Ooooh, I am so tired, bleary eyed, fed up. I have spent hours and hours and tens of hours, maybe hundreds, enhancing photos and re-doing my Croft History volume 1 book. I need a break.

First, although the photo enhancement process is simple (no choices to be made), and fairly fast, it’s still a one-image-at-a-time process. With nearly 3,000 to be done (I found more), my fingers are just about worn down with mouse clicks. I want batch processing!

Once each image has been enhanced and downloaded, the file name is changed, by them, to Enhanced_photo(1).jpg and so on, and when you download it, it goes into the Downloads folder, not the original folder. That means I have to transfer them to the original folder.

Then I have to visually match the new files with their originals and change the new file name to match the original, but with one letter or number changed so they don’t clash. This can be needed for as many as 90 files in a folder.

OK, so I did this. Then I started to update the images in the photo book with the new enhanced images. But their file names are different, so the book thinks all the original images are missing. Gaaah!

So then I had to go back to the folders and rename all the files so that the new coloured image file names are the same as the b/w images were, and rename the b/w images to be different, so they don’t clash again. I also keep finding duplicates and I’m not sure which one is used in the book.

Ugh! I am exhausted. I’ll get there, but it’s in a mess at the moment. I need a beer.

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There are some funny aberrations coming up in this image enhancement software (it’s in Israel, via the web, not on my PC).

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However, the quality is just remarkable:

Dad’s camera was a Voigtlander 6x6cm twin lens reflex with scale focusing. You had to measure or estimate the distance to the subject and set it on a scale around the lens for each shot. You couldn’t see focus on the screen and so many photos were out of focus, or more correctly, focused on the background (infinity). This software finally gives me sharp photos.

I’ve also found that it works on scenes without faces too, something I thought it wouldn’t. And it’ll spice up my more recent (e.g. 1960s onwards) film images too, although if they’re in colour, it’s a waste of time to ask it to enhance the colour. It just turns it to mush pastels.

I’m inspired now, to do more volumes of the history books.

I’m still in touch with all those people above, although one lives in Tasmania now. The others are all still in Perth.

But my bum is sore and my legs are weak from too much sitting!

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Brrr, it’s August and just normally cold and I’m tired of it. Only ten days to Spring. Yippee.

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People are talking a lot about the effects of this pandemic on our mood. Personally, there’s hardly a day goes by that I don’t tank my lucky stars that I’m living the life I am in the place I am. I almost feel survivor’s guilt about how well I have come through life and how well I’m travelling in this terrible time.

• I have a government pension, so no money worries;
• I don’t have a job to lose;
• I don’t have kids to worry about;
• I don’t have a mortgage, so no mortgage stress or fear of homelessness;
• I live in a great location in a beautiful house;
• I live in WA, where our movements are virtually unrestricted;
• I have just about everything I want;
• I always know where my next meal is coming from.

The only thing I’m a little fractious about is that I don’t know when I’m going to see my partner again. She’s in Vienna and who knows when international travel will be allowed again or our borders opened to foreigners? We can talk on the phone (for no cost on WhatsApp!) and talk by email, but it’s not the same, is it? I’m used to the solitary life so nothing much changed at all for me. Even so…

Hmmm, only a 4Byoot day so far, grey and cool (15C). Only a little rain so far. There’s a bird pecking at one of my ground level windows, covered in reflective film so they see another bird.

I found a dead willy wagtail on the back lawn yesterday. A pity, but birds do die of natural causes. Another one still visits me.

Despite some quite wet weather this month and last, we’re still way below the average. Western Australia has dried out incredibly over the past 45 years and our rainfall is still declining. I remember well when it started, 1977. We’d just finished a summer where we went three months without rain when I went on a trip to the UK and Germany. I remember commenting to people I got talking to about our extremely dry summer. And the graphs show that’s when the big dry started.

See the step down from the green line to the brown line, around 1975-77.

It’s lucky we have the two desalination plants, initiated by Labor governments.

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My time is now being eaten up by photo restorations. I did a folder of shots from Beverley in the 1960s and ’70s yesterday, about 90 images, and it took me around three hours. But the MyHeritage website renames all the fixed files to Enhanced_image.jpg, discarding the original file name! That means my Downloads folder fills up with Enhanced_image(1).jpg …. to Enhanced_image(126).jpg or whatever. These have to be moved back to the original folder, then the original image has to be found for each, the file name copied and pasted to the Enhanced_image(x).jpg, with an added “e” or some small change so they don’t clash. This takes time! I’ll have to complain to them — “Don’t change my filenames, please!”

As well, they place two small symbols on the bottom left of the image. No thank you. They’re not too intrusive, but I don’t want them on my photos.

Anyway, I continue to be amazed at the results, so much that it’s given me new impetus to produce more books. These are history and should be preserved for show, not stored away on hard drives. In fact, I’d better take extra care to back up as these are valuable history.

The other point is that each restoration and colourisation (colouration?) roughly doubles the size of the file. Therefore a folder of say 25 images and 300MB becomes 50 images at about 600MB. I’m currently using a 2TB drive, about half full and I’m going to have to buy a new hard drive, probably a 5TB. Criminy!

