Category Archives: Photography

Data Rescue …. to the rescue

Software

150 Blu Ray movies recovered.

One of the most frustrating aspects of Mac desktop computer ownership is Cupertino’s planned obsolescence policy, one which manifests itself in the endless – and mindless – ‘upgrades’ to the OS X operating system. These provide ‘features’ no one needs and ensure that old application versions cease working.

My movie HDD boxes, which contain some 20GB of movies plus 20GB of back ups had one of the 4 TB hard drives fail so I quickly procured a replacement and set to restoring it from the backup drive. The only snag is that the backup refused to mount on my desktop 2010 Mac Pro. Panic.

I fired up Disk Drill only to be told that my version of Disk Drill was outdated and required updating. I did as instructed only to be told after the update that now my OS was outdated and required updating. Some idiot at Disk Drill decided to share this requirement after the point of no return because, dear reader, I cannot update High Sierra as that’s as high as my Mac Pro will go without resorting to aftermarket hacks, something I very much do not want to do. I’m on OS X High Sierra, 10.13.6.

But I happened to have the old version of Disk Drill running on another Mac Pro so I inserted the apparently faulty backup disk in that machine, being sure to update nothing, and after 72 hours (!) Disk Drill told me it could maybe recover 15 of the 150 Blu Ray movies somewhere on that drive. Useless. I did run the recovery process out of curiosity and the recovered movies were but cut outs of the whole thing. Doubly useless. Yes, I know, Disk Drill will tell me how superior the latest version is but if they could also explain how I can actually run the thing I would be deliriously happy. So hasta la vista to another failed product, due to the raw stupidity of the developer.

I checked around for other recovery apps, suspecting that all that was wrong with my back up drive was a corrupted or lost file directory, as the disk was spinning away happily even though it would not mount in Disk Utility, and chanced upon Data Rescue which comes in both Mac and Windows versions. The Mac version is stated to work with OS 10.12 (Sierra) and later, so I downloaded a copy and ran ‘deep scan’ on the back up drive. A day later, lo and behold, all 150 movies were disclosed – even with the drive not mounted – and Prosoft hosed me down for $99 for a ‘single disk recovery’ version which I fired up immediately.



Data Rescue ‘deep scan’ gets under way.

$99 is a whole lot less than re-ripping 150 files whose average size for a Blu Ray movie is some 27 GB. 9 hours and fifteen minutes later I had the new WD HDD full with 149 of the 150 Blu Ray movies. Just one had gone AWOL. Checking a handful showed the content to be full and uncorrupted and the new disk drive was back in service, allowing us to watch Hitchcock’s ‘To Catch a Thief’ in all its glory on the 120″ home theater screen.



Data Rescue has recovered almost everything some 9+ hours later.

As for inflation, the last WD Red 4TB drive I bought 6 years ago ran me an inflation adjusted $183, whereas the new one was just $75. Not everything inflates in price! I use 5400rpm Western Digital drives; the 50% premium for 7200 rpm drives is money wasted for this application. Also, the less costly SMR drives are just fine. CMR is not needed in this simple use scenario. The differences are explained here.

So, if you are on Sierra or later then Data Rescue is recommended, based on my experience.

As for hard drives, statistically significant data (meaning thousands of samples) confirm that Western Digital drives, especially the ‘Red’ version, are far more reliable than those from competitor Seagate by a factor of 2x and, as luck would have it, the failed drive – it was completely locked up and would not spin – was a Seagate. So I’m sticking with WD in future.

Musso & Frank’s grill

Dining, Photographs

A Hollywood institution.



The bar scene.

The bar scene here may not be quite up to Manet’s A bar at the Folies Bergère, but the atmosphere was positively electric when we dropped by this fabled eating spot for dinner. After stumbling along Hollywood Boulevard, that is, trying not to breathe what passes for air in that neighborhood.

Despite its 103 year old provenance and great fame, the food and service were excellent and we lucked out with a small banquette seat isolated from the non-mask wearing set. This being a Thursday I naturally chose the famous homemade chicken pot pie while Winston enjoyed a lovely trout.

If you want to see the glitterati and enjoy a good meal in Hollywood, Musso’s is it.

iPhone 12 Pro Max snap, some taming of the highlights in Photoshop.

Poaching eggs

Cooking

Poached perfection.

This is one of an occasional series on cooking devices which make a difference. For an index of cooking articles on this blog click here.

