Refining technique improves pic

3D IMAGING This time I followed Marja-Leena's guidance. My £5 "swimming" Casio was scanned at 300 dpi (256 colours). Photoshop Elements was used to adjust the resolution to 72 ppi, to reduce the width to 200 pixels and to "save for web". The result is a 9 kb JPEG file.

It's an improvement on the flower (called Gypsophila according to my floricacious adviser) I scanned earlier. In this instance I left the scanner lid wide open; with the flower I propped the lid about 15 deg open to accommodate the black background card in an attempt to match the solid blackness Marja-Leena achieved. Fully open results in this maroon background; using the card came closer to black but, because the card was angled, caused unwanted reflections.

My conclusion is that Marja-Leena's scanner is optically superior to mine. Not surprising since it cost more than three times as much. What is pleasing is that I don't appear to have encountered the shallow depth-of-field problem that Lucy experienced.

This was purely an exercise to test the procedure. I'll keep an eye open for an opportunity which tests it for real.

Power drills - defining historical artefact

I distrust golden eras. The seventeenth century may have been great for poetry and playwriting but who cares if most of us only lived to thirty-seven. Or whatever.

The golden era of technology is today. In the 1960s we lived in an unheated flat in Stoke Newington and were so poor I had to save up to buy a power drill. A power drill! The basis of all home-based DIY. What’s more it was a lousy drill and through the louvres I could watch excessive arcing (the result of poor tolerance engineering) destroy the commutator ring.

Last week my brother had the almost unheard-of experience of having to replace his car battery. It was his own fault; his car had stood idle for 77 days while he walked from Land’s End to John O’Groats. Otherwise present-day batteries go on and on. Compare this with the 1960s when they needed intensive care if they were to start the car after a chilly weekend. Ominously, cars still came with a starter handle then.

Many talk mistily about corner-shop grocers. Forgetting that in those un-barcoded days, it took twenty minutes to buy some cheese and a few ounces of tea. And now my rant against a rosy-tinted past goes out into the world almost for free. Back then the prospect of a “long distance call” was terrifying.

Feeble steps towards third dimension

Following Marja-Leena's wonderful results in scanning three-dimensional objects here are two of my attempts. One was scanned at 400 dpi and one at 800 dpi. The latter resulted in a massive 17.2 MB file. Not that it makes much difference here. Both emerged as TIFs which are unacceptable to Blog. So both had to be enormously downsized and saved as JPEGs. The resultant degradation of quality is plain.

One thing seems clear. Both Lucy (who also tried this exercise and was disappointed by a very shallow depth of field) and I need better scanners. Marja-Leena's cost over $Can500 and allows her to scan to an incredible 1200 dpi. Also, Marja-Leena shows her pix on a website and is not restrained by the resolution limitations of Blog. But let's face it, I'm guessing.

VERIFICATION I'm sure I'm rediscovering the wheel here but Blog comments don't always go through the first time. Or even the fifth. I was horrified when this first happened to me, imagining duplicate after duplicate piling up at the addressee's blog. Now I've come to regard this as the norm. Just repeat the silly alphabet thing over and over (not forgetting to insert the password each time) until the comment is posted. I apologise for all this. I'm still only in my third month

Illness and disease - bad for health

Probability is a very hard branch of maths that exercises actuaries, the people who provide the glib yet unexpected reasons why you won’t get your insurance dosh. Here’s an example of actuarial small print.

I was invited to take out a policy to cover a very mean funeral. A meat-paste-sandwich funeral. But not even meat paste if my earlier-than-expected death were attributable to:

* Illness, disease or naturally occurring condition.
* Suicide, attempted suicide or intentional self-injury.
* Being under the influence of alcohol or of any drug except as prescribed by a registered medical practitioner.
* Being engaged in aviation except as a fare-paying passenger on a recognised airline.
* Being actively engaged in any riot, civil commotion or usurpation of power, or participating in any military, naval or air force action.

The questions rise like flies round a dust-bin. To die of illness? Would clipping my toe-nails constitute intentional self-injury? Am I covered if I dodge my plane fare? And thank goodness my power usurping tendencies are now over.

I’m tempted to go for it and sign up for bungee-jumping.

The front "garden" is even lower maintenance.

