Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. (c) Ruffin Bailey 2001-2018

We've had a D40 for approaching a year and a half, and overall I'm pretty happy with it. It does have a few major flaws, most notably an all too often inability to achieve focus or, in Auto mode, to decide which of the three focus sensors to use, both of which prevent you from snapping any picture with Auto's default settings. I don't like spending money to miss pictures.

Beyond the flaws, there are issues that I realize are neurotic peeves. I have FE2 and N70 film bodies, and a few manual (80-200mm f/4) and AF lenses (35-70mm f/3.3-4.5 and 50mm f/1.8) to go with 'em, as well as an old SB-20 Speedlight. Nikon, usually religious about backwards compatibility, has cut pretty much every bit of that compatibility out of the D40 short of the F-mount and flash hotshoe. I don't get AF from my old AF lens because there's no internal focusing motor in the D40, which makes focusing wide open at f/1.8 on the 50mm a challenge. I don't get Aperture Indexing (AI) on my 80-200 zoom because the D40 doesn't have the mechanical stop to read the dial. Both of those omissions admittedly make some sense, as they'd require significant physical additions and cost to the camera body, but the thing doesn't even have the circuitry to do TTL with the SB-20 -- nor can it ask the SB-20 to turn on the infrared focus-assist light. If using the assist light is as easy to integrate as it seems it'd be, leaving the ability for the D40 to use it out is plain dumb.

These things annoy me because they greatly limit my access to used Nikon equipment -- equipment I own and equipment I might scarf up off of ebay. Old AF lenses, flashes, much less manual focus lenses, are pretty much huge pains to use on the D40. The D40 will still run the shutter the way you ask, but you're going to be on the Manual setting and eyeballing everything. Swapping the built-in flash from TTL to manual (and from 100% to, say, 50% power), is a real hassle, effectively overcome only by adding the old Speedlight on top and ignoring the built-in flash.

I've since come around a little on the lack of backwards compatibility. The D40 is dirt cheap -- $470 for body and lens -- and the new DX format means that it's not like it'd be smart to use an old fisheye, even if AI worked. What used to be 20mm on the film Nikons works out to about 30mm on the D40, no longer seriously wide angle. For wide angle stuff, you're going to have to replace your lenses with something specifically made for the smaller DX sensor which takes advantage of the narrower view by using less glass and saving some you some cash in the process. What's a DX 10-20mm in full 35mm film numbers? 6.7-14mm? Try buying one of those. The old < 10mm lenses are wacky enough already.

Add to that that the truly long, fairly fast telephoto AF Nikon lenses have had internal motors since about 2000, which I knew, but didn't really take the time to realize what it meant: These work on the D40 too, which is pretty cool. The 300mm internal motor AF lenses are still pretty expensive, but it's a bigger field for finding used lenses than I'd thought I'd have when I first considered the D40.

(I realize talking about a $1200 lens on a D40 sounds idiotic, but do remember that every year you can hold out on the camera body is another set of fancy smancy features you can bag once you do buy. Lenses, speaking with only a hint of hyperbole, last forever. Bodies are replaceable. Do you really shoot at full res with your D300 right now if you're not on the job?)

So about the only lens I'm really missing out buying thanks to the D40s cut corners is the cheap 70-300mm Nikkor zooms. People love them, but the digital version is hundreds of dollars more. f/5.6 at 300 is getting close to slow, too. Not being able to use this lens is not as big a deal as I'd made it out to be a year and a half ago.

Still, I've wanted to try out a 300mm lens for nature photography and some sports, and wanted it at least as fast as my 80-200 f/4 that I use now. Even the 300mm Nikkor from 2000 that focuses on the D40 is insanely expensive for playing around. Luckily the D40 provides a neat loophole for getting an extremely inexpensive 300mm telephoto -- it's the first Nikon since the 60s, I believe, that'll attach to pre-AI lenses without getting damaged.

