Today I wrote a couple of articles for my photo tips website, though I only finished one of them. The other article requires some example photos, and the rainy weather today wasn't suitable for the photos I wanted.
I also found a good article on articlesbase to re-publish on my photo tips website. So I looked for photos on flickr and videos on youtube to illustrate that article. And I wrote an article for my photography website as well.
This morning I updated my pog website and went to Church.
In the afternoon I finished working on the article I was writing for my photo tips website yesterday. After that I did some housework and processed a pano.
In the evening I processed another pano.
This morning I went through the Bavaria photos I'd geotagged, to find the ones where I'd entered the altitude manually, but entered it in feet instead of metres. Then I corrected them to specify the altitude in metres.
I also listed all the photo files from the trip, ensuring that there weren't any more blocks of missing images. Since the files are numbered sequentially, I just did this by using Windows Explorer, and showing rows of ten thumbnails. So you can easily see if there are any missing files by just checking that the filename of the first file on each row is 10 more than the filename of the first file on the previous row.
After that I loaded all the files into Adobe Bridge, but it was creating thumbnails with the lens profile for my Miranda 24mm at f/2.8 applied. So I selected all the files, opened in ACR, and then deselected the use Lens profile box. This took quite a long time.
But then later, I was checking some more thumbnails, and they still had the Miranda 24mm at f/2.8 lens profile applied. So I had to do the same thing again. Annoying.
Everyone else went away on holiday today, so I had to do some cleaning. I also cleaned the bird feeders, which were getting very dirty. I wish birds would learn not to use where they eat as a toilet.
An annoying thing that keeps happening with Photoshop CS6 is that it keeps popping up with a Trial message saying that I have 0 days of trial left. It will still let me use it okay though. (I am on a monthly Photoshop subscription plan with Adobe). One time though, I got this message:
In the afternoon I prepared tomorrow's pog website update. I also wrote up the recipe for the cake I made yesterday.
In the evening I watched a double episode of the Equalizer. I uploaded a pano. And I wrote most of an article for my photo tips website.
Today I was still geotagging photos from the Bavaria holiday.
I had a big problem in that a load of photos had gone missing. I narrowed it down to that only some of the photos from my 8GB Sandisk card had copied across. Unfortunately, despite copying the card separately to two different hard drives, the same photos had not copied either time.
Since some of the photos had copied, I didn't realise at the time I was copying the card that most of the photos weren't being copied. I tended to just start the copy, then do something else for a bit, and then come back and check that the copy had finished okay. I didn't check the file sizes of copied folders, only that Windows said that they had copied okay with no errors.
So I tried various data recovery programs on my Sandisk 8GB card that hadn't copied properly, but none of them could find the photos. (I had re-used the card since). Eventually I tried using a recovery program on one of the hard drives that the images had been copied to.
I am extremely thankful that worked, and it recovered all missing images except one. The one it didn't recover was part of a bracketed set, so not particularly important.
What I think happened is that I was copying the images across from the memory card to one of the external hard drives. But the hard drive became full part way through the transfer. Because the transfer could not complete, Windows deleted the copied files from the card and the hard drive for some reason. So when I then copied the card to the laptop hard drive and the other external drive, the card didn't have the images on it that Windows had deleted.
But although Windows had deleted the files from the external hard drive that got full, the files were still recorded on the drive so that the recovery program could restore them.
Anyway, I am just really relieved that all those photos hadn't disappeared completely. In future I will have to check the size of the folder on the memory card before I copy it, and then check the size of the copied folder to make sure it has copied okay.
In the evening today I also made a cake.
Today I was just geo-coding photos from Bavaria. I haven't even got half of them done yet though. Also, I made a mistake on some that I manually geo-coded where I entered the altitude in feet, when it looks like it should have been entered in metres. So I'll have to go back and fix those later.
Today I was checking my backlog of emails that I received while I was away.
The other thing that I did was to get the photos that I took while I was away onto my computer. Since I took more photos than I have hard-drive space for, this meant ordering some new hard drives. I decided to replace one of my 1.5TB drives with a 3TB drive.
Since I use 2 backups for each drive, this meant that I ordered two 3TB drives - one for use as the main drive, one for first backup, and the two 1.5TB backup drives of the drive it is replacing can act as the second backup. The 1.5TB drive it is replacing will just be a spare drive, I guess Mauser might use it.
