look what they've done to my town, ma

 In the 1960s, I used to love taking an hour's drive south to Toronto to check out books, radio gear, photo gear, etc and have a lunch/supper of steak topped off with strawberry shortcake. In October, 2022 I drove/taxied downtown a few times for medical appointments. What an absolute mess. Construction, road closures, bicycle lanes, all time street parking, lane barriers, congestion, grid lock, etc. A 15 minute trip from the west end (Etobicoke) now takes about 1-1/2 to 2 hours or more.

Some brilliant designer removed the totally well thought out curved from the Gardiner eastbound to the Queen's Quay and around to York Street. In its place is a honking big tower to add traffic, a few traffic lights, a SINGLE left hand turn lane across three lanes trying to cut across to the right to proceed along Lakeshore to Bay or Yonge. Takes 10 to 20 minutes to go from Gardiner East to York North (used to take 3 or 4 minutes).

As the city accelerates the condos on every available lot, the lanes are reduced so cyclists, parkers can co-exist with drivers, and the speed limit is systematically REDUCED! Let me see, more traffic from new condos, fewer lanes for the traffic, and reduced speeds. Oh yes, and new LED/Projector headlights of all designs systematically blinding on coming drivers.

So take a cab (same issues, or ride a bike - elderly??? handicapped ??? - or use public transit with lots of stairs - elderly??? handicapped??? City driving is no fn anymore especially as night falls or rush hour closes in.

NB The title is from England's Melanie who lamented, "Look What They've Done to my Song, Ma". Fitting.

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Slang Dictionary

When I was in University, I browsed the used bookstores in Montreal searching for any interesting book. 

In March of 1963 I found Partridge's book "A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English" dated 1961. 

It was a big hit at school that fall. The book records all expressions except the coarse words related to se and the human anatomy - words banned at the time the book was printed but no longer.

The quotes it did contain were educational and down right interesting. Well worth the $8.98 I paid for the hard cover, signature sewn, 1,362 pp dust cover included remaindered new book! 

 

give me a ring

Last December was so cold my wedding ring fell off and I lost it. A week long search came to nada.

By April, it was time to replace the missing bit of jewellery. How times have changed in half a century! Most rings today look down right ugly to me.

Modern day stores view 10k as sturdy and 14k as a softer alternative.  The Birks clerk said they sell only 18k, with a sniff and a toss of the head. We thought the larger stores and the larger malls would have a wider choice. Not so. The larger chain jewellery shops did offer more, but had to send to a warehouse to get the correct size - about a month or so. The few chain department stores around had little choice and indifferent staff. One clerk at a large jewellery store suggested a small private shop with its own craftsman would custom make a ring.

Great idea as it turned out. We saw the man at our favourite small shop and sealed the deal. He would make a ring similar to the lost one and at a reasonable price.

Don has a gas attack

The other day my neighbour dropped by to see how much our last gas bill was as we had the same house design as him. Our bill turned out to be nearly a third the cost of his bill. I suggested to Don that that much gas over a month would have had his home boiling hot!

I suggested there was a meter issue and to check his meter first. He did. His meter reading was far less than it was a week earlier according to his invoice! Problem solved. The meter reader or someone along the line had mis-read the numbers and seriously over stated his usage.

A call to the gas company and the issue was resolved. Don was asked to pay about what we paid
 (we both have high efficiency furnaces). Makes you wonder since the gas company can accurately estimate usage and such a spike in "actual" use should have raised alarms.

a tale of two computers

Carol's Macbook Pro prompted a bag of complaints from her recently. It finally quit abruptly while updating the FireFox browser. I spent a few days attempting to download a new OS X for her. No luck. The Macintosh HD kept showing as all okay in Disk Utility but refused to mount. I could boot from the backup drive I made for my iMac (very slow) but the internal Macintosh HD still refused to mount and be visible!

On the other hand my old 24 inch iMac made a year or two earlier did let me purge it and reformat and reinstall the OS X Mavericks. It worked like a charm and Carol spent Sunday afternoon cleaning the keyboard,  magic pad, and screen with alcohol and invisiglass using a pin and a dental scraper on the keys as they had a decade plus of grime and dirt on them.

let there be light (finally)

And on June 20th, 2017 we were finally connected to Fibe TV via fibre cable.

