Its not easy being green

Ogres, today’s Inktober prompt, are not something I think about. Shriek was one, I think. Green big and brutish maybe,

I’ve been watch the series 7UP on SBS TV, and keep seeing the clip of a young Tony “When I grow up I’m going to be a Jockey”. Perfect! What would a young ogre want to be when they grow up?

He wants to be a Scary Ogre!

A surprise for Alvin

Today’s Inktober prompt is Smack. Not exactly a political correct topic! So I’ll have to put a bit of thought into what to draw. Luckily my cartoon character Lila has come to the rescue.

I’m surprised she is wielding the punishment but Alvin probably deserves it. No one, including me, should ever consider submitting text prompt generated AIslop as art into a creative project like Inktober.

Adding Colour into Inktober

Today’s Inktober prompt is Cactus. I have to admit I’ve never been a Cactus fan. I can remember back when I was a kid that "Prickly Pear" had become a real nuisance in drier farming parts of northern Victoria. I can also remember it being described as a noxious weed. Can’t remember seeing any of it for a few decades. It’s eradication obviously went well. So I had to resort to the Internet. Surprisingly it looked exactly like I remember.

I also know from pigment research that this family of cactus was specially cultivated in Pre Columbian America because they attracted the cochineal beetle, and was cultivated specifically to collect this insect from which the transparent bright red dye, we call Carmine, was extracted. So here was an opportunity to add a bit of colour using Schmincke’s aquadrop liquid watercolour ink. I love this stuff it’s really easy to use with a dip pen or waterbrush , mixes well and can easily be diluted down.

Saturday’s picture is pretty straightforward, inspired by my memory, checked up on the Internet and giving me an excuse to use coloured ink.

Nice Idea but a Challenge to Draw

This started out as a simple idea. The inktober prompt is Miniature and I figured as an illustration I’m looking through three different magnifying glasses at some tiny writing would encapsulate the idea. It an example of the type of Strange loop I like to include in my art. That was the inspiration Implementing it became a bit more complicated.

I tried out several compositions and they looked terrible. I’ve got a couple of big magnifying glasses and they’re circular So I needed superimposed circles which can make for an interesting composition, but the image inside circle needs to become more magnified at each step. So I thought I’d show this by including my hand or fingers holding the appropriate magnifying glass which of course needed to be smaller in a smaller space at each step. Two magnifying glasses where not a convincing composition. Three became very tight but I did have an old hand lens, which looked ok im the space available. So I spend a bit of time making a few drawings to get scales of my fingers and position of the magnifying glasses. I roughed out the basic composition but of course it’s not really possible to set up the same to sketch from life. After a couple of false starts in my sketchbook and also a lot of rubbing out I came to reasonable composition. But, then I ran into problems. I’m still having spacial problems with my vision close up and I found it very hard to do the detailed line work, particularly making things join up. What worked in the end was to begin with the innermost magnified image do all the ink line work within it and then move out to the next one.

It looks OK in the end but it’s not too obvious what I was trying to achieve. For those that are interested the text in the hand lens “This is tiny font used to get more words into a page of text within a computer file AI slop etc.” It’s hand written by me but it’s meant to be the type of hallucination LLM AI chatbots pump out. An you se the clue why? 

The moral of this story is next Keep it much Simpler, don’t strain your eye.

More Inktober and back to where Alvin Began

 As I had the idea for the second Inktober drawing I quickly thought it was a perfect topic for an Alvin cartoon, aka Meet the People.

The trouble was, recently I’d changed to first loading my hand drawn sketches into CorelDraw. Where I converted my rough ink work into smooth line work using the Corel autotrace function, and then I coloured the characters with the many great tools in CorelDraw. It took away a lot of drudgery and my work a had very unique look. Unfortunately, when my computer crashed some months ago the only version of CorelDraw also died/ I've not reloaded it onto any new computer yet. So what to do?

So I decided to go back to where it all began. Originally Alvin was devised to created using a number of cut out shapes. I had quickly sketch a few versions of him and his wife Lila. then rearrange them to create something like a cartoon I wished. I could play with the composition and exaggerate their body language. It was fun. I would then normally trace over, scan and/or redraw a final cartoon, it was simple and relatively quick. Here’s a little more detail from an old blog post.

In the interest of keeping it simple I did draw up the basic cartoon on scrap paper using a tombow pen, but then I cut out the shapes. I typed in his comments about a real relic from the past called a cassette printed that in a large font and drew a speech bubble around it. Cut it out as well and I had a decent early version of an Alvin cartoon. If you follow me on Instagram you’ll notice that so far this year I’m including the tools are used to create the drawing along with the drawing taken with my phone, rather than a scan of the drawing itself. I’m testing out my theory that I get more views when I have my hand in a picture, or showing how I created the image. Not just posting the finished image.

