PHOTO SPLICING WITH GIMP

I have a decent collection of yearbooks for my high school.  I have two flatbed scanners, a Brother multi-function device (MFC-490CW), better in quality and a Umax Astra 1220U, which has a larger scan area but only works with an older Mac laptop and can only do 150 dots-per-inch.  The older Mac laptop is a pain to use, very slow to boot up and to use, so I mostly use the Brother device whenever someone from my alumni group would like to see a page from my yearbook collection.  For most of the books, the pages fit perfectly into the scan area.  Even if the pages don't fit, I would lose only blank space on the page, or at most the page numbers, which can be at the extreme left or extreme right of the page.  For some of the older years, however, the photos would go edge to edge and my little Brother wouldn't be able to cover everything.  The situation is especially true with the faculty section.  With just one scan, some teacher would lose half of her face or a teacher on the other edge of the age would lose a third of his face.  Time to launch GIMP, the open-source photo-editing software!

Instead of just scanning the page once, I would scan it twice, or more as needed.  The first time I would focus on, say, the left edge of the page.  In the next scan, I would make sure to include the right edge of the page.  Some of the pages not only wouldn't fit horizontally they would not fit vertically either.  It is possible that I would need to scan four times of the same page.  One good thing is the Brother scanning software automatically add a number to the file name as the scans are created, e.g. 1968 p009, 1968 p009 1, 1968 p009 2, and 1968 p009 3

To get a perfect page, I would scan the same page four times, each time making sure one corner is perfect.

At last it's time for GIMP to do its work.  Mind you, GIMP does many things, but for my need, I just need to combine slices of one picture into another.  I would open all the scans of the one page in GIMP.  Let's say I will use the picture that has the right-most side intact.  It lacks a left side, some teacher's face is incomplete there.  I need to make the picture bigger so I have somewhere to paste the missing faces.  To achieve that, I would increase the Canvas Size (Image/Canvas Size...).  I always increase based on percentage and 10 more does the job.  The default is to expand on the right side and/or the bottom side.  In this case, I want to expand the left side and the bottom side, so I moved the preview picture around.  Should I want to increase the size uniformly on all sides, I would click the Center button.

Move the preview picture around to decide the new expand area.

When I scanned the yearbook page, it created a PNG file, a standard picture format.  Once I start to edit the file in GIMP, it takes on the XCF format that is used by GIMP.  One big difference between XCF and PNG is the use of Layers.  PNG has limited support for Layers, when you copy and paste, the pasted material is temporarily on its own Layer and can be moved around.  Once you close the file, the Layer is no longer there, whatever it had is now part of the file and cannot be moved easily like before.  Our picture with the expanded canvas size is ready to take on a paste and give it its own layer.  However, the expanded area is transparent and may not properly show the pasted material.  I find it best to instantly flatten the document (Image/Flatten Image) so that the expanded area takes on the property of the document.

After the Resize button was clicked, the picture is bigger, but the new area may not show pasted content.

Flattened, the expand area is now ready to receive paste content from the other three pictures.

I learned Photoshop before I used GIMP.  While GIMP probably does most things Photoshop does, the way GIMP works is a tad different.  So I went to the picture that has my missing right side.  I would copy the entire faces of the right edge, usually a whole strip from the top of the page down to the bottom.  With Photoshop, when I paste it into the first picture, I would be able to move the pasted item right away.  With GIMP, I would have to first select xyz, then I can move it around.  Before I discovered this difference, it was such a pain to move anything around after pasting.  I don't know how I did it, I just know it was painful.  I find it somewhat helpful if I zoom in, so I can better align the pieces.

With the piece from another picture copied and pasted, I have to make sure to choose the lower button, Move the Active Layer, before I try to move the piece into place.

That's all there is to it.  Scan multiple times of the same page, each scan covering each edge.  Expand the canvas size of one document, flatten the file to fill in the new, expanded area.  Copy and paste as needed, but make sure to select what to move.  Now you just have to carefully move the segments into position so all the faces are complete.  I have yet to find a way to move a floating selection by keyboard combos so it's such a pain to move with the trackpad on my Mac laptop, but that I can live with.  I usually save in the XCF format the file that has all the pasted items.  Then I export that file to PNG and delete the other files to save space.