That puts a lot of lenses back into play that, just as importantly, don't have as much competition/demand on the ebay market as the other manual focus lenses. Putting a pre-AI lens on your 1977+ Nikon that's not a D40 or D60 will damage your camera without some work that Rockwell describes as a hatchet-job, if only because your lens is no longer close to collectable and, well, does look a little rough afterwards. Now the guy with the "hatchet" pretty clearly knows his stuff, and short of the now-defunct conversion service from Nikon is about your only choice for getting pre-AI on any other Nikon body. And the "hatchet" starts at $25+$6 shipping = $31 surcharge. That's $31 extra bucks plus shipping up to Mr. White's workshop that I can bid with that most others can't.

Long story only slightly shorter, so I grabbed a pre-AI 300mm Nikkor for under $50 shipped. It's about a half-stop slower than f/4 (opening up only to 4.5), and won't focus any closer than about 13', but for several orders of magnitude less than my other choices for an f/4.5 or faster 300mm Nikkor, I'm game. It works well, so far. It also makes me feel a little better about the D40. A little.

Update 4/6: More links on the old 300mm. Seems to have something of a bad rep among aficionados, but not knowing better, I'm not sweating the lack of perfect sharpness. And for under $50 shipped (with one waiting in an eBay store for $75 shipped, willing to take less), the price of entry is next to nuttin. Nice having f/4.5 vs. 5.6, though I'd take 4 or 2.8. ;^)

Nikkor 300mm Observations
300mm f/4.5 Nikkor-H

Labels: Nikon, Other Stuff

Note: Apple, what the heck are you thinking? If you're billing the Mini to be the BYOKMM (Bring Your Own Keyboard Mouse Monitor) entryway for WinPC users to "Switch (c) Apple", you have to include a VGA adapter with the Mini. My G4 had one. Unfortunately I couldn't chain my mini-DVI to DVI adapter to my old DVI to VGA adapter, so I had to shell out a few bucks. Wish I hadn't opened the mini-DVI to DVI... could have gotten a few more bucks for it on eBay, I reckon. Still, Apple, please, add the VGA adapter back into the Mini box. The last thing you want is for a potential switcher to take their Mini home and find they can't attach it to their old PC monitor.

Otherwise, that huge shortcoming aside, the new mini is, so far, pretty much everything it was billed to be. Only issues so far are some major black screening playing World of Warcraft, apparently an overheating issue (so far solved by adding smcFanControl to up the minimum fan rate) and some lockup with iPhoto trying to figure out Faces. iPhoto has also had trouble with importing my old pictures and dating them. I've been playing around with exifViewer to make sure the dates are a correctable; they are. That is, the EXIF data in the jpegs shows the correct "taken on" date. iPhoto doesn't, and the bad dates are apparently the symptoms of an iPhoto bug. Faces hard locked iPhoto after it'd spent all night grinding, which was bad, and iPhoto also told me that I had 52,000+ pictures when I only have 8k. Makes me wonder what someone has to do to get a good photo management app. Write one, I guess. Picasa is doing okay, but a few pictures, when expanded, came up blank. Not good. It better not be losing pictures somehow, though on WinPC Picasa was not particularly destructive.

But yeah, the Mini is insanely fast compared to my G4s, runs iTunes without draining the processor, and allows me to once again do two things at once on my Macintosh. It's great. I imagine I'll shell out for max RAM in a few months, but otherwise, very cool and likely nearly worth the dough, assuming the economy picks up in the next, oh, two or three years. Next is downloading the iPhone/iPod touch dev kit, which only works with Mactel, which I (ob) finally have.

And the Apple store had a hard time hooking me up with a Mini. Apparently they were too hot off of the truck, and it took about 10 minutes for them to track one down. The concierge looked befuddled, kept saying that she was finding a sales specialist for me, and one guy who asked if I needed help while I was waiting turned out to be the guy that would be assigned to me a few minutes later. At least he apologized for the mix-up. Also note that student discounts must be taken at the local Apple store; I received one that was $30 less than it should have been for being too far away. Crock.

