Canon's actually pretty cool about the use of custom firmware. Plus projects like CHDK and Magic Lantern (and the thing that hacked the 300D into something fancier) have been around for quite a few years, and Canon hasn't tried squashing them.
(Although apparently their hacker-friendly nature most definitely stops when it comes to the EOS-1 line.)
A (cheapskate) friend of mine had an old Russian Lada which inexplicably came with a keyhole for engaging a 'launch mode'. Of course, he didn't have the key, but eventually he managed to pick the lock.
It would appear there'd been some kind of mixup in the relevant Soviet factories and it actually was a launch mode - and this peculiar Lada-Soyuz hybrid launched straight up into the sky, friend included.
He's probably still up there. Wonder if he ever tried docking with Mir?
Temperatures took the longest to get intuitively as I had to live through the various weather patterns before I could feel it. But, even then there wasn't really any advantage to it as I was still comparing it to what I consider a comfortable temperature.
Temperatures are easy.
-18degC: typical freezer. 0degC: freezing! Literally. 4degC: typical fridge. 10degC: bit parky out, definitely put a jumper on. 20degC: room temperature. 30degC: really quite warm. 37degC: human body temperature. 40degC: really bloody hot innit. 100degC: boiling (literally!)
Some of the Europeans I've run into say that Amtrak's on-board experience compares favorably to what they get in their countries, even if the trains are slower.
As someone who's travelled on more than his fair share of trains in Europeland - at least on the west coast, Amtrak trains are super-comfy. Big seats, loads of legroom, decent food (on the last trip - previous trip a few years ago involved a fossilised, tepid space-burger).
Best of all, there's often a carriage specifically for viewing the scenery going past. Of which there is a lot. Possibly including someone describing the scenery going past. I learned a lot about Mount Saint Helens that way. (Main reason for choosing trains - I fly a fair amount also.) Way better views than, say, the Eurostar - where you never even glimpse the sea you've been under.
I vaguely recall the WiFi working when I went from Seattle to Vancouver BC. Not terribly fast, but enough to email friends and family about the delays. (A swing-bridge had got stuck in the 'open' position, and the train had to wait for half an hour or so. The driver had then disappeared somewhere to get a sandwich, causing another ten minutes delay.)
Amtrak is great fun (some of the announcements on that Vancouver trip were gloriously surreal) but it's hardly an efficient means of transportation. I got the train from Seattle to Portland once, and realised it's a similar distance between the two cities as it is from Brussels to Paris. I used to catch the Thalys between Brussels and Paris - in the time it took to go from Seattle to Portland (including a freight-train-induced pause in sidings), I could have gone from Brussels to Paris to Brussels then back to Paris again.
It's not too hard to spot the ISS going overhead when the conditions are right - it's like a fairly bright star going at a fair speed across the sky. It's visible for just minutes at a time - it's sufficiently close to the Earth that you'd definitely need a hefty world-wide network to communicate directly.
You can still pull the plug from the electrical socket. They haven't figured out how to fuck that up....yet.
My school acquired a weird IBM Aptiva thing somehow in the early 1990s (I think it was won in a competition?) - and as is inevitable at a school, someone copied some games on to it. I forget the exact game responsible, but it was non-obvious how to exit - and with an increasingly irritated teacher looking at us pupils, the sensible thing seemed to be to power-down and restart. Push power button on computer, it turns off, push power button again, it turns back on - resuming to the game we rather needed to exit.
Right, go for the nuclear option - pull the plug from the socket. Plug back in, power up, shitting hell it's just resumed to the game again.
Right me and that other guy just made it up for...why exactly? Or maybe, just maybe, you got lucky or chose a really good model? The Olympus cameras don't seem to have this problem but a LOT of the cameras sold in your B&M stores DO have this problem.
Which manufacturer and camera models suffer from this problem? I'd be interested to know, so I can recommend against them.
(I've helped out with a fair amount of digital camera stuff for friends and relatives, and I've never actually seen a corrupted memory card. Plenty of accidentally deleted photos, one accidentally formatted card, one memory card that was flat-out dead, but no corrupted filesystems.)