To my surprise, the contracted technician (Bell long ago shed most outside and other none-core personnel) had to run a very long drop from the aerial terminal at the north west corner of our lot to the north east corner pole, strapped to the overhead cable, and then into the furnace room on the east side of my house.

While manuals have not yet appeared (last checked late 2017) the numerous electronic boxes had been consolidated to one plus a backup power cube. The telephone (land line) now goes over the fibre cable with the router converting the signal so installed in-house telephone cabling can be used as it is. The set top boxes (STBs) and internet are all connected via wifi emanating from the furnace room mounted router eliminating any need for data cables. Each TV has a wifi enabled set top box with a built-in hard drive for recording TV shows (my computers, printer, and iPod Touch all have wifi too).

During a power outage, the backup battery, can keep the telephone and internet connections going for up to four hours. Only the IPTV signal is lost. Upstairs the STB is 4K (our TV is HD just now) and downstairs it is HD. The TV signal - voice and video - still freeze at times for a second or two but the loss of signal as the trees begin adding leaves no longer happens (our old dish PVR was in bad shape with only a few receivers working at all to receive signals from space. And the resolution is so much better too if we watch HD channel signals.

coming to a home near you

After years of disappointment, Bell was in the neighbourhood (mid Etobicoke) installing fibre optic cable to the home ( FTTH) and in later February of 2017 the contracted company began to install here.

A team dug up our north east garden and proceeded to add the bright orange conduit tubing that would carry the fibre cable from an aerial  terminal in the north west of our yard to the nearby central office by a convoluted route that made a distinct u-turn and connected to another fibre cable in a manhole near-by.  Great, I thought, we can finally switch over from Satellite. "No", said one supervisor, "it will take a few months to connect you to the fibre". And sure enough, it took another FOUR months to connect us!

painless extraction or resize

The main reason I bought Affinity Photo was to resize images and extract an image from a pdf file. Both are easypeasy ... For the second one, drop the pdf file on top of the Affinity Photo icon. This will open Affinity Photo and display the pdf. If the pdf is multi page, it will offer the option to select one page or all pages. Choose the Move (v) tool which is the arrow on the tool bar below the hand. Click on the image to be extracted. It will be outlined with eight circles and a ninth circle and short line at the top.

Use the usual Cmd-Opt-Shft-S keys to display the save panel. Choose Jpeg and change the dimensions as needed. Be sure to tab so the change takes. Then choose selection with background and set the quality.

Just do the second paragraph above to resize an image. Double check that the saved image is the desired size. Easypeasy!

Affinity Photo by Serif

Last summer, when I upgraded to a new 27 inch iMac, my CS5 Adobe programs were not happy.  Neither was I! After CS6, Adobe switched to a monthly fee model and was too costly for my infrequent uses. Even Photoshop plus Lightroom was $10US plus HST each month or about $165CDN annually after HST and conversion.

Initially I was running macOS Sierra and more recently I changed to High Sierra. InDesign was a headache. Downloading the old version of Java helped as InDesign uses dozens of modules all linked by Java. It was still a bit flaky as I systematically tried various modules.

Another victim was Photoshop. The crop tool refused to work. And my LittleSnapper was no longer supported. Its crop option stayed too dark. A new free program called Snappy solved that. I learned that Affinity Photo was a cheaper option for Photoshop and had a 10 day trial for free. I liked it and paid the few $$ (about $80 total with HST and conversion). Upgrades are free at present. While Acrobat works, Preview can open pdfs and Affinity Photo can extract images from pdfs (another problem with Photoshop CS5).

Fortunately Lightroom still works so I use it regularly. The makers of Affinity Photo plan to offer an option for Lightroom in another year or two. Apple Photos is nice too, but refuses to use Lightroom's library so I would have to reenter 70,000 plus key words and notes. No thanks.

Back to the Futurre

Well, I finally decided to figure out why Blogger quit my blog a few years back. Turns out it is still there but since Blogger was bought by Google I had to use my Google password to access the blog and Voilá!

This my first post in about three years.

El Capitan Arrives

My last post on Mac was to announce OS X Lion. Much has happened since then. Apple has dropped charges for OS X, as of Lion, new versions and incremental versions of OS X are all downloaded and installed, alternate upgrades focus on system  internals to improve system speed. Efforts have been made to more closely align iOS and OSX UIs.

