Palmer's World

We were invited to a pool party at the end of the season and it was a great party, indeed.  Tons of pool, good eats, and a great time around the campfire, singing along with Anne and JF.  Thanks for the invitation!

It’s pretty amazing what you can do with photos these days.  I was photobombing this nice shot of the ladies, and you can barely see me!

With my diagnosis of being pre-diabetic last year, I have been eating greek yogurt in the mornings.  When I noticed the kids also eating it with me, I noticed we would go through one of those tubs in one day and one of those tubs are $8!  I had to figure out a new way of doing things.  

I knew the instant pot had a yogurt setting so I gave it a whirl.  I would say the first batch came out a bit runny…but not horrible.  It tasted good and was worthy of making a second batch.  I realized that it did not freeze well, so the next batch was a half gallon batch and that seems to be the sweet spot so far!

Poppa and Grandma came up for a week as Dad had to get an MRI.  Here they are listening to a story before bedtime.

I had purchased an X-Files lego set.  Poppa and Ezra are hard at work with it and will probably be working on it for the next month.

Our dryer broke on us.  I can’t complain too much.  It came with the house and we have been living here for 16 years.

Buying new appliances is strange in the year 2026.  All we want is something that works.  But now they have all sorts of fancy new modes, and things that I figure will break on me.  Also, we were set on buying a matching washer and then realized it had a slant to it!  Strange!  A week later we went back to Dufresne and Vero worked her negotiating magic and got us a new washer, dryer and bed frame.  It will take a month to get here, so it’s been an adventure doing loads of laundry and spreading out the clothes to dry across the basement!

I brought Mom and Dad to Chucks’ Deli for a sandwich.  I also showed Dad the dessert trays and he couldn’t pass up the mille feuilles.

The kids had some friends over on a Saturday night.  We had some cheese pizza and watched Zootopia 2.  They were also trying to make a house for their shared stuffed animal Mylo.  I’m not sure if they ever got around to finishing that.  Too many things to do when you have friends over!

On Labour Day, Vero had the great suggestion to go biking through Russell and go to a favourite park of ours.

There’s a really big hill to go down and we were proud that the kids went down a few times.  Ezra managed to hold on tight until the end and at one point his bike tipped over and he scraped himself up.  It wasn’t too bad.  I’m glad it happened at the end and not while he was zooming down the hill!

Mom and Dad had the great idea of extending our shelves in the bathroom.  Here is the cleanup job.  Mom couldn’t get over the Costco size amount of soap bars I had!

We brought Mom and Dad to the Vars Community BBQ.  It’s always a fun activity but it gets quite cold waiting for the kids to finish watching their movie!  At least I brought a warm jacket and warm socks.

Mike and Melanie invited us over for an end of season pool party.  There was some great hot dogs, chili and a campfire as well.  It was a good way to wind down the summer.

I couldn’t pass up a shot with that nice sky behind Mike.

On our way to Cirque du Soleil, we dropped by to say hello to some friends.

I can’t believe we are seeing TWO Cirque du Soleil’s in one year, but here we are at Luzia!

We got a clown nose with the purchase of some popcorn.

I enjoyed Luzia, but I think I preferred Echo better.  But let’s be honest…any Cirque production is magical.  I’m not entirely sure that these aren’t acrobatic mutants on stage.  How can a human accomplish these amazing feats?

I’ve had a phone for many years now, and have never put into a washing machine, until today!

I’m not entirely sure how I went from taking all my items out of my one pocket of jeans, but failed to take out my phone from the other pocket, and then proceeded to throw it into the wash!

To my horror, I realized that the phone was missing and the only logical place it could be was IN the machine!  I went to check the machine and it was locked because of spin cycle.  I did all I could, but I could not figure out how to override the lock so I just let the cycle complete.

Sure enough, I found my phone in the machine.  Nooooo.  I think I came out pretty lucky though.  The screen was still functional when I fished it out of the wet pants pocket.  I turned the phone off, and read all the things I should do with it (and somehow rice was not a tip that some folks adhered to?).

I left it in Ezra’s bedroom with the fan pointed on it for most of the day and I can say that the next morning the thing seems to be working fine!  I really lucked out.  I’m not sure if it’s the waterproofing on these new phones, or God was looking out for me?

My cousin Troy contacted me, asking some questions about scanning his mother’s photo albums.  It got me thinking about my quest of scanning photos and I realize that I have a lot of knowledge and opinions on the subject, so I decided to write them down here.

Quality vs. Quantity

I remember when Google Photo Scan came out.  It was easy to use, and I had a scan of my childhood memories?  Sign me up!  I remember  borrowing all my parents photo albums and getting to work.  I remember scanning most of them and I had a good collection of my childhood photos.

Years later, I was staring at a photo that my Uncle Gary had scanned and I was thinking “Wow, this photo is incredible quality, compared to the one I have.  What’s the difference?”

I believe this photo was scanned using the Google Photo Scan app.  Not bad.