It takes about 10 seconds to remove the memory card and plug it into a tablet/laptop/whatever. Unless you need photos uploaded essentially as you shoot them (which I suspect woudn't work very well at the same time you were taking new pictures), there is no reason to have the camera able to connect to a network.
You're kind of assuming the photographer is right next to the cameras - professional wireless whatsits (e.g. Nikon and Canon) are intended for full remote control of multiple cameras. So at a sports event, a photographer might have one down behind the goal with a wide-angle lens, another pointing at the other goal, etc. etc. etc. - all uploading to the photo agency for up-to-the-moment imagery. Newspapers needed things soon, the internet needs it now.
Still decidedly embarrassing if they are so easily compromised, of course.
Yes, delete button is right there, and will happily help you corrupt all of your data on the card, in $4000 camera. Thats the point.
What on Earth are you doing with your cameras? I've been deleting unnecessary photos from cameras for years, as well as using the memory cards for general file storage (somehow I still have no USB memory whatsits) - and I've yet to suffer from any file corruption. I do tend to reformat cards that need emptying rather than mass-deleting files, but that's mainly 'cause it's much quicker that way. I've frequently had full cards that I've pruned photos from so I can take some more. (Experience mainly with Canon dSLRs, but also with Fujifilm, Minolta, Panasonic etc.)
I suspect my habit of only buying decent memory cards has caught up with me yet again.:-(
If you want an open source, host-it-yourself web-app then there's Tiny Tiny RSS, as recommended by a co-worker.
The site's been up and down all day for some completely inexplicable reason, but the brief glimpse I got of the live demo was pretty impressive. I escaped Google Reader nearly a year ago (the Google Plus 'integration' had been annoying me, and in a fit of pique I got rid of all Google dependencies I had) and while I've been mostly happy with the desktop-app Vienna RSS for Mac OS X, further alternatives are always welcome. I imagine someone will get an open cross-client sync working now that Google Reader is going away...
But I feel like the sentiment of his post is pretty correct.
Indeed - I find I very rarely use continuous shooting on my own cameras, and I don't think I've ever hit the buffer limits in a real-world situation, but faster memory cards are still bloody useful simply for copying stuff over to a computer afterwards.
UHm, no. Top of the line SLR can't handle 20 shots in buffer, and any consumer grade is 1-2 max. You won't get you 3-5 FPS (mid tier) or 5-9FPS (high end) without a fast card.
Definitely not a top-of-the-line camera, but still fairly decent - Canon EOS 7D. With the latest firmware, mine claims to have a 22 shot buffer in RAW, 80 shot buffer in large JPEG. 8fps. Plus it'll potentially shoot for even longer depending on how fast the memory card is - but it does take CompactFlash rather than SD.
Granted the top layer, which is all we have studied up until now will be nothing exciting (likely layers of dust deposited over millennia), but unexposed layers have a lot of historic potential.
The stuff they're looking at is rock that's (very) slowly being further exposed through erosion by the wind - the rocks formed early in the history of Mars, then newer, upper layers have eroded away, exposing this particularly old stuff dating from around the time life began on Earth. If Mars had similar conditions, then it's a good place to look for remnants of organic molecules...
Ancient indigenous organic molecules could be also destroyed or transformed by the ionizing radiation in the shallow subsurface of Mars. Due to a thin martian atmosphere and lack of magnetic field, the surface of Mars has been bombarded continuously by the energetic particles of the galactic and solar cosmic rays (GCRs and SCRs) for much of its history. Unlike UV radiation which is absorbed in the first mm of soil (Mancinelli and Klovstad 2000; Cockell et al. 2005), GCRs can penetrate down to 1 meter below the surface (Dartnell et al. 2007). Over the long period of exposure, cosmic rays particles have the capacity to transform complex organic compounds into macromolecules having different, more refractory chemistry and/or into smaller molecules broken from a parent molecule. The latter case may occur either by direct impacts or by secondary reaction with oxidative radicals produced by radiation in the immediate vicinity of the organic molecules (Dartnell et al. 2008). It is not clear how such long-term degradation would affect SAM’s measurements of organic compounds at the ancient geologic outcrops because the rates of erosion are highly variable on Mars (Golombek et al. 2006). Erosion of the ancient rock would naturally expose “fresh” (less irradiated) material to the surface with potentially “unbroken” organic molecules. Furthermore, SCRs, which are less energetic than GCRs, cannot penetrate and destroy organic matter deeper than 2 cm below the surface (Pavlov 2011). Therefore, MSL’s drilling and sampling of outcrops from 5 cm below the surface will exclude the effects of degradation of organic matter by solar cosmic rays. Finally, using the radiolysis constants of amino acids Kminek and Bada (2006) and Pavlov (2011) demonstrated that simple organic compounds with masses below 100 amu, should have a good chance to survive long-term exposure to GCRs in the shallow subsurface even extremely low surface erosion rates. Results from Curiosity’s Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) will provide modern radiation characteristics that will help improve long-term modeling of the surface radiation on Mars and possibly constrain its affects on near surface organic chemistry.