My iMac, bought back in August 2007, is noticing the effect of newer OS X versions. The previous  release, Yosemite, was clearly slower until a few incremental versions later fixed the memory issues so smaller systems with only 4 Gb memory could work comfortably. El Capitan, which is the internals tune-up for Yosemite, is definitely slower on older pre-2012 systems that cannot use Metal, the sub-system intended to offer a speedier computer.

There are some things that don't work correctly with this version of OS X, but I do like the disappearing menu bar at the top of the screen and the split screen option to set up and view two apps or files. Once loaded, the apps do run at the speed I have seen before, but the spinning beach ball does occur a bit more often.Maybe its time to buy a new system...

Nifty Slide Show HTML5 program for iMac

For our fall auction in 2013 we had over 100 lot images from many estate sales. To post so many online was a big job so I searched for an application to simplify things. In the Apple store I found a handful. I already had Keynote and iPhoto and Lightroom which can do slideshows, but none seems easy to use.

Exhibeo on the other hand had a selection of templates, could load a whole folder at once and seemed simple. The app used HTML5 like Hype and worked like a charm. The rudimentary instructions meant you needed a basic understanding of HTML. I created a page called "index.html" within the main folder I created by exporting Exhibeo as html. I uploaded the folder and sub folders and files via Dreamweaver. The result as you can see on my Sep 15 2013 Estate Auction page worked perfectly. And it is fast to display ALL the lots shown in thumbnail form on the screen. Clicking on a lot enlarges the image. You can use the options to limit the file size. I elected to use a maximum size of 800 pixels length or width and allow the program to show an image slightly larger. Turned out to be $20 well spent!  

UPS Battery

When I opened my MAC on July 12, 2012, the power suddenly flickered and the MAC powered down and up again. And my UPS decided to give a couple of beeps every few seconds. After a mad scramble I found the APC UPS manual. It told me that the battery was bad. I moved all the connected power cords to alternative sockets and pulled the battery. It was stuck. Eventually I pried the battery out of the UPS case to discover it was a pair of 12v batteries joined together.

One of the pair had a cracked case and lost its charge in no time at all. I decided to do an online search for APC RBC109. To my delight Canada Post popped up with suggested sources ranging in cost from  $90 to $68 plus shipping. Amazon.ca at $81 including shipping (regular $106, it said) looked good since I had an account with them and found them fast and reliable.

After the weekend, I received a note from Amazon saying that shipping was delayed a couple of days. This went on for a week with a message about a delay every couple of days. Finally I sent a note asking how I could help expedite the order. I received a Whoops! response within a couple of hours. My battery was deemed hazardous material and as such could not be shipped from the USA (even though I had ordered via Amazon Canada who listed the battery as available in Canada. Amazon apologized and said the battery would be removed from their Canadian site (still there 3 days later).

I decided to browse outside Canada Post and came up with a list of sites. Most were "Canadian" in name only and shipped in "5 to 8 days plus weekends and holidays" by Courier, not Canada Post. The physical address was omitted and the 800 number gave no indication of location. One company, UPS for LESS offered an alternative to the APC replacement battery for $42.32. And they had a physical address in the GTA. I called this morning and the batteries were in stock. The $42.32 covered both batteries and the defective cells could be returned to them at no charge.

I drove over this afternoon and found them tucked away in an industrial plaza on Bentley Street in Markham. Sure enough, they had the new set. The replacement cartridge consisted of two 12 volt batteries. The representative pulled off the APC sticker on my old battery. The old and new batteries were identical in make and model (Noisia Vision CP1290 12v 9.0 AH, by Center Power Tech, Ltd., and Made in China)!

So for about double the price before shipping, APC or its agents offered 1. An APC label stuck over the maker's name, 2. a replacement cable for the perfectly usable cable connecting the original two batteries, and 3. a piece of thin foam with double sided sticky stuff to join the two separate batteries into a cartridge. I bought from UPC for LESS and I am a happy camper.

      
  

Google Doc Embedder

When I moved to Wordpress v3, I broke the code for the imbedded pdf files in various Wordpress pages. Since the hard links worked and the page threw an error "plug-in needed", I thought it was Safari and/or Adobe pdf reader that was at fault.

