Menu
JUDI LAPSLEY MILLER + PHOTO ARTISTRY
  • Home
  • Artworks
    • Photo Artistic Prints
      • All prints
      • Birds of Aotearoa/New Zealand
      • Flights of fancy
        • The Selfie (kākā)
        • It's about time
        • Two Minutes to Midnight (kākā)
        • Professor Polly
        • The big idea
        • A quick study
        • The web of life (toutouwai)
        • The reckoning
        • The scenic route
        • The bird watcher
        • Uncharted waters
        • When I sing my heart ascends
      • The beloved tūī
        • His magnificence (tūī)
        • Her Mystery (tūī)
        • In fine feather (tūī)
        • Portrait of a tūī
        • At what cost forever (tūī)
        • The Sign of the Southern Cross (tūī)
        • Nightlife
        • I shall ride every storm (tūī)
        • From Whence Cometh Evil (tūī)
        • Sad wings of destiny (tūī)
        • The Collector (tūī)
        • The Spy (tūī)
        • Unfurling (tūī)
        • Forever calling me (tūī)
        • A portrait of a tui 2
        • A portrait of a tui 3
        • In all his glory (tūī)
      • A cacophony of kākā
        • An urban jungle
        • Imagine
        • Visions of Zealandia
        • Break on through...
        • Baby kākā
      • Incredible kererū
      • Superb owls
      • Awesome forces
        • All at sea
        • He came to me...
        • Adrift
        • The emergence of flight
      • Support Forest & Bird
      • Support Zealandia
      • Birds of the world
        • Bathtime in Bella Vista (crimson-rumped toucanet)
        • Over the moon (red-tailed black cockatoo)
        • The helper (red-rumped parrot)
        • Contented (kookaburra)
        • Dreams of Freedom (dollarbird)
        • Her Majesty (eclectus parrot)
        • Whirlybird (scaly-breasted lorikeet)
      • Wildlife Photography
        • Terms of Endearment (korimako)
        • A new view
        • His resplendence (tūī)
        • The Sweetheart (kākā)
        • Portrait of a tūī
        • After midnight (kiwi pukupuku)
        • Dreaming big (takahē)
        • Baby Takahē
        • Watching over you (kākā)
        • The Poser (scaly-breasted lorikeet)
        • The Watcher (blue and gold macaw)
        • The Fighter (rainbow lorikeet)
      • Extra-large prints
    • Original Artworks
    • Framed Art
    • Skrark Art Prints
      • Tūī in Pōhutukawa
      • Aberrant Brown Tūī
      • Kākāriki Portrait
      • Nocturnal Kiwi Pukupuku
      • Rare Black Tern
    • TinyArt Gifts
    • Galleries & Exhibitions
    • Postage stamps
    • Gift Certificates
    • Buying Art FAQ
  • Subscribe
  • Blog
  • Challenges
    • Art of Birding 2022
    • Art of Birding 2021
    • Art of Birding 2020
    • Art of Birding 2019
    • Art of Birding 2018
  • About
  • Contact
  • Home
  • Artworks
    • Photo Artistic Prints
      • All prints
      • Birds of Aotearoa/New Zealand
      • Flights of fancy
        • The Selfie (kākā)
        • It's about time
        • Two Minutes to Midnight (kākā)
        • Professor Polly
        • The big idea
        • A quick study
        • The web of life (toutouwai)
        • The reckoning
        • The scenic route
        • The bird watcher
        • Uncharted waters
        • When I sing my heart ascends
      • The beloved tūī
        • His magnificence (tūī)
        • Her Mystery (tūī)
        • In fine feather (tūī)
        • Portrait of a tūī
        • At what cost forever (tūī)
        • The Sign of the Southern Cross (tūī)
        • Nightlife
        • I shall ride every storm (tūī)
        • From Whence Cometh Evil (tūī)
        • Sad wings of destiny (tūī)
        • The Collector (tūī)
        • The Spy (tūī)
        • Unfurling (tūī)
        • Forever calling me (tūī)
        • A portrait of a tui 2
        • A portrait of a tui 3
        • In all his glory (tūī)
      • A cacophony of kākā
        • An urban jungle
        • Imagine
        • Visions of Zealandia
        • Break on through...
        • Baby kākā
      • Incredible kererū
      • Superb owls
      • Awesome forces
        • All at sea
        • He came to me...
        • Adrift
        • The emergence of flight
      • Support Forest & Bird
      • Support Zealandia
      • Birds of the world
        • Bathtime in Bella Vista (crimson-rumped toucanet)
        • Over the moon (red-tailed black cockatoo)
        • The helper (red-rumped parrot)
        • Contented (kookaburra)
        • Dreams of Freedom (dollarbird)
        • Her Majesty (eclectus parrot)
        • Whirlybird (scaly-breasted lorikeet)
      • Wildlife Photography
        • Terms of Endearment (korimako)
        • A new view
        • His resplendence (tūī)
        • The Sweetheart (kākā)
        • Portrait of a tūī
        • After midnight (kiwi pukupuku)
        • Dreaming big (takahē)
        • Baby Takahē
        • Watching over you (kākā)
        • The Poser (scaly-breasted lorikeet)
        • The Watcher (blue and gold macaw)
        • The Fighter (rainbow lorikeet)
      • Extra-large prints
    • Original Artworks
    • Framed Art
    • Skrark Art Prints
      • Tūī in Pōhutukawa
      • Aberrant Brown Tūī
      • Kākāriki Portrait
      • Nocturnal Kiwi Pukupuku
      • Rare Black Tern
    • TinyArt Gifts
    • Galleries & Exhibitions
    • Postage stamps
    • Gift Certificates
    • Buying Art FAQ
  • Subscribe
  • Blog
  • Challenges
    • Art of Birding 2022
    • Art of Birding 2021
    • Art of Birding 2020
    • Art of Birding 2019
    • Art of Birding 2018
  • About
  • Contact

