June 11 2019 darktable and Spreadsheets Meet

Mike left the explanation of how to configure a server to allow a single IP address to serve four domains, each configured as a subdomain on the server, until next month when Brian will be back and gave a presentation on darktable. He illustrated a variety of effects, how you can organise the right hand pane to reflect your personal workflow and how easy it is to access and work with the history feature.

Mike mentioned its ability to work with raw camera images and John asked whether it was better to save raw images as PNG; however, David said that PNG, being an uncompressed format, tends to generate rather large images. It would be better to use something like EXR.

Bernard then tried to demonstrate the infra-red camera he had set up using a Raspberry Pi to check whether they were being visited by a hedgehog; however, he was not able to make the necessary connection [because of a bug in the version of the ‘Waitress’ web server he was using]. So he showed the test video he had made to demonstrate that the setup worked.

John rounded off the meeting with a presentation on spreadsheets to mark 40 years since the release of VisiCalc. He stressed the importance of using spreadsheets only for numerically intensive work and not for manipulating textual or sensitive data where a database would be more appropriate and more secure. In response to the point about errors in spreadsheets, David reminded people of the Reinhart and Rogoff paper which had been used to justify austerity but had significant errors in the Excel spreadsheet used to support the argument.

Past Meetings