This was scanned using a V600 scanner.  While I am no expert on colour accuracy, since I don’t have the original in front of me as I type, you can see that the one taken with a scanner is better quality.  If you take a look at the bottom right corner of the first photo, you can see white sprinkles.  You also see evidence of these sprinkles in the middle of the photo..all around the first photo really!  It’s just artifacts that Google Photo Scan leaves.  Whereas, the V600, does not.

Also, the megapixels (which can be adjusted), is much higher on the second photo (21MP) vs. The google photo scan photo (9.2MP).  You cannot adjust this on Google Photo Scan, whereas you can control those types of things on the scanner.

If your goal is to get through things fast, and you don’t mind the tradeoff in quality, then maybe Google Photoscan is a viable option.  Maybe it’s even changed over the years and it’s a better product.  It’s worth trying out to see if it’s suits your needs if you prefer quantity over quality.

But if quality is your goal, and long term preservation where you never have to scan these photos again…a proper scanner is probably your best bet.

Negatives vs.photo prints

If possible, scan the film negative instead of the printed photo.  I was lucky that my mother taught me to keep all my negatives.  My project benefited from scanning the negatives as the quality was even better than a great scan of a printed photograph!  I wish I knew that from the beginning.  I went from scanning prints from a photo album using Google PhotoScan, to scanning prints using a proper scanner, and then my uncle showed me the magic of scanning film negatives so I scanned film negatives as well!  I’m still going through those film negative scans to try and organize things.

Scanner software

My cousin was asking me about a photo auto-crop service that is powered by AI that he found on the internet.  You scan a page of an album, take the scan, upload it to a website and bam.  They crop the photos, and spit out individual photos for you.

I’m sure it works, fine, but if you have some good scanner software, it already does that for you.

When I bought the V600 flatbed scanner, it came with Silverfast which seems to be a very powerful scanning software in the scanning community.  I’m still trying to figure out different options I can use.

It does what Troy was asking about…I scan an entire page of an album, decide the DPI/quality of the scan I want, it auto-crops and spits out individual photos (JPG, or TIFF, or whatever format you choose), and even does colour correction that you can preview beforehand.  Ever have those old photos that have an orange tinge to them?  You can fix those with this software and it does it right away while scanning the photos.

Not a bad scan from the Google Photo scanner, right?  It’s pretty good!  But there’s an orange tint to it, which can probably be removed by some colour correcting software.  Also, if you start zooming in, you will see the quality isn’t the best.

This photo was scanned using a Kodak film negative scanner.  Now that I think about it, I didn’t even use scanner software to remove the orange tint…it just happened because I was scanning the film negatives.  That being said, the difference is the same if I had an orange tinted print scan and used scanner software to remove the orange tint.

I notice in the film scan that there are artifacts like scratches and dust on it.  That’s one thing I haven’t cared about touching up at this point in my project.  I figure that’s an entirely new set of skills to work on when I’m retired!

Again, it really comes down to what you want out of your project.  Do you want to keep the orange tint to evoke the memories of looking through an old photos album?  Or are you looking for colour accuracy of the moment?

Speaking about colour accuracy, I remember borrowing Nanny’s photo albums and going to Wal-Mart to use their scanning booths.  They had a colour correcting feature and I was toying around with it, thinking it was great.  When I got back home, Nanny said “We look like we have been down in Jamaica for an entire year!  Look at our skin!”  I guess I went overboard with that!  After that moment, I realized I should try and go for colour accuracy at all times, and I’m still not an expert on that stuff.

Back to the Silverfast scanner software…it was a steep learning curve and a lot of trial and error, but I feel that I’ve figured out what I like to do with it, and I think it makes my workflow easier.  Other scanner softwares are probably comparable.  Even those AI tools to auto-crop images might be useful if you have dozens of photos to go through and crop.  But scanner software does a lot of that for you (and more!).

Conclusions

It’s Sunday morning, I’m starting to get hungry, and I’m realizing the only person who will read this is Troy and this blog post is probably overkill for his question.  I’ll stop here for now, but I’m sure I’ll come back and add things when I think of them.

But if I had to look back on my entire photo scanning journey, I think I would have liked to have started with a dedicated scanning machine from the beginning, as I have spent a lot of time in my life just re-scanning the same photos using different methods (example: Google Photo Scan vs. V600 scanner).  My goals were: 1) Quality over quantity 2) colour accuracy 3) sharing these memories with others.  If my goals were quantity over quality, maybe I would have stuck with Google Photoscan, because it’s not a HORRIBLE application.  It does the job, and it does it much quicker than scanning on a traditional machine.

Last night we had quite the treat in the house.  Sierra made us supper, all by herself.

She made some tacos.  We were very impressed.  I especially enjoyed how she thought that she could put a cucumber through a garlic press and it would come out in little strings.

They did not.

It came out as a mush type concoction.  She added some soya sauce and said it was kind of like wasabi so use it sparingly.  I proceeded to try and get a little bit and the entire thing fell into my taco!

