Last week 06-2024

Week in review 06-2024 and one storm warning after another due to heavy rain and overall it is actually too warm for mid-February, even if it is very uncomfortable outside 😉

This week, after more than a year since its launch, we once again discussed focus stacking and, of course, the comparison between the Luminar NEO extension and Helicon Focuas as its biggest competitors. At its launch, the Luminar Neo extension was still very sluggish, to put it mildly.

To put it bluntly, Skylum has unfortunately failed to optimize or improve the extension in terms of processing speed. The operation is still the same and there are very few setting options, but they are sufficient.

The results in direct comparison with Helicon Focus, for example, are quite impressive. Luminar NEO is the cheaper app or extension, but Helicon Focus offers considerably more options to influence the results of the stitching of the individual images and is considerably faster.

Nevertheless, Skylum should have used the time to at least catch up on speed. Saving the results in a separate album in the user’s profile is also not ideal in my opinion. Nevertheless, it is an attractive extension for Lumianr NEO, especially if you only want to do stacking occasionally.

Luminar NEO has been around for 2 years now and there are now a total of 8 expansions for various tasks. Skylum is starting an anniversary sale on February 15th, where you can buy Luminar NEO with a discount. The 1 year subscription will be available for 59,– € instead of 79,– € and will be interesting again. The promotion is valid until 26.02.2024. And if you use the following code AFF-y2DY, you get 20% on top 🙂

There are more and more warnings about data loss with inexpensive USB sticks. This is probably partly due to the fact that inferior chips are simply installed in such sticks with a lower memory capacity than normal. In some cases, however, micro SD cards are also used in such sticks, which the consumer may not notice if he does not break open the stick. This is quite blatant and really a fraud on the customer, because despite the lower memory specification, such sticks are likely to fail more quickly and you then have the loss of data if you don’t have a backup.

And then this week the following message appeared on my OPNSense:

An upgrade to the next major release of the OPNSense firewall software. This is a good opportunity for the update and then I can invite you to share my experiences with the OPNSEnse firewall and matching hardware.

All in all, another very eventful week. I hope you enjoy the articles and look forward to your questions and comments.

ciao tuxoche