Thursday, March 2nd 2023…Sometimes, even I am surprised…

So, I got the new NAS drive and set it up on the network yesterday. I added Twonky and iTunes server. Twonky is a DLNA-compliant media server that runs on the Western Digital platform. It will, if directed also reach into iTunes and index all your iTunes stuff and allows you to play music and whatever on your DLNA receiver. In my case, on my Pioneer Elite SC-72 Receiver (glorified pre-amp). I can actually send music there and it automatically plays. I can also push it to my NAD M-50 streamer. It works “just like downtown”. Amazing. I am hoping that I can figure out how to rip CD’s to the NAD and consequently to the NAS drive. That’s my next hurdle. iTunes server is supposed to allow you to share or play your iTunes content on other devices without the need for a MAC. We shall see…

-Rat

Friday, February 24th 2023… Everything is always a project…

So, I grabbed the NAD M50 streamer from my buddy for a song (bad pun) and am trying to get it connected to my network. I got it connected and it seems to be working well, except that I cant see any way of ripping CDs since it only seems to play them. In the meantime, I think my old “MyCloud” NAS died. I was planning on using it on the M50 as an external storage device. Now I have to troubleshoot it and see if it’s worth saving, or just buy another replacement NAS drive. Everything’s a flipping project.

Update: So, I get home from work Friday night only to find my small NAS drive dead – I had a sneaking suspicion. I saw that it has a USB 3.0 male plug so I went on Amazon, just for kicks and ordered a male-male USB 3.0 cable. Got it today (Saturday) and got my NAS drive working. My concern is for how long? I am currently copying all of the files off onto a backup drive and ordered a new NAS.

I did get a painter’s diary though from “Jerry’s Art Supplies” for my watercolor paints. I also got some extra paints that I was running out of – cerulean blue, cadmium red, and alizarin crimson. I still need to order burnt umber. I’m fixing 3 of my last 4 pictures. Little changes – fixing things that bugged me. I’m also working on a picture from about 2 years ago that I never finished. As a matter of fact, it was only about 40% done with it. I’m interested to see how it finishes. Looking at it with my current eye, I think I was very timid with my tones and colors when I walked away from it.

-Rat

Wednesday, February 22nd 2023…If it’s not one thing, it’s another…

WordPress, ISP’s (Internet Service Providers), ICANN, 3rd Party software providers. Damn. Why can’t we all just get along. It’s tough running a simple blog. WordPress upgrades its code, PHP is out of date, update PHP and the site breaks, the new WordPress doesn’t play well with the 3rd party apps that are supposed to support it. Your domain is expiring, if you want to own the domain from a technical standpoint, you need to register with ICANN, but the ISP who supports your site, for some reason can’t send emails to ICANN with your domain emails. Do that and your information can’t be private, don’t do that and you get all kinds of spam calls (calls from numbers that don’t really exist). Lie about it and ICANN finds out and your domain is shut down. That’s the dark side of ICANN. All this to keep things “free”. Get the government involved and nothing works right because business’ keep it that way, get business involved and nothing works in your favor (meaning you’ll have to pay for everything and if they can’t monetize it, they won’t develop it – so you’re stuck with what they give you until someone figures out a way around it. And then there are the hackers who exploit your stuff just because they want to experiment on stuff that is meaningless.

Ugh, to have a blog. How do all these people stay fat, dumb, and happy? I don’t get it. Maybe because they stick to monetized sites with tons of crappy ads that charge little to nothing. I dunno. Fuck em’.

-Rat

Sunday, February 12 2023… Happy flipping’ New Year…

I can’t believe it’s February and I haven’t posted since September of last year! Holy Crap! Today is supposed to be sunny and nice (50F for a high). There is a grove of interesting trees that I wanted to photograph. I’m going to bust out the hybrid and go for a short ride. There have been some interesting changes and some interesting things going on.

The basement is slowly getting cleaned (-1.0 bummer:very cool). I haven’t done anything with photography (bummer). No Tai Chi (bummerx2), but I have been researching while I’m getting my area cleaned (-0.5 bummers). I hooked up the Ohm’s to the Carver amp (TFM-25) and nixed the old receiver (CT-3) for a “new” Pioneer Elite (SC-72). My bro gave me all his old CD’s so I’m going to throw them in the carousel. That said, I am starting to seriously consider the BlueSound Vault 2i Network Streamer. I’d really like to rip all my CD’s and store them on a NAS and put away all my CD’s for good. Once upon a time back in 2007, I ripped them all up to iTunes. I’d like to get away from that since Microsoft is not developing it anymore and its “iffy” sometimes. It’s all a project. A buddy of mine has a NAD M50 streamer player and is willing to sell it to me for a good price. I’m also considering that direction. I don’t want to be stuck with CD’s with no way to play them or degrading disks. I’ve been keeping up with painting watercolor (fun). Since I’ve posted last, I’ve done 3 watercolor paintings that I can remember – 2 koi (16×20), the Niagra river (16×20), and a sunflower (10×12). I’m also working on fixing/finishing a painting from last year (32×40). I’ve started prepping/training for the upcoming riding season. Losing some weight (a priority) and working on my cardio and strength. Ill post pix’s next time because I’m working this morning, and on my work laptop, so I don’t have my graphics and web tools.

Speaking on working, I’ve been working like a dog. That said… I finally got some help. It’s been a blessing. We moved offices to a new location – closer to my house so my commute is now 15 minutes tops.

-Rat

Monday, September 19th 2022…It’s been a while…

(The Bad) No bike riding or at least its been limited. Never straightened the basement. No Tai-Chi. Got COVID for my birthday. Never put my new rims or cassette on. Have tried to get my power meter to work — to no avail. I did gain a crap load of weight (for me). I never got to use my micro desktop.