In the mean time, I replaced one of the hard drives in the PC with one that I took away and had the holiday photos on it. At first the PC didn't recognise the new drive. Then after restarting, it wouldn't output anything to the monitor. I switched it off and tried again, but still the same.
I disconnected the drive and started the PC again, and still no output to the monitor. I switched the monitor off and then on again. Still no output to the screen. Then after a few seconds, the standard PC start-up splash screen popped up on the monitor, and the PC was working okay.
So I switched it off again, and plugged in the drive again. Switched it on again, and now it detected the drive and worked okay. Computers, eh?
I then did a binary compare between the holiday photos stored on that drive and the backup copies stored on the other drive I took with me, and the laptop drive. (The other drive ran out of space, so half the backup was on that drive, and the other half on the laptop).
Doing the compare against the files on the laptop was tricky because there didn't seem to be anyway to connect the laptop to my PC. (Connecting Win7 and XP computers to the same network / homegroup seems to be impossible). I had to copy the files from the laptop to a CF card, then connect the CF card to my computer, and do the binary compare against the files on my computer. Since there were many more images on the laptop than can fit on the CF card I was using, it was a case of rinse and repeat until all the images had been compared.
But I am now done. Currently I only have one backup of some files, but it will hopefully only be a few days until the new drives arrive, and then I can get everything sorted and back to two backups. In the meantime, I can work on my holiday photos, the first job being to geocode all the images. I will probably be doing that tomorrow.
Today we went to visit Hohenschwangau, a castle in the Bavarian alps. We got up at 5am as it was quit a long journey to get there. We left about 6am and got the train to the Hauptbahnhof, then from there we got the train to Fusen.
The town was very nice and Bavarian with typical Barvarian buildings, and some painted with images (normally christian related) on the outside. Mauser bought a couple of sandwiches and croissants from a local shop that was open. (Most shops were closed with it being Sunday).
We went through the town and up a track near a church, on the way to Kalvarienberg. There were lots of small buildings with paintings of saints etc. in them on the way. We stopped in a clearing bit where there were a few shrine style things, and had our sandwiches and croissants. Mine was a cheese cob, but actually also had sauce and half a gherkin in the middle. Mauser's was a salami cob, but also had half a gherkin in it.
At the top of Kalvarienberg there was a viewing platform with three crosses on, with two of the crosses empty and a model of Jesus on the centre cross.
We went down from there to the other side of the mountain where there was a lake with lots of people swimming in it and others sunbathing nearby. We walked round the lake, and then on to the town of Hohenschwangau. We had a look round the grounds of the castle and paid to look inside as well. It was a guided tour and you weren't allowed to take any photos inside.
Unforunately Neuchwanstein castle was covered in scaffolding, so it didn't make a very nice view, and we decided not to visit it as well. (Neuchwanstein is another castle located close to Hohenschwangau).
Then we walked back to the Lake, and went back to Fusen, though a different route than we'd used on the way there. We stopped at the Lechfall waterfall, which just appeared to be a wide, but not particularly steep, man-made waterfall. We had some food at a nearby pub, we both had 0.5l of Konigs something hell (or something similar) to drink. I had weiss wurst with pretzel and mustard, while Mauser had Sausage salad.
Mauser's salad was slices of polony style stuff with slices of onions and gherkins and stuff. It was probably about 50% meat. My weiss wurst were two sausages in a bowl of water with herb bits floating around. I guess they boil them.
The skins were quite tricky to cut though. The sausages were quite sweet, and the Bavarian mustard was sweeter and not as hot as English mustard. The pretzel was just bread in a pretzel shape with lots of salt added to the outside. It was a nice dinner.
After we'd had dinner, we went out to see the Falls again, and it was raining quite hard. Then we walked back to Fusen station. I was wearing my waterproof coat, but it wasn't actually waterproof, and got soaked through.
We caught the train back to Munchen, but I started to feel sick on the train, so I spent most of the journey standing outside the toilet, just in case. I did try to be sick in the toilet a few times, but couldn't.
Then when the train stopped in Munich, we got off and I immediately felt really sick. Then I was sick on the platform, I tried to hold it in with my hands, but couldn't. It all spilled out onto the ground, while lots of people were walking past who had just got off the train.
I cleaned up my hands on my handkerchief, then we looked for someone to tell about the mess. But we couldn't find anyone, so we just got the U-bahn back to the hotel. When we got back I just went to bed.
