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Categories: all aviation bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater Wed, 30 Sep 2009I decided to do a quick-n-dirty layout of a Korona lensboard, and figured my work might come in handy for others. I need to redo this sheet a little bit, as it's not entirely clear how things are laid out, but it's too late to modify just now. I'll post another one soon that's more illustrative, with more description on the sheet. So, for the Google-bot: if you have a Korona (Gundlach) 5x7 view camera from the 1910s, and you need a lensboard for it, you're probably looking for this: Lensboard plans for Korona 5x7 camera (v1) - PDF file I plan to make mine out of plastic, probably black ABS or something similar. The 42mm hole is good for anything that is mounted on a Copal #1 shutter, such as the 210mm Schneider Symmar-S f/5.6 lens I'll be putting in mine. I'll probably make it out of two thicknesses of 1/4" plastic (since we still live in an SAE world, sad to say) glued together, with the larger piece milled down to 6mm where it matters, at the top and bottom edges. It's a .35mm difference, but it'll mean the difference between the board working and not working. Important note: I am not an expert! I just took some measurements off my existing lensboard and stuck them into a CAD drawing. I probably got something wrong, your mileage may vary, etc. Posted at 23:51 permanent link category: /misc Tue, 29 Sep 2009Every once in a while, I'm struck by a random whim. In going through old negatives a week or two ago, I came across one of a friend from highschool, Amy Tarlow. I remembered it being a decent picture, and on the negative it looked good. I didn't do anything about it, just kind of filed that data away. Tonight, I was chatting with Amy on Facebook (the evil blog-killer), and randomly mentioned this negative I'd run across. She was interested to see it, and I (not having a scanner) lamented not having a light table available. Then, it occurred to me that I could tape the negative to the monitor, and that would be a kind of light table...
It's hardly something to get thrilled about, but I thought the outcome was pretty interesting, and actually quite acceptable for a quick-n-dirty try at coming up with a useable proof. Tape negative to monitor, load blank page in Firefox (handy all-white screen), shoot with G10. Voila, instant ~4 MP copy of the negative. Load it into Photoshop, tweak the levels (the negative is a bit overexposed and contrasty, but workable), et voila! In related news, I'm getting close to being ready for some 5x7 shooting action, which will almost certainly involve the acquisition or construction of a light table to check out negatives. I have a modern 210mm lens (Schneider Symmar-S f/5.6 in a Copal #1 shutter) sitting on the living room table, which only awaits a lensboard to make it complete. I have a spot-meter on the way, and dark cloth waiting to be installed in the bathroom. It's close. Posted at 23:52 permanent link category: /misc Fri, 18 Sep 2009For those of you waiting with bated breath, I did finally get the truck all sorted out. When I bought it, I had a pre-purchase inspection done, which revealed that the DPFE sensor was the cause of the Check Engine light I'd noticed. On something of a whim, I went into the Car Quest store across from my workplace earlier this week, and asked if they carried the replacement sensor. Indeed they did, and once I got a look at it, I realized it would be foolish to ask someone else to replace it -- two bolts, two tubes and an electrical connector. This is a job anyone could do with two wrenches and a little bit of patience. So I replaced the sensor, and disconnected the battery for 10 minutes, to clear the check engine code from the computer. I drove it everywhere I went for the next few days (which was actually kind of gross, and I managed to get a parking ticket, because I'm so out of practice with parking habits), and when I went into the emissions testing station yesterday, they gave it an immediate pass. Previously, it had reported "Not ready" twice, which I now think was the computer cleverly insisting that the busted DPFE sensor really was important to the process. I had been concerned that I wouldn't get it past the emissions test in time to avoid the late fee for transferring the title. Fortunately, that all worked out just fine. I'm glad that whole thing is done. I've parked it, and am back on the bike, and surprisingly happy about that. Driving around my 17 MPG resource hog wasn't enjoyable at all, and it was a real relief to throw a leg over the bicycle again yesterday. Posted at 10:55 permanent link category: /misc
Bloggers Disappear, Friends Wonder
I've got a little roll of friends' journals and blogs that I check daily, but for the last month or three, it's been pretty arid out there. Tumbleweeds, like. Where'd everybody go? I suspect I know, and I know the painted hussy you're all hanging out with. It's Facebook, isn't it. Oh sure, 420 characters is plenty of space to say something, and it's fun to play with what you can pack into that constrained space, but we want to know your in-depth thoughts as well. We want to see your stories, your successes and failures in more than a brief paragraph. Even worse, maybe it's Twitter. Oh, Twitter looks good, but you end up jittering around like a meth-head, barely able to string two coherent thoughts together. An ADD service for an ADD nation. Well, I'm here to tell you, break the addiction! Come back to your long(er)-form writing roots! We miss you, and we promise to read what you have to say with eager brains and ready comments, snarky or sincere as the entry warrants. Posted at 09:47 permanent link category: /misc Tue, 15 Sep 2009
