - or so I hope

Raspberry

Berries

I forgot to include rasperry photographs to my previous posting which had the berry in the title. So here are two photographs of raspberries.

The new version of Mac OS X, 10.7, aka Lion, was released today in the App Store. This must have been the easiest and fastest major operating system update ever: download the update (and 24 euros is not a bad price!), start it up, wait a while (we went for a walk), and log in to the system. (I made an up-to-date backup in Time Machine before starting, of course.)

Everything worked as it used to work. Well, the system is still starting up: indexing the hard disk and making the first Time Machine backup, but I have been using it all the time. And dare I say this: the system feels more responsive than before.

Well, some things are ... different ... some would claim better ... but nothing disturbingly so. The Mail program has changed quite a lot in visual appearance, and that may take some time to get used to, but I already like some things there.

Of the upcoming iCloud service there isn't yet anything to report ... have to see in Autumn what that means for the user.

Anyway, so far so good. Knock on wood...

Praising the iMac

Red and green, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Snail, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Three years ago - almost to the day - I bought an 24" iMac, together with the EyeTV receiver for watching and recording digital tv. This was a really smart thing to do. The iMac has been for the family many things: TV, VCR, DVD player, CD jukebox, gaming machine, and of course a computer - all at the same time.

All family members have their accounts on the machine, and Parental Controls make it easy to set rules for how the children access the iMac. All children have learned their computer skills (which are rather impressive) on the iMac.

The biggest new thing was how the iMac affected our TV viewing. Thanks to the EyeTV dual tuner, it is possible to watch and record two channels simultaneuously. This makes it possible to watch TV when you want, instead of when something is broadcasted. Within a very short time this changed TV viewing dramatically, cutting the time spent watching TV to a fraction.

There have been occational problems (such as this), but overall these things have been minor, and often due to doing something wrong at the computer.

I checked at the Apple site how computer hardware has changed in three years. Instead of 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo one gets - for the same price - 3.60 GHz Intel Core i5 processor, twice the memory, three times the hard disc, and a 27" display instead of 24". And the graphics card is very much faster.

But there is no need to switch yet. The iMac works well, like a workhorse, and despite occasional situations when the 4 GB memory is a bit too little, everything works as smoothly as you wish. Part of this is due to software improvements - upgrading to Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) gave a significant boost to the machine. Maybe Apple shoots itself in the fool by optimizing the software, but I don't mind.

And at work, my Macbook Pro is still doing great, at one year and nine months of use. My previous laptop (Titanium Powerbook) lasted six years, maybe this will do the same?