Anyway, some more examples:

Here’s something funny. Here’s the original:

This tells me that the AI software is looking for face shapes and then substitutes face parts from its stored parts. Same for the distorted lips and mouths in the comparisons above. But you only see the distortions at high magnifications, the normal sizes look good:

So, I plug on. As I said, at least 2,467 and I’ve only done about 200 so far. Months of work ahead. I love doing it so that’s fine.

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I’m not sure if I mentioned – my current book is Presumed Guilty by Bret Christian. He’s a local, Perth author. It’s all about the WA police and the awful miscarriages of justice that have been visited on at least five innocent men in WA since around 1964. Make no mistake, it’s improved somewhat now but you did not get a fair trial in WA in years past.

The main problem is the police approach to crime solving of seeing a small piece of evidence or seeing a possible link to someone they know and focussing entirely on that evidence to the exclusion of everything else. It’s called confirmation bias, the process of seeing every new bit of evidence as confirmation of your original theory. It’s also called copper’s instinct, which can also be described as blind pig-headedness.

One of the worst in this regard was former detective, later Commissioner of Police Owen Leitch. He was notorious (now) for his blind faith in his own instincts, his gut feeling about a crime, so that he fitted the evidence to the suspect, not the crime. Once he had a suspect, his mind became fixated and he disregarded any evidence that didn’t fit that suspect.

The falsification of confessions was also a specialty of the WA police. They would dictate a confession and use verbal and physical abuse on a suspect until he (it was almost always a male) would sign anything just to be relieved of the police abuse. Often it was on false promises of “Just sign this and you can go home.”

The book goes into incredible detail about the miscarriages of justice against these men. The corollary is that the real guilty person is not found and gets away with the crime. In my opinion, the Corrinne Rayney murder is just another of these cases. The police picked the husband, Lloyd Rayney as their “prime and only suspect” in the first few months of the case and pursued him exclusively. He was tried and found not guilty, the judge heavily criticising the police, but the real killer has gone free all these past ten years or more. I’m sure the police are still working on it but there’s no evidence of any progress.

The other awful thing the book reveals is how one-eyed and blind the courts and judges can be. The judge in the cases of Darryl Beamish and John Button was Justice Sir Albert Wolf. The prosecutor was Ronald Wilson. In both cases, they were so determined to accept the police evidence, especially Owen Leitch, that they sneered at anything that didn’t fit with that evidence and disregarded the confession of Eric Edgar Cooke, the rwal killer who went to the gallows swearing he committed the crimes that these two innocents were convicted of. Luckily the Labor government of the time abolished capital punishment (despite the Liberal Party wanting it retained, which many Liberals do to this day). Otherwise these two, Beamish and Button would have been executed for murders they didn’t commit.

I said this before, be very afraid if you fall into the hands of the WA police and courts. Things have improved, but you still stand a good chance of being “verballed”, “fitted up”, made to sign false confessions and being subjected to physical abuse. NEVER sign a confession, no matter how badly you want to get out.

This is a great book. Presumed Guilty, Bret Christian. Quite tense and scary in many parts.

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.

How’s that for an intersection? Contrast that with our airport intersection, a difficult to navigate mess, with tightening curves and confusing signs. Poor design.

Perth Airport interchange. A confusing mess.

Aaaooouuurrrgh, it’s cloudy fine outside but with a max of 16.2C, a bit cool, 15 deg at the moment. Maybe a 5Byoot day. Another 16C day tomorrow, they say.

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I finally chose and bought a new printer yesterday, an Epson ET7700. I’ve had a small Canon one for about 10 years and although it only cost a couple of hundred, I reckon I’ve fed about $2,000 worth of ink cartridges into it in that decade of use. I’m fed up with the expense. As well, the yellow nozzle is partly blocked so my colour printing looks wonky. Apart from that it’s OK and when it was printing colour well, the prints were magnificent.

The new Epson is from their Ecotank range. Instead of little 10ml cartridges, each colour (Black, Grey, Yellow, Magenta, Cyan) is a big tank of about 250ml (I think) which you can refill from bottles. The printer advertises itself as being good for 19,000 pages of black and white, and 14,000 pages of colour per refill. The ink is included in the box.

The initial cost, $729, is quite high but I hope to save at least that amount by not having to buy new ink so often. I’d estimate that the initial bottles should last me at least a couple of years before needing more ink. I’m told the refills are reasonably priced too, $25 for the black and $15 for the colours. Wow.

So now I’ll be able to fill all those photo frames I’ve got. I’ll report.

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I also have the Epson Stylus R2880 A3 photo printer that I’ve had since about 2007 (?). It’s a great machine and has been very reliable, despite being unboxed for a while, then reboxed and stored away for nearly two years, then unboxed, working fine first time despite its long sleep, then being boxed up and moved here. I don’t recall ever having a head clog. But I think a sensor is blocked because it doesn’t detect the paper and just feeds it straight through, not printing anything. Frustrating. I should tackle it, but it’s so big that it’s hard to work on. It’s one of those “gonna” jobs awaiting me.

I was sorely tempted a couple of months ago. A Perth photo store was advertising the latest Epson A3 printer, a couple of generations on from mine, for about $1,000. But I stopped short because I thought, what am I going to do with my existing machine? It’s not saleable with the fault, so what do I do with it? I concluded that I’ll just have to fix the fault.