Inktober already

In case you hadn’t noticed I haven’t been posting much here, Mainly because I had eye troubles (again) and couldn’t see. So any computer work was a total strain. I also hadn’t done anything on social media for a couple of months, which was a good thing really. Instagram is really the only thing I check occasionally these days. However my eye is getting better and I have previously enjoyed doing the Inktober challenges. So I’m going to try draw something every day this month. Following their official prompt list.

The first topic is pretty simple. It’s Apple. First of all I thought of trying to draw a laptop with an Apple logo. I’m not an Apple fanboy and I don’t have any apple gear so forget that. Instead, I just got a nice green apple put it on the table after breakfast got out a new sketch book and my new favorite Tombow pens. Keep it simple, no need to go overboard on the first picture.

Now to keep going every day for the rest of the month.

Yet Another Microsoft Copy Disaster

 I'm still cleaning up old computer files, and I've been moving non-photo and non-video stuff into a miscellaneous folder on a USB backup drive. Eventually that drive got full, so I decided to move everything to my studio external hard drive, which still had space.

 A few nights ago, I plugged in the USB drive and started copying a large directory with multiple subdirectories over to the external drive. I didn't use TeraCopy (hadn't installed it on my studio computer yet) and just did a standard cut and paste operation. I didn't really check how long it would take, but based on the speed, I figured it would run for hours.

 I’ve got an eye infection that needs my attention, so I left the copy process for a couple of days. When I finally checked back on it, something had clearly gone wrong. There was a fresh login screen The computer had obviously rebooted. Only a handful of files had actually made it to the external drive, nothing like the multitudes I was expecting.

 What happened? My computer had upgraded itself without my permission. I'd specifically asked to delay updates for five weeks, but Windows did it anyway and apparently killed the entire copy operation without giving me any error messages or warnings that something went wrong.

This is exactly the kind of frustration that's been building with Windows 11 over the past six months. Yes, I could have done better by installing TeraCopy first and actually monitoring the process. But the real issue is that Microsoft's system silently failed without telling me anything was wrong.

I've totally lost faith, I cannot honestly rely on Microsoft anymore.

Teracopy is available on the Microsoft Store, but to find it you must spell it exactly without the double r and it should be the first item on the list and have an page that looks like the one on the righr. It is free. It’s simple to use and works fine

Can We Trust Them?

I got one of those promotional emails from Google Workspace recently, pushing "Ask Gemini in Drive." Their pitch: get synthesized answers pulled from multiple files, no need to actually find and read them yourself.

Sounds convenient. But here's the thing I believe strongly in this age of AI slop and post truth internet you must always check your sources.

If there's a conspiracy or cartel among tech giants, it works in two parts.

First, they're slowly weaning us off our own capabilities. Our own PCs, our own software, our own data, our own creative work. Everything gets pushed toward a thin client model where it all lives in the cloud. Their cloud. Their software. Your data, despite endless assurances it stays private (except for training purposes, except for testing, and so on, have you actually read the updated terms of service lately). That means they control everything. Sound familiar? Too much like Orwell's Big Brother?

Second, while some features stay free for now, it quickly becomes clear you'll need to subscribe, and not just to one service either. The real hidden cost will be cloud storage, and eventually being locked out of what's actually yours. I'm not exaggerating. OneDrive has already started doing this, and not just to me.

So we'll be handed answers without needing to think, but we could pay dearly for the privilege.

Is this nirvana, or is it dystopia?

Proof read by Claude Sonnet 5

Frustration Central

I lost some of my working computer files earlier in the year and confidence in Microsoft.. My office computer died right after a Windows update, and it caught me between backup cycles. About a month of photos was only partially saved. Not great!

Firstly I stepped back and looked at what I need to do to make sure it doesn't happen again. This lead to going back through all my backups and archives. It wasn't a happy task many of the archive sets were missing a significant number of files and several were of zero length. It took a while to track what was happening.

The problem turned out to be a short-coming of the copy function in Microsoft windows when copy multiple nested directories in an unsupervised way. The copy function can hit a file it can't copy and it then moves onto the next directory leaving the rest of the directory or directories not copied. Occasionally it sems it just created an empty file header and moved onto the next file. These missing files only showed up with detailed review. The number of files in the affect directories would become less in subsequent copies or the amount of disk pace required would become slightly lass. Empty files where easy enough to find once I knew What I was looking for. My adoption of creating at list of the MD5 checksums a few years ago really helped zero in on problems in recent year. 