Let's hear it for trams (and 3D imaging)

I never understood why authorities in large UK cities (London and my home town, Bradford, to name but two) took against trams. True the routes were inflexible and the vehicles noisy. But compared with their “greenness”, durability, and high average speeds on dedicated – as opposed to shared – tracks these problems could have been resolved.

Re-introducing them now would be expensive. Yet their unhampered progress (on unshared track, that is) would be a genuine carrot to tempt drivers away from cars at rush-hours. Unlike buses which suffer the same traffic jams as cars.

Pittsburgh had a tram system when I lived there (1966 – 1972). It was ramshackle but did the job. It did share downtown roadspace with cars; however drivers were uneasy when a tram loomed up in the rear mirror and did their best to get out of the way.

Hanover, in northern Germany, has a permanent site for huge industrial exhibitions. The modern tram system there is ideal for coping with temporary population surges.

CHECK THIS OUT! Did you know your scanner can handle three-dimensional images in a way that improves on your camera? Click on Marja-Leena's site. For further proof click on Onion skin I'm proud I played a small part in encouraging Marja-Leena to publicise this technique.

Oh sole mio

Do cobblers still exist? Not that they’ve received much help from me over the past decade. My footware routine is unvarying: buy trainers from M&S, wear them until they start pumping in rain water (less than a year), buy another pair, drop used pair into garbage bin.

In my youth all shoes were repaired. Our cobbler was a caricature. Short, hunched, bright-eyed, Mediterranean complexion, loquacious to the point of being prepared to talk to a ten-year-old. What about? I have no idea. All I remember is the backdrop – a huge table piled high with scraps of leather. Plus two items of technology.

In the corner a powerful mangle or wringer. Except that the rollers, instead of having parallel sides, mated convex with concave. Before attachment to the shoe the rough-cut flat sole was passed through the mangle giving it the contours of a shallow dish. I cannot imagine why this was necessary. Nor do I intend to embarrass my correspondents by asking them. Knowing why would require familiarity with those dark, cold, hungry years of Britain’s immediate post-war.

The other item (in fact there were several) was the sharpest knife in Christendom. The blade was hook-shaped and one tour of the newly attached sole was enough to remove all the overlap. As if the leather were a damp Digestive.

And then there was the smell. Ah…

I can’t match the lovely horticultural close-ups of my correspondents so here’s a long shot of part of our garden. It’s low maintenance.

A moment in the world of logistics

In cramped countries like Switzerland and Japan ground space is money. So companies put up high warehouses. But there are limits. A warehouse a mile high would cost a fortune. Putting goods into it – and getting them out – would take time and time is money.

Also, the higher you go the more expensive the equipment. At lower levels a forklift truck will do, beyond that hardware evolves until the system is completely automated. Big money.

A forklift benefits over automation in that it can “free range” – carrying goods at ground level, sometimes taking them out of the racking and loading directly on to a lorry. Most warehouses use forklifts.

When I wrote professionally about logistics, I visited a supermarket warehouse where it was conceded the height limit for a free-ranging forklift system had been reached. The vehicles were reach trucks, more stable variants of the counterbalanced forklifts most people know.

These trucks could lift to just over 11 m. Viewed from beneath this is some distance but I was on a walkway near the roof looking down. The truck cab looked microscopic; the mast uprights throbbed, twitched even groaned with the effort of holding the load that high. Journalists should avoid going anthropomorphic but in this case it was inescapable. In any case, it worked.

There's more to music than just notes

Concert organisers truckle to soloists. Their piece always precedes the interval so that they can be off the premises before I’ve reached the end of the ice-cream queue. You’d expect a concerto to provide the climax.

At least there’s an entr’acte with a piano concerto. Sometimes it’s more fun than the music. Three men, not wearing tuxedos (Why do I detest that unsuitable musicianly garb so much?) march on to the stage, clothe the Steinway in a duvet, turn it on its side, remove the legs, add more duvets, manhandle the rather sad looking parcel on to a trolley and then wheel the whole thing away very, very carefully. The audience at Birmingham last month granted a polite round of applause to the spectacle.

There’s more technology before the concert when the Steinway expert tweaks the machine according to the pianist’s preference but mere punters don’t get to see that. In compensation there was quite a lot of fiddling with the twin harps that feature in Shostakovich Five.

A concert grand must represent the ultimate in objects that can’t be mass-produced. I wondered how much they cost and was surprised to find that £50,000 is absolute tops and you can pick one up for £25,000. Apparently they don’t improve with age as a Guarnerius does.