Not so. Tonight I switched to "Google Doc Embedder" and this code works. The related pdf file must be accessible via a URL, not simply stored in the Wordpress media database. Now all the forms show once again.

The Lion Roars...

Well I was one of a million plus who downloaded Lion (OS X 10.7) the latest version of the Mac OS the first day it was offered. It was a first in many ways. The first OS to be downloaded from the new App Store. The OS installs itself and reboots your system for you. It has many refinements. It is a closer match to iOS with the use of gestures on the trackpad.

This version won’t run on hardware older than my August 2008 iMac. It will not run old PowerPC apps that once ran under Rosetta. While it has a number of modern UI features, you can change some back to the old style - like the scroll direction, whether you use full screen or not, etc. It took me just two hours to download and install.

Very few problems so far. Magic Prefs tangled with my touchpad. My dot mac email wouldn’t work until I reset its password. My MobileMe remote disk disappeared from the desktop until I changed the prefs to add a local disk - the content of the local disk I had before was saved for me in a folder on my desktop. And Safari dropped my ClickToFlash plug-in. The replacement was an updated version which I tracked down. The old Quicken doesn’t work but Quicken Express, which I use, is fine. The Adobe programs work (CS5) as far as I have tested. I am pleased with how smooth it installed and once again it scoots along fast on this 3 year old system of mine.

Hype Animation Program

Hype is a new app for web design animations. It uses the “HTML5” tags, CSS3 tags, and a generous dollop of javascript as an alternative to Flash which is presently in Apple’s bad books. Compared to Adobe Flash, it is much cheaper, has a very user friendly UI, and apparently a lower overhead. It is currently the top grossing app in the Apple OS X App Store.

And I can see why after making my first simple slideshow with it this week. And the resulting file runs on any platform including my iPod Touch. Look for my post on Amanda Rataj at phsc.ca to view the slideshow which was my first use of Hype. If you use a Mac and need an animation tool that is less daunting than Flash, give it a whirl - its well worth the few dollars.

A New Printer - Kodak ESP7250

I was shocked when I went to buy ink for my Canon MP510 printer this week. It cost $82.79 for the four inks - $93.55 with HST. The US price was $63.90 - $18.89 less. I guess no one told Staples/Canon that our dollar has been at or above par the past couple of years...

By coincidence, my MP510 committed hari-kari the next day. It sounded like something broke off inside. This is the second Canon printer to die on me, although the i5000 did last longer. My two previous HP printers became obsolete long before they suffered mechanical failure (old parallel port machines).

I looked at a number of alternatives. Still smarting from the high price of ink for Canon, and their indifference to the dollar parity, I ruled them out. Of the others, I chose Kodak. The ink was the least expensive and according to industry tests the best of the current 3 colour lot. And for me the difference in price here vs the States was miniscule. The printer, an ESP7250, was not perfect - it was slower and MUCH noisier than some competitors and with the 180 degree paper path, prone to paper jams. But for me the image quality and economy of materials won out.

Yes, I am now using a KODAK printer - who would have thought it possible?

A New Day

March 21st, 2011 I went live with a new look for our web site. I put the home page and some key pages up in Wordpress. The new layout links to other pages previously generated with Dreamweaver or earlier with GoLive and even earlier with Front Page.

This change was prompted for a few reasons. I wanted to give the site a face lift and a fresh look. I wanted to have the means to add in items without firing up Dreamweaver. I wanted to move to a less techie regime to maintain and update the site so at some future time the site could be managed by a less technical volunteer. And finally, to add some password protected pages for executive use.

While I chose to use Wordpress on my shared server, I kept this little blog on Blogger because I like its look and simplicity.

Russian Hackers

“The Russians are coming the Russians are coming” was a very funny movie in 1966. Today not so funny. This fall, some Cyrillic scumbags hacked our web site. How do I know they were Russian? Because one php script I found was a notorious r57shell with all the box captions in cyrillic.

I found three scripts and dozens of phony html pages and images of luxury goods. Most of the pages were buried umpteen folders deep. You may recall getting spam offering fabulous deals on luxury goods. The links take you to these hidden pages on sites like ours and work away at separating you and your money.

If the thieves had broken into my store and stolen goods I could call the police. Not so with cybercrime. This hopefully starts changing this coming September 2011 when we catch up with the rest of the G8 countries and activate an anti-spam law - Bill C-28.