For a short time I was side-tracked by the unnoticed update in windows 11 that copied my working directories of photo into a subdirectory under OneDrive and then started uploading them to the cloud, and worst still starting to remove older files from my computer (all unknow to me).

Turning off the link to OneDrive, was the simple solution. But microsoft seems to be able to turn on the "private" OneDrive after it updates (now manditory in window 11 home. Arrggghh!

This is unacceptable behaviour microsoft

I searched through every backup or archive I had and saw the pattern where files disappeared during times where I bulk copied many directories. Looking in forum and targeted web searches I found I was not the only one who noticed this and found most highlighted the bulk copies of directories although there was a variety of reasons suggested as to why.  Not checking the copy I had left myself open to both such problems,  The other likely cause was "data rot", from earlier backup sets that used DVD and CDs as the backup media. I also have been using old hard disk from computers that died from update in my air-gapped backups/archives, and t was possible that these might suffer from  a process known as magnetic decay or "bit rot", but I could not find any evidence of this even in disks tat had not been fred up in 3 years. Solving both these issues lead me to Teracopy because it does have the  option to verify files after copy to ensure they are identical.. It is nice and simple and works,

It was complex figuring out how best to compare a range of "incomplete" backup set I already had and just find one good copy of each photo. The crux of the problem is; I had no simple way to know what was missing and/or what might be corrupted. I realized that my "air gapped" copies on old harddrives would be a nice starting point. It was

So in the end I returned to the 3-2-1 with 1-0 extension as the best method of backup and keeping an archive of my photos. I've modified the process a little, I don't keep my off-site backup in the cloud and I use Teracopy, XNview MP to look at photos as images and the MD5 checksums to ensure that my photo collection is free of errors.

DIY Calibration Chart

 A DIY Calibration Chart for Photographing Your Art (No Expensive Gear Needed)

Ever taken a photo of your artwork only to have it look completely different once it's online? You're not alone. Professional calibration tools from companies like X-Rite or Datacolor Spyder can help fix this, but they're expensive and actually only work on devices you control. The real problem is you have no control over how someone else's screen displays your image.

So, I created a simple chart to tackle the biggest issues that come up when photographing art for the web. It’s a low cost printable calibration chart you can use any time you photograph your art to be shared on-line.

Getting Started

Download the chart (as a .jpg file) and print it at 4 by 6" (10 by15cm) on photo paper. Choose matte or semigloss over glossy to avoid reflections. Any inkjet printer works, or take it to a photo print service like Ted’s, Officeworks or Harvey Norman.

You can use the chart before you shoot, or after, when editing. Fixing lighting issues before you shoot saves time and gives better results overall. Just place the chart on or next to your artwork, under the same lighting conditions.

Why Dynamic Range Matters

Dynamic range describes how much detail a camera captures from shadow to highlight. Your eyes handle huge contrasts easily, from sunlight to starlight, but cameras struggle. That's why bright skies blow out to white or shadows go pitch black in photos.

The chart has grayscale steps down each side, each representing a 2 percent shift in light intensity, plus small target circles for finer detail. The more steps you can distinguish in your photo, the better your lighting is working. If steps disappear into the background, especially on the darker side, add more light, but don't overdo it or you'll blow out the highlights.

With practice, you'll learn to spot overexposure (dark steps look too light) and underexposure (light steps look too dark) just by reviewing the upper or lower greyscale on the chart.

This trick works after the shoot too. Use your photo editing software's exposure, contrast, and shadow/highlight sliders can make changes on your photo containing the chart, then copy those settings to the rest of your batch. Thus you only need the chart in one reference photo per series where all the photos are taken umber the same conditions

Colour is trickier than tone. Our eyes adapt to lighting variations automatically; cameras don't. The chart includes seven reference dots, six colours plus black, representing the core building blocks of the sRGB colour space used in jpeg files. The table below show how each of the tiny coloured lights (red,green,blue) on your TV screen of computer monitor are lit up to get the given colour. Zero indicated the light is off and 255 that the tiny light is fully on. These lights then make up a single pixel within the photo image.

(255,0,0)         R            0 Red
(0,255,0)         G            Green
(0,0,255)         B             Blue
(0,255,255)     C            Cyan
(255,255,0)     Y             Yellow
(255,255,255) M            Magenta

After taking the photo, you could use a colour picker to compare your photo's dots against these values. This won't give you pixel perfect correction, but it'll reveal a colour cast. The main thing to watch for. Do the dots still look clean and bright, or dull and grey?

