A.C. Flory's Blog, page 32

The tiniest Aussie van-house

I’ve been fascinated by the idea of Tiny Houses for years, but this one literally blew my mind:

I’m not sure I’m tidy enough to live in such a…neat…space, but I totally fell in love with the aesthetics of it.

Still smiling,
Meeks

Derila Refund!

A short while ago I wrote a post about a terrible experience I had while trying to buy one, single pillow online. You can read that post here.

Today I’m overjoyed to be able to say that the full refund hit my bank account:

A screenshot of the refund

I’m still waiting on my new card, but at least I have my money back. I credit this blog for at least some of that. My thanks to all of you for having my back.

love,
Meeks

When a Pantster has to Plot – or how I wish I knew then what I know now…

Excel worksheet showing the timeline for each character

I consider myself to be a pantster because I don’t plot the events of my stories out in advance, but as you can see from the Excel worksheet above, there comes a time when plotting is a necessity.

Every ‘event’ shown in the top half of the timeline has already happened – in book 1 of Vokhtah – and generally speaking, I managed to keep that story nice and tight. The trouble started when I first realised that the timeline for the caravan to and from Deepwater was way out of whack.

That unpleasant discovery lead to the first Excel spreadsheet which reverse engineered the plot, but only for the Blue/Messenger and the Apprentice. If you haven’t read Vokhtah, don’t worry. All you need to know is that the Blue-disguised-as-a-Messenger and the na-Seneschal-disguised-as-an-Apprentice were the two main characters. Reverse engineering their timelines necessitated the making of a map:

Map of Vokhtah created using Inkarnate

The grid on the map allowed me to get a realistic [ahem] idea of how long the different parts of the journey would take. That was when I realised just how out of whack my guestimate in Vokhtah actually was.

What the hell was I going to do about it? Vokhtah was already published and book 2 relies on that timeline. Could I fudge it?

The simple answer is no, I can’t fudge it because a small fudge in book 1 will snowball in subsequent books as I weave the lives of the other characters into the storyline.

In desperation, I went back to Excel and created the spreadsheet you see up the top.

I’ve now got a pretty precise handle on the various timelines, but what’s become painfully obvious is that a few things will have to be changed in book 1. They’re not major things; the story stays the same. What will change is the sequence of some of the chapters. Chapters, and the sequence in which they occur, give the Reader a sense of time passing. I needed more time for certain things to happen, even though they aren’t mentioned at all in book 1. These are the things that happen concurrently with the main plot and lead directly to plot events in the next book.

What kind of things? Gestation, for one. The Six of Needlepoint is mated on day 16 of the story [in book 1]. Something has to happen XX number of days later, but it can only happen if the foetus has had a reasonable amount of time to develop…

Okay, I can see some of you rolling your eyes in disbelief. Why don’t I simply make the gestation period fit what the plot demands?

The reason is that biology is my thing, and although I’m writing about aliens, there are certain things that probably stay the same for all carbon based lifeforms – the bigger the animal, the longer its gestation period. So yes, I could fudge it, the Vokhtah series is a work of fiction about a place and a people that do not exist, but… -deep sigh- I HATE scifi that fudges things.

So, now to my regrets. When I published Vokhtah [book 1 of the Suns of Vokhtah], publishing anything was a brand new experience. I did a lot of research about how to publish as an Indie, but there were so many things I did not know, could not know. One of those things is that the first book of a series sets the rules of the world in place. Subsequent books have to live with those rules. You can’t just suddenly change a core constraint – like time – without ruining the story for people,like me, fussy, picky people with a decent memory.

By the time I’d written the Innerscape series I knew better and did not publish book 1 until the whole damn lot was right. I think it shows in a plot that is tight, despite being written by a pantster. How can I do any less for Vokhtah?

The result of all this soul searching is that once the whole series is finished, I’ll put out a new edition of the first book before I publish the subsequent books. I just hope that doesn’t mean I’ll lose all the hard won reviews dating all the way back to 2013.

Anyway… every decision has consequences, and I’ll just have to live with mine, but boy do I wish I’d known all this in 2013.

Anyone else have regrets?

Meeks-with-a-sad-face

Derila Pillows – faulty merchant interface? or a deliberate scam?

I haven’t been sleeping well for a while now – neck problems – so this morning I bit the bullet and went looking for a better pillow. I found glowing testimonials for a new kind of pillow – the Derila. When I checked the price it seemed reasonable, so I started the process of buying one…ONE.

By the time I reached the bit at the end where you have to confirm your order, I noticed that I’d been charged for 4 pillows, not one. I tried to fix the quantity but the website wouldn’t let me. So I regretfully decided I’d live without and did NOT press that last, all important button.

