Computer Log

Total amateur comparison. I had to reduce size to 1440×1080 and export to a 95% jpeg in order to reduce the size enough for WordPress to allow upload. Image program reports original resolution, Phone 4160×3120, Camera 4320×3240

I was surprised that my old camera had more megapixels (14.1 released 2011) than my phone (13 released 2020). I’m also surprised how close to identical I framed each shot considering I just stepped outside my front door. To my eyes the 12yo camera image looked better than much newer 3yo phone. My grass looked greener for sure. I’m sure the Carl Zeiss camera lenses also helped. I’m also surprised how much megapixels have increased in just a few years. As I said a middle of the road camera I looked at a few days ago had 48 megapixels.

One other surprise was the huge 8GB 🙂 microSD card I had installed in it. It might not even be able to support a large (for today) card. Correction my OS said 8GB and I assumed microSD, however it’s actually a basic SD card…not micro. The manual says…SD memory cards of up to 64 GB have been tested and proven to operate with your camera.

Didn’t leave charging overnight. Resumed today. After a while charging light turned off. Put in camera and it seems fine. I’m very surprised.

Next day update. With the charging issues I was a little concerned that it might not hold a charge. However the next day it still shows a full charge.

Plugged the charger with battery in yesterday. No lights at all…until late today. Yellow light started blinking. It’s on life support and I don’t expect it to recover.

No sooner did I type the above paragraph that the yellow light stopped blinking and is now solid.

Looking to upgrade my phone because it’s becoming a hassle to operate due to a intermittent unresponsive touch screen. I never buy top of the line maybe barely middle of the line. One of the models I’m looking at has 48 megapixel camera.

Smartphone’s have largely replaced stand alone digital cameras for the average person.

Anyway looking at some of the camera megapixels made me want to look at my old digital camera. A Sony Cybershot Model DSC-W560. It was a great (to me) camera in it’s day. I briefly looked at a few reviews around January 2011, so I probably bought it around then. Mine was all brushed aluminum as seen below. They offered other colors. I didn’t even remember it having a Carl Zeiss lens. I tried to charge the battery today…but no charge light. So it’s probably dead.

Amazon has a used one listed for $188.99.

Saw a tweet saying Julia (the language) is 11 years old today…Valentine’s Day

I have been trying out Startpage search for a week or so. But going back to DuckDuckGo for now. Because Startpage seemingly doesn’t offer sentence or word completion or close match in results. At least that’s my perception. Which is important to me. I often use this feature as a spellcheck.

I meant to comment on this a few days ago. I find it ridiculous that Raspberry Pi’s are so hard to get…hence expensive. The main reason they became popular was their surprising low cost and size. That’s what attracted me to them. Now apparently people are willing to spend $150 and more for one. I bought mine because if I didn’t find it useful it wouldn’t be a big expense. However it was useful and cool. But in some ways people are now telling Raspberry Pi…you are so great I don’t care what you cost. I just want to brag that I have one as a status symbol. Their prices just makes me want to check out an alternative SBC. So it was with interest that I watched…

At first look the Orange Pi 3 at $48 on Amazon looks interesting. It’s a big upgrade over my Raspberry Pi Model B+ I bought in November 2014. Which only ran a 32bit OS.

At the moment I don’t really have a Pi project in mind. I probably had several in mind within the last year. But my mind tends to divert around things I find unacceptable. And knowing what the Pi started out to be. And the current prices. I’ve just mentally moved on to other things. I’m not going to send a message to Raspberry Pi that you’re so great that I don’t care what you cost. It seems that Raspberry Pi’s have become to the SBC what Mark Cuban has become to TV’s Sharktank. Where it has become obvious to me that many of these people are so interested in dealing with Mark that he could almost offer them a bag of poop and $5 and they would accept. “Oh Mark if it’s your poop I’ll accept the deal”. Why don’t they just rename the show to Marktank. You can see the disappointment in their faces if he passes on them. Oh no now I have to deal with these lesser multi millionaire’s.

Wrote about FreeOTP reinstalling itself here. So I haven’t been using 2FA since. Since it was asking for a password and I didn’t have one. Today I thought I better find another 2FA app. Thinking I don’t want to use FreeOTP just incase I read about some fix. Anyway I looked at Authy and another one. There were things I didn’t like so I finally thought the heck with it I’ll just use FreeOTP and face the consequences. So I started it and it wanted a setup password. I created one like I always do in my password app then reentered it thinking here we go anew. But it brought up my old 2FA accounts. Wow!

So evidently the new install was to add features/functionality. Would have really been nice to know that before deactivating 2FA on 4 old accounts. When that happened the first thing I did was google FreeOTP news and…NOTHING!!!! So experience taught me when asking for a password that you don’t know and is not in your password app. You’re screwed. Now the new the features are nice…in hindsight!

A interface refresh
A password
Backup and restore.

So since I deactivated 2FA on Amazon for example…y sending them my DL. I wanted to add that back. Well that worked.

However I now have 2 Amazon entries (and others too). I can’t figure out how to delete the old one I deactivated. I tried looking in the menu…nothing. Maybe something will show up with a long press…Nope! I could rename the old one. So it’s better than nothing. But cluttered. I googled and read something about swiping right or left…but that didn’t work.

For this type of update we should have been forewarned. Something like “Hey our next update is not asking for an existing password but will require you to create a new password. Your entries will appear after creating the new password!!!”

This is Redhat not some dinky little unsavvy computer company!

Also couldn’t start settings in menu. Also no error message. So try to invoke from CLI gave…
bill@bill-MS-7B79:~$ cinnamon-settings
No module named ‘PIL’

A little strange because if I start python I can import PIL

Sounds related to yesterday’s configure menu problem, no response and no error.

Which I no doubt caused recently with this PIL issue/fix.

The following solution fixed both today’s sound and yesterday’s menu configure problem…

apt-get install –reinstall python3-pil

pip list still shows
Pillow 9.4.0

This was supposed to be a Flatpak rant. I know that the downloads use to be huge. But I just checked a few apps that I downloaded the appimage and somewhere along the way the flatpak has become much smaller than in the past. I checked Krita and Kdenlive and the file size reduction is dramatic.

I’ve uninstalled Flatpak completely at one point regaining 10GB. When I had a slower connection I’d wonder why a Flatbak download took so long. Here I wrote about the Bitwarden Flatpack that was a 1 GB download. And the Appimage was 90.3MB. That’s over 10 times bigger. The Flatpak download today is a much more reasonable 124.8MB. The Flatpak is version 1.32.1 the Appimage is version 1.33. At least that’s what the appstore says. Perhaps it actually downloads the current flathub version which is listed as 2023.1.1 released on 1/13/2023.

My Krita Appimage is 348.4MB the Flatpak today is listed as 178.9MB. However the Krita Appimage is version 5.1.1 and the Flatpak is version is 5.0.6.

I think the diet is relatively recent, because I’m pretty sure I checked some Flatpak program within the last few…maybe 6 months, and they were still huge. Because of their excessive size, I wouldn’t use them. Now I certainly will consider them.

Perhaps the large size was a Flatpak Linux Mint issue. All I know is I’m very happy that they are much smaller now.