Indian Ocean off Bali.  © PJ Croft 2016

A pilot has been posting photos on a photography blog I read regularly. I found them interesting, but not exceptional. These are some of mine.

© PJ Croft 2016

These were taken in the 1980s when we had room to swing around in the seat and shoot out the window. I can’t do that now. The plane was a 747 in those days, even to Bali. There was room to move.

A 747 wing, from Bali. The colour is from use of a polarising filter. © PJ Croft 2016

McDonnell Ranges, Central Australia. © PJ Croft 2016

The Olgas, Central Australia.  © PJ Croft 2016

The above two shots were from the inaugural flight of Compass Airlines’ service from Perth to Cairns in about 1993. The return fare was $200, I think. Great trip. These are all film, of course.

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I mentioned last week that I dropped my Samsung tablet PC off at a Samsung kiosk at Joondalup to have a warranty problem fixed. I was told, 3-5 working days.

Well, Friday came and went, yesterday, the 6th day came and went, and no news.

This morning I got a call from a PC repair company in Sydney, asking me for my password so they could get into my PC. I specifically asked the Samsung guy here to make a new user because I didn’t want someone poking around in my things. But this morning they insisted they had to have my password so they could do a backup.

Grrrrrrr! I gave it, but I have worries. It’s now 7 working days. When am I going to get it back? I find it odd that they can’t do a backup without opening my user name. Anyway, this is a BIOS problem. Why do they even need to access the desktop? Suspicious! Not happy, Samsung.

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Look at this!

It’s a little town called Punaikiki on the west coast of NZ. It’s in the news because a French hitch-hiker went ballistic after he waited four days unable to get a lift there.

Too bad about him, but wow, what a fantastic place. This makes me want to up sticks and move there. It’s inspiring, to me.

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I fitted my new gas struts to my car on Sunday. Yes, it was easy. Ball and socket joints. Prise off the spring clip and they pop off. Boy, that tailgate is heavy if one strut is missing!

Place the new socket over the ball, give it a tap to make it spring into place, and it’s done. Repeat for the other side. About ten minutes. Now the tailgate springs up and I have to haul it down. Good.

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In the 1990s, that once great firm Kodak came up with PhotoCD. It was film images scanned by Kodak for us and recorded onto the relatively new gold CDs, supposedly indestructible, with a minimum 100 year life.

The images were digitised at a highest resolution of around 4,000 x 3,000 pixels or similar, a seemingly fantastic resolution at the time. The files were about 30MB in size, and you could have 100 images per disc. They were compressed into the .pcd format, and there were five different resolutions in each file, ranging from thumbnails to the full size.

The discs could be played onto your TV screen by using a PhotoCD player, and I owned one at one stage (it was very cheap, because no-one wanted them). It also played CDs of music, but not DVDs because they hadn’t been invented then. (I think when I moved in 2013, I literally trashed the player because I couldn’t get anyone to take it.)

I got four PhotoCDs made, each one containing 100 of my images. I still have them. But I can’t open the files!!! No-one cares about PhotoCD any more. The discs will last me 100 years, but I can’t use them. Duh!

I’m sure I’ll find a program to open them, but I don’t have anything among my dozen or so programs at the moment. Grrrr.

PS: OK, no problems, I’ve found that the ancient shareware program Irfanview opens and converts them, so problem solved. I’ve just batch converted 50 images and found that although I had many of them, there are quite a few that were lost in my big disk crash in early 2014. I haven’t seen them for some time. Yay!

PPS: No, there are more problems. The .pcd files I have on my hard drive only contain the mid-sized resolution, what they call “base”, which is 768 x 512 pixels. This is far from the 3,000 x 2,000 pixel highest resolution.

I think I have to retrieve the actual CD to get the big files. I hope I can! I have the CD, that’s not the problem.

So much for Kodak’s 100 year life. So much for Kodak. A once great company, brought down by stupid, complacent, vain, arrogant managers.