Today was very warm, close to 30°C. But I spent most of it inside doing my Monday classes online, ending the topic of “Time Passing”. I started work on planning for the next topic, which is “Copying Things”, covering aspects of copyright, intellectual property, and so on.
The weather tomorrow is set to be much cooler, with a forecast maximum of only 19°C. It may be another day like we had a week or two ago, where the maximum temperature was set at midnight.
In the afternoon I went for a walk with my wife (who was home from work for the Labour Day public holiday) and Scully. And then I made listings on eBay for some more of my 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons books that I don’t want any more. If you’re interested and in Australia, these may be a bargain for you to pick up (if you’re overseas the postage will probably be prohibitive):
- 4 Rules Books: Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Masters’s Guide, Xanathar’s Guide to Everything Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything
- 4 Monster Books: Monster Manual, Volo’s Guide to Monsters, Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons
My last class tonight started at 9pm, but because of daylight saving starting here it’s an hour earlier for all the students, including one in the USA who had it move from 7am to 6am. He was dedicated enough to get up early for it, but was yawning a bit. All my other classes I made an hour later (for me), to keep them at the same time for the students, but this one I really didn’t want to move to a 10pm start – I’d be turning into a pumpkin before it ended at 11pm. Unfortunately it’s going to get even worse for this kid in November when the US goes off daylight saving, and the class becomes a 5am start for him. I suspect he won’t keep doing it after that.
Finally, a weird thing I noticed taking photos of my D&D books for eBay. I’m using my brand new iPhone 16 and taking photos saved in HEIF format. Some of the photos when I open them in Photoshop, I hit save and it allows me to save them as a JPEG. But some of the photos I hit save and it has a restricted set of save formats available, excluding JPEG. I have to use “Save a copy” to create a copy of the image before I can save it as JPEG. I suspected it might be because the iPhone camera was automatically using HDR mode for some photos and saving them in a higher bit-depth or a different colour space or something, but examining the HEIC files shows no such differences – they’re all 8-bit colour in Display P3 colour space. I examined the EXIF tags of the images and I don’t see any salient differences at all.
So I have no idea why some of these images Photoshop will allow me to save as JPEGs and some it won’t. I tried searching briefly for an answer online, but my search terms couldn’t locate anything relevant.
New content today:
You’re literally an internationally-recognized expert in the field. If you have problems with image file formats, what hope do us mere mortals have?