Imagine my horror when I checked my online banking and discovered that the website had taken my money anyway. I am now $152.00 poorer. On an age pension that is a lot.

This is the email I sent to Derila:

I did not CONFIRM payment on any ‘order’ so charging my bank for $152.00 is a fraudulent transaction.

Either the whole Derila website is a scam or there is something very wrong with your merchant interface.

Why?

1. Because I only ordered 1 pillow and was charged for 4.

2. There was no way to change the quantity so I decided not to go ahead. That should have stopped the transaction but…

3. When I checked my online banking a few minutes later, I was horrified to see that I had been charged $152.00, for Derila Pillows I had not ordered.

Next, I rang my bank and asked for a stop payment, but apparently the payment had already gone through at my end. I was told that I had to wait for the payment to go through at the merchant end before the bank could begin the process of claiming a refund on my behalf.

To add insult to injury, the bank also said I would need a new card to be sure I wasn’t scammed again. Now I have to wait 5 – 10 business days to get a new card. I am furious.

I intend to post the contents of this email onto my blog. It should be live by 2:00 pm. In that blog post I will tell my readers that I will update them on the result.

If I do not get a refund, I will do two things:

1. I will post a second article updating my readers about what happened to me and asking them to reblog the info. so that no one else ends up getting scammed.

2. Next, I will contact SCAM Watch and report the website for fraudulent activity. With any luck, Derila.com.au will be forced to shut down.

This is what I will do. What will Derila do?

As per that email, 2pm has come and gone so I’m posting this. Also as per the email, I will update you all on what happens next. I hope it’s a refund, but I’m not holding my breath.

Apologies for the angry post, but to be conned like this, when I’m so damn careful, is beyond infuriating.

Meeks

ESO player housing: Moon Sugar Meadow

I completed this house some time ago, but my video capturing and editing skills have only just caught up. This video includes a number of new features, including a soundtrack:

I still have a lot to learn but I now know how to use the ESO in-game camera a bit better. It doesn’t matter how good your editing skills may be if the raw footage is poor quality.

On the video editing front, I’ve learned how to:

Cut and splice the video footage with still images to create a smooth flowing visual narrative,Focus on important images using freeze frame,Narrate the important ‘bits’,Add a ‘soundtrack’ to help tie the whole thing together.

I’m particularly proud of the soundtrack as I was just experimenting, and it worked. lol

For anyone who’s interested, I recorded roughly ten minutes of video just for the background music. Then I took the video into VideoStudio Pro 2021 [the software I use for editing] and ‘split’ the audio out of the video. This left me with just an audio track. I then added the audio track to the completed video.

What all that means is that the video is made up of three layers:

the edited video [complete with sound effects like bird calls and footsteps],the voice over narration, andthe music soundtrack.

Once my skills improve a bit more, I hope to be able to create how-to videos and maybe, one day, a trailer for my books. That’s all in the future though. For now, I’m still on a massive learning curve. Thanks for coming along for the ride.

cheers,
Meeks

Aussie Innovation : Wave Swell

This is a really exciting innovation because it’s simple and [relatively] cheap to manufacture and run. That means it has the potential to be used worldwide, wherever a country has access to a beach.

I’m really proud that it’s one of ours. You can read about the whole thing in the New Atlas article.

cheers,
Meeks

A Negative RAT!

I’m getting my second booster [4th jab] tomorrow, so I thought I’d better do a RAT [Rapid Antigen Test] before hand…just in case. As you can tell by the title, I’m still Covid-free.

Given how long the Offspring and I have been self-isolating, you’d think we’d have nothing to worry about, but the reality is that we haven’t been living in a complete bubble. We do have to go to the chemist [pharmacist] every so often, or the IGA [local independent supermarket], or into a service station to pay for petrol, or into a confined space for a booster. We’re always masked, but these days most other people are not. So when you get the sniffles, you worry.

In this case, I was 99.9% certain we only had hay fever – the wattle is blooming like crazy at the moment. Nevertheless, with so many people around us catching the damn virus, it’s hard not to worry. Anyway, it seems we’re still part of the roughly 17 million Australians who still haven’t had the virus.

In case anyone’s wondering, the booster I’m getting tomorrow will be Pfizer. Working on the theory that mixing and matching increases the effectiveness of the current vaccines/boosters, I’ve had the two initial AZ jabs, one Moderna jab and now one Pfizer jab. I guess that makes me a Heinz.

cheers,
Meeks

Hydrogen – the perfect renewable

Hydrogen has become something of a buzz word lately, but is it really a magic bullet for solving our energy problems? The answer is a qualified ‘yes’.