The final product.  Not perfect, as you can see a little gap in the upper left corner, but all teachers have their faces fully displayed.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF ZOOM

Manually sorting a Facebook album by the last names of the people in the photos is a painstaking process.  My stumble upon the Fn Left and Fn Right keyboard combinations, to quickly go to the start or the end of the album, really helps, but I also discovered another way to complement the process.

By default, web browsers show the site's content at regular size.  You can zoom in to perhaps see more details or zoom out to see more of what's available.  The first picture below is the standard size.  I used to perform my manual sort by scrolling a little bit, to get the album description out of the way, such that the first visible row would be half-shown at the top, the second row fully shown, and the third row just have its head peeking out.  That way I know where I was going when I manually move the photos into position.  I can also blindly move really quick through the list but at the end I still need to finely place the photos in its alphabetical position.

I then discovered that I can use the Zoom function in Google Chrome, or whatever the browser of choice, to see more photos.  It went from three to five, but if I zoom out some more I can see even more.  I find five to be just the right amount.  Anything further the names may not show.  The keyboard combo to Zoom Out is Command minus.  Command zero gets you back to the default size.

So, if manual sorting of Facebook album is a task you abhor, use Fn Left and Fn Right to move around quickly, then Zoom Out as needed so you can see more of where you are going.  In these pandemic days, you may be sick of Zoom Meetings, but this kind of Zoom is very useful and really helps your manual sorting.

MAC KEYBOARD SHORTCUT - FN LEFT, FN RIGHT

I run an active Facebook group for my high school alumni.  I make heavy use of albums to keep the photos better organized.  A popular album has the ambition of some day having at least one photo for every teacher or staff member of the school throughout the school's 100+ history.  I have to manually sort the photos by people's last name.  It's a tedious process but Facebook doesn't offer any alternative.  You can find the album at this link:

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=oa.10156768646347611&type=3


Sometimes when you put your mind to it, you can find ways to make the process more tolerable.  In this case, I recently discovered the Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts to jump to the beginning or the end of a document.

When I add a photo to the album, Facebook puts it at the end of the list.  I would then have to drag it into position, wherever alphabetically it should be.  If it's just one photo, not a big deal, but if I add multiple photos, that mean after sorting one photo I would have to go back to the end and drag the next photo into place.  With Fn Right I can now quickly go to the bottom.  When I am done with organizing all the photos, in the past I would have to scroll up a few times to get to the top of the page, where the Save button is.  Now I can just use Fn Left and there it is, the Save button.

I use a Mac laptop and the Fn key is usually for modifying the F1, F2 etc keys along the top.  On a desktop Mac, there may or may not be a Fn key.

ITSY-BITSY ISSUE WITH JITSI MEET USAGE IN THE REAL WORLD

I hosted my first real-world Jitsi Meet videoconference yesterday.  It went pretty well, well over an hour actually, for free, gratis, no dollar!  I even circumvented the issue of not able to show my fancy-shmancy video of names of participants.  As you may recall, one thing that makes Zoom fun is the virtual background, which can be either a static picture or a video.  Jitsi has no such feature.  To show my video, I loaded it onto a laptop then play the video in a loop in the open-source program VLC.  Place the laptop in direct sight of the device that's running the Jitsi meeting, problem solved.  A bonus with this solution is that the video's pixelation doesn't look so obvious.  Recall that the original source of the video is some GIF animation, which was meant to be viewed as a small part of a web site.  Magnify that to full-screen, in a video, and you get pixelation, not very pretty.

The itsy-bitsy issue some of my users had with the Jitsi Meet was that they misunderstood the instruction.  It says go to so-and-so link and enter this phrase when you are prompted to enter you-know-what.  I like to leave out the word password in my instruction whenever possible, to avoid having the content scanned and password easily detected.  What did two of my users did?  They launched the Jitsi Meet app and went straight to entering the password as a meeting room.  That's the first thing that comes into focus when you use the Jitsi Meet app, it asks for a room name, to either create or join.  In effect, my users created their own room, instead of joining the one already in progress.  In the future, I may try starting a meeting with no password, to eliminate any possibility of anyone accidentally creating their own room.  When there's a core number of attendees having joined, then I'll create the password and let people reach out to me when they are prompted for a password.