Five reasons Wingspan is the most fantastic boardgame ever created!

25/9/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
One of our first games using the original Wingspan pack.
I have a low tolerance for board games and learning all the rules (usually leading to an evening of tedious reading and not much game playing), so when Linton bought me Wingspan for Christmas, I was suspicious, but intrigued - it did involve birds afterall! Fortunately he is a games rules-lawyer so it didn't take too long to get playing and to get the hang of it. Since then, Wingspan has completely captured our imaginations and we play nearly every night over dinner (props to the inventors that gave the pieces a slip-coat cover, that so far has mostly resisted red wine, chili sauce, and greasy cheese). So here are my top five reasons why I think Wingspan is the best game ever invented!
  1. It's the perfect two-player game. With only two people in our household, most boardgames don't work, but Wingspan is a fabulous two-player game, with the right mix of random and skill-based aspects to keep us on our toes. We haven't played multi-player yet, but one of the best features is that no-one goes out early and then has to sit watching others have fun (those games suck).
  2. Every game is different, requiring you to contemplate your strategies and tactics for the hand dealt. Each game of four rounds has round goals and bonus card challenges that give endless variations. Can you get combinations of birds to work with each other in symbiosis to power the eco-system without wasting resources? Those games are especially satisfying.
  3. It's educational, but subtly. Each bird has a "super power" usually relating to their behaviour. I laugh at the parrots who give other players food - if you've ever seen a parrot eat you'll know why. I also laugh at the ibis - fondly known as a bin chicken - who goes through the discard pile looking for goodies. So much love and thought has been put into this game!
  4. It's gorgeous! The artwork is incredible, each bird is beautifully hand-painted and realistic. One of the artists, Natalia Rojas, worked for a while at Zealandia, which is why New Zealand birds in the Oceania expansion pack are so well-represented.
  5. It's as competitive or as cooperative as you want to play it. We usually try to be both. Even when you lose, you can still take great delight in the beautiful sanctuary you've created.
Picture
A more recent game playing all the expansion packs and the Oceania board with nectar. Linton got a huge bird total (70) so we took a photo for posterity.
I must admit that in our household, we call this game not Wingspan, but a Game of F***s. Most of the cards are referred to as Little Sh**s or Useless F***s, because they don't help the current goals. But some birds are totally awesome like the Wedge-tailed Eagle, Great-horned owl, Puffin, Little Penguin, and the Black Noddy. Worth loads of points, these birds also look gorgeous on the board.
Having played so many games, we've developed "House Rules" including:
1. If you get the Spangled Drongo, you must call out "Spangled Drongo!" loudly using your best Ocker accent. What a name for a bird!
2. The galah is called "Vinny" after YouTube's Marlene McCohen's gangster - he's even striking the gangster pose on the card.
3. The kākāpō is called "Sirocco" as the big-green-budgie-of-love was undoubtedly the reference bird for the illustration.
4. ​When the Little Penguin is fishing, you need to call out "Fish!" if you catch one, just like Cat does when using the fish vending machine in Red Dwarf.
Picture
5. And finally, for those with the Oceania expansion pack, one of the round goals is "No goal" which we think sucks because it decreases the total points achievable. Instead, we have a house-rule that it's for "NZ birds played" but as you will have likely guessed we call it the "NZ F***ks" round. We use NZ Birds Online as the adjudicator as to whether the bird is "NZ" or not, and refer to looking up a bird as "Consulting Colin" after Colin Miskelly, who created this amazing resource. It's turned into our favourite round goal. It's fascinating to see how many vagrants we get (did you know NZ has kookaburras?).
I can't wait for the next expansion pack to come out - yes I'm addicted!
​
Do you play Wingspan? Do you agree it's the best game ever? Do you have some fun house rules too?