Most of it, yes - but Flickr helpfully strips out said EXIF data for the reduced-size versions of the photos. This combined with Google's allow-download-without-seeing-any-attribution-details? Nice!
Actually, doing some more testing - Flickr has an optional (and trivially easy-to-defeat) system to prevent visitors from saving displayed photos to their computers. Google Image Search goes straight past this - so an all-rights-reserved, the-owner-has-disabled-downloading-of-their-photos image can be saved straight from Google with no indication whatsoever of the photographer's wishes.
(While I'm really not protective of my own stuff, I know other people are of theirs - Google's behaviour here is at the very least terribly impolite.)
Something about slashdot makes it really combative. I don't know if it's the karma system, us, or something else. But if you say something people see, no matter how rational, someone is going to disagree just to disagree, and it's probably going to be a little nasty.
Dear "Webmaster", nobody cares about your shitty website packed full of annoying ads. Get over it already.
If someone clicks the Google Image Search 'high-resolution' link for one of my photos from Flickr, they get a medium-resolution version with no description, attribution or copyright information. (Example search page here.
If they go to the ad-free Flickr page, they get links to much higher resolution versions, associated images and also get informed that it's under a super-open Creative Commons Attribution licence.
I'm not a photographer so this will probably sound ignorant (because it is), but what makes lenses proprietary? Isn't it just physics, light input/output? Is it really impossible considering the pro-level costs to build mounting adapters to mate different branded components?
There are surprisingly few optical problems (assuming you've got the space to work with) - a Nikon SLR lens (flange focal distance of 46.5mm) can be mounted on a Canon EOS SLR (flange focal distance of 44.0mm) with nothing but an appropriately shaped, 2.5mm-thick bit of metal sticking the two together. (The opposite would need special optics in the way in order to get proper focus, since otherwise the focal plane will be too far from the film / image sensor.)
Mirrorless, interchangeable lens cameras have very short flange focal distances (not being SLRs, they don't have a flappy mirror assembly between the lens and the image sensor). There's much more room to build adaptors that fit - potentially several centimetres when mounting an SLR lens rather than a few millimetres.
The main problem is all the electronic communications stuff present in modern lenses - for autofocus, setting the aperture and for the lens to communicate back its specifications, status and so on. Probably the most impressive range of adapters I've seen is from Metabones - some of which include full electronic compatibility between a Canon EF lens and a Sony NEX camera. (Not affiliated with them, and not a customer - primarily I'm hoping someone gets off their arses and builds a full-featured Nikon-lens-to-Canon-camera adapter. The existing dumb-bits-of-metal are great for video, but I'd like one that does everything, please!)
Slashdot Mirror
Canon's actually pretty cool about the use of custom firmware. Plus projects like CHDK and Magic Lantern (and the thing that hacked the 300D into something fancier) have been around for quite a few years, and Canon hasn't tried squashing them.
(Although apparently their hacker-friendly nature most definitely stops when it comes to the EOS-1 line.)
A (cheapskate) friend of mine had an old Russian Lada which inexplicably came with a keyhole for engaging a 'launch mode'. Of course, he didn't have the key, but eventually he managed to pick the lock.