New Truck Reveals Consumer Winners, Losers
I finally succumbed to the vague desire I've had for years, and got myself a small pickup truck for heavy errands that won't fit on a bike. It was a surprisingly involved process, including two trips to Bremerton and about three weeks of waiting around for various events to happen. Of course, once I finally got it back to my house, it was time to start dealing with all the necessary transfer-of-ownership, insurance, and potential repair tasks. This flurry of activity has reminded me exactly why I dislike owning vehicles at all. First, there was the insurance. My long-time agent retired earlier this year, and my account was transferred (through some alchemy I don't understand) to a different agent, whom I will, for the moment, refrain from identifying in the hopes that things get better once it all settles down. My first call to this agent was to establish roughly what insurance would cost for this truck. This yielded a figure of $56 and change per month. This was an acceptable number to me, so I proceeded with the arrangements. After this call, there was a fair amount of waiting around for the aforementioned delays with the seller. Finally, I was ready to head over and buy the thing, so I called the agent back. "I'm ready to start the insurance on this truck," quoth I. "Great," quoth she, "we'll just need a month's deposit to start that up. That'll be $127." "One moment," quoth I, "days ago, the number was $56. What giveth?" "Oh," quoth she, "there's no possible way you got a figure of $56, that's half the lowest rate I can imagine." I was understandably upset at this development. There's no possibility I'd misunderstood the first call, I had the notes to prove it, and a very clear memory of how it'd gone. Something was seriously amiss, and I went to lunch that day very angry and frustrated. This $127/mo business was way too rich for my blood. I sent a text message to the seller, saying it was off and that I was unhappy with insurance as a concept. I may not have used exactly those terms. I called the agent back after lunch, after I'd had a chance to calm down a bit. I was transferred directly to the agent (I'd previously been dealing with office lackeys, as far as I know -- I don't recall ever having talked to my previous agent directly), and after a fairly tense, "Calm down, Mr. Johnston, let me see what's going on here," type conversation, it came out that the correct rate for me was in fact $53 per month. Ok, fine. You people need to talk to each other (and she said that's exactly what they did, and gave me the impression that my name was now well-known at their office as an example of how not to handle customers). I gave my credit card number, and asked to start the insurance coverage, as I would be picking up the truck that night. There was yet another delay with the seller, who'd lost track of the "Yay I paid it off" letter from his loan company, and I called the agent back a few days later to say that I hadn't actually bought the truck yet, and to not start coverage yet. The conversation was somewhat vague, as I didn't know when exactly I could pick up the truck as we waited for the bank to main a new letter to the seller. Then, when I went to complete the transaction the second time (which went alright, revealing only that I needed an emission inspection to complete the transaction), but in the rush to make the ferry, didn't remember to call and start the insurance. I figured, due to the vague conversation I'd had with the agent as regards "don't start it yet," I was probably covered, and made the trip back without incident. Then it was the weekend, so I waited until Monday to call the insurance agent back and confirm that all was copacetic, and that I had proof-of-insurance cards on the way. "Ok, we'll just need $107 from you to start coverage." I believe I have never sounded more like I wanted to reach through the phone and remove a person's jugular vein with my teeth than during that conversation. It's probably a good thing there were no witnesses to my actual appearance, as I'm sure it involved the words "red" and possibly "incandescent." Not only had they not charged my card when I first called and said, "Start the coverage," they'd once again utterly misspoken as regards what the charge would be. So had I gone that first time and picked up the truck, I would have had zero coverage, opening me up for a $500 lack of insurance ticket if anything had gone amiss enough to involve the polizei. And of course, the entire weekend that I was driving around trying to deal with emissions inspections and the like, I was technically uninsured, although the drone on the other end of the phone assured me that they would have covered anything in the event of a collision. That's so encouraging, thank you. It also developed that the $107 charge was because they needed two months of payments to start coverage. Of course, how silly of me not to have known that. I'd first assumed it was because my coverage premium had changed yet again. Why was I told it would require one month previously? A misunderstanding, naturally. My misunderstanding? Not