Dealing with A Colour Cast

Colour cast is sneaky because your brain corrects for it automatically without you noticing. Old incandescent bulbs throw a yellow-orange tint; overcast daylight can add a blue tint. Reflections from walls and furniture are often the biggest culprits, since your brain filters these out but your camera doesn't.

To check for colour cast, look at the white background behind the chart's colour temperature panel. If the white looks yellowish or bluish instead of neutral, you likely have a bias. The nine squares can help confirm this.The three colour squares of the same colour as the bias will appear brighter and/or stronger, while colour on the opposite side will appered duller or darker.

The fix is usually simple, find better light. If using artificial light, Daylight LED bulbs (around 5000k) are cheap and reliable. If using natural light, shoot in soft shade rather than direct sun, like near a window indoors, under a veranda, or in an open garage. A white board opposite your light source can bounce light back and soften harsh shadows.

When editing, use white balance, warm/cool sliders, HSL adjustments, or LUTs, always test these changes on your reference photo first before applying to the batch.

One Final Tip

Avoid the saturation slider orfilters when photographing art. They can make your image look garish, especially on screens where the viewer has already boosted their own contrast and saturation. If colors look flat, use the vibrance slider instead, and go easy with using it.

With this one printable chart, you can catch lighting and colour problems before they ruin your photos, and fix them quickly if they slip through. No expensive gear required.

Introducing a DIY Calibration Chart

Why You Should Calibrate Your Screens (And How This Little Chart Helps)

Ever wondered why a photo looks perfect on your phone but flat and washed out on your TV or a print? It is not you. It is your screens. Even the best cameras, monitors and printers cannot capture or display the full range of light and colour that your eyes can see. That is where a simple calibration card comes in, and once you understand how to keep your equipment acceptably accurate.

Photographers talk about dynamic range, the span of light a device can capture, measured in stops. Each stop doubles the amount of light involved. Your eyes can handle around 15 stops. A good modern camera manages 9 to 11. Most TVs and monitors only reach 7 to 9, and even quality printers top out around 6.5.

That gap matters. When a device cannot handle the full range, it clips the extremes. Dark tones near black collapse into pure black. Bright highlights blow out into pure white. Detail and colour simply disappear at both ends.

Colour is its own puzzle, it doesn’t really exist as something physical, and there are two divergent interpretations of what creates it. How a device captures and reproduces colour is pure physics and maths of energy and light. How your brain perceives colour is much more personal, shaped by cognitive psychology and the lighting around you. Neither view is more "correct" than the other. The calibration chart will not give you laboratory precision, but it will nudge your average colour rendering and tonal contrast in the right direction.

Step One: Calibrate the Input (Your Camera or Phone)

Tonal calibration, getting the brightness and darkness levels right, is the single most useful adjustment you can make for realistic photos.

Look at the calibration chart and you will see a grey scale gradient running from black to white, with small grey rectangles down each side. On the right, the rectangles start light grey and get progressively lighter toward an almost white target. On the left, they start darker and step down toward a very dark target. Each little step represents a 2 percent shift in light intensity.

Here is the trick: point your camera or phone at the chart and check how many of those rectangles you can actually distinguish. You will probably lose a few, especially near the very dark or very light end. That is completely normal. Digital sensors simply cannot match your eyes' range, and cameras are designed to expose for an average middle grey tone anyway, so they will usually “clip” the extreme tones.

Start with your camera on an automatic exposure mode (A, P, or the green auto setting on a DSLR or mirrorless camera, or the default mode on your phone). Manual exposure is not necessary here.

Check the result somewhere you can actually see the screen properly. Camera and phone screens are notoriously hard to read in bright daylight, so review indoors or in shade.

If you can only spot a few rectangles on the dark side, the chart probably needs more light. If you cannot add light, try adjusting the exposure value (EV) on your camera or phone instead.

Advanced camera calibration (colour accuracy, white balance, lens distortion, sharpness) varies wildly between brands and models, so this card will not replace a proper colour profiling system. What it can do is flag obvious problems, like a consistent colour cast, or tonal issues worth investigating further.

Step Two: Calibrate the Output (Your Screens)

Now views a photo of the ca on your monitor, TV, phone or projector. This is where brightness and contrast come in, usually tucked inside a picture or display settings menu, accessed through a settings button or remote.

Start with brightness. Push it up and the screen gets lighter, revealing more rectangles on the dark side. Pull it down and you will see more detail in the light rectangles instead. The goal is a balance where you can see a good number of steps on both sides.

Next comes contrast. This stretches or compresses the range of visible tones. Getting it right is a bit of a balancing act between contrast and brightness. If you can see plenty of rectangles on one side but hardly any on the other, nudge the contrast up slightly, then pull brightness back to rebalance.