But first, what is hydrogen?

Hydrogen is the ‘H’ in H2O.

What is H2O? Why it’s good old fashioned water, that’s what!

About 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, so if we can find a cheap, easy way to extract hydrogen from water we’ll be half way there to our renewable magic bullet.

We can already use electrolysis to split water atoms into hydrogen and oxygen, but the process requires both energy AND catalysts like platinum and iridium. If we use solar or wind power to extract the hydrogen then we’re still left with the problem of the platinum and iridium, neither of which is cheap.

Luckily, a lot of research is being directed at the extraction process. One team, headed by Dr Alexey Ganin of the University of Glasgow, is working on ‘pulsing electric current through a layered catalyst’ in order to extract the hydrogen. With this discovery, the pulse is the key.

Another team, from Stanford University, ‘developed a low-voltage, single-catalyst water splitter that continuously generates hydrogen and oxygen for more than 200 hours’. The beauty of this discovery is that the catalyst used is nickel-iron oxide. Not platinum or some other rare earth.

Clearly then, the extraction process is being improved in leaps and bounds, but what of the other side of the equation, the use of hydrogen as an energy source?

At the moment, hydrogen ‘…can be physically stored as either a gas or a liquid. Storage as a gas typically requires high-pressure tanks (5000–10,000 psi tank pressure). Storage of hydrogen as a liquid requires cryogenic temperatures because the boiling point of hydrogen at one atmosphere pressure is -252.8°C’ [Hydrogen Storage – Basics].

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I’d like to be anywhere near a hydrogen car if/when it collides with a truck and goes boooom!

To be a true magic bullet, hydrogen has to be both cheap and easy to produce and cheap and easy to store [and then use]. It also has to be safe. This is where new research is really powering ahead. Recently, not one, but two, separate research teams have come up with novel ways to store and transport hydrogen.

I’m very pleased to say that a team from Deakin University, right here in Australia, has come up with ‘a super-efficient way to mechanochemically trap and hold gases in powders’. Powders!!!

The neat little gif below [not mine] illustrates the process:

https://newatlas.com/energy/mechanochemical-breakthrough-unlocks-cheap-safe-powdered-hydrogen/?utm_source=New+Atlas+Subscribers&utm_campaign=dd973ce1ae-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2022_07_20_12_50&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_65b67362bd-dd973ce1ae-92416841

The steel balls pounding away in the cylinder separate the gases and then bind one of them to the boron nitride. That’s why it’s called a mechano + chemical process. The resultant powder can be stored safely at room temperature. To release the gas, you simply heat the powder.

Hot on the heels of that discovery comes another, this time from a Hong Kong based company EPRO Advance Technology (EAT). They’ve made a silicon based powder that doesn’t contain hydrogen – it makes hydrogen… when you add water.

‘The Si+ powder can be made using a (preferably renewable) energy source, as well as metallurgical-grade silicon – which itself can be made from sand, or from crushed-up recycled solar panels and electronics. EAT’s process results in a porous silicon powder that’s completely safe and easy to transport.’

https://newatlas.com/energy/eat-si-hydrogen-generating-powder/

Two completely different approaches to the storage, transport, and use of hydrogen. Will either one become our magic bullet? I have no idea, but breakthroughs like these give me hope that we will be able to stop climate change before it stops us.

cheers,
Meeks

New toys, new skills

Some months back, I invested in Corel VideoStudio Pro, as well the Action! video capture program. One helps me take good quality video footage, the other helps me turn that raw footage into something a great deal more professional. Unfortunately, both have required quite a steep learning curve, but I’m proud to say I can now do a proper ‘voice over’[1].

In time, I hope to make short how-to videos to complement my how-to posts. You saw a tiny snippet of that in my last post. For now though, I’m doing player housing walkthroughs while I learn the ropes. This is my latest walkthrough:

A narrated walkthrough of the Undercity

This particular housing project is set in an area that looks like a real wasteland, so I tried to reproduce some of the things I visualised in The Vintage Egg, in particular the story about the Christmas Roast. I think I managed to fudge the grim feel of the Undercity, but I couldn’t quite re-create the high tech architecture. Still, I had a lot of fun.

I’m off to practise some more new skills.

cheers,
Meeks

[1] My first efforts saw me recording the ‘narration’ at the same time as I was trying to film the video. Okay for simple things, next to impossible for more complex things. Now I can focus on the video first, then record the narration over the top of the video. Still need a script but it’s miles easier.]

