June 12th, 2009
As I wrote in my last blog post, I’m currently looking into getting a film rangefinder such as the Bessa R3a. Obviously, such cameras don’t come cheap, and I’ve been looking into ways to make it worth my while (and money!). I uncovered (somehow, whilst browsing around) [this project].
Now, I know the article is rather explicit in saying that one should use a Leica, but I quite frankly don’t have the money to buy one, and believe that a camera such as the Bessa R3M (similar to the R3a, but with no auto-exposure) would be an ideal camera to complete the project with. As the writer quite rightly points out in his [next article], Leica cameras hold their value extremely well, and you could quite easily re-sell the camera for what a price very close to what you bought it for. As I mentioned earlier, there’s no way I’d be able to fork out for a £2500 camera unless I got like two full-time jobs or something silly along those lines, so I think a £300-400 Bessa will have to do.
It is advised in the original article that one should shoot as many rolls of film per week as possible. This is a pretty large expenditure, but I imagine that I would purchase a box of 10 rolls of whichever film I decide to use per month. This would probably amount to around £35 a month for the raw film, and approximately another £35 a month for processing costs. The article recommends getting 1-6 “work-prints” per film – I would not get prints of these photos, but instead upload them to Flickr, so I would effectively be uploading between 10 and 60 photos a month. Every month, I would pick out the two most interesting photos (as calculated by Flickr) from what I had uploaded that month, and get prints made of them.
The monthly cost would come to around £85 a month, with an initial outlay of around £800 for a camera and lens, and £200-250 for a film scanner.
(Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I would most likely get a 50mm lens. Or possibly a 40mm lens. Not 100% sure on that one.)
Tags: Bessa, Film, Leica, One camera one year, Photography, Rangefinder
Posted in Photography | No Comments »
June 4th, 2009
For my birthday, both my parents have agreed to contribute a sum of money towards a camera for me. At first, I had my heart set on a DSLR, but now I’m not so sure…
Let me explain. I’m as much of a computer geek as you can expect the average Comp Sci student to be, perhaps more so. I love my digital toys (or hate, depending on the situation). But for some (perhaps insane?) reason, I still prefer film to digital. My primary camera at the time of writing is an Olympus OM-2n, and it performs perfectly. Since starting out with the whole photography business, I’ve gained an interest in street photography. It’s great fun (although a teensy bit scary at times), and I love just randomly snapping pictures of interesting-looking people. I’ve been using my OM-2n primarily with the Zuiko 135mm f/3.5 lens I have for it, and I’ve generally been having great fun with it. However, I would much prefer to get closer to the subjects and get better shots that way, rather than shooting from a distance. For that method of photography, a rangefinder point and shoot camera is much more preferable and discreet compared to an SLR. Prime examples of rangefinder cameras that the average person may well know of include the Leica range of cameras.
Now, Leica cameras are a tad expensive (coming in at around.. £2,500 for the body only!), so I’ve been looking around at cheaper alternatives. The one which seems to most suit my needs is the Voitländer Bessa R3a. It’s a fraction of the price of the Leica (a “mere” £350), and seems to offer most of the capabilities of the Leica M7. It also uses the Leica M-mount for lenses, so if I ever did earn enough money to upgrade to a Leica (possibly a Leica M8 or M8.2 sometime in the distant future), any lenses I bought would for the Bessa R3a still work on the newer camera.
The Bessa R3a also has a 1:1 viewfinder, meaning that I’d be able to shoot with both eyes open (which would probably be kinda weird at first, but I’m sure I could get used to it). It uses aperture-priority for its “auto” mode, which is the same as my OM-2n. It has the ability to display two shutter speeds in the viewfinder: the shutter speed which you have selected as the user, and the shutter speed which the camera recommends. It produces outstanding results on film, with a resolution of 125lp/mm (line pair/mm). The only “downside” is that it cannot be used without batteries. I guess I can just make sure I keep spares with me at all times.
In my last blog post, I wrote about the advantages of getting film processed in bulk, buying film in bulk, and the use of film scanners to reduce the costs of photography. I believe that if I practice what I preach, I would be still be able to feed myself, whilst continuing to shoot film. (But only just…). Depending on what I decide I prefer to do in the long run, I would most likely invest in a double-digit or single-digit Canon DSLR or a Leica M8 of some sort. But this would all be in at least a couple of years, so I’m not going to think about that too much.
Now, this blog post may well be a tad pre-emptive: I’m not going to buy any new camera until I’m off my crutches. This will allow me to experiment much more thoroughly with street photography with my OM-2n and two legs. I’ll be able to get closer to my subjects, and keep moving whilst taking photos (which I cannot do at the moment). I want to be able to spend a good month or so shooting with my OM-2n on two legs before purchasing a new camera, so I’d be on the market around about late August or early September. We shall see what happens.
Tags: Bessa R3a, Crutches, Film, Leica, Olympus, OM-2n, Photography, Rangefinder, Street Photography, Voitländer
Posted in Photography | 4 Comments »
May 29th, 2009
I’ve recently been getting into photography, thanks to my girlfriend, Willow, and a couple of mutual friends of ours. At the moment, I’m shooting with a film camera, and as you can probably imagine, this isn’t the most cost-effective of approaches. As such, I’ve been looking into how to make it cheaper for me to enjoy this hobby (especially as I’m a student with limited funds).