P.S. This is not a paid or solicited review, I'm just a dedicated fan.
0 Comments

How to recover when disaster hits your disk

31/10/2020

0 Comments

 
Photo of a kākā parrot chick sitting on a towel and held gently by a bird handler
A photo of a cute kākā chick found after data recovery was run on an old SD card.
A product review: Stellar Data Recovery
​
We’ve all had that sinking feeling when we try to download our photos off the camera card but instead get a nasty error. Or perhaps an inadvertent slip of the mouse deletes your files permanently. Or even worse, lightning strikes and zaps your computer! No matter if it’s a snap of your cat with its tongue stuck or a rare and endangered bird that you hiked 10 km to photograph, chances are your photos are precious to you.


​Is all hope lost? Not at all! Deleted and damaged files are not necessarily gone forever. With a simple deletion or reformat, the files are still there so long as you don’t write more to the disk. All that’s gone is the index to those files. Even a damaged disk is likely only damaged in parts. Fortunately, there is data recovery software to save us. It’s been many years since I’ve had to resort to disk scraping, so I had no idea what the software to do this tedious task is like these days.
Recently Stellar asked me to review their data recovery software, with the nice kickback of a free standard licence. I assured Stellar (and you) that receiving this gift would not affect my review. Stellar asked me to do this review as a wildlife photographer. They didn’t know that part of my day job at Mimosa Acoustics (where I wear many hats!) involves product testing and bug discovery. And I’m good at it. I’m known as the Chief Breaker and Wrecker. If I can find a way to break it, I will. But I tried my best to behave and use the software in the same way an end-user might rather than a product tester. So I started by not reading the instructions! And trust me, this is what 95% of users do when faced with new software. My day job also involves user manual writing and customer support - I know you don’t read the manual!

​
The install is straightforward and kindly takes you to the website showing the steps to get started. I ignored it all and jumped on in…
Screenshot of Stellar Data Recovery file selection
Choose file types to look for.
Stellar has designed their product with photographers in mind. What’s really cool is that the software is meant to recognize a vast range of image formats, including native RAW formats, and can display the images. This makes it much easier to find what you’re looking for. But how well does it actually work?
Screenshot Stellar Data Recovery choose location
Next choose which locations to search. I've chosen an old SD card.
I found an old 6GB SD card last used in an ancient Panasonic Lumix superzoom camera and in an old scanner to save PDF scans to file. The card had 2 empty folders and one folder with 6 PDFs, circa 2014. The initial scan found a further 22 files in 7 folders. I liked that the file structure interface clearly showed the existing folders and deleted (but recoverable) files and folders, which had a red cross over the icon.
Picture
The DCIM (camera folder) had subfolders, one of which had RW2 (Panasonic) raw files. The preview wasn’t able to show me an image of this old format, but I chose the first image to recover. I saved it to my desktop and was glad to see the entire folder structure was written and not just the file. Win10 could preview the image, and I was delighted to see it was a photo of a baby kākā! Awwwww cute!
Screenshot Stellar Data Recovery deep scan in progress
Waiting for the deep scan to finish.
Curious as to what a Deep Scan might reveal, I tried that. A Deep Scan does take significantly longer to run, but a progress dial manages expectations. This time 43 files were found in 14 folders. A new folder was created on the card called “Raw Data.” In this folder, the files are grouped into subfolders by file type, not in their original folders. Why is that? Well, if the original folder structure was still readable, it would have been picked up by the Initial Scan. Without the index, all the data recovery software can do is recover the individual files. What is curious is that it found files it labeled as *.RAW from the old Panasonic camera and could preview them. Perhaps it just didn’t know that RW2 files are RAWs? 
The four RAW files it found had wildly different sizes. Two were 4GB, and two were 20MB. I’m guessing the two 4GB files were missing end-of-file markers because they were partially overwritten. The JPG preview in the RAW file was still viewable. Conveniently, these files are named by the camera type and image dimensions, e.g., “Panasonic DMC-FZ100-4536x2448-9029440.RAW”. The smaller files were recoverable, but the larger ones took forever (and to be honest, I got bored after 10 minutes and stopped the recovery). I also tried deep recovery of a WMV (not readable) and a PDF (recovered without error). Deep recovery is not guaranteed even if a file is recognized because it may be partly overwritten by other data.
Photo of a fridge with magnets, including an SD card
SD card stuck to my fridge with a strong magnet - eeek!
I then took this card and stuck it on the fridge with a powerful magnet for a few minutes (don’t try this at home) and then dropped it on the floor (inadvertently). My plan was to well and truly corrupt the card, but unexpectedly, the card survived its torture just fine. It wasn't corrupted! Rerunning Stellar showed the same files available for recovery, including the Deep Scan. I still wouldn't recommend doing this on a card you care about though...
Screenshot Stellar Data Recovery showing preview of photo
Screenshot after scanning my Sony card - this time the previews showed, including a photo of a glorious tūī!
I then tried one of my current 64 GB SD cards, which regularly gets reformatted by my Sony a7riii camera and currently has multiple photoshoots saved. The card was less than a third full, so there was plenty of “empty” disk to find previously deleted photos. The Stellar file preview could display the Sony ARW images, which was handy. The initial scan showed the expected available, undeleted folders and one deleted folder, which was empty.  So I entered Deep Scan. Curiously, the deep scan did not find the photos prior to formatting as I expected. A card reformat doesn’t delete the files; it merely rewrites the index, so there should have been files there to be found. It seems there is something about the Sony reformat that Stellar doesn’t recognize? This is obviously an issue for a product aimed at photographers. Who among us hasn’t inadvertently reformatted a card before downloading the images?
Photo of a takahē foraging on grass
The late "Puffin" Takahē - long gone, but not forgotten. It was lovely to find an old photo of her, even if the photo wasn't that good...
For fun, I then looked at a 32 GB SD card from my Panasonic GX8. This card had been reformatted and had no images. The initial scan found nothing other than the basic file structure. But unlike the Sony-formatted card, switching to Deep Scan revealed deleted files. There was a JPG, 8 RAW files (all with previews), and two TAR files in the Raw Data folder. All the RAWs were suspiciously 4GB again, which is much larger than the native RW2 format of around 15 MB.  I recovered both the JPG and a RAW file successfully and opened the latter in Adobe Camera Raw. I also found a previously deleted folder with Panasonic RW2 files under the MISC folder, none of which could be previewed by Stellar. They were, however, recoverable, and I could also open them in Adobe Camera Raw. So lovely to find an old photo of Puffin!

