It’s been someting like six months since I’ve posted an entry. I’ve taken photos, I’ve had random thoughts, whatever else would go into an insignificant personal blog without a particular theme. What’s the holdup? Nothing really big, just…annoying.
First, in I think November 2016 (maybe even 2015?), Windows updated its Photos program and totally dumbed it down by replacing its color/temp/cast/whatever controls with a limited number of dumb useless filters. I discovered this when I was about to edit a whole bunch of yarn photos, for which I actually rather care about their exact colors, and was so frustrated I was about in tears. Why…why would you SUBTRACT features that worked and replace them with far less applicable ones? I was far from the only person to complain about this, but that didn’t fix it.
I did find another photo-editing program that basically served my needs without being too oversized, but as far as I know it doesn’t have the simple capability of browsing my photos from the folder they’re in and seamlessly doing some minor editing on them and saving the duplicate. Which is really all I want. If I needed to do serious editing, I have Photoshop on another machine, but I don’t want to do that.
This problem is less of a problem now because I also changed phones and the new one has a better camera, so I have less adjusting to do (and I can do some of that on the phone). But my phone should not be more suitable as an editor than my laptop, darn it.
The second molehill I kept tripping on is that my main laptop was getting harder and harder to use, not because of software or hardware issues, but because the touchpad was becoming impossible to click. That laptop has a touchscreen, which I have always disliked because I really don’t need to make things happen every time I brush away the ibiquitous cat hair, but for the first time I actually had a use for it as a substitute touchpad, sort of. The scrolling functions still worked just fine, but I couldn’t click anything without extreme pressure. I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts, but not for cropping photos. And of course the photos that I’ve been saving for posts are all on that machine. Occasionally I’d try copying a few to my other laptop for posting, but then I never got around to it.
A week or two ago I finally complained enough about it that spouse looked into it and found that this wasn’t an uncommon problem with that laptop due to battery swelling. Which is what had happened. The touchpad was literally being forced out of the keyboard surface. So he ordered another battery and put it in and also replaced the hard drive and now all I have to do is reinstall the software and I have my functionality on it again, with its larger screen and fixed hinge (as opposed to the flexible hinge of the Surface I’m typing on, which is not so useful when one actually uses laptops on one’s lap).
Have I done that yet? Of course not.
However, that’s no reason not to put up a post with more recent photos. Of course, none of these things were sufficient reason not to post anyway; the underlying problem is that I have, as spouse has put it repeatedly, the attention span of a goldfish. But I should at least be able to manage a post per month.
Crud, it’s no longer January. Oh well. Still a good time to post a Find the Cat, right?
That one may have been a little obvious. How about this one?
Better? No? Well, I’m out of practice.