With Zoom, you can include the password in the invitation link.  That's one advantage Zoom has over Jitsi Meet, but I do wonder if there's some coding that can be added to a Jitsi Meet link that would include the password.  I'll check that out and report back...

LET US GET JIGGLY WITH JITSI MEET

The Internet is great but sometimes searching it without the exact term to look for can be an exercise in futility.  I first heard about Jitsi as a great alternative to Zoom, the videoconference service that suddenly took over the market in the age of COVID-19, on one of the podcasts hosted by Leo Laporte.  It's open-source (read:free, to most people) and has no time-limit, not like the 45-minute constraint faced by Zoom non-subscribers.  Some time later, someone else mentioned it so I decided to check it out.  On a side note, it annoys me greatly that many people these days don't go directly to a website even when one is give to them, but instead first go to Google.com or such and search for said web site.  Such action can be so time-wasting, as you don't necessarily find what you need right away.  Such is the case with me and Jitsi, in the beginning.

All I had to go by was the term Jitsi so I had to search for it.  One link after another, I found myself downloading some Jitsi application for the Mac that prompted me to login, either via Google Talk, AIM, or some other chat network.  Definitely not what I was looking for.  I used to use x number of chat clients and it was such a pain keeping so many accounts and passwords.  I never want to go back to that.  Then there was some other Jitsi thingamajitsi that can be downloaded to have my own Jitsi server.  Good grief, I just want to start a meeting with someone to test things out, why do I have to setup a server just for that?  I started to try to find documentation for Jitsi.  Some doc pointed me to jit.si but it's a dead link.  Some other doc had a nice table of content but page after page merely says Welcome to Jitsi with no useful content whatsoever.  Talk about going down the rabbit hole!  Running into cul-de-sacs on the information highway!

What I should really search for was Jitsi Meet.  People wrongly associate terms with the actual things themselves regularly, either because they are too familiar with the product, or just ignorance.  I've heard users refer to Google Chrome, the web browser, as just Google.  It dries me nuts!  The best thing I could have done, assuming I had the exact info handy, was to go straight to https://meet.jit.si/ .  Jitsi Meet's approach is a bit different, in that you just enter a room name and away you go.  The Jitsi Meet web site has some code running that makes up random room names for visitors to use.  I was initially lost and used one of those random names just to see what's going on.  The thing is just click in the box where the name is being generated and make up your own name then you are all set.  Note that there is no scheduling capability.  You just create the room on the fly, when everyone gets out, the room disappears.  Past room names are remembered by the web browser or smartphone app, so the room can be created anew when needed  In a way it looks like the meeting can be scheduled, but it's really not.

Once in a meeting, things are not that much different than Zoom or other videoconference web sites.  You can mute yourself, mute participants if you are the host, blur the background, start a chat, the usual stuff.  End-to-end encryption is in beta but that makes Jitsi Meet attractive security-wise. You cannot setup a fancy virtual background, so it's a minor loss.  (Ironically, just the other day I spent much time cobbling together a process to make fancy video of names of Zoom participants.  Now the video is useless for these Jitsi Meeting.)

On a computer, you truly don't need any software.  I discovered later the chat client I downloaded is Jitsi Desktop.  It has little to do with the videoconferencing capability of Jitsi Meet.  Jitsi Meet may be a side project of Jitsi Desktop, but for the average user pretend you never heard of Jitsi Desktop.  Just go straight to meet.jit.si .  Likewise, you don't need to install any server software if all you want to do is host or attend a meeting.  The server stuff is for the Linux platform anyway, like Debian or Ubuntu.  I don' care what the Linux gurus say, the average user doesn't need to know about Linux.  One more time, meet.jit.si is all you need.  You do need to setup a name before you can participate in a chat, but that's the extent of "setting up" to use Jitsi Meet on a computer.