By the way, my existing R2880 uses eight ink cartridges plus a Photo Black, at approx $23 each. A full set costs about $210! Luckily I’ve only needed a new set about three times in over ten years. Photo printing is an expensive business!

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L: Clive Palmer                                                  R: my jocks

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I’m still waiting on the MyHeritage people to phone me for their special price to use their photo restoration software. I reckon I could do all the shots I need in much less than a year, so I suppose $240 for one year’s use would/might be reasonable.

My USA second-cousin has sent me her family tree which she’s done (so far) on Ancestry.com. It made me realise that I registered for that many years ago and made a start on our tree, but didn’t go on with it. It’s very addictive and it works even better now that so much data has been sourced to build links. Maybe I might have another go.

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I watched Craig Reucassel’s program, There is no Planet B on the ABC last night. Very well done. What got my hackles really raised is that Chevron and Woodside signed contracts during the tenure of the last WA Liberal government (i.e. about 5 years ago) for the right to retrieve and process huge amounts of LNG from the Browse Basin, on the proviso that they capture and store underground an equivalent of CO2 that they generate.

Have they done it? No. Nothing. Despite the contract, they haven’t bothered. This is criminal! Remember those names, Chevron (USA) and Woodside (Canadian). Liars, polluters, law breakers.

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I’ve started a new book in the past few nights, “Presumed Guilty” by Brett Christian, the Perth author and suburban newspaper proprietor. It’s mainly about the research he’s done (publication date 2013) about the way Perth police lay false charges and fabricate evidence about major crimes. His research in this case (I’m only early in the book) is about Darryl Beamish, the deaf and speechless young guy who was charged and convicted for the murder of Jillian Brewer in Cottesloe in 1959. He was convicted on utterly false evidence, obviously couldn’t defend himself and was sentenced to hang, but the sentence was commuted, yet he spent 15 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Only after 44 years was he finally exonerated.

He is just one of many people in WA who have been “fitted up” by the police. One of the worst doing it was Owen Leitch, the former commissioner. I remember that name well from the 1980s. I have long thought that if you are ever held by the WA police, be very scared because often they will fabricate evidence and “confessions” to get a conviction. It’s been shown over and over again and it’s only due to people like Brett Christian and Estelle Blackburn that the truth has finally come out.

The book is gripping reading. I’ll report back.

It’s in WA.

For the past 20 years I’ve been working away on preserving and documenting our family history. I’ve produced a CD-ROM and three books (so far).

The CD-ROM

And for me:

The years since 2015 have been eventful. I’d better update this.

I’ve also produced three volumes of my best images:

As well, I’ve made books on Venice, Java, Japan, Bali and the South West of WA.

This was my first effort at a photo-book in 2009. I forgot to put my name on the cover.

It occurs to me to show the range and quantity of my family image collection. This is big – there are 48 contact sheets, too many to show individually. Here are two:

The rest are compressed into contacts of contacts:

A contact sheet of contact sheets.

I still have yet more photos and negatives to be scanned.

Dad, Colin digging, Mum, Beverley, c1966

Hmm, only a 4 Byoot day today, no rain and a fair bit of blue sky, but cloudy and cold now at 6pm. Must try harder, Mr Weatherman. Oh, only 23 days to Spring, too. Good-oh.

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You saw the amazing photo restorations I did on the MyHeritage website last week:

Amazing results, but after I’d done 10 they blocked me until I pay. There was an invitation to comment on the site and I said, “I don’t need the family tree, all I want is the restoration software, but A$240 p.a. is too much to pay.”

It seems that they are flexible in their pricing and have asked to be able to phone me to talk about it. With misgivings, I’ve sent my phone number. I have a maximum price I’d be prepared to pay in mind so I’ll see what they offer. I have a finite number of images to do, and once they’re done I won’t need it any more. I hope I could do them all in a few months.

I’ll also say I want to be able to restore full size images, 3,000 x 2,000 pixels or more. and get them back in the same size, not reductions. This will be interesting. Something told me they’re an Israeli company.

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This little guy turned 60 last month. Beverley c1966.

I did try two other photo restoration programs, Topaz Sharpen and PhotoGlory.

Topaz does quite a good job but you have to fiddle with the controls. There are two Auto buttons but I find it confusing about which does what. Engaging them doesn’t seem to do much. The results are nothing like the results from the MyHeritage web site. No thanks.

Similarly, PhotoGlory gives you lots of control over the result, but that also means it takes time and requires you to make decisions about how much is enough. Again, the colourisation is nothing like the results from the MyHeritage software. So, no thanks again.

The thing is, I have hundreds of old B/W photos to do and I need speed and good results, as shown above.

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Has anyone else noticed the proliferation of pop-up notifications on web sites since the beginning of this year? I mean, you open a web page, but as soon as you move your mouse over it or scroll down, a rectangular notification panel pops into view, covering part of the page. You have to click an X to dismiss it.

Grrrrrrr!  I’m sick of it. It seems to be new this year, making me wonder if someone has discovered it and published the code or something.

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Also, has anyone else noticed how many women, and it’s all women, have rings through their nostrils? It’s reaching the stage where I seem to see more women who have one than don’t.