It would appear there'd been some kind of mixup in the relevant Soviet factories and it actually was a launch mode - and this peculiar Lada-Soyuz hybrid launched straight up into the sky, friend included.
He's probably still up there. Wonder if he ever tried docking with Mir?
Temperatures are easy.
-18degC: typical freezer.
0degC: freezing! Literally.
4degC: typical fridge.
10degC: bit parky out, definitely put a jumper on.
20degC: room temperature.
30degC: really quite warm.
37degC: human body temperature.
40degC: really bloody hot innit.
100degC: boiling (literally!)
As someone who's travelled on more than his fair share of trains in Europeland - at least on the west coast, Amtrak trains are super-comfy. Big seats, loads of legroom, decent food (on the last trip - previous trip a few years ago involved a fossilised, tepid space-burger).
Best of all, there's often a carriage specifically for viewing the scenery going past. Of which there is a lot. Possibly including someone describing the scenery going past. I learned a lot about Mount Saint Helens that way. (Main reason for choosing trains - I fly a fair amount also.) Way better views than, say, the Eurostar - where you never even glimpse the sea you've been under.
I vaguely recall the WiFi working when I went from Seattle to Vancouver BC. Not terribly fast, but enough to email friends and family about the delays. (A swing-bridge had got stuck in the 'open' position, and the train had to wait for half an hour or so. The driver had then disappeared somewhere to get a sandwich, causing another ten minutes delay.)
Amtrak is great fun (some of the announcements on that Vancouver trip were gloriously surreal) but it's hardly an efficient means of transportation. I got the train from Seattle to Portland once, and realised it's a similar distance between the two cities as it is from Brussels to Paris. I used to catch the Thalys between Brussels and Paris - in the time it took to go from Seattle to Portland (including a freight-train-induced pause in sidings), I could have gone from Brussels to Paris to Brussels then back to Paris again.
Here you go.
It's not too hard to spot the ISS going overhead when the conditions are right - it's like a fairly bright star going at a fair speed across the sky. It's visible for just minutes at a time - it's sufficiently close to the Earth that you'd definitely need a hefty world-wide network to communicate directly.
(NASA ISS sightings site here.)
Here you go! Down near "Sound can be a "two-sided coin" in war, he argues."
It's the Grauniad. It was more likely to be '123passwrod' [sic].
I've always assumed it's some weird endianness issue. Which doesn't bode well for the actual e-books...
My school acquired a weird IBM Aptiva thing somehow in the early 1990s (I think it was won in a competition?) - and as is inevitable at a school, someone copied some games on to it. I forget the exact game responsible, but it was non-obvious how to exit - and with an increasingly irritated teacher looking at us pupils, the sensible thing seemed to be to power-down and restart. Push power button on computer, it turns off, push power button again, it turns back on - resuming to the game we rather needed to exit.
Right, go for the nuclear option - pull the plug from the socket. Plug back in, power up, shitting hell it's just resumed to the game again.
There's some pretty decent views on the way, too - the train runs right next to the sea for a significant portion of the route.
Magenta?
Which manufacturer and camera models suffer from this problem? I'd be interested to know, so I can recommend against them.
(I've helped out with a fair amount of digital camera stuff for friends and relatives, and I've never actually seen a corrupted memory card. Plenty of accidentally deleted photos, one accidentally formatted card, one memory card that was flat-out dead, but no corrupted filesystems.)
You're kind of assuming the photographer is right next to the cameras - professional wireless whatsits (e.g. Nikon and Canon) are intended for full remote control of multiple cameras. So at a sports event, a photographer might have one down behind the goal with a wide-angle lens, another pointing at the other goal, etc. etc. etc. - all uploading to the photo agency for up-to-the-moment imagery. Newspapers needed things soon, the internet needs it now.
Still decidedly embarrassing if they are so easily compromised, of course.
What on Earth are you doing with your cameras? I've been deleting unnecessary photos from cameras for years, as well as using the memory cards for general file storage (somehow I still have no USB memory whatsits) - and I've yet to suffer from any file corruption. I do tend to reformat cards that need emptying rather than mass-deleting files, but that's mainly 'cause it's much quicker that way. I've frequently had full cards that I've pruned photos from so I can take some more. (Experience mainly with Canon dSLRs, but also with Fujifilm, Minolta, Panasonic etc.)