On a smartphone, you do need to install the free app.  It's straightforward, nothing to stress about.  In case you somehow have to type the name of the meeting, it is case-insensitive, i.e. case doesn't matter.  I was worried since Jitsi Meet is open-source and since there was mention of Linux and Unix, a world where case matters, that Jitsi Meetings are case-sensitive also but luckily it's not.

Jitsi Meet is a very viable alternative to Zoom.  I got free minutes from Zoom before, I don't know what algorithm determined that, so it's possible your Zoom meeting is long enough to get things done.  However, if you don't want to worry about time-limit and can live without the convenience of having a schedule, or the fancy virtual backgrounds, Jitsi Meet is a natural choice, especially for those mindful of spending money.

MAKING OF CUSTOM, FANCY-NAME VIDEOS

May someday someone will write a program that lets you type in a word, then animate it in some fancy way, save the animation in some video formats, and finally combine a few of such videos into a longer one.  Maybe it already exists but I just don't know about it.  It may cost a lot of money or may be totally free.  I do have my own process and it only costs me the price of buying AmigaForever.


It is not a pretty process but it works for me.  To review, this is one example of the end product of my process, just a couple of names written in some fancy way:

The first step is to make the animation in PersonalPaint (PPaint), a paint program for the Amiga platform.  I run E-UAE emulator on my Mac and make use of the necessary Amiga programs and such from the AmigaForever package.  The Amiga platform is blessed to have these AnimatedFonts created just for the platform.  I think Adobe AfterEffects may have something similar, but I don't have the money for Adobe products.  The AnimatedFonts may have been created originally for the DeluxePaint program but PPaint also supports them.  PPaint takes the tedium out of using the AnimatedFonts by using ARexx, a scripting language for the Amiga, based on the standard Rexx.  You select the crown icon (rex = king), choose the proper script and fill in some parameters then execute the script.  In my case, I use only the Animate Text and the Save to GIF scripts.  The Amiga platform has its own AnimBrush animation format that most of the rest of the world doesn't care about, so to have the product used outside of the Amiga platform it's necessary to convert the animbrush files to the animgif format.  Name by name, I would write them then convert to animgif.  I find that having each frame set to 10 and the last frame set to 60 show the animation at a reasonable speed.  I also do not use Transparency so that the animation appears on a black background instead of a white one.

Animgif files are great but for my purpose I need something in a video format.  I cannot recall if I spent much time researching but my conversion tool of choice is via the web site EZGIF.com.  There are many tools to slice and dice animgif files but to me the most useful is converting them to MP4.  As soon as I click Save, the MP4 comes down with some default name.  I would go into my Downloads folder and rename the file to match the name from the animgif.

Not too long ago I finally discovered the joy of using iMovie.  It was a natural progression to try to use iMovie to compile my various MP4 into one nice movie. Alas, that's not the case.  For some reason, some MP4 wouldn't play properly.  Instead of starting from the beginning they would start somewhere in the middle and ends somewhere else near the end.  The files would play fine in VLC or QuickTimePlayer, they just don't play well within iMovie.  I also tried the free Spark Editor from Adobe, same result.  Very weird.  Luckily, I stumbled upon ClipChamp.com and it works like a charm.  The interface is very similar to iMovie, maybe it's just a standard thing.  You can even add generic music and other effects but I decided to keep things simple and only use ClipChamp to string the various MP4 files into one movie.  Exporting the movies at the lowest resolution is free and that's by me.

There you have it, quite a process but it works:

1. PersonalPaint either on a real Amiga computer or an emulator.  The nice thing with the emulator is the resulting GIFs are on the host computer.  You don't have to worry about getting them off an Amiga computer to some web-enabled machine to use the online tools mentioned.
2. EZGIF.com to convert the animgif files to MP4
3. ClipChamp.com to combine the few MP4 files into a bigger video.  I was able to combine nine video files, they are short to begin with though.

FREE CUSTOM ZOOM BACKGROUND VIDEO

Free is good, right?  I have had my share of receiving free stuff from the Internet, yes they do exist.  Here's my little gift to the Internet in general.