I confess that this is a technique which it has taken me a couple of decades to master and the length of time is a direct function of my general resistance to kitchen gadgets. I greatly enjoy the physical aspects of cooking and prefer to use traditional hand tools – cleavers, knives, pounders and so on – tending to look askance at gadgets.

Now my many years of poaching failure have seen attempts at various techniques. I have done the swirling vortex hot water with vinegar bit. Abject failure. Wisps of ugly egg white everywhere with the egg, as often as not, looking like the victim of alopecia. Then I chanced on Nigella Lawson’s BBC cooking series. Well, actually, I chanced on staring at Nigella – which is why guys watch her show – so my attention to her detailed instructions may have been less than perfect, but she advocated draining the cracked egg in a small sieve, spraying lemon juice on it and then placing it gently, via a ramekin, in hot water, no vortex in sight. The result was much the same as the vortex method. The water clouds up, whites migrate to the surface and you cannot see what the heck is going on.

So I put the whole thing aside and decided that poaching was not going to be a winner for me.

However, I’m anything but a quitter, and recently came across this device:



The four egg poacher.

Click the link for Amazon which will happily take some $33 of your money.

And disregard the one star reviews which say you will cut yourself on the edges of the stamped insert (you will not) or that the screws come out (they do not). These are likely posted by crooked competitors seeking a sales boost, and there are many devices like this at various prices and capacity (2, 4 or 6 eggs) to be had. This one is spendy but I have found it to be beautifully made, with the eggs being perfection itself. And you can always see the state of your eggs through the glass cover. I used two cups of water and you use the same amount whether poaching 1, 2, 3 or 4 eggs.

I swiped a generous layer of butter on the inside surfaces of the removable Teflon cups. Do not use olive oil. The eggs will stick after a couple of uses.

Once the water was simmering I gave the eggs 3 minutes. I found no need for the provided spatula to remove the finished egg. Grab the cup using the provided spigot, give it a shake and out she comes. Three minutes made an egg that was was nice and runny, and if you like your poached yolks hard then I grieve for you.

Here is the whole Eggs Benedict routine with Canadian bacon and Hollandaise sauce. I warm up the bacon for 30 second on high in the microwave. This has it adopt a shallow cupped shape which neatly holds the poached egg atop the English muffin::



Breakfast.

I use Knorr packets of Hollandaise to cut down on the cholesterol. Half a packet (12g) with a half cup of milk and a little butter is enough for four eggs.

A great device, recommended heartily.

And if you want the perfect egg in a shell, be sure to read this.

Site search has been fixed

Photography

Finally!

Google Search for this site has not been working when activated from the ‘Search’ box at the bottom of this page.

I have replaced it with a new search tool named Relevanssi. Scroll to the bottom of this page, enter a search term and you should see results with the first 60 words included, thus:


Search results for ‘Nikon D3x’.

Label drinkers revisited

Photography

Nothing changes.

I wrote about Label Drinkers some 16 years ago.

It’s sort of comforting to report that little has changed, and those purported experts have only grown in number since then.

An amusing article in the Washington Post reminded me of my old column.

It seems that a fraudster selling vinyl records under the MoFi label has been cleaning up selling ‘pure analog’ records for egregious sums when, in fact, the source material for these pressings is digital. Encomiums to this fraudster who lit on some of the most prolific and spendthrift Label Drinkers on the planet.


MoFi fraudster at work.

‘Audiophiles’, you should understand, think nothing of spending fortunes on analog gear – turntables, cartridges, etc. – and will listen to nothing but scratchy old vinyl disks, thewhile preaching to all and sundry that only analog can deliver pure sound. This, of course, is utter rot and not a single blind listening test has them identify good digital from best analog at a statistically meaningful rate. Go ahead, Google away. Not a single set of data exist which indicates they can actually tell the difference unless, that is, their precious vinyl is scratched in which case even I would ace the test.

Now before I point you to the wonderfully funny newspaper hit piece, let me illustrate for you the idiocy of these fools, who truly prove that there is one born every minute. Here are two examples of Audiophile Label Drinkers’ essentials – the ubiquitous turntable and cartridge:


$200k plus and still no sound.

And here’s the article. Enjoy:

And just as a reminder, the camera in your iPhone puts the one in the $10,000 Leica M11 to shame. The $100,000 Tesla is pure garbage, with the worst build quality and reliability of any vehicle. And only a fool buys a Patek Philippe (I sold mine – gulp!) – unreliable garbage with the worst customer repair service imaginable.