2015 — 27 August: Thursday

The weather put paid to our walking plans yesterday. Today's treat, however, will go ahead as planned.¹

My "logistics" chap...

... from Amazon did eventually show up, quite late yesterday, to hand over his mixed parcel of goodies. Here's just one of them. I note the Australian distributor of my guilty pleasure Blu-ray decided to tinker (unwisely, in my opinion) with the cover artwork.² On the left here is the 1999 original Columbia variant from my UK DVD:

However, the BD has a potentially-interesting 52 minutes of documentary extras, so I shan't grumble. The film is (somehow) over 30 years old. <Sigh>

[Pause, for breakfast.]

Scanning at 200 dpi didn't help, but at 600 dpi the artefacts disappear, at the 'cost' of a longer scanning time, and a larger file size. When it's been scaled back down to the 1080 pixel vertical height I use for this video artwork — to match the Full HD resolution of the Kuro plasma screen at the other end of the living room — there are the stripes... gone!

I'm sure...

... it's just me, but I don't "get" Hindemith. Too austere for my ear, I fear. Still, nearly time I wasn't here...

[Pause for lunch, followed by a minor expotition in search of a drinkable drink, caused by a power cut in Len's part of the village.]

I did some errands...

... and then, in no particular order:

having rinsed away as much as I could of the truly frightful taste of a "strawberries and creamy cooler" from Costa, and
oiled³ the cutters of the new shredder with the Halfords "3-in-1" oil from a plastic squeezable "can" that mimics the original rust-prone containers I recall from Dad's garage in the 1950s (it's made, these days, by the WD40 people), and
failed to stick a little wide-angle Halfords "blind spot" mirror on to the Mazda's left side wing mirror, and
stewed a fresh concoction of plums, cranberries and blackcurrants, and
skimmed this interesting (and potentially rather useful) "Nomachine" Remote Desktop software, and
made a welcome cuppa, and
removed the birdy crap from my windscreen...

... I resumed scanning stuff from Amazon. Item #2 is my next, even older, Brian de Palma pot-boiler "Dressed to Kill". Pauline "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" Kael said of this 1980 schlock-horrorfest that it was: "permeated with the distilled essence of impure thoughts". A pretty good encapsulation.

But, hang on, what's this? Quelle Horreur! The bottom edge of my initial 600 dpi scan has stripes:

But these stripes are on the original printed artwork. An idiotic graphic designer's PoMo "nod" to the raster scanning lines of analogue TV screens, perhaps?

It's fair to say...

... this next item is a bit of an oddity. Made between 1976 and 1978 by Thames TV, and aimed at children, it sounds like an ancient Mexican variation on a theme of "I, Claudius". Patrick Troughton? Music by David Fanshawe?! I'd never heard of it, but then we watched very little broadcast TV⁴ in the 1970s.

From ancient Mexico...

... to life in Britain in the 1960s — as captured by 500 or so "Look at Life" short cinema films. I always found these much more interesting than the tedious ads for toothpaste, cigarettes, booze, shampoo, banks, estate agents, restaurants (which, I recall, were almost uniformly dreadful) and the armed forces:

I chose this 3xDVD set for its focus on "science" and "engineering" topics. Could be a bit of a hoot after the other items.

Footnotes

¹  Lunch in a pub. What could possibly go wrong with that?
²  I also noted (with growing irritation) that I had to place both pieces of artwork at an angle on the flatbed of my scanner and then rotate both scans in software to try to minimise the stripes (not the venetian blinds!) that revealed an unwanted interaction between the resolution of the scanning process (I generally use 300 dpi as my starting point) and the resolution of the original colour block-printing process. This fancy new HP All-in-one printer/scanner is a whole lot more susceptible to this effect than I would wish. I've yet to find a "dither" setting in the GIMP that might blur out this unwanted artefact so I shall experiment with different scanning resolutions. (It's not as if I'm short of RAM, after all, let alone disk space. A decent resolution colour scan of, say, an A4 size image effortlessly soaks up more memory than I had available — a mere 20MB — on the entire hard drive on my original RISC OS PC in 1989.)
³  A vital maintenance step that, I think I can safely assume, the now-late owner of the previous incarnation signally failed ever to do.
⁴  We both had a variety of freelance jobs — Christa taught German in evening classes, for example, while I had my hi-fi kit and record reviewing, and related programming and writing work — as well as our "day" jobs. Spare time was far too precious to allocate to TV.