Obviously, the cheapest option in the long-term would be to buy a DSLR (Digital SLR) camera, however, I want to carry on shooting with a film camera for the time being (although I do have plans to buy a DSLR towards the end of the summer). Due to this, I’ve been focusing on how to make it as cheap as possible to do film photography. I have been taking my film to Jessops to get them processed, printed, and scanned, but the quality of the scans were, at best, mediocre. Jessops also used cold developer when developing my roll of Ilford HP5, which resulted in unacceptably high levels of grain. They also scan colour images with a green/blue cast to them, which in some cases, can completely ruin a good photo. A friend on IRC has recommended (on numerous occasions) that I use Peak Imaging for photo processing, then to scan the photos myself at home. Peak Imaging offers a discount when many rolls of film are sent in to be developed at once. The main expenditure in this plan would be forking out for a film scanner: a decent model would set me back about £200-odd. But after so many rolls of film, it would start paying for itself: after doing the maths, it would take approximately 20 rolls of film until the scanner started paying for itself (assuming mid/high-resolution scans). In addition, having your own film scanner allows you to scan only particular frames from the negatives – or particular slides – and at higher resolutions.
So, although I do plan to get a DSLR, it seems to be well worth buying a flim scanner, especially as I plan to continue using film throughout my experiments with photography. The £200 expenditure quickly pays for itself, and allows me to worry much less about how much I’m spending whilst taking photos. I’ll also start buying film in bulk once I’ve identified my favourites, and store them in fridges so that they don’t go out of date so fast: every little helps…
Tags: Film, Jessops, Money, Peak Imaging, Photography, Scanning
Posted in Photography | 1 Comment »
May 28th, 2009
It seems to me that with the (relatively) new microblogging technologies such as Twitter and Identi.ca, and the increasing popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, the use of IM technologies such as MSN, AIM and Jabber is decreasing.
Although I have an account on most of the IM services, I’ve found myself being online less and less, and it doesn’t have such an important place in my mind. I’m not sure whether this is because many of my close friends have started using IRC, or because I’ve started to keep up with old friends more on Facebook, or because I’m keeping track of what aquaintences are up to using Twitter, but my use of Jabber and MSN is slowly decreasing, even though I have over 200-odd contacts. Having said this, I do find myself using Facebook Chat more and more often, even though I hate its guts. Why? Simply because various close friends and family members find it easier and simpler to use, and more accessible than any of the other technologies available at the moment. Don’t forget that we’re talking about (relatively) tech-illiterate folk here.
It might be due to Facebook Chat becoming more “mainstream” and easier to use. Or the fact that people don’t seem to equate their GMail account with IM functuality (i.e. GTalk). Or the amount of nonsense encountered on MSN. But as far as I can tell, the use of specialised IM technologies is decreasing on a regular basis, and the use of microblogging and social networking sites is increasing extremely quickly.
Many people are talking about the death of social networking sites such as Facebook due to microblogging technologies, however I refuse to believe that this is the case. But I do think that the use of IM technologies for communication between friends and family members is going down the drain. I cannot, however, speak for the use (or lack thereof) of IM technologies in the workplace – I know that within the sysadmin team(s) or programming team(s) in industries, IM is a great tool for communication, on the other hand, many companies are still using IRC and have private IRC servers for communcation within the workplace.
Tags: Facebook, IM, Jabber, Microblogging, Social networking, Twtitter
Posted in IM, Microblogging, Social networking | 3 Comments »
May 3rd, 2009
My recently-sent email to the -core and -dev mailing lists:
Hi,
I've enjoyed my time with Gentoo, mostly... But these days I've just got
too demotivated to work on it. I might have stayed if Ken69267 posted me
some Lifesavers, but he didn't. 
On a more serious note, the problem seems to be the complete lack of
management in the required places, Gentoo is fast becoming (or more
likely, already is) an anarchic organisation, where it's becoming
nigh-on impossible to keep track of things.
I see a number of issues with Gentoo these days. The lack of a proper
leadership body. Lack of people working together in unison. The tree
needs to be sorted out: we have >16000 packages, and 200-250 developers,
not all of which are ebuild developers) - We're still using CVS, we do
*not* have the manpower to keep all the packages updated properly using
a centralised VCS. If these issues were fixed, I don't know/care how
they do get fixed, but if they were, I might consider coming back.
If you *really* want me to stay/not retire, and attempt to help fix
these issues, then I guess I can do so if enough people request that of
me. But I will do so purely in a "managerial" position, and will do no
ebuild or other such development.
I'll still hang around in various channels and so on and so forth.
Whatever happens, I do apparently maintain a few misc packages, most of
which are low maintenance. Various herds will now need a new lead
(apologies guys), so that will have to be arranged as well. You will
also need to find another slacker to replace me 
If there isn't a mass revolt against my retirement, so long, and thanks
for all the fish! Otherwise... We'll see.
