[Choc-Ful-A]

Hey you went through my old stomping grounds. Did you spend much time in Crescent City Ca? Bummer about that way internal battery. thats a moronic way to design something. It’s almost like they want you to send the camera in for something which shouldn’t need a tech person on most cameras.

edited to ad I just looked for a backup/clock battery on my T1i and cant find one so my Canon will probably need the same tech service if that battery dies too. bummer.

Crescent City was just a lunch stop on the trip from Ashland Or to Eureka Ca. So we were just there long enough to take photos at the harbor, then drive to the other side of the harbor to have lunch. And of course take more photos… Then it was one last pit stop for coffee/tea at Dutch Brothers (a cool regional chain) before heading south.

As for clock batteries, the fact that it’s difficult to replace it somewhat annoying. But what really made me crazy was that the camera won’t work at all without it. There’s really no excuse for that design. Even if certain functionality is lost, the camera SHOULD work with the regular battery in place. If I could have set the clock and reconfigured it every time I took out the battery I could have limped through the rest of the trip. For whatever reason, the engineers at Nikon decided to make the camera do everything normally except save the photo to the SD card when the clock battery goes.

Also, I just chedk the shutter count on the last photo the D80 took for grins… It took 13745 photos before the battery went. That doesn’t sound like a lot to me, since it’s easy to take hundreds of shots in a single day. But at least it make 5 digits before it died!

And the last shot it managed to capture is pretty fitting, it’s a shot of a fisherman at sunset taken from the Sundial bridge in Redding.

[Choc-Ful-A]

The only thing I don’t like about the D3100 is that when I plug it into my Linux system via USB cable it doesn’t appear as a mounted filesystem, like the D80 does. Instead there’s some obnoxious special mechanism for accessing the device that only certain applications know how to use. So I have to pull the SD card out and use a USB card reader to transfer photos. I’m not a fan of this particular “progress”.

The D3100 is permanently stuck in PTP mode, not Mass Storage mode. It’ll appear under Linux as a camera device if you have a driver loaded.

http://ptp.sourceforge.net

I assumed it was something like that and I find that “design” offensive. There’s no reason to invent some special purpose protocol for transfering pictures when plain old USB disk emulation works just fine.

Luckily this is a temporary camera for me, otherwise I’d be tempted to harrass Nikon for making such a poor design choice that constrains the way people use the hardware they purchased.

[Choc-Ful-A]

Also, some flatbedf scanners (even inexpensive ones) have light sources built into the lids specifically for scanning slides and negatives. The one I bought a couple of years does and it came with various plastic brackets for holding negatives of various sizes. So if you have a camera store near you that rents equipment, you might be able to rent a scanner for a day that will attach to your computer laptop via USB cable and you can scan them yourself. You’d have to install some software to control the scanner and save them to disk, but there are free packages that do it. I think when I was scanning negatives I was using GIMP to do it.

[Choc-Ful-A]

The issue of the Boobies post (and the O for PS threads) has been brought up, and the devs are considering options. We certainly could envotinate, but then that will really mess up stats, because we all know people would proceed to vote for the Boobies/O images.

Seems like “always show the first comment” is a simple enough solution to me since that would take care of the concerns of both PS and Farktography contests. And it should be be simple on the coding side too. But I may be missing something…

[Choc-Ful-A]

I added all the links posted here to the homepage of Nihilon. But since that site gets virtually no traffic, I really would be surprised if you even see a blip from those links. It’s still cool to link up to my photography peeps though. 🙂

[Choc-Ful-A]

That’s fantastic.

Yup, great find! I’ve already forwarded the link to 3 non-Farktography people. 🙂

[Choc-Ful-A]

What I have put online isn’t well organized or very presentable, so I will not be offended in the least if you don’t want to link to any of these. But since you asked, here’s where various postings of my photography can be found (mxed in with other junk).

Nihilon.Com

SmugMug for CNAME jj

DeviantArt for Choc-Ful-A

And there are a couple of videos from me here, one of which is an trippy animation of photos my camera arbitrarily added random colors to.

YouTube for CNAME jj

[Choc-Ful-A]

Wow, I take off on vacation for a few days and you guys get all famous on me! 😆

Well done, folks, and congrats! 🙂

Ha! Well I haven’t been on vacation but I second the well done and congrats! That’s a couple wins for the good guys this week.

[Choc-Ful-A]

Any recommendations for hyperlink color? Brighter blue? Red?