(The Good) I have… been painting watercolor. I have been working like a dog. I did go on vacation for a week and got to relax!. I did get to use my camera a bit. I did get rid of my old desktop (gave it to my nephew). I did start working out again after recovering from COVID. I did give my daughter a painting that I had to paint, mat, cut, and frame – and its been over 40 years!) as a going away gift. I have been bike riding once a month – and if you know me, that’s a 90% reduction – but at least I have been going. I am forever the optimist. 30 miles is better than no miles.

I have to get together a list of stuff to complete around the house before the weather turns to shit.

-Rat

Wednesday, June 15th 2022… Photography 101…

So, I am a fledgling photographer and I have tons of questions for the photography guys at Photography & Friends Plus. Since I am invested in Nikon and Adobe, most of my first questions will revolve around those 2 products. My questions are concerning: bracketing, stacking, raw files, and Lightroom.

I have a Nikon D810 full frame camera (yes, it’s heavy as hell with it’s telephoto lenses attached). When we sold our house, we had a professional photographer take the pictures and I was fascinated with the technique he was using – “bracketing”. I had originally purchased a Nikon D5300 with its 3 kit lenses. There were things that the camera had and things had left me wanting. One of those things I wanted was decent bracketing – or shooting pictures in succession from the same POV but just altering the exposure. You capture the lightest lights and the darkest darks and everything in between and really get a HD picture when you re-assemble them using a technique called “stacking”. There are other types of bracketing – depth of field, focus, flash, white balance but I was interested in exposure bracketing. The thing with bracketing is that you need some additional software that allows you to “stack” the images to get the final result. Astro Photography also uses this technique.

This leads me to my second question… How in the hell do I get the RAW files off the camera and onto a Windows PC? I have RAW + Fine JPG selected on my camera – the camera is creating both files. I can see them, look at them, manipulate them on the camera but when I take them off, bam! I am left with 2 jpg files. I can’t seem to get the raw files off the camera. My goal and future project is to shoot glass using these techniques. I collect Czech glass vases and want to photograph my collection. This is in preparation for another project that I have for the future! First things first. My guess is that there is something stupid that I am doing or not doing that is preventing me from getting these file off the camera as both types.

My assumption is that Lightroom Classic can do all this. Maybe not, but I see that there are drivers for raw files from Adobe. There is probably a stacking feature also, but not real sure.

-Rat

Tuesday, June 6th 2022… Damned if you do…

I am thinking of doing something slightly different with my business plan and making it a bit more encompassing and not sticking strictly to an art studio. I don’t know. It’s just a thought I had. I’ve seen galleries in different places that seemed so one dimensional. I think if I ever wanted to transition to something more retail oriented, I’d be stuck. The dream started with painting and branched out into photography. If I stuck to painting, I would need to stick to a specific type and I don’t want to limit myself. I’ve been to a couple of shops that were arts and gifts. That seems much more to my liking. Not necessarily crafts but affordable art. I don’t like to be “pigeon holed”. I want to do art on my terms.

I’ll have to think about it.

-Rat

Tuesday, May 24th 2022… Argh…I just threw my hands up…

Last time, As I was saying… I wanted to try and fix some things and try some new things for my web site as well. Well, I haven’t had the time to try new things. With the work on the job piling up and pressure to work more hours and the weekends disappearing due to responsibilities, plans, and work … at least (as of late) I’ve had some leisure time on weekends. Too bad it doesn’t include riding road biking (bummer) though. I’ve also had to take a couple of weeks off due to podiatrist fun and crappy weather.

I did see Garth Brooks in concert at Notre Dame though. Very fun. It least the concert was fun and most of the weekend was relaxing. I will refrain upon saying anything else though. Imagine that, I saw Garth in concert and new most of his songs. Funny how that works. How the hell can you hate Country music and know his catalog? I am at a loss.

-Rat

Thursday, March 24th 2022… Learn something new, every day…

So, I’ve wanted to do some creative stuff with my blog and websites and have been stymied by things in WordPress that don’t integrate well together. It’s really starting to piss me off. Almost as much as getting my site hacked by people that have nothing better to do. I’ve had this plugin that is supposed to help migrate a site by doing an export. Sounds simple in theory, but it’s been only going so far and then dying. I’ve also wanted to use Elementor and for some reason, it also crashes my site. So the other day, I got a brainstorm and decided to do a parallel site that I really don’t care about, just to experiment. I’m using Bluehost as a provider and domain ratpuke7.net as another site – kind of a developmental site. We shall see…

-Rat

Sunday, March 20th 2022… A beautiful day…

And i didn’t get the bike out! Instead I made soup, went and washed the car, washed the mats and shampooed some spots, and took Anne to Walmart. Came home, had soup and played Rummikub. It was gorgeous out today – a balmy 61 degrees, clear sky and lots of sun.

Which got me thinking about “Daylight Savings Time” that occurred last weekend. Would I rather have it CDT year round, or CST year round? I hate the yearly time changes, but would I want to change? Probably not. I’ve been railing on this for a while now. But now that it’s a possibility, i really hope it doesn’t go. Lets look at the extremes, what would sunrise look on the Winter Solstice day? Currently with things the way they are, sunrise would be at 7:15am CST. If it was CDT, it would be 8:15am. That would kind of suck if I got up early – its cold and dark. On the plus side, that day (the shortest day of the year), the sun sets at 4:24pm CST, would now set at 5:24pm . Not a huge bonus, but id rather have sunrise earlier. Looking at the summer solstice (the longest day of the year) with the same optics, sunrise which is currently at 5:17am CDT, but CST would put it at 4:17am. Sunset which is 8:29pm CDT would now be 7:29pm. The day seems really long if you get up early. Hmm, the jury is out on this…

At least I didn’t have to work today – it’s a good day.

-Rat