It's A Little Blurry Around Here

For the past month or so, I've noticed that whenever I attempt to upload the amateurish photographs that help illustrate my posts to Blogger, something rather odd happens. Not so noticeable perhaps at first glance, but when one expands the images to their full capacity, they become rather blurry.

I was beginning to wonder if I should pay a visit to my ophthalmologist.  It then crossed my mind that my trusty little camera might have packed it all in and demanded its retirement.  Prodding further into this sorry state of affairs, having already wasted several frustrating hours fiddling with settings I didn't even know existed, I came to the realization that both my camera and my spectacles were performing as expected. There was only one thing left to do and that was to throw myself down the rabbit hole that is Google and figure out exactly what it was that was causing my crisply detailed images to become a blur.

The answer, as it turns out, is that Blogger has deemed it appropriate to degrade the quality of my carefully shot images and publish them at a mere fraction of their original size and quality.  My hands were tied.  I had absolutely no control of how my images were published.  To anyone who cares about such things, you can only imagine the frustration this has caused.

I've finally discovered a hack to restore my previous month's foggy image postings to their maximum effect; a pain to be sure, but a step I shall have to endure for all future published photographs.  I have now applied the hack to each and every photograph of the last four postings.

Below is an example of what it is I'm talking about (don't forget to stretch/expand the images for full effect):

A degraded image of an Iris I included in a recent post

Photo: Chronica Domus

The higher quality original image - with hack applied - insuring it is published the way it was meant to be seen

Photo: Chronica Domus

Please bear with me while I work out a better solution to this time-consuming "trick".  I shall resume my regularly scheduled postings within a few days but wanted to keep you all abreast of the goings on behind Chronica Domus.

The Tale of a Naughty Laptop

My morning started with coffee and cursing.  The cursing was emanating from my husband who was thoroughly peeved off with our laptop that was not behaving to his liking.  To his insistence, the computer was making decisions on its own, such as opening pages and pushing command buttons on various websites.  Of course, I scoffed dismissively and returned to my coffee.

Fast forward to the afternoon following on from a wonderful lunch, it was my turn at the keyboard.  I began working on the outline for a future post when suddenly, what were imaginary problems when they involved my husband earlier in the day, suddenly became my reality.

It seems our laptop saw fit to publish my working model gibberish, a fact that escaped my notice for five hours.  Upon returning from a visit with friends, I was mortified to discover this rather red face inducing development and swiftly deleted the posting.

I suppose this is all my fault as there have been plenty of warnings in the media of late regarding the fact that Windows XP is no longer supported by Microsoft, thus subject to some rather nasty digital illnesses.  I think mine just caught a bug. 

This was definitely the straw that broke the camel's back so we are now in the market for a less vulnerable laptop.  Please stay tuned as normal service will resume shortly.

Have all of you non-Mac users updated your computers from Windows XP?