Adobe Lightrom 6

Once again I would like to beg Olympus to update their Olympus Viewer software so that it is usable because Lightroom is driving me nuts again.

So I have been having a problem that appears to be getting worse where as an editing session extends in time the performance of Lightroom diminishes.

Of late I have been keyword photos, approx 700 in a catalogue of 3000, well within the alleged capabilities of the product. After a few minutes responsiveness notably drops eg clicking to select an image starts to take a few seconds to respond. This continues until Lightroom becomes unresponsive. Other programs remain entirely unaffected and processor / memory / disk appear to be responding normally but Lightroom has lost itself. Unfortunately, if I leave it too late to restart Lightroom it is impossible to kill and my PC becomes unresponsive.

I have of course updated to the latest version 6.10.1 but that has made no difference at all.

There are multiple posts online with performance problems but there is a more fundamental issue and that is the "too_many_redirects" issue preventing login to Adobe forums.

I have no tried on Windows 10 Chrome, Edge and IE and all have the same problem. I have tried changing my profile name (why would that make any difference I ask!) and that does not work. I have tried on Android and that doesn't work.

Adobe seems to have a notably interest in charging significant sums of money for professional software and then appear to be unable to back that up with professional product or support.

Conservatives

Wow, they are all at it.

I would like to do a post on the lib dems (who?) but I suspect keeping their political ambition to about half the voting populace knowing the name of their leader (Farren perhaps? ) is sufficient for this time around.

Or perhaps talk about labour (who?), to be fair that is easier as their policies except under New Labour (aka conservative) have been the same for my whole life, overspend, break the economy, perpetuate old methods of working. They do add the new dimension of just what level of destruction to themselves they can cause by the old labour world clashing with the modern and a leader who is yet to show, we'll anything positive.

But no, stick with the conservatives who are proposing, for this 5 minutes anyway, that no one will have to sell their homes for care and we will be able to not spend it all. Not sure how that will get administered and not drained away by councils. The practical note here is that this seems disingenuous to me. At present one does  it have to sell ones home to cover care costs, they can be recouped from sale on death. What the Tories have not mentioned though is that any interest rate other than below inflation is compound and hence will escalate and given the current rate is massively over inflation it is clearly designed to take all remaining wealth at a punitive rate. Good luck not paying out that last 100k.

The Greens

Today on Radio 2 I heard that the Green party has a 4 day working week in their general election manifesto.

I am interested as to how this would work and be financed. I am contracted for a 5 day week, does that mean I would be stuck with that? Would I automatically change to a 4 day week? Would I automatically lose 20% of my salary or would I be paid overtime for day 5. Is there more chance I would get acknowledgement for all the extra hours I have to do anyway?  Other full timers will be on 5.5 or 6 day contracts.

It sounds like a policy that hasn't been thought out, sounds like a vote winner to me too.

To ask practical questions though, what is the benefit for employers? Sounds like more legislation, more staff and lots of transition to me. What is the benefit to the country? We have unemployment but do we have enough unemployed with sufficient skills in the correct locations to fill the 20 to 33% additional roles, a bit of fag paper maths suggests we have nowhere near enough unemployed regardless of skill and location.

Still, a 4 day week sounds good from where I sit.

Photography lessons learned

Between us we took something approaching 2,000 photos in our 2.5 weeks sojourn in Brazil. While taking photographs is "cheap" today there certainly is a case for taking the right photo at the time to reduce post processing time.

But there are probably two other lessons.

1. If taking photos for panoramas I need a system to clarify where a set of shots start and end to reduce trial and error.
2. More importantly, at the start of each trip make sure all of our devices have their time synchronised just like in all the best war movies before an attack - finding photos almost randomly spread and manually trying to get them into the correct sequence is a pain.

Microsoft Windows "Creator" Update

This last week has presented me with a challenge, you see Windows 10 now automatically downloads updates. I don't think this is a bad thing but if only Microsoft could get it's act together and deliver fully tested, safe software with a real purpose, instead I was presented with a "do you want to install me now, later or shall I pester the living daylights out of you until you lose the will to live and accept" dialog box for win 10 Creator's update.

This was actually interesting because for some reason Edge had opened, I wouldn't normally go anywhere near Microsoft Edge (aka Internet Explorer untested vNext, refer to previous comments about untested product) so I must have been desperate. I still have the default home page and it had several articles saying "Microsoft don't want you to install Creator's update".

Typical, as with previous updates, Microsoft have delivered a product that can cause reboot to fail.

So days later having rebooted and shutdown successfully, navigating the nag options on the shutdown panel and repeatedly dodging the "you haven't install me yet" notifications I accidentally pressed "Update and Reboot" instead of Shutdown. See what they did there, just like in some other Microsoft products the "do something really dangerous" option is placed right next to the do nothing option.

Well, to say that install took a while would be an understatement but it finally installed and rebooted successfully.

What do I get for the trouble? Oh Paint 3D! So let's see when I first got Windows (it seems that way, it isn't though because the first few versions of Windows didn't function, bring back GEM) I loaded up Paint, discovered it was a bare bones product aimed at 3 year olds and proceeded to ignore it except for those times I needed to modify a screenshot (until Snipping Tool, Microsoft you did good there, why is it so well hidden?).

So Paint 3D, well it's like Paint (is that now "Paint Old School", "Paint 2D" or just "Paint forget I happened"?) but with some 3d shapes. It feels tantalisingly close to a product with a purpose but it isn't

Anything else worth the hours of updates on the Creator's edition? No, nothing that I have found or I have seen suggested online.

What is worse is that it seems the update is trying to shutout low powered machines which must mean making Home Theatre PCs and those cheap Windows tablets redundant - suggests Microsoft is trying to reduce its market share (or has a new operating system it hopes people will buy not having been discouraged by the last abortive attempt).


Come on Microsoft show us a reason to keep loving Windows.