PowerPoint – How to ‘Remove Background’

After the amazing PowerPoint effects achieved by Diana Wallace Peach in my previous post, I just had to see if I could master some of those techniques myself. The answer is…kind of. This is my, ahem, masterpiece:

I don’t think I’ll be headed to Cannes any time soon. But…I did learn some really useful skills, and today I’ll walk you through the PowerPoint ‘Remove Background’ option. If you’ve tried this option before and given up in frustration, don’t worry, I had the same problems so we’ll do it step by step.

The first step is to open PowerPoint [hereafter known as PP] and select a blank slide.

Next, click the ‘Insert’ option on the Ribbon and find an image that you want to work with:

The image below is the first one I worked with:

The picture frame looks as if it’s empty, but in reality the middle is not transparent at all. It’s white.

In order to have the mask appear as if it were inside the frame, I had to get rid of the white in the middle. Easier said than done. When I tried to remove the background in PowerPoint, PP wanted to delete the frame, not the white in the middle!

The purple area is what PP thinks should be removed

PP helpfully colours the area[s] to be removed in purple. Pity that’s precisely what I want to keep. -rolls eyes-

I guess the default setting assumes that whatever you want to keep will be in the middle…. Trust me to do everything backwards. In my own defence, however, the labels on the buttons and the explanations of those buttons only made sense after I’d finally worked out what to do and how to do it. -grumble-

Anyway, allow me to explain the buttons:

Background Removal buttons in PowerPointMark Areas to Keep

If you hover your mouse over the ‘Mark Areas to Keep’ button, you’ll get a tooltip that says: ‘Draw lines to mark areas to keep in the picture’. I assumed that the word ‘lines’ had to be some kind of misnomer. It would take a lifetime to draw enough lines to take out half a picture! Ditto for the ‘Mark areas to Remove’ button. I was wrong.

When you click on the ‘Mark Areas to Keep button’, and then draw any kind of line across your picture, a whole section of the picture will be selected. In the following screenshot, I clicked ‘Mark Areas to Keep’ and then drew a line from the top left of the picture frame to a point near the bottom. The line was not straight:

reclaiming part of the picture frame in PowerPoint

Given that the picture frame is made up of straight lines, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to ‘fill in’ the frame properly. What I discovered was that the ‘line’ is not set until you release the mouse button at the end point.

In other words, you click the mouse at your start point and hold it down as you drawn the line. If the line is wonky, you can straighten it just by moving the mouse. So long as you keep the mouse button held down, you can keep moving the line wherever you want:

How to ‘Mark’ a line in PowerPointMark Areas to Remove

Once I’d ‘marked’ all the purple areas and changed them to ‘keeps’, it was time to mark the middle as an ‘Area to Remove’. The principle is the same as for marking areas to keep: click the ‘Mark Areas to Remove’ button, click the mouse on an area to be removed, hold down the mouse button as you move the mouse across the image, release the mouse button to trigger the ‘remove’:

Delete Mark

If you make a mistake, you can undo the last line by clicking the ‘Delete Mark’ button and then clicking the line you wish to remove. That second part is critical as nothing will happen unless you do. You can also use the keyboard shortcut CTRL-Z to ‘undo’ the last thing you did. So much easier.

Discard All Changes

This is like a global undo. If you select this button you will delete every single change you have made. Use with caution.

Keep Changes

This is the button you hit once you’ve done all that you want to do to the image. ‘Keep Changes’ bakes all the changes so they ‘stick’. No more undoing any of the changes. It’s the last step in the whole process.

And now for those eyeballs.

PP is very good at detecting curves so long as there is a strong contrast between the object and its background. The eyeball I wanted to use is perfect…except for the bit at the top where the eyelashes are basically the same colour as that part of the eye.

free image from Pixabay

To excavate that eyeball from the eyelashes, I made the image as big as possible using the slider down in the status bar [bottom of screen]. Then I clicked on ‘Mark Areas to Remove’ and drew teensy weensy little lines. <>

My stubbornness persistence paid off because I managed to get an almost circular eyeball, but when I tried it in the mask, the not-quite-perfect curve was noticeable. So I cheated. I turned the eyeball upside down.

I should say here that the easiest image to clean up was the mask!

free image from freeimages.com

Although the left side of the mask is in shadow, the shadow is a different colour AND there’s still enough contrast to allow PP to detect the edges.

All in all, I’m loving the ‘Remove Background’ function in PP. It has limitations – the lack of curved lines is a big one – but for large jobs that can be a little rough, it’s miles easier than vectoring an image in Corel. As always though, you have to use the right tool for the right job.

My thanks to Diana for introducing me to a very useful tool indeed.

cheers,
Meeks