Final thoughts

Stellar Data Recovery has a friendly user interface and is intuitive to use. I liked being able to search and group by file types and see previews (sometimes!). I can see how that could considerably reduce the search time and effort if it’s just a specific file that needs recovery.
I did not have a corrupted disk to test, but I hope recovering photos from reformatted SD cards is a fair test. It certainly worked fine for the card from my Panasonic GX8. But there is an issue with Sony-formatted cards that Stellar might want to look into, given Sony cameras’ rising popularity.
 
I hope you never need to use data recovery software, but Stellar is worth a look if you do. Stellar offers a free trial, so if you find that it doesn’t work for your situation, you won’t be out of pocket. When it does work, it works well and is intuitive and straightforward to use.

Have you ever had a corrupted disk and had to use data recovery software? How did you fare and what did you use? Let us know in the comments... 
 
Reviewed: Stellar Data Recovery Standard
Platform: Windows 10


Loading...
0 Comments
    Access Octomono Masonry Settings

    Judi Lapsley Miller

    Fine art inspired by the stories of birds and the natural world. Starting with photographs, I let my imagination take me on flights of fancy. What is real and what is imagined is blurred. What is physical and what is virtual is disrupted. Bursting with colour and life.
    ​Welcome to the Art of Birding...
     

    Bird letters

    Art, birds, photography, wildlife - be the first to find out what's happening...

Categories

All
Adventures Birding
Art
Behind The Scenes
Birds
Climate Crisis
Digital Photography
Framing
Fungi
Kākā
Lightroom
Photo Artistry
Photography Challenge
Photography Techniques
Photoshop
Product Review
Tūī
Volunteering
Watercolour Doodles
Zealandia EcoSanctuary

Archives

May 2022
April 2022
March 2022
January 2022
December 2021
November 2021
September 2021
June 2021
April 2021
March 2021
February 2021
October 2020
September 2020
March 2020
January 2020
November 2019
July 2019
June 2019
April 2019
January 2019
December 2018
September 2018
July 2018
May 2018
March 2018
February 2018
January 2018
December 2017
October 2017
August 2017
July 2017
June 2017
May 2017
April 2017
February 2017
December 2016
November 2016
October 2016
September 2016

RSS Feed

Instagram

Photo of Judi Lapsley Miller behind the camera

​JUDI LAPSLEY MILLER + PHOTO ARTISTRY

hello@artbyjlm.com
​

021-180-9633
​Wellington, New Zealand

Fine art photo artistry &
wildlife photography ​
Get joyous bird-art stories in your inbox!

© COPYRIGHT 2016-2022
Judi Lapsley Miller,
​except where indicated.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Privacy Policy
Shipping Policy
Returns & Refunds Policy
Cookie Policy