Ugh. Ugh. UGH! I do not like it. I do not want to look at your nose if you have a ring through it. Or a stud in your tongue. UGH! Don’t women understand what this signifies? It’s obscene. I mean that word, obscene.

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Likewise, torn knees in jeans and pants. It’s only women, but they’re all the same, all copying the same artificial pattern of cuts in the knee area of jeans and pants. Gee, how original. Come on.

Tokyo 1992   ©  PJ croft 2020

I’m initiating a new unit of weather called the Byoot. Monday was about 2 on the Byoot Scale, being so cold and wet, whereas I’d rate today at about 6 – nice and sunny, but still a bit too chilly. Will ten divisions be enough? There are days in December that would rate 9.5, I reckon, but some days feel better. I’ll decide as I go. Anyway, today was fairly Byoot.

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The MX-6

Sob, it’s gone. But what a departure. I advertised it on Facebook Marketplace at about 5pm on Sunday. Within the first half hour I’d had three or four enquiries and they just kept coming. I’d had 15 by bedtime that night.

Next morning, same, a stream of enquirers. By the end of the day I’d had about 24. But only a few took it any further, asking for a time to see it. I thought I had three guys coming on Monday, but only one actually came. He was only an L driver and came with a mate, but he didn’t have his finance organised so had to go away saying he’d be back. Yeah, right.

Then yesterday the enquiries kept coming, reaching 35 by 5pm. But one guy said at about midday that he wanted to come and seemed serious, even though he was in Mandurah. I told him I’m in Butler, not Canning Vale where F/B placed me, but even so, he wanted to come, so he did. He was a young guy, 22, and came with an older bloke, nice guys. They went over the car very closely, asked a lot of questions, phoned a mechanic mate, asked more questions, took it for a long drive and came back to do the deal.

Even while I was doing the paperwork, two more enquiries came in. This was a hot item! We did the paperwork and when I said, OK, payment time, the young guy paid in cash. Wow. (It’s in the bank now, tea leaves, so don’t bother). So we shook hands (actually, no we didn’t – virus) and they drove away. Deal done.

There was so much interest that I reckon I could have sold it four times over. I told a few guys it had been sold but although they’d said they were keen, they didn’t come. I said to them early that if someone came with the money, I’d have to do the deal and that’s what happened.

I actually sold it for $500 more than it cost me. I just added that to give myself some haggle room, but I reckon I could have added another $1,000 or more if I’d thought of it.

But the ludicrous tricksters – one guy said “I’m just asking if you might be willing to except 2000 please I’m looking for a car for my mum and that’s all I have atm cheers“. Ha ha har, what a stupid way to say it. Several guys tried to make stupid low offers like this, or ask me what’s my lowest price. I said, “Mate, there is so much interest that I have no need to lower the price.”

So, it’s gone and although I had trouble getting in and out and didn’t drive it much, I’m going to miss it. It was in remarkably good condition for a 25 year old car but lacked things compared to more modern cars. Like a rear window wiper.

I should mention, two of the really keen enquirers were women and they were both very disappointed when I told them they’d missed it. But one wanted to swap me for a Honda Prelude and the other hadn’t got her finances together. Sorry ladies, it would have been nice to meet you.

NB: the MX-6 in Melbourne that I nearly bought sight unseen for $6,000 earlier this year is still for sale. It’s on Car Sales. It’s lucky I didn’t proceed as it was going to cost another $1300-1500 to have it brought across and it looks as if other buyers are not going for it.

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The Throttle Position Sensor for the Honda MDX arrived on Monday too, so as soon as I can get that in, the better. That car hasn’t moved in about four months and has cost me two new tyres and a new battery this year, plus $70 for this TPS, so it’s not in my good books. No fuel, though.

I wish I knew what the future holds because I had thought about driving north in the Honda, but I’m a bit nervous about a second wave of the virus.

I’ve had an odd “rash” on my fingers in the past few weeks which the GP diagnosed as chillblains, but I’ve had chillblains when I was much younger and they weren’t like this – red raised lumps and areas of skin on the fingers, spreading to both hands.

The doc prescribed a blood pressure drug to open up the veins, but the rash was going away of its own accord so I only took one tablet.

However, I read news reports of Purple Toe Syndrome which sounds like what I had, except that it affects the fingers too. It’s being talked about as a side effect of COVID-19, so I got a little worried and thought I’d better get tested.

I phoned the medical centre this afternoon and the doc said (a) there is no community virus activity in WA (reassuring); and (b) in the absence of any other symptoms (true) there’s no reason to have a test.

But if I want one, phone for an appointment at a Clarkson clinic. Then he made a joking reference to not wanting a probe of the underside of my brain. Yeah! So that’s that.

Venice, 2008.  © PJ Croft 2020

BRRRRR!! I’ve always said August is the hardest, coldest month of our winters and today is proving it. The max is forecast to be only 15degC and I think it will struggle to make that. The temp in my house was 14.7C when I looked at about 11am. Of course, if I closed the patio door it would help (done now). And I’ve got the air-con on reverse cycle, so it’s nice inside now, even though the rain is steadily coming down.

PS: 5pm, no wonder I was feeling cold. the max today was 12.1degC, the coldest August day for 15 years. Wow.

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The MX-6 is up on Facebook Marketplace now and wow, there has been an amazing number of enquiries.