All in all, I would consider the entire supper a big success.  Bravo Sierra!  We even let her in on the secret that whoever prepares supper gets to relax for a few minutes while everyone else cleans up afterwards.

Us: “So, what did you think of your experience making supper?”

Sierra: “It was hard!”

Sierra holding up the sign with her foot

I think Ezra wanting to be a driver for a driverless car is quite interesting!

I’m not entirely sure who they were trying to imitate, but they seemed excited by it!

Special thanks to Maman for dying their hair and the to the kids dying Maman’s hair!

A few neighbours typically get together to walk the kids to school on the first day.

Waiting to go in

I quite enjoy the annual ‘kids start school’ event in the playground.  I will miss it when the kids stop going to this elementary school.

When I got back home, Sierra convinced Maman to watch the Descendents: Wicked Wonderland movie.  I then realized it was the last night of summer before we would have to have ‘normal’ bedtimes again, so I suggested we made it a full movie night with chips and pop.

It has been a great summer, even though Vero and I didn’t have the full summer off.  It will be hard to go back to the ‘routine’!

What a great photo of Bruce!

All good things come to pass, and unfortunately, the news came that Bruce Losier had passed away.

Bruce and Louise welcomed me (and others) into their home like they were members of the family and it really hurts to see him gone.

Here is a note I wrote for Bruce:

We made 11 jars of pickles this year and gave one to Mia who came and helped out.  Quite a few of them didn’t pop, even though we wiped down the jar tops after pouring in the brine.  Not sure what went wrong there.

Vero and the kids got a sweet deal and got a whole lot of cucumbers for the task.  Unsure of how many baskets there were, as it was in a large cardboard box.

It was a nice hot day on Tuesday so we set up a lemonade stand.  It was open for 3 hours and the kids said they got around 40 dollars.  Not bad!  They said they made sixty the year before, but I remember Ted Sullivan sending 20 dollars their way, so they made about the same.  I tried to explain to them that they owed us money for the frozen lemonade they used but they seemed pretty upset by it.  I ended up charging them $2.25 for one can and said that next year they will need to pay for all three cans that they used.

Soccer season ended this Tuesday.  Vero volunteered as a coach/assistant coach for the second year in a row.  It’s fun seeing her out there wrangling young kids together to try and achieve a goal!  This year she was the coach for Ezra’s team and assistant coach for Sierra’s team.  It’s weird to think that soon enough, the kids will be too old to join the Vars soccer league.

A few years ago, I got Vero a gift to go to a ‘tea on the lawn’ event and she brought Sierra.  Every year since then, Sierra asks to return so it’s become a bit of a tradition.  Ezra went one year, as well, but declined this year.

Considering he had a gift card from Poppa and Grandma for his birthday, we decided to head to the Lego store while the girls went to tea on the lawn.  Look at that massive lego figure in the photo!  Ezra asked if he could buy that with his $50 gift card.  “Maybe it was $50,000!” I replied.

We perused a few things in the store, but he honed in on a fun fry truck and said “Oh, this is what I probably want.”  We continued on through the store and I pointed out a few other sets, but he kept saying “No, it’s not as a good as the fry truck.”  We then put the last fry truck in the store into our hands and walked around the store looking for other options, but nothing could beat this awesome french fry truck!  Success!

Ezra and I went to the food court and he showed me this neat trick of opening the ketchup pack horizontally and you could use it to dip your fries in.  Genius!

Logic Pro Stem Splitter, I love you!

This morning, while waking up, I was thinking about our wedding anniversary and a flash of brilliance came over me.  I could use Logic Pro’s artificial intelligence stem splitter to save some audio from my wedding!

Background

At our wedding, there were a bunch of people playing songs and we plugged into a soundboard and PA system.  Unfortunately, the beginning of the set never had my mic recorded properly, so it was really unusable as a capture of the moment.

We did have some video of the moment, but the audio on one video was distorted, and the other video was decent, but not soundboard quality.

For years, I was thinking of ways to salvage it, but my tests didn’t work.

Until now!

Now

I have been using the Stem Splitter for a year now to help out some of my live concert recordings and it works quite well!  I tried it on the audio from the wedding and BAM!  It worked!  I managed to boost my vocals, reduce Vero’s vocals, and add some reverb to the guitar.  I think it turned out pretty darn good!

I somehow forgot to get some photos of Ben and Krista’s family when they were visiting.  I blame the lack of daylight after 9PM!

It was a fun night filled with a lot of s’mores, some popcorn over the fire, a verbal introduction to Magic Commander, the projector set up at a decent hour, and the sounds of kids screaming at each other while they chased each other around the yard.

A great summer night!  I even got to play a couple of rounds of ‘Let’s get to know you better’ from Once We Were Spacemen.  I found out that Ethan really doesn’t like the veiny parts of an orange and Krista can play the clarinet and the alto and tenor saxophones.  So interesting!

Ezra was NOT impressed that he had to go to bed at 11:30pm while the others got to stay up and play.  I assured him that everyone else was going to bed soon enough.