A quiet warning here: if you regularly use your screen in a bright room with strong light behind you, chances are your contrast is already cranked to maximum, which clips both ends of the tonal range. If that sounds like you, reset contrast to the middle, adjust brightness first, then slowly bring contrast back up while rebalancing.

Screen technology has changed a lot over the decades, from old cathode ray tubes to today's LED and LCD panels, and every manufacturer implements these settings a little differently. Materials also degrade over time, which is worth remembering if your screen seems duller than it used to be. When in doubt, the factory reset option is usually a safe, well calibrated starting point.

Step Three: Get Your Colours Right

Once tone is sorted, it is time for colour. Look for settings labelled colour, tint, colour temperature, hue, saturation or intensity, though the exact wording  and what bit changes depends on your device.

Saturation is often cranked up by default to compensate for ambient light, so check the row of coloured dots on the card. They should look natural sitting against the mid grey background, not artificially intense.

Many screens also offer picture modes such as vivid, natural, cinema, standard or eco. These bundle together saturation, brightness and contrast settings, so cycling through them is often the fastest way to find something that suits your eyes, though be aware they can override the careful brightness and contrast work you just did.

The chart itself has a colour temperature section running from warm reds, oranges and yellows through to cool blues and violets, sitting on a clean white background. If that background does not look properly white, you likely have a colour cast issue.

Small reference squares next to this section are arranged in 5 percent increments of colour strength. The top row handles colour temperature, from yellow through to blue purple. The bottom row handles “tint”, from magenta through to green. The middle row, goes from a red to a cyan .

To use them, simply check which square looks whitest against the background. If the background leans slightly green, for instance, a square on the magenta side will probably look closer to true white. That tells you which direction to nudge your tint control.

One last thing worth remembering: your room's ambient lighting will influence how you judge all of this. Do not calibrate for magenta while sitting in a room bathed in green light. Match your adjustments to the conditions you will normally be viewing in, and you will end up with a screen that shows your photos the way they are meant to be seen.

You should now have better screens to judge your images, that may be photographing your art, a portrait or to judge your results as you edit or modify your photographs with filters and app.

Another Microsoft favourite bites the dust

I thought I had put off any Microsoft updates for 5 weeks, but the updates happened last night. Maybe it was 5 weeks

It proudly announced that it updated itself and had five things to show me I don't think any of them were particularly new and/or exciting. They just wanted me to let them access my settings which I decided wasn't a good idea. The one thing I did immediately notice was that my phone link had a big message at the top and it wanted me to read the QR code on the screen. I had gotten used to using Phone Link and liked it.

Not unexpected, I had also updated my Android phone (I had trouble recharging my 7-year-old phone battery) and perhaps thought it was to do with a setting on the new Android phone. I did use Android Switch which worked quite well, and transferred most things. There were a few inputs required, I had to re-establish some connections with passwords etc. However the transfer was very smooth.

I aimed my camera at the QR code and clicked on the link, which took me to the site aka.ms (which is where you download the phone link segment for your phone), BUT, and it's a big but, it was a blank screen, so I tried again, investigated what response I could get, waited a while, then tried again and again. I could see from the display on my laptop it was still pointing to my old phone so I went and found it and made sure it was turned off. I went back to my phone and just typed in the address aka.ms to get to that URL. The phone seemed to think for a little while and then came up with a big red warning that my phone was not suitable because it wasn't connected to a VPN, which it isn't. The message also conveniently suggested that I could use Microsoft Azure as my VPN, and again no thank you. I don't really want Microsoft snooping on my phone as well.

If you're listening, Microsoft my trust in you is diminishing everyday

Can Watercolour Paper Deteriorate?

If you've pulled out a beloved pad or big sheet of watercolour paper only to find it's soaking up paint like a sponge, don't panic. You're not alone, and it's probably fixable.

Watercolour paper, whether cheap or expensive, cotton or cellulose, can deteriorate over time. There are two main culprits worth knowing about.

1. The first is chemical and/or biological damage. Acids from household cleaners, food smells, vinegar, even alcohol can drift through the air and quietly degrade your paper. Moisture give the opportunity for mould or algae, attracts insects or animals to stop by and snack. You'll usually notice yellowing, dark patches, tears, crumbling or even holes. Unfortunately, this kind of damage is pretty much permanent. there's not much you can do to rescue it. If this is effecting existing art work, especially if its precious, don’t attempt to fix it yourself seek out professional conservators. There are ways to improve the storage and display that can halt further deterioration.
2. The second culprit, the more common one, is the sizing breakdown. Sizing is the term used in paper making circles that refers to any substance added to or applied to the surface to reduce the absorbency of water. Most quality watercolour paper is coated with gelatine, the same stuff that makes jelly set. It's brilliant for painting because it holds moisture and pigment at the surface rather than letting them bleed deep into the paper. The problem is that gelatin is sensitive to humidity, temperature fluctuations, and light exposure. Humid environments or climates are particular culprits, but even leaving your pad on the back seat of a hot car can cause it to fail in patches. The result? Your paper suddenly behaves like blotting paper.