At last count, 27. They came thick and fast – I only listed it at about 5pm yesterday and I had 12-15 enquiries within three hours. That’s the good news. The bad news is that not one of the enquirers has followed through (one has now, see below). Most have asked if they can come for a look and I’ve provided the address for half a dozen or so, but no-one seems to be doing anything about it. I ask them to text me for the address and I spell out my phone number to avoid skimmers, but many can’t seem to read and want me to put the actual numbers up. No. I put my email address up in these messages a couple of years ago and I’ve been plagued by scammers and porn ads ever since.

One guy seems especially keen, but wants to wait until Wednesday to come here and wanted me to hold it for him. I said I can’t do that, if anyone offers me the money, then I’ll have to take it.

It’s amazing how people don’t read the ad. Even though it said, “I’m in Butler”, people keep asking me where I am. It doesn’t help that Facebook places me in Canning Vale, I suppose.

I was expecting two guys to come this morning – I thought we had appointments, but neither has turned up or messaged or texted. What’s wrong with these people?

At one stage last night, I got a F/B link to my ad that had been shared by someone and all they wanted to do was pour scorn on the car and how bad they think it is. What??!! I let them have the thick edge of my tongue, I can tell you. There are crazies out there.

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Venice, 2008.  © PJ Croft 2020

Aaaah, the federal government, that is the PM and the Attorney General (my local member, by the way) have withdrawn the government’s sup[port for Clive Palmer’s High Court case to force WA to open our borders. Hah! They must have realised the depth of feeling in WA against fat Clive and his selfishness. Plus the damage this was doing to the Liberal Party.

I think the damage will linger, regardless of their withdrawal. People have long memories for something like this. Our premier and the Labor Party are so popular and highly regarded for their handling of this virus crisis that I think we are going to fare well in both the forthcoming state election, due in March, and the next federal election, not due until May 2022 unfortunately.

The prime minister (Scott Morrison, from Marketing) is riding high in polling at the moment, but let’s not forget

• When he was minister for immigration he was every bit as cruel and heartless as the present minister, that monster Dutton. So much for Christian charity, he’s a cruel, child abusing, torturing bastard;
• He’s a member of that loony church that believes in the Rapture and how true believers like him will be chosen by god to rise to heaven, and that all non-believers (like me) will be consumed in the fires of Hell. He believes that prayer won him the 2019 election (whereas we know it was largely lies against Labor, and Labor’s overly complex promises that lost it for them);
• That Morrison repeatedly refused to meet with a large group of retired and former fire chiefs who tried to warn him of the fire season risk as far back as April 2019. When the huge blazes broke out, Scotty was nowhere to be seen. He was holidaying in Hawaii. He only returned because he was told how bad it looked.
• He backstabbed Malcolm Turnbull to become PM. I don’t think much of Turnbull, the man who crippled Australia’s fibre-optic network, but at least he was a believer in needing to do something to reduce our CO2 emissions and mitigate climate change.
• He was forced to leave his position as head of the Australian Tourist Commission due to “financial irregularities”. Hmmm, we don’t hear much about that, but it doesn’t read well.

Oh, boring.

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Venice 2008. © PJ Croft 2020

Speaking of god, I’ve finally finished the Einstein biography. What a book, so well researched and written, all 551 pages. Einstein was Jewish and although he rejected all the claptrap of religion for most of his life, he did say one thing that resonates with me.

The churches always talk about god’s great plan and how the universe was designed and created by god. Well, Einstein rejected any idea of a god who answered personal prayers and concerns himself with every little happening on this Earth.

His view was that although he didn’t believe in an all powerful god, the universe and everything in it seems to fit to a plan, to be designed to be just so. Who or what or how it came to be just so, we will probably never know, but gradually we are uncovering the laws of the way it was designed. The great quest of physicists from Einstein, Bohr, Planck through to modern physicists such as Feynman, Hawking, Greene and Carroll is to find the one great set of equations that fits everything in the universe, the so-called GUT, the Grand Unified Theory.

Unfortunately, we’re still a long way from that and it’s mainly due to gravity. Newton’s Laws apply to everyday big things (including trips to Mars) and quantum theory applies as you get very small, the size of electrons and weird particles small. It’s fairly well understood how these mesh.

But gravity stands apart. No-one can see how to tie gravity to quantum mechanics. There are four fundamental forces in nature – the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, the electromotive force and gravity. Gravity is the weak relation to the other three and no-one knows why.

The other interesting thing about Einstein is that he went to his grave (actually he was cremated and his ashes scattered, so there is no grave) in denial over quantum theory. The thing is, when you get so small, as small as electrons and protons and neutrons and quarks, you can not say with precision where a particle is at any given instant, because the act of observing a particle changes it. Therefore you cannot predict the path of an electron, for example, in the same way that Newton’s laws allow you to precisely predict the path of a thrown ball or a dropped weight.

All his life and in spite of his formidable intellectual powers, Einstein resisted this idea that statistics plays such a strong role in physical particles and life. He never relented, never accepted, fought all his life to find an alternative theory. He was so stubborn that he fell out with a few of the other famous physicists of his time. Strange.

