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.