I have a need to show a video with the names of members of my Zoom workout group.  We are not supposed to run together any more, so we meet over Zoom.  We each do our own thing, be it treadmill, running-in-place, exercise bike, elliptical, or even actual running on the street.  I've been using my StravaArt as a static background picture and want to step up my game.  The process is rather involved but here's the offer:  provide me a series of names and for each name I will make a video with the fancy AnimatedFont shown in the second video.  I then connect all the individual videos into one long one that you can use as as virtual background video during Zoom meetings.  Or whatever use you can do with a video, it'll be just an MP4 file.  There is a limited of six AnimatedFonts available, but the way they are written can add a little variety.  Left to right or simultaneously.  Also right to left if you really want to go that far.  Just leave a short list of names, say up to ten, optionally specify the font for each name and the way the name is written.  I'll reply with a link to my Google Drive where you can download the MP4 file.

I'll get into the nitty-gritty details about making the videos in the next post.

GOOD OL' WALL STREET POWERBOOK G3

In recent days, I played around with some old computers I have in my attic and elsewhere.  Today I spent some time with my first Mac computer, a Macintosh Powerbook G3, aka Wall Street.  I re-learned so many things I need to write this down somewhere easily accessible, maybe the general public can find some useful info, too.

I got the old Powerbook with Mac OS 9.x and now it runs some early version of OS X.  I found the preference setting to reboot into OS 9 but then it seems to be stuck when I tried to locate the equivalent option to reboot into OS X.  Second time around booting into OS 9 I gave Startup Disk some extra time to crunch the hard drive to present the OS X boot folder.  Whew!  Not that I plan to do anything useful with it.

How did we get by back in those dark days!?  A laptop with no WiFi?!  No freedom of movement, just tied to whatever desk that has an Ethernet cord connected to the router!  The optical drive was just a CD-R, I thought it was DVD!  No wonder there was no DVD Player application in the computer.  Still, when I inserted a regular music CD nothing happened.  No icon for the disc, iTunes didn't see it as a source.  Maybe back then OS X or 9 didn't support importing of music?  Who knows, but I am not going to sweat it, for now.

It was my first Mac and I spent much time and energy to expand it. I think it came with a removable battery and a removable optical drive.  A little knob at the front left and right corners is used to eject the whole unit.  On the left bay I added a SuperDisk removable drive from VST Technologies, with capacity of 120 MB!  The battle between Iomega Zip and Bernoulli whatever-its-name was still going on and the max capacity at the time was 100 MB.  So VST outdid those guys by 20 MB, except that it never caught on.  I have just one of those 120 MB disk.  The drive is capable of reading 3.5" floppy disks, woohoo!  I just test wrote a file to some random floppy that I still have.  I have this crazy idea that someday someone important will offer me a huge sum of money to get something off a floppy disk.  With this laptop, I can read the disk but then what?  It has a PCMCIA slot and I have a PC-card adapter to add two high-speed USB 2.0 ports, alas when I connected a 128 MB flash to it nothing happened.  (I was mindful to not use some flash drive with capacity of GBs in case the old OS doesn't recognize such high capacity.)  Maybe I would need additional driver.  Maybe the USB ports are for mice and such only.  I suppose worst-case scenario I can connect the laptop to an Ethernet network and transfer files via the network.

What a trip down memory lane!

BROOKLYN REBUS REDUX

Here's another simple puzzle.  Can you name the two-word neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York?  Again, ignore the fact that I drew an octopus but it does play a role in the puzzle because of the gear it's in.

BROOKLYN REBUS

I love puzzles, especially those that involve interpreting words or symbols that mean something else.  For example, a cluster of cloud with the number 9 means cloud nine, as in to be on cloud nine, meaning to be extremely happy.  Rebus may be one way to name such puzzles.  With the ongoing quarantine in NYC and elsewhere, I played a few already and finally decided to make one myself.  The puzzles I played have a whole grid of items, hopefully as I devote more time into making my original puzzles I will have a whole grid to share too.  I have a fascination with octopus and have a whole album in Facebook devoted to sighting of them, so my first thought is to both entertain my octopus fans and be unique with my puzzles by always include the creature in my drawings.

Can you guess the neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York depicted in the drawing below?