We know now that quantum theory is true and Einstein was wrong to deny it. We still don’t know all there is to know about quantum mechanics but experiments have been done to verify parts of it, enough to convince almost all scientists. Yes, it’s very, very strange, queer almost, but there it is.

Good book, recommended. Einstein, by Walter Isaacson, Simon and Schuster.

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At last, a potential buyer turned up. Lucas, with his mate Luke – easy to remember. Lucas is on L plates so I took him for a drive but as I’m only on 3rd party insurance, I couldn’t let him drive. He was OK with that. But no commitment. He wants to leave it until Wednesday. I said, well, if someone offers me the money I can’t hold it for you. Besides, there’s another very keen guy coming on Wednesday.

That makes 27 enquiries. I wish I had half a dozen of these to sell.

PS: enquiry no. 28 came in at about 4.30pm and he just said, “Whats the lowest you would do”. No punctuation. I said, No chance mate, I have no need to bargain.

2 June 2008  Trigg Bushland   Fuji s100fs @ 400mm.

Ooooh, lovely day. I don’t know what the temp is but I’m feeling a little sweaty and I’ve got the front door open for a little breath of fresh sea breeze. Nice.

Trigg Bushland Reserve 2 June 2008, Fuji s100fs  @ 400mm

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I’ve been out for a BSB – a ‘Bull-Shit Brekky’ with a couple of photo-dog mates this morning at our favourite cafe overlooking the ocean in North Beach. Because I keep my expenses notebook I was able to say that’s the first time we’ve been able to resume after our last one on 13 March. I miss being able to prattle on about photography and electronics and our solutions to the world’s problems and it was good to be able to meet again. I took the opportunity to take some photos afterwards:

At 24mm. You can just see a ship, centre frame on the horizon.

This is the ship at about 350mm

This is full stretch, 2000mm. It’s the Princess ‘something’. That’s Rottnest Is in the background.

Also 2000mm, but closer so not so much atmospheric distortion.

Trigg Island (that rocky bit with the white post). Fremantle in the distance.

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I get daily emails from The Chaser, which for those who haven’t had the pleasure is one of Australia’s funnier and more intelligent teams of comedians. They’re the ones who dressed up as Osama bin Laden when a big Australia+Pacific meeting was held in the opera House in Sydney about 15 years ago. They got through security too, up to a point.

Anyway, I thought today’s email was pretty good:

As the second wave of the pandemic in Australia widens, it’s become clear that our business model is going to need some tweaking if we’re going to survive. Our normal business of serving in-house freshly baked quips, witticisms and japery is simply not logistically possible. People in Melbourne are no longer allowed to travel across the city to pick up our very specific joke about butter chicken. Increasingly, people in Sydney are hesitant to physically come in to pick up a loaf of satire, or a pint of parody.

That’s why I’m proud to announce today that we’re partnering with Uber to allow you to enjoy our two-and-a-half-star comedy without leaving your house.

From now on, all our jokes will come in vacuum-sealed frozen containers that you can easily re-heat in the comfort of your own home. Don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe. We’ve been re-heating and re-serving our own jokes for years. Even a joke that’s 20 years old can be served as fresh if you know how to reheat it correctly.

Of course, Uber will be taking a 30% cut on all orders, so you may notice a drop off in the size and quality of many of our jokes. But it’s important to support local jokes, so please buy them anyway.

Here’s a sample of our menu.

TO START
Observational humour about living in lockdown – $4.99
Jokes about face masks – 10 for $15
Gags about Melbournians liking coffee – $3.99 (packs of 100)

MAIN MENU
One-liner about Donald Trump delaying the election – $12.99 (fresh)
‘Scott Morrison is an idiot’ trope – $19.99
‘Albo is useless’ trope – $29.99 (popular!)
‘Bill Shorten is useless’ trope – $1.99 (stale)
‘Mark Zuckerberg is a robot’ thigh-slapper – [SOLD OUT]
Prince Andrew double entendre – $23.99

DESSERT
‘NBN is slow’ bon mot – $12.99
Wisecrack about George Pell being a paedo – $14.99 (reheated)
Croque en bouche of ‘Murdoch is evil’ deadpans – $89.99 (unavailable in Australia)

I’m not so sure about the ‘Albo and Bill Shorten are useless’ tropes but I had a good laugh anyway.

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Perth Murray St Mall, 2 March 2005  Minolta A2, my first digital camera.

This pandemic is becoming a bigger problem than we imagined back in March, isn’t it? It’s not just ‘going away’ as the Dump would wish it to, on the contrary, it looks like being a problem for at least another year. The only hope is that an effective vaccine will be developed, but even if it was, it would take months or a year before supplies can be manufactured and distributed.

The USA will try to out-muscle everyone else to get supplies, of course. Trump has dragged their reputation as a world leading citizen down into the gutters. Yet so many people over there are utterly blind to his bullshit and lies, utterly unable to see any other point of view. With the USA armed to the teeth, more weapons than people, it will only take a small spark to set off a catastrophe. Cleansing fire?

PS: I’ve just found this in The Guardian –
Sheriffs around the country are refusing to enforce or are even actively resisting Covid-19 mask laws and lockdowns, while others have permitted or encouraged armed vigilantism in response to Black Lives Matter anti-racism protests.