The good news is there are ways to bring sizing back. The simplest fix for the more expensive papers that will have both internal and external sizing is to wet the entire sheet, let it dry completely, and paint on it straight away. You can add the desired level you require in that new painting session. It sounds almost too easy, but it genuinely works, there are plenty of experienced painters who swear by it. The catch is you really only get one go at this, so time it well.

If that's not enough, you can re-size the surface entirely. Powdered gelatine is one option, though it's a bit fiddly. A more practical route is using a commercial watercolour ground.

I have found acrylic gesso also works well. Thin coats work best, I aim for two light layers, keeping the water content below about 30% to avoid bubbling and poor coverage. The dilution allows better flow/coverage and also gives you control over absorbency. More water leads to more absorbency, so a bit of experimentation and you can get back to something close to the original paper feel.

One tip worth trying: instead of a brush, use a small foam roller to apply the gesso. It leaves a fine, even texture similar to cold-press papers that's genuinely lovely to paint on. Especially if you're working with granulating pigments that like to settle into small dips and hollows.

So before you throw out that dodgy paper, give it a second chance. Chances are, it's not as far gone as it looks.

Towards Building the Perfect Sketchbook Holder

With a paint-out weekend in Castlemaine on the horizon for the Watercolour Society, it was time to build a sketchbook holder that could actually handle the job and coimg winter weather.

After two prototypes, I had a pretty good idea of what I was looking for. The foam core version was light and semi-waterproof, but it quickly buckled in the middle. The framing matte offcut held up better until it got wet. The sticky side of the velcro tape also caused problems by lifting the paper surface off the matte board rather than releasing the velcro, when I tried to remove my palettes. 

I found a sheet of 5mm craft wood (MDF) that was sturdy enough to do the job but light enough to hold in one hand. A couple of coats of acrylic paint should ensure the waterproofing. Then came the fun design tweaks. I added internal slots to hold bulldog clamps to nicely hold the sketchbook open. I slightly changed the shaped to better fit A5 sketchbooks in both portrait and landscape formats. Two rows of velcro and a felt bumper to keep my larger palettes snug and secure.

The result is a holder that keeps my sketchbook and palette firmly in place with one hand free to actually paint. Back to plein air testing.

More Nonsense

After spending hours last month untangling the mess Microsoft made by quietly inserting OneDrive into an active role on my Windows 11 machines, I thought I had finally sorted things out. OneDrive had been redirecting my Documents, Pictures and Videos folders into its own subdirectories and syncing them to the cloud, all under the guise of "backing up" my files. In reality, it was removing them from my control.

After some research, I restored everything to its proper location, removed OneDrive and the equally annoying Copilot, and delayed Windows updates as long as possible (note: Windows 11 Home users can only delay updates, not stop them entirely).

Then last week, updates from both Microsoft and Google undid much of my work. Copilot reappeared, desktop icons went missing, my machine started launching straight into Edge on startup, and OneDrive was back, once again redirecting my Documents, Photos and Videos folders to its own directories. Fortunately it was not uploading to the cloud this time, but the intrusion was unwelcome regardless. 

I am clearly not alone in finding Windows updates frustrating and error-prone. A NotebookLM "podcast"on the topic covers the issue well. I’m very conscious that AI generated content is frequently incorrect, just AI slop, however this is worth a watch.

 

Whilst on YouTube I found a video that explains specifically how OneDrive sneaks back through a backdoor Microsoft leaves open during updates, its longish and detailed with steps to keep it Microsoft at bay at least for now.

If you are running Windows on a computer or laptop, good luck! Make sure you keep a current backup of all your files at all times.

Plein Air sketching follow up

What Actually Worked (and What Didn't)

Over the past month, I’ve had a trips down to the Mornington Peninsula, Venu Bay, and I'm partway through the Plein AirPril challenge, whereby I’m supposed to do an outdoor painting every day in April. It has been a great chance to properly road-test my three DIY portable setups I'd been tinkering with.