I HEART iMOVIE, SORT OF

It is indeed true that Necessity is the Mother of Invention.  No, I didn't invent anything that can change the world drastically.  It's just that all these times as a Mac owner I rarely play with iMovie, which is part of the iLife suite of multimedia applications bundled with every Macintosh computer.  When my son was young, I may have dabbled a bit, baby videos and all.  Maybe my Mac back then was too old and slow, or maybe I didn't have the time like I do now during the pandemic quarantine, but I didn't make anything out of iMovie.

I run a very active alumni group for my high school and one day came across a YouTube video that turned out to be popular with the group.  Then some time later I discovered that the video was blocked by YouTube, because of some copyright issue with the music used.  It's still there, maybe viewable in some Communist country that doesn't care about copyright laws, just not available where I live.  I was able to contact the person who posted the video and after much waiting finally got a hold of the video file, some 700 MB in size and in the WMV format.

The entire video is 35 minutes in length and would need to have certain sections having no sound because of copyright.  From my past dealing with uploading videos to Facebook, it's best not to have a big file.  Facebook needs to do some processing and after the long wait to upload the big file, say anything 300 MB or bigger, there would be another delay before the video is viewable.  I was sure iMovie could do that for me - chop up the video into more digestible sections and zero out the sound level anywhere that there's music that may offend some copyright owner's feelings.

If it's something I have no idea how to proceed I would read up, perhaps spending an hour or so going through the online help.  But iMovie looks simple enough so I dove right in.  Making the first few clips was a pain!  Sure I got them made, but I was doing it the hard way.  Eventually I found the correct way, as far as I know, and I was quickly Splitting clips, Joining them, etc.  In the end, I was able to even re-combine all the various clips into one file to re-upload to YouTube, without the offending music.  If you are from Newtown High School of Elmhurst, Queens, New York, Class of 1994, check out the video:


NEWTON HIGH SCHOOL OF ELMHURST, QUEENS NY CLASS OF 1994 SENIOR VIDEO

MORNING ROTATION

I suspected the doves have some internal clocks that tell them when the rotation would happen, which happened yesterday around 9:15 A.M. This morning I camped out by the window since 7 and the rotation occurred around 8:45. Alas I didn’t have the camera ready to catch the birds together. It happened quickly, one came in the other flew away, no peck on the cheek, no “Catch you later, honey”.

HATCHING DUTY SWITCH

Five years ago a pair of mourning doves built a nest outside the window of my home office. I vaguely recalled that the birds took turn hatching the eggs. About a week ago, another pair built a nest but I didn’t happen to see more than one bird at a time. This morning I recorded the birds switching hatch duty. The smaller one is probably the female dove, which, through a simple contest with my Facebook friends, is named Rose. The male bird has no name yet. I hope the chicks will meet a better fate than those from five years ago...

WHAT IS YOUR (WORD) GAME?

As I spend most of my time at home, I find myself much involved in various word games on the smartphone or the laptop computer.  Before the pandemic, I regularly played Lexulous, as a Facebook app, with the only player I can count in the environment, and Words With Friends.  Through one of those ads that kept bombarding the WWF interface, I checked out Scrabble Go and am kinda addicted to it.  I may be wrong but it seems the tiles in Scrabble Go are purposely distributed as really lousy, to nudged players toward using the diamonds collected, or worse (for the players) cough up real money to buy power-ups etc.  The ads are a pain, too, but I just used that down time to close my eyes briefly.  In the Scrabble Go world, good players seem to be difficult to come by.  For me, a good player is someone who moves regularly and not once a day, but also someone with an average point per move similar to mine.

At times, opponents in Scrabble Go took too long to move so I recently resorted to playing Duel games.  Instead of having all the time in the world for each move, there's a time limit, go pass that limit and you lose your turn.  The board is also smaller and the game is limited to five moves.  It sounds stressful and it is.  Not a great way to relax but I hate waiting.  I do wonder if the players are real people.  Words With Friends have that, computer players, somehow I find it unappealing.  I remember in the old days playing chess against computer opponents.  The first few levels the computer would take forever to move, or make quick, totally dumb moves.  Then at some point it got really smart and never make mistakes so there's just no point of playing.  Some of the opponents in Scrabble Go Duel are like that.  They are really awful and try to spell long words but miss the high-score tiles altogether.  Then there are "people" who use fancy words that are found only in some medical dictionaries.