America has been a looney country for many years, but now I will say they are truly insane. Sheriffs, officers of the law, “permitting or encouraging armed vigilantism”!! I can confidently say, I will never, ever set foot in the USA again. Madmen.

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Meanwhile, our home grown reptile, Clive Palmer and his court case to FORCE us in WA to open our borders is setting everyone’s teeth on edge. This selfish man who cares more about his own money than the health of the rest of us is challenging WA in the High Court over section 92 of the Constitution regarding “free and open intercourse between the states”. The framers of the constitution had the right idea, that there should not be any impediments to free trade and entry between the states of Australia. There should not be any fee charged to enter a state, nor any tariffs on goods between states.

But they never envisaged a situation like this. This is clearly a case where the constitution breaks down, where it doesn’t cover this state of affairs. We can only hope that the High Court sees common sense.

Meanwhile, the Liberal Party have decided to shoot themselves in the foot by supporting Palmer in his case and taking Palmer’s side. The anger this is producing here looks as if it will lose them a huge vote in the next election. WA has always been vitally important in federal elections and it’s very possible that they could be wiped out federally in WA.

They’re already very much on the nose at a state level with their blocking of the reinstatement of the commissioner of the CCC, showing that they have a lot they want kept hidden, and their support, then reversal of support for the hard border. What a stupid situation – the WA leader of the Liberal Party, Liza Harvey, first argued strongly that the border should be opened, then when the Victorian virus resurgence happened, reversed herself and said it must remain closed, and now her federal colleagues are contradicting her and saying it must be opened! What a crazy party.

I’m rubbing my hands with glee of course. I don’t hide it – I’m a long term Labor supporter and the more the Liberals show how incompetent they are, the better, as far as I’m concerned.

Tea, anyone?   © PJ Croft 2020

Winter? The temperature reached 24.4degC yesterday! No wonder I was feeling too warm in my Sloppy Joe. I was feeling a bit of perspiration.

Wow, the days are mounting up since I started writing this blog as if it were a diary during this pandemic. We were taken by surprise, weren’t we? My group were planning a reunion on the 6th of April and I recall we debated whether to cancel. Well, events moved so fast that the decision was taken out of our hands: the self-isolation period began soon after in March and we were locked in for a few weeks.

But thanks to good management by the state government, I read a description of Western Australia as having “eliminated” the virus, like New Zealand has. Having the hard border closures has worked and although it’s caused a loss of tourists from the east, I think that’s better than having a high death rate.

Billionaire Clive Palmer is shouting his mouth off and taking WA to the high court because he’s not been allowed entry to WA. But entry is allowed to “essential” people. He might have business interests here, but I don’t see that his interests, no matter how important he thinks he is, override the safety of people here. Rack off, Clive!

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I did go out yesterday, for a long drive in the MX6 along the freeway to Altronics in Balcatta (everywhere’s a long drive from here )-: ). That is an enjoyable car to drive. The four wheel steering makes the steering so sharp and precise, and the low shape makes it grip the road so that you look forward to twisty bits. But the cruise control is much more fiddly than the Mitsi Verada and the brakes need a hard push.

But I’ve got to sell it. I don’t need three cars and I’ve had my fun with this.

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Anyway, I went to Altronics to buy an ESR meter. What’s that, you say? ESR stands for Equivalent Series Resistance. Huh? It’s a characteristic of capacitors, electrolytics mainly. Huh?

A capacitor (sometimes incorrectly called a condensor) is a very simple device: it’s just two conducting (metal) plates spaced apart, with a dielectric between them.When a voltage is placed across the plates, electrons are attracted to one side and positive protons to the other side. This results in a charge of energy being stored in the dielectric substance between the plates. The dielectric can be just air, or in the case of electrolytic capacitors, it’s a chemical compound.

Because there’s no physical connection between the plates, direct current is blocked. But when alternating current (AC) is applied, energy is stored and released in the dielectric on each cycle and so the voltage on one side will appear on the other plate. So a capacitor blocks DC but passes AC. The better the dielctric and the bigger the plates, the better it works to pass AC.

But as a capacitor ages, or just because it’s being a bastard, it can develop an effective DC path between the plates, shown as a resistor above. This is known as the equivalent series resistance, ESR. This is a bad thing. If we can measure it, it shows the quality of the capacitor. The higher the ESR reading, the worse the component.

This is what I bought, shown measuring an electrolytic capacitor with its value and ESR.

I got it home and started checking the electrolytics on the analogue power supply board out of the SACD player. Bingo, within five minutes I had found a 220μF 50V cap that measured about 20μF with an ESR of >40Ω. Clearly faulty. You do the checks in circuit, without needing to unsolder the component. That’s the way we like it.

Unfortunately I don’t keep electros in my spares kit so it will have to be tomorrow before I can buy a new one. This is only one board – there are hundreds of caps that could be checked. It’s nearly always the small values that go faulty.

In fact, back in the ’90s at Channel 7 we used to have masses of Sony equipment. A lot of it became notorious for developing faults due to these small value electrolytics going bad, so much that one of the trainees was employed for months and months doing nothing but replacing all these capacitors on all the boards out of Sony gear. I think Sony had used one manufacturer’s components and it turned out to be a bad lot. There were literally hundreds of them. We didn’t bother testing them, it was quicker to just replace them en masse.