The clear winner: the sketchbook holder

I haven’t used my tripod easel at all, but I’ve used the sketchbook holder constantly. It securely holds both my A5 sketchbooks, one with a hardcover sewn-spine, the other a wire-coil visual diary style. You slide the book covers behind the holder, fold the pages forward, through the slot and spread the pages to where you want and clip them with large bulldog paper clips on either side, and you're done. Even in the wind, it stays put. It's light enough to hold one-handed while standing, or it just rests across my knees when I'm sitting.

The whole setup takes almost no time: a pencil, a pen, a water brush, and my homemade CD dot card palettes. Done. It pays to be agile when the fickle Melbourne weather decides to throw storms, rain, wind gusts, but is mostly grey and overcast with occasional surprise sunshine at me all in the same afternoon.

The watercolour sketchboard: promising but …

I only pulled this one out a couple of times. It works, but it's heavier, slower to set up, and critically, the prototype was made of matte board. Getting drenched a few times took a real toll on it. The bulldog clip slots are a clever idea, and worth keeping in any future version

Lessons learned the hard way

Bag organisation matters more than you think. Rummaging around for that specific brush or pen mid-session is genuinely annoying. I've since started bundling brushes and pens in cord concealer spiral tubing and keeping them in small ziplock bags. Bonus is less disruption searching,

Using Velcro was trickier than it looks. Its holding capacity between its hock and loop surfaces is powerful. So powerful when I taped it to plastic palettes, the sticky backing kept pulling off surfaces as I removed the palettes. It was also lifting the paper surface off the matte board, strong double-sided tape and hot glue didn't work well either; PVC glue was slightly better. Still experimenting, looking for a heavy-duty version of this tape.

Keep your water brushes topped up. I nearly ran out of water mid-sketch one day. Lesson learned: empty, clean, and refill water brushes before heading out.

The spray bottle is actually pretty mandatory as well because it lets you keep whatever form of watercolour palette you’re using moist and the paint easier to pick up, especially with a water brush.

What's next

I'm planning to rebuild the sketchbookholder in plywood, with slots at the side to hold the sketchbook pages and a slightly bigger top flap for my larger palettes. For larger work or when using larger watercolour pads or blocks, I'll stick with my existing drawing board (the one with the tripod mount) with a camera tripod for a proper travel easel setup.

Overall?  Happy with how it went. Sometimes the simplest, lightest setup really is the best one.

Dealing with Unexpected Expenses in Retirement

As you get deeper into retirement, you start to dread things breaking down and needing replacement. They're often big, expensive items, and we've had several recently unrelated plumbing and electrical issues, with multiple big-ticket items needing repair and/or replacement. Annoyingly, these are things that have to be replaced but don't get covered by standard insurance. You just have to grin and bear it. It is time to consider a careful division of limited retirement funds, what's most important to maintain and what could be tolerated or put off.

Unfortunately, the surprises just kept going on and on with different new problems.

Anyone know how to open the
well-designed Lacie housing?

My current computer problems have become a low priority behind everything else? One extra problem arose when our washing machine flooded laundary and tripped the power. One of my attached drives in the studio failed to restart. I had been gradually building up a family photo library on it from my larger photographic collection. Unfortunately, it wasn't yet backed up. The same hard drive also now housed all my Wednesday Wanderers photos and had become the working area for my website updates, also not backed up.

Is this yet another disaster? Some of the working files are still around on my two working computers. I'm hopeful I can take the unresponsive Lacie drive apart and maybe recover what's on the disk if I can just open the well-designed housing.

The moral of the story? If things get tough, make sure you backup everything and don't just have a single copy of important computer files. Older and wiser, isn't that what they say...

Figuring Out What to Keep and What to Change

Laptop

The good news is that the basics are already sorted. Email, browsing, office work, wifi, bluetooth, and lots of small applications all have solid Linux equivalents, so day-to-day computing isn't a problem. The more interesting challenge is figuring out what to do with the more specialised creative software.

The office computer, the one that died its unfortunate death-by-upgrade, had been the focus for most of the heavy graphics work. It was well set up for it. Dual screens, a BenQ eye-care monitor (low contrast by design but genuinely helpful reducing glare for my eye problem), and enough USB ports to keep all my external photo backpack drives plugged in at once. Replacing that setup takes a bit of planning.