I miss playing the crossword puzzles in the free newspaper Metro New York, which not long ago combined with the other free daily news, AM New York.  I actually play the puzzle in both papers but I prefer Metro's because the grids are larger, easier on these old eyes.  I was really happy that the combined newspaper kept the larger format, same puzzles.  Now that I'm stuck at home as a non-essential non-employee, I cannot pick up the newspaper any more.  Recently I went online and printed out the puzzle for that day, plus the day before.  Yeah, I'm an old-fashioned guy who still prefer pencil and paper.  When you do the puzzle interactively, it's too tempting to click some button to get the answer.  I have lots of pencils anyway.  I rescue them whenever I see one laying on the street.  Happy Word Playing!

THE NEW NORMAL, UGH

The new normal is the new phrase in this trying time.  I hope it won't stay too long and we will eventually go back to the old normal that I was familiar with.  Something as simple as a grocery trip is all too complicated.  I used to just go to the store and buy what I need.  Ordering for delivery or pickup never crossed my mind, but last week I used the service, to avoid spending too much time outside of the house.  At first I thought delivery service was a no-brainer but it turned out delivery would take longer, list a week away.  So the next best thing was pickup service - you order what you want, you pay for it ahead of time, then you go to the store between certain assigned hours to pick the items up.  Simple, right?  There was a mention of a verbal confirmation will be made but it just didn't click in my head what that means.  So I went to the store, with mask and gloves, and learned that they were still one day behind with the order.  I get it, people not working, maybe things didn't get delivered, whatever.  I guess at least the store is still open, that there's a system for people to order online for pickup or delivery.  I'll be back out tomorrow to get the stuff, once verbal confirmation is received.

ZOOMIE ROOMIES

Zoom.us video conference service gained much popularity during this COVID-19 pandemic.  Free for 40 minutes  or available at some reasonable price, the web-based service is used by people quarantined in their houses to interact with other people quarantined in other houses.  I've seen Zoom meetings between members of orchestras, yoga teachers and students, the list goes on and on.  Just prior to me losing my desktop support job, because there's nobody around to need my support, I kept overhearing the manager of the group talk about users wanting to use Zoom.  Now it's everywhere and tonight I had some fun playing a trivia game over Zoom.

It is quite a lot of work to organize the game but I think we got the right people for the job.  Someone came up with all the questions and answers, the format, and someone else tallied the scores and sent the various teams into their Breakout Rooms so they can talk among themselves.  I named my team Zoomie Roomies, to reflect the fact that my team of four are split into two different physical rooms, two per room.  We were roommates of sort, but over Zoom.  I think I coined the phrase Zoomie to refer to users of Zoom.us service, but maybe someone already did that.  It does give me an idea for a cartoon, in a day when the current pandemic is over but we will have other issues related to Zoom.  Stay tuned!

LEARN WITH MAC GEEK GAB

I regularly listen to the Mac Geek Gab podcast.  Cool intro music but what I like the most are the quick tips etc.  Mind you, most of the time I cannot apply the tips but it's still good to know.  My Mac is not at the latest and greatest version of Mac OS X so those tips simply don't apply.  Other tips like WiFi meshing or RAID setup also don't help because I don't have the hardware.  At least not yet.  They do talk about iDevice's iOS and I finally found an applicable tip, namely the Shortcuts app for iPhone and such.  It's sort of like programming for the masses.  I haven't done much with it but quickly cobbled together two Shortcuts "scripts".  One is to turn off Bluetooth then turn on Low Power Mode.  I name it Save Energy.  Supposedly I should use that script each night before going to bed.  In the morning, I would run the Normal Energy script, which undoes those settings.  Just something to explore the Shortcuts app.  There is an Automation portion of Shortcuts that I haven't explored.  Logically, these scripts should run automatically at certain time of the day, as long as the iPhone is on.  Something else I will explore is what to play or act when the iPhone sees my car's Bluetooth system.  Happy Exploring!