In fact, that’s a thing in electronics servicing: many times it’s not worth spending time unsoldering and test each component in turn based on your analysis. It’s sometimes better to just say, “F..k it, just replace the lot.” It’s the time that costs money, the components are dirt cheap.

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Next job will be to replace the laser in the SACD player. Luckily the service manual was up on the web so I’ve got the full instructions. I’ve had to crop the page because the same instructions are in Japanese on the right of the diagrams. It’s beautifully done.

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By coincidence, SBS showed two episodes consecutively of a documentary called “Einstein and Hawking” last night. I watched all two hours of it but I wouldn’t recommend going out of your way to see it. It wandered around a lot and was a bit superficial and showed many of the same graphics and animations repeatedly.

But it was historic in the sense that it showed Hawking as he was, along with contributions from several great physicists of today such as Kip Thorne (who’s old enough to have worked with Einstein), Brian Greene and Sean Carroll. There was some footage of Einstein but not his actual voice.

I’m in the closing stages of the biography and in the years after 1945 and the bomb, Einstein and others were in effect trying to put the genie back in the bottle as they saw the frightening potential of nuclear weapons. Einstein strongly advocated a supra-national world government with command of its own armed forces, so that no one nation could dominate others. We all know how that turned out.

Russia was the problem then, as it still is now. After WW2, they were starting their takeover of Poland and Hungary and the other eastern European countries, forming the USSR. There was never any hope of Russian ceding any power to any so called world government. Nor, as long as the USA had the bomb, would they ever have taken a subordinate role. Einstein’s views were hopelessly naïve. As history has shown.

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Speaking of being hopelessly naïve, our esteemed Liberal Party treasurer Josh Frydenburg has shown us his stupidity this week. On Sunday he said he is an admirer of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and their policies.

It’s hard to believe someone in his position can be so out of date. Reagan was a big spender, mainly on the US armed forces and there’s no doubt that he forced the collapse of the Soviet Union. But in doing so he massively increased the US government debt, lowered taxes for the rich and effectively stopped wage growth for ordinary wage earners. He led at a time when monetarism and crackpot economic theory dominated. He’s not regarded as a good economic manager. no matter how much the weapons hawks love his memory.

Thatcher’s ideas have also been discredited by now. She was a believer in austerity, in cutting the size of government, reducing government services, persuading people that they needed to stand on their own two feet and help themselves. She is infamous for saying, “There is no such thing as society. There are only men and women and families.” Which was a roundabout way of saying, it’s up to you to look after yourself, don’t expect government to look after you.

The problem was her policies meant that London and the SE of England got all the help they needed and became very well off, while the north and west of the UK went downhill, with factories closing, jobs disappearing, council services being cut and poverty rising.

The effects of this are still being felt and probably contributed to the north of the UK voting for Brexit.

So Reagan and Thatcher are regarded with contempt by most economists (and me) now. For our treasurer to come out and say he admires them is like saying we need another Adolf Hitler to sort out the race problems of the world.

So, terrific: we have a prime minister who believes in a real God who does miracles just for him (a religious nut, in other words), who refused to listen to 20 fire experts who warned him of the bushfires long before they happened, who went on holiday while the east coast was burning, and was just as cruel to refugees as Dutton is now. And a treasurer who believes in ghosts, who listens to dead people and admires crackpot economics.

Oh, I feel better now. Relaxed and calm. Not.

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Unfortunately the MyHeritage website blocks me from doing any more photo enhancements with their magical software unless I sign up and pay for the top level. That’s about $240 for a year’s access. It’s too expensive.

I’ve tried Topaz Sharpen AI but it’s nowhere near as good and it’s mostly manual. It doesn’t do as good a job and it’s too slow. That costs US$60.

That leaves PhotoGlory. I’ve given it a brief try and it seems to also be mostly manual, so it’s time consuming. That’s only $20 so I might have to go with that.

I wish I knew what MyHeritage are using because I am mightily impressed. Also, if I did pay the money for a year’s use, would it allow me to fix my full sized images, or would it only produce reduced sizes suitable only for web pages? I could ask, I suppose.

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I’ve just had a phone call from DHL Startrack, the couriers, about collecting the Lenovo laptop. They were supposed to email me to arrange a time yesterday week ago, the 20th, but they didn’t. I asked Lenovo to give them a poke and next day I got the email with the labels and an arrangement that they would come on Thursday 23rd. They didn’t, and then I got a phone call from Lenovo that afternoon to arrange a time for the next day, Friday 24th. Again, they didn’t turn up!

Yesterday, Monday, I thought they might come, but no. Today? No. Now I’ve had a call from them wanting to arrange it for tomorrow, but I’ve got an appointment at 10am so no. Now it looks like Thursday.

I’m sick of this! I’ve had trouble with DHL before. One time I was waiting on a parcel delivery at the Trigg house. I waited all morning but nothing came. Then in the afternoon I found a card inside my front screen door saying that they’d knocked and no-one was home. Bulldust! I was home there was no knock. My car was in the carport.

They took my parcel back to the depot near the airport in Welshpool. Grrrrr. On a wet, stormy Friday afternoon, I had to drive to the international airport, find their premises and collect my own package. I was not happy. I wouldn’t use DHL. They are not reliable.