that I can tell. As I explained to the woman on the far end of the phone call, I don't object to paying the required amount to do it right, I object to receiving false information, repeatedly, with apparent disregard for what effect that might have on my situation. (Such as making me try to cancel the purchase, having determined that the whole situation was beyond my means.) In theory, I now have insurance coverage for the truck. I have a printed-then-scanned-then-emailed coverage card saying so, in any case. I'm just waiting for the first bill, which I expect to show that my payment is $107 per month. The second story to come out of this whole situation is much less amusing/complex. The truck's electro-brain hasn't collected enough data to tell the state's electro-brain whether it's polluting too much or not. The state has requested that I "go drive more." As my friend Chris commented, "We can't test your emissions, you haven't polluted enough." The winners and losers here are much clearer: I called two shops for advice on this situation, after the state-recommended driving didn't come up with enough data. The first call was to Bill Pierre Ford, where the service adviser defaulted to, "Yeah, we can diagnose that, it'll start at $100." He was fairly coarse about the whole thing, giving me the impression I was troubling him unnecessarily. The second call was to Precision Tune, where I talked to Bob, the general manager. He was extremely helpful, pleasant, knowledgable, and came up with the advice, "No really, drive more." This is to be followed by a free scan of the computer at his shop to see if it's collected enough data. If it fails to pass emissions for any reason, he told me about the $150 exemption: spend $150 or more trying to fix a failed emissions check, and you get the check waived for two years, whether you fixed it or not. Bully for Bob, and I suspect you can guess who I'll be talking to about getting problems fixed. This can be taken as a lesson, all you business types: your first contact with the customer is important. I will forever more suspect my insurance agency (who has me somewhat locked in) of being a pack of incompetents, and it will take very little to prompt me to initiate the potentially-arduous process to transfer my account to a different agent. A pleasant and knowlegeable phone-talker beats a gruff and knowlegeable phone-talker. Can you afford to turn away business? Posted at 12:38 permanent link category: /misc Wed, 09 Sep 2009 I was inspired today, by some random inspiration particle sleeting
through space, to pull out my For my own future reference as much as anything else, it's a Korona 5x7 camera, and I was able to find two lenses for it: one about a 200mm, the other about a 140mm. The 200mm(?) lens is a Bausch and Lomb 5x7 Tessar 1c, with no size marked, mounted on a 1900s-looking ACME shutter (pictured); f/4.5-32, T, B and 1s through 1/300th. The 140mm(?) lens is a Wollensak 5x7 Symmetrical Wide Angle with a Wollensak Betax shutter; marked apertures are f/16-128 (with a large uncalibrated section on the adjuster that looks like it might go down to perhaps f/9), speeds are T, B and 2s through 1/100th.
Update: Thanks to information at The Camera Eccentric, I now think that the B&L lens is a 7.5" (almost exactly 190mm) lens. The 1920 B&L catalog lists the lens at $75, or $100 with a shutter. Also included is the code word "Haggle," presumably to make ordering by telegraph cheaper (telegraph messages were charged per word). The Korona catalog from 1910 lists approximately the camera I have, making that a reasonable guess as to its age -- the 1905 catalog doesn't list it. Posted at 22:54 permanent link category: /misc Fri, 04 Sep 2009In the last few days I've had some suprising events work out around me. The first was to do with my projector. A couple of years ago, I made some changes to my home media life: I ditched pay TV service and the TV I'd had (which had its own story, having been passed between friends since college), and I got a projector. The projector was a good choice, and worked well for me, but in the last few months, every time I'd turned it on, it started making this terrible grinding noise. I knew what that meant: dying bearing. I figured it was probably a fan, so I pulled it off its ceiling mount, and opened it up. There was the horrible noise, but no, it wasn't coming from any of the fans. Huh, though I, what else could make that noise? Then I dug a little bit further, and realized what was going on: the color wheel's bearing was dying. The color wheel is a little translucent wheel that sits in front of the lamp, and filters the light a few hundred times per second. Each time a different color is up, the miniature mirror array in the projector moves to light up those pixels which should the that color. It's a pretty good system, but with the bearing on that wheel dying, the projector obviously had a very limited lifespan. I couldn't replace it without risking damage to the whole thing, so I decided to throw myself on the mercy of the manufacturer, Sharp, and see what they said. Imagine my surprise when I heard that this projector had a 3 year warranty! Imagine my further pleasure when I called up Costco, where I'd bought it, and discovered that I had gotten it in October, 2006. The repair probably would have cost a few hundred dollars -- cheap enough to be cheaper than getting a new projector, but possibly close to the original purchase price of