Photography awards in the EOY competitions 2023

I managed a couple of successful images with the Waverley Camera Club End of Year competition:

The fly image (below) got the Best Colour EDI (digital image) and one I took in 2005 with my first digital SLR won the president’s trophy (subject: wind)

And Melbourne Camera Club Trophies:

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Server migration

I’ve just migrated to a new hosting provider. Quite a hassle getting a cPanel backup from the old service provider, but once I had that the transfer went easily. This is just a test post to make sure it all works as expected.

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Australian Interstate Photographic Competition

I got a great surprise today to hear that I had won the Roy Berryman trophy for the Best Image of the Exhibition 2020 with my Image in Image 2 photo. It also got the Herbert Medallion for best monochrome. Image in Image 2 has been going well for me.

 

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Photographic successes in the Australian Digital Photography Awards

I managed 10 acceptances including one merit, one highly commended and one silver medal. 🙂

 

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Download photos from Google Album.

I often share photos with others using a link to a google album. To download the photos from Google Albums is easy. At the top right find the more options menu (three dots icon)

Click on the 3-dots to open the menu, and select download all

A file download dialog will open asking where to put the ZIP file containing the photos from the gallery. Download this file and you can extract all the images from the gallery in one go.

If you only want one or two from a large gallery, click on the gallery thumbnail to open the specific image. There is a 3-dot menu under which is the option to download that image (this downloads an image file so you don’t need to bother with extracting the image from a zip file).

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Worldwide wildfire map

I was browsing the web and came across this interesting map, showing the distribution of bushfires/wildfires worldwide. It seems clear to me that there will soon be few areas of rainforest left in the equatorial region.

When I was doing my undergraduate studies at the University of Tasmania, the head of Botany, Prof Jackson, was fond of saying that in Tasmania the three main causes of bushfire were man, woman and child. I wonder how many of the fires on this map were lit by human intervention vs natural causes like lightning.

There is a stark warning in a recent NewScientist article

“It seems that large-scale clearing of vegetation by humans has created deserts before. Take the now-arid interior of Australia. It was much wetter until around 45,000 years ago. Today’s desert depressions were huge permanent lakes, kept full by strong and wet monsoon winds. Lake Eyre, also known as Kati Thanda, back then extended to around 10,000 square kilometres, but is now usually a dry salt-encrusted plain.

Global climate factors can’t explain the dramatic drying, says Gifford Miller at the University of Colorado. “The only variable that changed is humans colonised the continent.” He and Australian colleagues argue that the most plausible explanation is hunters burning bush to round up their megafauna prey. The loss of vegetation shut down moisture recycling and “weakened the penetration of monsoon moisture into the continental interior”, he says. As a result, today, “precipitation diminishes rapidly inland, to less than 300 millimetres within a few hundred kilometres of the coast”.

That interpretation offers a stark warning for other continents, not least South America. Australians, however, appear not to have learned the lesson. Much of the continent remains a hotspot for deforestation that may explain continuing declines in rainfall. …”

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Photographic successes

I received an envelope today clearly marked “do not bend” and looking like a herd of mastodons had walked over it. Inside was my certificate for my AAPS (Associate of the Australian Photographic Society). Do I have the energy to continue up the scale – for the Fellow of the APS it is another 100 international competition acceptances.

Other recent successes include a gold medal in the invertebrates section of the 5th Nature National – INVERTEBRATES 2018 competition with an image of a leaf-cutter ant.

Leaf cutter ant in Costa Rica
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Fixing the IP of an ethernet printer on a Sagecom F@ST™ 3864AC Router

I discovered that rebooting the F@ST™ 3864AC router supplied by Optus with my NBN transition stopped my wired ethernet printer working because the printer’s IP had changed. To prevent having to reconfigure the printer’s IP port at each reboot I fixed the IP on the router to a static allocated IP. Here is how.

  1. Log in to the admin page on the router: http://192.168.0.1  . The username and password are printed on the underside of the router unless you have changed them.
  2. click on the Advanced Settings tab
  3. Click on Advanced Settings. On the screen that appears select Advanced Setup to expand the submenu, and select LAN
  4. At the bottom of the page find “Static IP Lease List. Under the list find “add entries” – click this to open a dialog. Add the MAC address of the printer (see below), and a suitable IP address (eg 192.168.0.150 — the last number should be under 255, and I’d use numbers above 100 so there is less likelyhood that something is already using that IP). In the page shown above I have already allocated a printer to 192.168.0.122.
  5. To find the mac address of the printer…From the Basic menu (home menu) select Advanced setup, then Device Info then ARP
    — is there an entry that matches the printer? (ethernet printers usually have their own web page so you can explore the various IPs listed using your browser to find one with the relevant printer web page)
    — try Device Info:DHCP to see if your printer is listed there.
    — or, in a windows command window type arp -a to get a list of allocated IPs, then browse to these IPs to check which is your printer
    — Or get it on the device, but every printer is different.  Try working through the printer’s menu for networking settings. Many printers let you print out the printer settings so you may find MAC address on that.
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Migrating several standalone WP domains to WP Multisite

I decided to merge a number of existing standalone WP installs into one multisite installation, so that I would have less maintenance to keep things updated and free of security holes. Whilst there are a number of excellent guides out there, none of them quite got me there… I eventually sorted out what I needed to do. So here are some quick notes on my migration of several separate wordpress sites onto a multisite WP, on a hostgator linux hosting service with cpanel. I will fill in the bits that the usual instructions leave a little unclear. There are some caveats at the end.