NYS ON PAWS

Quarantine and loneliness can go together well.  A few weeks ago Governor Cuomo of New York State stated that the State was to be on P.A.U.S.E., where the acronym translates to some contrived meaning that basically says only essential businesses can stay open.  Shortly afterward the wordsmith in me thought of New York State on P.A.W.S.  My contrived meaning is Pets Are Wovewy Sidekicks, where Wovewy = Lovely, just the way pet owners talk to their pets, kinda like baby talk.  I wouldn't know since I never have a pet but I watch pet videos every now and then.  My little joke/pun is actually behind the time.  I thought the government would declare that everyone needs to have a pet.  On their own, people already ran out to animal shelters and cleared out all dogs and cats etc.  It's totally understandable.

A friend mentioned the lack of nipple rings but I'll them out for now.

DR. STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB

New York City's current dilemma is so depressing I finally decided to take my mind off current events by watching a movie.  I used the Crackle app on my iPhone and after some scrolling picked Dr. Strangelove, aka How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.  It is one of those movies that I saw snippets of back in the day of channel-flipping.  It is also the movie that got me to love the tune When Johnny Comes Marching Home.  Maybe it was the suspense and action that were pulsating on-screen, the tune is so memorable.

Without reading up about the movie, of all the times I saw short sections of the movie I didn't know that Peter Sellers played a few different roles in it.  What a talented man!  I knew him mostly as the clumsy Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther movies.  The Strangelove movie deals with nuclear annihilation but had its funny moments.  My favorite part is when Group Commander Mandrake asked a Colonel to shoot the Coca Cola vending machine to get him some coins so he could make a call to the President of the United States, to give the President the code to recall the B-52 bombers on their way to attack Russia.  The Colonel told Mandrake that if there really is no imminent nuclear war then Mandrake will have to face the wrath of the Coca Cola company.  Such absurdity is in many places throughout the movie.  Someone trying to reach some important general by phone and he was busy on the toilet seat and didn't even want to take the call afterward.  The Russian chairman insisting that he's more sorry than the U.S. President about the impending nuclear holocaust.  Some high-ranking general believing in conspiracy theories and putting in motion something that ultimately doomed the world.  Not a good choice of a movie that would cheer me up, even with the funny moments.  One man can really doom the world if not enough people try to stop him.

THE HISTORY OF LOVE

I picked up the book The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss, off the front porch of some house in Park Slope when I went for a run there last month, some day around Valentine's Day.  It is a common practice in that area of town, people just put stuff out on their porch to give away, sometimes with a sign that says "Free", other times none.  Sometimes I even carry books to the area and donate to the few Little Free Libraries in the area.  On that day, I failed in my mission to declutter because I think I also picked up some other books.

The History of Love sounds like an ambitious title, so grandiose, so historic.  It's sorta like the movie Inception, a book within a book.  Yes, there are characters inside the book that are connected to a book called, surprise surprise, The History of Love.  The beginning was pretty sad, much about an old man with no relatives counting the days until he dies.  So depressing, maybe that's why I couldn't get far.  Then a girl named Alma was introduced into the story, I didn't catch on right away that she was in the same universe as the old man.  As a matter of fact, in the same city, this great New York City of ours that is mostly a ghost town because of COVID-19.  In theory, with NYC on lockdown I should have plenty of time to read etc but I was just not in the mood for it.  Eventually I did and finished the book after a few nights as before-bed reading.  Once I saw how the story turned out, that the girl was trying to find the real people behind the book, that she would eventually meeting the old man, I went through the book much faster.  I did have to read the Wikipedia entry afterward to make sure I didn't miss anything.  In the old days, that would be a Cliff Note or Monarch Note.  Yup, I pretty much got the gist of the story.  Supposedly a movie was made out of it, but I am reluctant to see it so soon.  I'd rather see the movie, if I ever will, some time later when what I remember of the book is gone or mostly gone.  I think it's more enjoyable that way.

In the spirit of decluttering the house, I am thinking of offering the book to my local Buy Nothing group, although I am not sure if anyone will want it.  Who knows, when my local library first closed down for the immediate future I thought about raiding the nearest Free Little Library but I never followed through with the idea.