Labels: iPhoto, mini, os x

title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude.	descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001.
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Friday, March 27, 2009
Revisiting the (my) Nikon D40 We've had a D40 for approaching a year and a half, and overall I'm pretty happy with it. It does have a few major flaws, most notably an all too often inability to achieve focus or, in Auto mode, to decide which of the three focus sensors to use, both of which prevent you from snapping any picture with Auto's default settings. I don't like spending money to miss pictures. Beyond the flaws, there are issues that I realize are neurotic peeves. I have FE2 and N70 film bodies, and a few manual (80-200mm f/4) and AF lenses (35-70mm f/3.3-4.5 and 50mm f/1.8) to go with 'em, as well as an old SB-20 Speedlight. Nikon, usually religious about backwards compatibility, has cut pretty much every bit of that compatibility out of the D40 short of the F-mount and flash hotshoe. I don't get AF from my old AF lens because there's no internal focusing motor in the D40, which makes focusing wide open at f/1.8 on the 50mm a challenge. I don't get Aperture Indexing (AI) on my 80-200 zoom because the D40 doesn't have the mechanical stop to read the dial. Both of those omissions admittedly make some sense, as they'd require significant physical additions and cost to the camera body, but the thing doesn't even have the circuitry to do TTL with the SB-20 -- nor can it ask the SB-20 to turn on the infrared focus-assist light. If using the assist light is as easy to integrate as it seems it'd be, leaving the ability for the D40 to use it out is plain dumb. These things annoy me because they greatly limit my access to used Nikon equipment -- equipment I own and equipment I might scarf up off of ebay. Old AF lenses, flashes, much less manual focus lenses, are pretty much huge pains to use on the D40. The D40 will still run the shutter the way you ask, but you're going to be on the Manual setting and eyeballing everything. Swapping the built-in flash from TTL to manual (and from 100% to, say, 50% power), is a real hassle, effectively overcome only by adding the old Speedlight on top and ignoring the built-in flash. I've since come around a little on the lack of backwards compatibility. The D40 is dirt cheap -- $470 for body and lens -- and the new DX format means that it's not like it'd be smart to use an old fisheye, even if AI worked. What used to be 20mm on the film Nikons works out to about 30mm on the D40, no longer seriously wide angle. For wide angle stuff, you're going to have to replace your lenses with something specifically made for the smaller DX sensor which takes advantage of the narrower view by using less glass and saving some you some cash in the process. What's a DX 10-20mm in full 35mm film numbers? 6.7-14mm? Try buying one of those. The old < 10mm lenses are wacky enough already. Add to that that the truly long, fairly fast telephoto AF Nikon lenses have had internal motors since about 2000, which I knew, but didn't really take the time to realize what it meant: These work on the D40 too, which is pretty cool. The 300mm internal motor AF lenses are still pretty expensive, but it's a bigger field for finding used lenses than I'd thought I'd have when I first considered the D40. (I realize talking about a $1200 lens on a D40 sounds idiotic, but do remember that every year you can hold out on the camera body is another set of fancy smancy features you can bag once you do buy. Lenses, speaking with only a hint of hyperbole, last forever. Bodies are replaceable. Do you really shoot at full res with your D300 right now if you're not on the job?) So about the only lens I'm really missing out buying thanks to the D40s cut corners is the cheap 70-300mm Nikkor zooms. People love them, but the digital version is hundreds of dollars more. f/5.6 at 300 is getting close to slow, too. Not being able to use this lens is not as big a deal as I'd made it out to be a year and a half ago. Still, I've wanted to try out a 300mm lens for nature photography and some sports, and wanted it at least as fast as my 80-200 f/4 that I use now. Even the 300mm Nikkor from 2000 that focuses on the D40 is insanely expensive for playing around. Luckily the D40 provides a neat loophole for getting an extremely inexpensive 300mm telephoto -- it's the first Nikon since the 60s, I believe, that'll attach to pre-AI lenses without getting damaged. That puts a lot of lenses back into play that, just as importantly, don't have as much competition/demand on the ebay market as the other manual focus lenses. Putting a pre-AI lens on your 1977+ Nikon that's not a D40 or D60 will damage your camera without some work that Rockwell describes as a hatchet-job, if only because your lens is no longer close to collectable and, well, does look a little rough afterwards. Now the guy