Here's where the graphics and photo software currently stands:

Program	Temp Destination	Linux Alternative	Cost
ON1 Photo RAW	Laptop	Darktable	Free
Luminar Neo	Laptop	Darktable	Free
Corel Draw	Studio	Inkscape	Free
Corel Painter	Studio	Krita	Free
Corel VideoStudio Pro	Studio	Kdenlive	Free
Corel AfterShot Pro	Laptop	RawTherapee	Free?
Paint.NET	Both	Pinta or GIMP	Free
XnView MP	Both	XnView MP	Free (user supported)

The encouraging news is that ON1, Corel, and XnView all offer Linux versions of their software, which opens up some options. The outstanding question is how to transfer licences from the dead office machine without having to buy everything again, particularly if switching to Linux versions. That's a puzzle still to be worked through.

Studio

The way I work has always been a bit like following a thread wherever it leads. An idea turns up when it feels like it, on whichever computer is in reach, so sketches, notes, half-finished drafts, and collected images end up scattered naturally across all three machines (office, laptop, and studio). The office computer was nominally where it all came together, but that's never really been the point. The point is being free to pick up and run with something the moment it sparks, without being tied to one desk, one device, or worse, someone else's server.

That last bit matters quite a lot, actually. The whole appeal of building and managing things locally is that the work stays mine, on my machine, without a monthly subscription, quietly making itself essential to getting anything done. There's something genuinely satisfying about owning your tools outright.

Which brings up the trickiest part of the whole picture. My website has been built using Incomedia's Website X5, which fits that local, hands-on approach perfectly. I can build and preview everything on my machine, tweak the code directly where needed, then upload it live via an old-fashioned FTP (FileZilla) when it's ready. Simple, direct, and nobody else involved. The snag is that Website X5 is Windows-only, with no Linux equivalent on the horizon.

Program	Destination	Linux Alternative
Website X5	Studio	No direct equivalent
FileZilla	Both	FileZilla (Linux version available)

Most things have been recovered and pieced back together, but a few Website X5 gaps makes this a natural moment to stop and ask whether it's time to find a different approach that keeps that same local, independent spirit intact.

Progressing Along Nicely

Office

My Linux Mint desktop replacement is settling in beautifully in the office, and honestly it's way quicker than the Windows 10 machine it replaced. I'm taking it step by step, loading and testing things as I need them rather than throwing everything at it at once.

The old Windows 10 Desktop PC had been with me since my consulting days, so it was pushing close to 10 years old. Over that time it had accumulated just about every piece of software I'd ever owned, and it had gotten painfully slow switching between programs. On top of that, I was dealing with complications from a corneal graft at the time, which made screen glare a real problem. I could only manage about 20 minutes of detailed computer work before it became unbearable. Safe to say I don't miss that setup at all.

For the hardware I went with my old Toshiba laptop, affectionately known as ICE because it's white. It's probably around 15 years old and had a rough patch with what looked like an internal disc corruption. Fingers crossed that's sorted now because it's cruising along nicely. It's also the only laptop I have with an Ethernet port, which means I can connect directly to the NBN router rather than relying on wifi. It's not exactly exciting hardware but it's a comfortable old friend and a reliable workhorse.

The main task now is figuring out what works well in Linux and what I might need to find alternatives for. I started with Firefox and webmail, but quickly switched to Thunderbird Mail for email and found it much more to my liking. I was also keen to reduce my dependence on Google where possible, but still wanted to keep using Gmail, Calendar and Drive. The answer turned out to be Ungoogled Chromium, a stripped back browser that follows the same basics as Chrome but without all the Google tracking. It works really nicely with Gmail, Google Calendar, Docs and Drive, so that box is ticked.

The last piece of the puzzle, for now, was finding a replacement for Microsoft Office. Fortunately LibreOffice was already installed and it's been great. It looks and feels very similar to Word and Excel, and it plays nicely with Google Docs and Sheets too. I haven't stress tested the compatibility yet but for my everyday needs it's doing the job perfectly.

A long way further along than I expected, and so far so good. Best of all, it's all completely free!

Pleasant Surprise at the 9by5 Exhibition

Yesterday I headed along to the City of Greater Dandenong Council's 9by5 exhibition opening at the Drum Theatre and was genuinely impressed. The foyer was packed with both a large crowd, and also with 225 works on show spanning a huge range of styles and media, from a few beginners right through to very experienced artists. Each artist could enter up to two pieces, and having everything the same size (9" by 5") made for a really cohesive exhibition. The organisers did a wonderful job fitting it all in.

My work ended up down the back (as usual), but I was pleased to find a red sticker already on one of my watercolours!

It was great chatting with some of the other artists. Everyone was enthusiastic and grateful for the opportunity to show their work. A point that kept coming up in conversation was how wonderful it is for people to be able to see and buy affordable original art, and I couldn't agree more.

The exhibition runs until 1st. May If you're on the south-east side of Melbourne, it's well worth calling in. and if you can't make it in person, the most works are also available to buy online.