the thing, which had been marked down and on closeout. That pleasurable surprise was amplified as I worked with Sharp: they sent me an electronic shipping label, for overnight shipping to their factory. Two days later, I received an email saying it was headed back to me, again by overnight shipping. A day after that, I had it back in my hands. Wow! I had really expected the warranty repair to take weeks, if not a month or two. Go Sharp! The next pleasant surprise came from an even more unexpected corner. When I moved into my house in 2000, I ordered DSL service through a now-defunct company called Bazillion, which was bought by Speakeasy when it croaked, so I've been a Speakeasy customer for most of my time in this house. Unfortunately, my house is about twenty seven thousand feet from the Central Office, which means that Qwest won't even acknowledge that DSL is possible, and Speakeasy could only get a nominal 144k connection speed out to me. Even that was something of a lie, actually testing around 90-100k. Maybe twice the speed of a 56k dialup connection. Of course, the alternative is Comcast cable service, but Comcast has been on my villians list for a long time: bait-and-switch pricing, high-pressure sales tactics to get you to buy TV and internet service together, port-blocking and traffic-shaping (techniques to limit the customer's access to the internet in various ways), and a reputation for being evil cusses to deal with when anything wasn't exactly as you hoped. So I avoided Comcast. In 2007, when I tried and failed to sell my house, I decided to swallow my pride, and give Comcast a try, figuring it was 2007, and it was reasonable to expect higher broadband speeds in Seattle, one of the tech centers of the world. The conversation went something like this: Comcast: Hi, thanks for calling Comcast. Can I have your social security number? Me: What? No. Comcast: [a little hurt, but rallying] Ok, then... can I have your driver's license number? Me: [increasingly annoyed] Uh, no. Comcast: Ok, well, you're pretty much SOL then. You can to into one of our stores, where they can record your driver's license number... Me: <click> I can't stand businesses that need your social security number for no greater reason than "we want it," so that pretty much killed things right then and there. I called Speakeasy up and re-established my DSL service, all 144 thousand shimmering bits per second of it. Then, a few months ago, I somehow heard about Comcast Business. A little bit of research later, and I realized that this was the answer to my desire. Comcast Business is a separate division from the consumer folks I'd talked to before, and is in the business of providing no-nonsense bandwidth to small businesses. It costs a tiny bit more (not very much more, once those bait-and-switch "introductory rates" on the consumer side expire, as it turns out). The service it provides is straight service, without traffic-shaping, port-blocking, or any of the other crap that made me want to shoot Comcast into the sun. And, perhaps most importantly, when I called them up to set up service, I talked to someone in the Seattle area, who asked for the service address, and some questions about what kind of service I wanted. There was no mention of SSNs, or security deposits, or any of the abhorrent nonsense the consumer division seems prone to. I was not pressured to add TV or voice service to my order. The service was explained in clear (if techy) language that was music to my ears. Imagine my further surprise when I found that the installation appointment was for a 2 hour window! Comcast is famous for informing their victims that their installation appointment will occur some time between 8 am and 6 pm on a given day, and you'd better be there, or there will be a fee! And if Comcast fails to show up, oh well, we'll schedule you for another day-long period of waiting for that indolent knock on the door, maybe a week or two away, because hey, we're a busy corporate monolith! On the day of installation, the installer called me early in the day and asked if it would be alright if he showed up early. I agreed that that was fine, and he was there about half an hour later (exactly as he'd predicted), and about an hour later, I had internet service. He was pleasant to deal with, knew what he was doing, and did it well and quickly. Since then, I've been able to watch streaming video (a rare treat!), download and upload files with impunity, and generally have an honest high-bandwidth experience. DSLReports' testing tools have informed me that, depending upon where I connect, I'm getting between 5 and 20 Mbps download speed, and between 1/2 and 6 Mbps upload speed. Comcast calls this service 12/2, a nominal 12 Mbps download, 2 Mbps upload. It costs $59.95 per month, or about $4 less per month than I'm paying for 144k iDSL service from Speakeasy. Wow. Wow! So it's been a rare period of consumer success for me these last few weeks. I'm so used to companies exerting themselves strenuously to anger me that it's a bit of a shock. Don't worry, I'll come down off the cloud soon enough, I'm sure, but for the moment, it's nice to know that it's still possible to get good service without feeling like I'm some company's whipping boy. Posted at 08:10 permanent link category: /misc Categories: all aviation gadgets misc motorcycle theater Written by Ian Johnston. Software is Blosxom. Questions? Please mail me at reaper at obairlann dot net. |