Thanks,
welp
Posted in Gentoo, Linux, Xfce | 10 Comments »
April 18th, 2009
So I came back home from Aberystwyth on the 4th April. I apparently now have a sofa in my room, and there’s another one downstairs… This is new. But anyway, I must digress! Kate is into photography quite a bit, as is another good friend of mine, Steffy. So I decided that I’d jump on the bandwagon and get snapping! Admittedly with a film SLR which they started manufacturing in around… 1975 – the Olympus OM-2n. The camera works well, and I found it with a 50mm f/1.8 lens…
So, off to Rotterdam I went! Steffy and RhiRhi almost didn’t make it, because Steffy bought the tickets for the wrong month… But we all made it over in the end, they just had to get a different ferry home, which was fine. Steffy enjoyed eyeing up my Olympus OM-2n, and he brought along some film for me to use in it. So I started taking a couple of photos on the ferry, and decided to save the rest of my film for Rotterdam.
Rotterdam itself was good fun! We stayed at a 5-star hotel: I was with Kate, RhiRhi and Steffy had a room, and fragalot and slightlymad had a room too. Service was excellent 
We went to the zoo on the second day, and I took plenty of photos there, some of which I deemed Flickr-worthy, and uploaded on there. Some… weren’t so good, but overall, I’m quite pleased! I really, really enjoyed the stay, especially spending time with Kate. I think a good time was had by all
Just before I went to Rotterdam, I went on eBay and purchased a 35mm f/2.8 lens to play around with. Steffy reckons I’ve got an eye for architecture, and that I’m quite good at portraits, so I’ll probably be focusing mostly on those two genres. I got my hands on the 35mm last night, but am out of film… I’ll probably buy a roll later today, and take some photos in Aldeburgh later on. I have 5-odd rolls of film being delivered on Monday, some colour, some B&W, all of varying speed. So I’ll be able to experiment with different ISO speeds, different exposure times, and different aperture sizes… should be fun! I do however, make no promises as to the quality of my photos… 
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
March 13th, 2009
Tonight I’m going to (attempt to) update to Xfce-4.6 on my Xfce VM, so I’ll let you know how that goes goes.
On a side note, drizzt has been busy working on stages for Gentoo/FreeBSD on amd64, so I’m probably going to attempt to install that in a VM, and see how we get on with that. With any luck, we’ll hopefully have the ~amd64-fbsd keyword in the tree at this rate!
Posted in FreeBSD, Gentoo, Linux, Xfce | 2 Comments »
March 10th, 2009
Is waaaaaay too addictive. Seriously. Narcissus and I cleaned out my room yesterday evening, and there were twenty two bottles of Oasis in my room. >.<
I think I should stop drinking Oasis, but it’s just too nice! And it tastes much nicer than water. I don’t care what additives it has, it’s just… nomnomnom!
Update: It’s 3 days later, and I currently have something between 7-9 bottles of Oasis in my room. Fail.
Tags: Addiction, Oasis, Random
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
March 8th, 2009
Right, I’ve spent most of the weekend sorting out various Apache/DNS/VirtualHost issues on Narcissus’s new VPS. He’s got five IP addresses pointing at his VPS, and randomly assigned them to the various sites hosted on the server… I wasn’t best pleased with this, so split the sites into various categories, assigned them an IP address based on that, and redid the DNS.
After sorting that lot out, it was time to sort out the filesystem locations where the sites were being hosted. The VirtualHost directives were originally pointing at content in ~user/public_html. I find that this has a number of issues, especially when the user wants to have multiple subdomains, and also when users want to put actual content in their ~user/public_html to be made available via http://foo.bar.com/~user. It is also a lot less centralised, and especially in cases where the user has no account on the server, can lead to a lot of unused user accounts, which I consider to be a security liability. As such, I prefer to host sites in /var/www/$site_name/htdocs with their logfiles stored in /var/www/$site_name/logs. This leads to a system which is much easier to manage as all the sites are centralised. If a user needs to make changes to their site, there’s a symlink created to ~user/sites/$site_name, which leads back to the site in /var.
So, we hacked together a quick script to move sites to the proper location, update the httpd.conf, and ran that, which solved the “problem” fairly quickly.
After doing all of that, I decided to get some content up on our new house website (the group of students I’m living with next year decided to make a website for the house, with aggregated blog feeds, house rules, news, forums (for debating issues and so on), and various uses like that. I decided to use Drupal as a CMS, as I decided it offered most of the functuality which I needed, and have been working on getting that up and running. I’ve still got to sort out the aesthetics side of things, but it should be up and running properly sometime soonish, at which point, I’ll announce it to the world.
Tags: Admin, Apache, Broken, CMS, Drupal, House, Sysadmin
Posted in Linux, Sysadmin | 2 Comments »
March 6th, 2009
Using mv instead of cp to transfer files from your WordPress backup to your new install is not a good idea. Especially when you hose the new install, and the file you copied over was the config file. Then I deleted the backup of the database in my frustration… Go me!
So now I have yet another new blog, let’s see how this one lasts, ‘eh?
Tags: Bad idea, Blog, Broken, PEBKAC, WordPress
Posted in Blog | 3 Comments »