Let’s say you are starting with domain example1.com and example2.com.

First set up a new WP-multisite installation and make some sites within this to serve the pages and posts.

  1. make a new add-on domain to hold your multisite setup using cpanel. If your base hosting domain is mysite.com, for example you could create an Addon domains – say  multi.mysite.com.
  2. install WP multisite into the directory for multi.mysite.com : using Quickinstall in cpanel install a new default wordpress install, into the directory for multi.mysite.com.
  3. follow the directions at https://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network to make this default single site install into a multisite install (just a few minor edits). Choose the subdomains option at step 3.
  4. use the network admin menu to add new sites, one for each of the domains you are migrating. For example, make sites example1.multi.mysite.com and example2.multi.mysite.com (later you will link these to the domains example1.com and example2.com.)
  5. Log in as an administrator to example1.com and example2.com. Export the contents of each blog using Tools::Export in the dashboard.
  6. Import these export files into their respective multisite sites using the dashboard Tools::Import. If the system says there is no importer installed, click the wordpress installer title in the list of possible importers that is presented, and this should install the importer. This should import the posts and pages, and the images if you click the get the images checkbox.
  7. In the Network admin page, add the necessary plugins and themes that you are using in the migrating blogs, and network activate them.
  8. in each of the new sites sites (eg example1.multi.mysite.com and example2.multi.mysite.com) enter the dashboard and configure the desired theme, configure the site (Dashboard::Appearance::Customise etc) to set up the appearance as you desire it to be. You still have domains example1.com and example2.com to use for reference so you can have new and old open side by side to confirm all look the same. If you want to automate this transfer of configuration settings, and your theme does not have this functionality, then you can follow the instructions at https://digwp.com/2014/04/backup-restore-theme-options/ to set up a backup and restore for theme options that may save you some time (caveat: those instructions may not apply to all settings in all themes).

Once you are happy with the configuration and content, it is time to move the domain to point to the new site. To do this you need to set up mapping of the domain into your new install.

  1. Add the plugin WordPress MU Domain Mapping (https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-mu-domain-mapping/). The instructions with this include information about configuring ANAMES and CNAMES and the like. Ignore… this is handled by domain management in cpanel.
  2. In the new multisite dashboard, choose My sites::Network Admin::Dashboard. On the left menu select Sites::all sites.
  3. Hover over each of the sites you made earlier. At the bottom left of the screen/browser window you should the corresponding URL for the site. The final characters will be “?id=2” or some other number. Note the correspondence between the ID number and each site.
  4. In the new multisite dashboard, choose My sites::Network Admin::Dashboard. On the left menu select Settings::Domains.
  5. You should see listed any domain mappings you have already, but at this stage there will be none. Add a new domain – enter the site ID you determined earlier, and add the domain you want this to be mapped to. Click the Primary check box. Click SAVE.
    eg if example1.multi.mysite.com had id=2 you would enter Site ID=2, Domain = example1.com, primary=checked.
  6. The page should now show the new site on the list of domains, and Dashboard::Sites should list the new domain in the Mapping column in the list of sites.

Now to get the domain to use the new site instead of the old site, using cpanel.

  1. first, just so you can see if you are viewing the new or old site, make a small difference – eg a minor change to the Site Identity text (select site: Dashboard::Customise::site identity) so you can see if you are on the old site or the new site.
  2. In cpanel choose Addon Domains (or subdomains if you are mapping a subdomain name not an addon domain). Locate the relevant domain names. The second column is labelled Document Root. Click the small edit icon after the document root. Change the document root to the folder where you made your new multisite install. Click CHANGE. The list should now show the updated information.
  3. It will take minutes to hours for the change here to propagate to the relevant name servers and take effect. After a while you can reload the new domain name (example1.com or example2.com) and see if the pages are loading from the new site. Once that happens you can archive the old site folder, backup the old site database, and delete the old installation files (eg in quickinstall, or by manually deleting the folder and the corresponding mysql database – take care you delete the correct one). It may be sensible, however to delay the deletion until you are 100% convinced the multisite setup is working as you want. If something critical fails, it is easy to revert to the old site by changing the domain to point the root back to the original folder.

NOTES: Caveat emptor

  1. If you are migrating old sites, note that some plugins that you have used in the old sites may no longer be supported / available.
  2. Some plugins that work well in single site set-ups do not work well in mutisite installations.
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Europe 2016

I’ve just returned from a 2-month trip to Europe: Spain, Tangier, Portugal, Andorra, France and the UK. Details in Blog form with photo gallery links at http://europe2016.austvic.com.

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