Oh hell, WordPress has changed the interface. They’ve introduced the “Block”. I don’t understand what it means, I just know that things have changed and shifted and I’ve got two extraneous lines above what seems to be a floating formatting bar that I can’t move out of the way to the top of the page. This has always been a clunky word processor in my opinion, very restrictive, simple but inflexible and lacking so many things. Grrrrr! They’ve been warning us this change was coming 

AYiiii! I just hit backspace twice to correct a typo and it dumped me out of the paragraph back to the list of posts. Luckily it had saved the draft. This is going to take some getting used to.

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I mentioned last week that the MyHeritage website said they would offer me a price reduction in response to my comment that I don’t need their family tree part, just the photo enhancement facility.

They did phone me on Thursday (from Israel, actually) and although I didn’t manage to drive them down to what I wanted, I got 15% off so I signed up for a year. I figure I’ll easily be able to do all my photos in 12 months and I’ll get out then. Famous last words, of course. Genealogy does seem to be quite addictive.

[By the way, genealogy and Mineralogy: the cane toad Clive Palmer’s company is called the latter. Now, call me naïve but I pronounce that Mineral-ogy. To me, it’s obvious. But everyone, news readers and radio journos, is saying Minerology. Why? It’s not spelt that way. Why introduce spurious pronunciation? Sheeee.]

Anyway, I’ve made a big start on sharpening and colourising all my photos and it is remarkable!

Anyway, you get the idea. I’ve just done a file and directory tally and I have 2467 images, give or take, in the Croft directory alone. There are duplicates but that’s 12.2GB of images.

I’m going to complain about a few things:
* No batch processing, each image has to be done separately. Tedious.
* It changes the original filename to Enhanced_photo.jpg. Grrr! I have to go back and find the original file, copy the filename and apply it to the new file, with a small change to indicate it’s a new file.
* It places two small symbols in the bottom left of the enhanced image. No! I don’t want these.

(I’ve had to use asterisks to show a bulleted list as the easy way has disappeared and I can’t find it. What a dog’s breakfast!)

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By the way, I use TreeSize Pro by JAM software https://www.jam-software.com/. It allows me to right click on any folder or disk to get a listing and size, then I export it as an Excel file to get the totals. Easy. I’ve been using TreeSize Pro for at least 20 years. Recommended!

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Speaking of dogs, there was a good program on SBS on Thursday evening, about dogs and their relationship to humans over the millennia. The old story is that dogs evolved from wolves and became domesticated.

It turns out that’s only partly true. Analysis of wolves’ and dogs’ DNA has isolated a few genes, one in particular, which show that a sub species split off from wolves several thousand years ago. Wolves can’t be tamed or domesticated, but a branch of their tree with this gene split off a long time ago to become the dogs we know. This gene seems to predispose dogs possessing it to want to be friendly and “loving”, not just to humans but to other species of animals as well.

It showed a Russian experimental farm where up to 60,000 wild foxes were caged (ugh!) and assessed for their willingness to let humans get near them and touch them. Most wouldn’t, but some would and these were separated out and bred. Gradually, they produced offspring that were human friendly. Analysis of their DNA showed this gene.

So when your dog looks lovingly into your eyes, it’s not just wanting food, it’s built in to their DNA to be friendly to humans, and your pet pig too, if you’ve got one. If not, maybe you should get one?

That leads to the question, what about all the other animals that can become human friendly? Do they have this gene too? The program didn’t ask that.

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Well, it was a 6Byoot day in the morning but the clouds have rolled over and although it hasn’t rained yet, I’d only put it at about 4Byoot now. They forecast 100% chance of rain today and tomorrow.

I’ve taken a chance and done a load of washing, and just hung it on the line. What are my chances of getting it dry before it gets a rainwater rinse? Too bad if it does.

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While hanging it out, I noticed that my pegs have stainless steel springs. That’s remarkable. Stainless steel has become so cheap that it can be used for disposable clothes pegs. And stainless steel screws and fittings are now so cheap and common. It’s only a few decades ago that you wouldn’t have found that stuff outside a shipfitter’s yard.