Stayed in bed till quarter after eight this morning, feeling very sinful. Cold outside the covers, plus the kitten didn’t want to move and how could I be so heartless.
Finally get up, light a fire, and even an hour later with a lovely coal bed I can’t keep a fire going. Gad, I hate this stove. Tomorrow, oh, maybe tomorrow. Maybe a mere 24 hours from now I’ll be the proud owner of a wood stove that actually works.
I’d stopped using the damned thing at all until a couple of days ago. The weather has been lovely, day after day, lots of sun and afternoons in the sixties. But the nights get colder and colder, which makes mornings a bit shivery. Sunday morning, knowing I had to start building fires again, I debated the costs and benefits of cleaning the stovepipe just to settle my mind. “You’ve got to be kidding,” said Lazy Joel. “Two, maybe three days and you’ll be replacing the pipe entirely. Why go to all that trouble?” “Because that’ll be the two or three days when you burn the cabin down,” retorted Paranoid Joel. For the record, Paranoid Joel won that debate. So now I’m remembering the other reason not to bother starting a fire: Keeping it lit is a full-time job.
Also, a mere six weeks since the pipe’s last cleaning, it really needed cleaning.
I need a new blog camera. The one Claire donated a few years ago hiccuped on and off for a couple of weeks, and seems to have permanently died. Since all my money is sequestered in the Woodstove Fund, I did blow twelve bucks for a dollar-store cheapie and some batteries. I feared this might be money wasted, since the package made it clear I needed to upload the software from this CD to make it work. Since I use Linux, that can be a problem.
It was, and that’s all I’ll say about that. Still need a new blog camera, but it’ll have to wait. Stove first, then glasses. After that, a camera will start sounding more important.
It looks like my host server isn’t done having troubles, as some of you may have noticed this morning. These things happen when you depend upon the hardware of strangers, I suppose. Hopefully it’ll stay up now.
It’s just a grumbly morning.
Joel, I’m sorry about one more dead camera. But do you really need the software for the camera you just bought? Maybe so. But I’ve always just used the free open-source graphics program, the GIMP, to open and manage images from cameras. Won’t work with you new one?
What Claire says! What they call software is as likely crapware or malware – maybe both. The linux aspect could complicate things – but generally all this digital camera business involves is accessing a removeable drive – usually via USB. (one of my earlier cameras used a floppy adapter)
Same goes for the ‘software’ that comes along with the disc when one gets real film developed and digitally converted – just another way to cludge up a hard drive.
Recently ran across a nice and lightweight photo editing software for PCs – and it’s free:
FastStone Image Viewer
It has most of the functionality of my paid Photoshop – seems to consume less resources and seems better designed at the interface. That’s all FWIW – of course.
I wasn’t too worried when I couldn’t load the gulch here, but when I couldn’t load Eric Peter’s blog either, I wondered what was going on. Went through the nonsense of downloading an update for Firefox and a few other things… but still couldn’t load these two sites. Everything else worked fine. At least the updates don’t seem to have broken anything – but now I have some silly thing at the top of my right click menu… “After the deadline” – but it doesn’t DO anything when clicked so I’m really puzzled. Oh well. Now I think I’ll go see if Eric’s blog will load.
Downloaded that photo editor, PNO… I’m not too happy with Gimp, so maybe this will be better. And yes, the only way I can access the photos on my camera is by using it as an external storage device. None of the photo programs will talk to the camera to download things the normal way.
No, I’ve got a perfectly good photo editor in Gimp. But the computer doesn’t seem to recognize the camera’s memory card. I suppose that’s what the software’s supposed to do, but I can’t open it to see.
What kind of memory card has it got, Joel? And do you have a card reader (really, really cheap on eBay) or are you just connecting the camera to the computer with a cable? Sounds like a solvable problem; you have geeks on tap here, you know.
Claire, I don’t even know if this thing has a memory card as such. The manual doesn’t mention one, there’s no way to remove it, but there are lots of warnings that I should save pictures before removing the batteries. So that tells me there’s just a volatile memory.
The CD contains a camera driver that must be loaded, but apparently it’s only compatible with M$ and Mac. When I load the CD the installer won’t start, and the .exe file won’t open.
Hello, ML! I’m not sure that software will work with linux products – I think it’s only for Windows platforms. I could be wrong but I’ve not seen anything in the documentation that mentions linux. I’m still in the habit of referring to Windows machines as PCs – to the exclusion of Mac and linux and other OSs – I should have been clearer.
Joel – I’m still working on getting a grip on linux – but if you want to volunteer a bit more about the camera and the way it’s supposed to interact with your computer (via USB – I assume) – I’d be willing to bang on it a bit. First thing I’d probably need is the name and model designation of the camera – and to know if you already use the USB connections on your machine. (i.e. – flash drives, external mouse, etc.)
Sure, I use USB connections for all sorts of things. With the old camera, I just plugged it in and it acted like an external drive. My computer doesn’t recognize this camera – which also connects via USB – and the manual predicted that it would not without the new driver. It’s just a cheap dollar-store Vivitar 69379.
Looks like you got that camera working? The pic quality and resolution are about what I’d expect of the camera after reading about it! (the pic of the stove)
Anyway – if you haven’t gotten it working yet let me know and I’ll pass along a handful of links that may help.