The background is actually a dark denim weave with a hint of blue. I could probably lighten that for monitors that don’t have good low-end acuity.

Either of those colors would be fine as long as they’re a bit lighter. Take a look at my site linked above and see if you like either of the colors there. The red is #C00000 and the blue links are #6090C0. Another alternative would be a bold light gray (#E0E0E0 or #C0C0C0). That way it blends more with the existing text but still stands out a little.

I’ve got dual LCD monitors, one fairly new and one several years old. I can see the denim hatch fine on the new one but just barely on the old one, so maybe just a little lightening.

Well given your military connections and the “denim” pattern, maybe “cadet blue” would be a good inside joke? The hex code is #5F9EA0 and it’s looks good to me (and is very readable) on a test copy of the page I made. It’s defintely blue, but close enough to grey that it seems to work with the neutral/dark color pallete of the site.

[Choc-Ful-A]

Well don’t mess with it if everyone else likes the simplicity and cleaner feel. That can be pretty powerful, just look at Apple design…

Maybe if there was a separate area for backstory or “the making of” then people could dig for more info if they wanted without adding clutter to the UI?

But my main point was that I think you’ve hit on something really good with the site. And all the creative tinkering with equipment to get the photos definitely should be publicized for people to see. It’s impressive from a physical object perspective and the results are uniqueand charming as well.

[Choc-Ful-A]

I think the site is really good on a coup[e different levels. First, the pitch/story is really compelling. The idea that you’re an artists/engineer split brained person who wants to work on projects, preferably in collaboration with others is great. And I’m a big fan of the DIY ethos (and hardware projects) so the “void my warranty” section is my favorite.

The only missed opportunity IMO is that when pulling up the photos in the different sections there’s no captions or links to more info to learn the backstory. Since I know some of what went into producing the ones in the low-fi and conceptual ones I wished other people viewing them had a way to get that info.

[Choc-Ful-A]

Apparently you have to compile from source to get the high-bitdepth functions for now, but I haven’t had time to breathe lately much less fiddle with software to find out first hand. It’s really going to be nice to have an alpha slider in high color depth… RawTherapee is nice, but I miss having photoshop-esque levels tools.

I don’t have the time/energy/motivation to play with GIMP 2.8 right now (looking for a new job is the worst job EVER) but I’m intrigued… I’ve compiled GIMP before and don’t remember it being too difficult. I think it takes quite a while to complete since there’s so much code, but I don’t remember having to fight through the process like with some other packages. I wouldn’t be surprised to find it’s somewhat unstable if the functionality is that new however.

And on top of that, I’m REALLY liking RawTherapee now. It is missing lots of tools that are in GIMP, but it’s also got lots of adjustments that GIMP doesn’t have. So I think I’ll be using both even after I get a hi-color depth version of GIMP up and running.

[Choc-Ful-A]

one of fthe problems with manual focus on my lenses is that they were designed for use by folks who never manually focus. the focusing rings are pathetic.

I had a similar problem with a lens and I found it so infuriating I put it in a draw and never use it. I don’t use autofocus so I’ll never buy a lens that doesn’t work well when manually focusing. The one I hate came with the camera.

[Choc-Ful-A]

Yeah this is correct and I’m aware of it. There’s an options page where you instruct zenfolio to use a custom domain. But in order to use that option you have to complete a successful DNS test, which is where I got the error message about the A record. Once that propigates, I’ll be able to set Zenfolio’s settings to use my domain name. Thanks again!

Got it, my bad! I would never have imaged that Zenfolio would require the DNS check before you can config the custom domain. Doing them in the other order makes a lot more sense to me and would allow people migrating from an existing site to do so without any downtime at all.

But c’est la vie! Sounds like you’re on the way to getting everything in working order.

[Choc-Ful-A]

Sorry to keep acting like the town naysayer but I just read the Zenfolio help pages and I’m pretty sure DNS along is insufficient for what you want to do. I believe any domain name you want to access your site has to be configured as a “Custom Domain” as they call them.

Otherwise no matter how successfully you manage to direct browsers to the right IP address with DNS settings, the Zenfolio service won’t know what to do when it receives the request. I think that’s why going to your alternate domain names results in a 404 error page FROM Zenfolio now.

Here’s a link to a page on the Zenfolio site that might be helpful.

http://help.zenfolio.com/customer/portal/articles/408210-using-your-own-custom-domain-name

If you already setup the “Custom Domains” on Zenfolio, then the DNS changes may be all you need. But both changes need to be in place for this to work as far as I can tell.

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