I suspect my habit of only buying decent memory cards has caught up with me yet again. :-(
If you want an open source, host-it-yourself web-app then there's Tiny Tiny RSS, as recommended by a co-worker.
The site's been up and down all day for some completely inexplicable reason, but the brief glimpse I got of the live demo was pretty impressive. I escaped Google Reader nearly a year ago (the Google Plus 'integration' had been annoying me, and in a fit of pique I got rid of all Google dependencies I had) and while I've been mostly happy with the desktop-app Vienna RSS for Mac OS X, further alternatives are always welcome. I imagine someone will get an open cross-client sync working now that Google Reader is going away...
I'm more worried that a zombie Stanley Kubrick will rise from the grave, wanting to shoot another film with available light.
(Lit by candlelight? Yeah, okay. Lit by a single stick of burning incense? That's just taking the proverbial.)
Indeed - I find I very rarely use continuous shooting on my own cameras, and I don't think I've ever hit the buffer limits in a real-world situation, but faster memory cards are still bloody useful simply for copying stuff over to a computer afterwards.
Definitely not a top-of-the-line camera, but still fairly decent - Canon EOS 7D. With the latest firmware, mine claims to have a 22 shot buffer in RAW, 80 shot buffer in large JPEG. 8fps. Plus it'll potentially shoot for even longer depending on how fast the memory card is - but it does take CompactFlash rather than SD.
The stuff they're looking at is rock that's (very) slowly being further exposed through erosion by the wind - the rocks formed early in the history of Mars, then newer, upper layers have eroded away, exposing this particularly old stuff dating from around the time life began on Earth. If Mars had similar conditions, then it's a good place to look for remnants of organic molecules...
The aim of the drill is to get to rock that's not been significantly irradiated by cosmic rays. From this paper on The Sample Analysis at Mars Investigation and Instrument Suite:
Most of it, yes - but Flickr helpfully strips out said EXIF data for the reduced-size versions of the photos. This combined with Google's allow-download-without-seeing-any-attribution-details? Nice!
Actually, doing some more testing - Flickr has an optional (and trivially easy-to-defeat) system to prevent visitors from saving displayed photos to their computers. Google Image Search goes straight past this - so an all-rights-reserved, the-owner-has-disabled-downloading-of-their-photos image can be saved straight from Google with no indication whatsoever of the photographer's wishes.
(While I'm really not protective of my own stuff, I know other people are of theirs - Google's behaviour here is at the very least terribly impolite.)
I disagree!
If someone clicks the Google Image Search 'high-resolution' link for one of my photos from Flickr, they get a medium-resolution version with no description, attribution or copyright information. (Example search page here.
If they go to the ad-free Flickr page, they get links to much higher resolution versions, associated images and also get informed that it's under a super-open Creative Commons Attribution licence.
There are surprisingly few optical problems (assuming you've got the space to work with) - a Nikon SLR lens (flange focal distance of 46.5mm) can be mounted on a Canon EOS SLR (flange focal distance of 44.0mm) with nothing but an appropriately shaped, 2.5mm-thick bit of metal sticking the two together. (The opposite would need special optics in the way in order to get proper focus, since otherwise the focal plane will be too far from the film / image sensor.)
Mirrorless, interchangeable lens cameras have very short flange focal distances (not being SLRs, they don't have a flappy mirror assembly between the lens and the image sensor). There's much more room to build adaptors that fit - potentially several centimetres when mounting an SLR lens rather than a few millimetres.
The main problem is all the electronic communications stuff present in modern lenses - for autofocus, setting the aperture and for the lens to communicate back its specifications, status and so on. Probably the most impressive range of adapters I've seen is from Metabones - some of which include full electronic compatibility between a Canon EF lens and a Sony NEX camera. (Not affiliated with them, and not a customer - primarily I'm hoping someone gets off their arses and builds a full-featured Nikon-lens-to-Canon-camera adapter. The existing dumb-bits-of-metal are great for video, but I'd like one that does everything, please!)