with the "hatchet" pretty clearly knows his stuff, and short of the now-defunct conversion service from Nikon is about your only choice for getting pre-AI on any other Nikon body. And the "hatchet" starts at $25+$6 shipping = $31 surcharge. That's $31 extra bucks plus shipping up to Mr. White's workshop that I can bid with that most others can't. Long story only slightly shorter, so I grabbed a pre-AI 300mm Nikkor for under $50 shipped. It's about a half-stop slower than f/4 (opening up only to 4.5), and won't focus any closer than about 13', but for several orders of magnitude less than my other choices for an f/4.5 or faster 300mm Nikkor, I'm game. It works well, so far. It also makes me feel a little better about the D40. A little. Update 4/6: More links on the old 300mm. Seems to have something of a bad rep among aficionados, but not knowing better, I'm not sweating the lack of perfect sharpness. And for under $50 shipped (with one waiting in an eBay store for $75 shipped, willing to take less), the price of entry is next to nuttin. Nice having f/4.5 vs. 5.6, though I'd take 4 or 2.8. ;^) Nikkor 300mm Observations 300mm f/4.5 Nikkor-H Labels: Nikon, Other Stuff posted by ruffin at 3/27/2009 12:16:00 PM
0 comments
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Mesh Networks with the iPhone From AppleInsider: The new iPhone 3.0 software will also add Bonjour discovery support, allowing iPhone users to discover nearby devices without requiring them to set up an ad hoc Wi-Fi network. Instead, the device will use Bluetooth to discover other phones advertising their presence, a feature that can be used in multiplayer games and other applications. The feature is automatic and doesn't even require the presence of Wi-Fi; developers just need to call on the feature and build in a menu to show it off. This is the biggest news of the iPhone's new OS. Now you've got all the tools to start making a mesh network, even on the iPod touch. Seriously, this is huge. Get your workstation to speak Bluetooth to the touch, and you can start bucket brigade Internet access for pretty much anyone, anywhere. iPhones are always on, give or take, and now everyone with one can potentially be a relay point/Hotspot for everyone else in the world. That car in front of you has an iPhone? Get close enough (I'm not sure how good Bluetooth is at this, but you get the point), and, with the right app, your computer could send and retrieve email. The best way around any future loss of net neutrality is to create a "People's Network," where we provide our own infrastructure. We're getting close with the iPhone now, though once the new unregulated, "WiFi++" deregulated spectrum comes "online", I think you'll see a lot more in the way of the mesh. posted by ruffin at 3/18/2009 08:25:00 AM
0 comments
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Macs are men and PCs are women. So says the Shuffle Listen to the video on the Apple - iPod shuffle - The first mp3 player that talks to you page. About 3/4 of the way in, in the "Using VoiceOver", they explain that when you sync your Shuffle with a Mac, it uses a male voice to talk back and a female voice when you sync to a PC. (Wish I knew them well enough to say which voice was which off-hand. Neither is Bubbles. ;^D) Huh? Bizzare. Was listening wondering if I could chose another voice, and then BAM, well, guess I'll have to buy another PC. posted by ruffin at 3/11/2009 01:00:00 PM
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Gruber's Shuffle hits the stage From Daring Fireball: Redesigned iPod Shuffle, With VoiceOver Sounds like a clever idea. I was going to blog that it wouldn't be long before Gruber was gloating a bit, but it appears I've been beaten to the punch. The new shuffle looks neat. Apple's still just barely one step ahead on every facet of ~~mp3~~ portable digital music players, even in markets where it's essentially the only player (the Shuffle). The only drawback here is that there's no interface whatsoever on the player itself, tying you to Apple for your earphones no matter what, it appears. That sux0rz. Seriously. I like to drag around $1 Big Lots headphones so I don't mess up anything important when I'm iPodding (even when I'm iPodding with the new Creative player I ordered... my (hrm, monitor, Peek, mp3 player, and U2 album?) fourth purchase that cnet's Cheapskate has impulsed me into). Also not surprised to see that Apple's surprised with the amount of refreshed desktops they've sold. The new Mini rocks, especially when you're upgrading from G4s. Even from integrated Intel, it'd be a bonus. And yes, I'm enjoying my iPhone emulator and Xcode. Labels: iphone, ipod, mini, xcode posted by ruffin at 3/11/2009 12:03:00 PM
0 comments
Saturday, March 07, 2009
The megahertz myth revisited I'm thinking the video card/CPU combo is going to approach the way we used to view dual-processing several years ago once 10.6 is released. That is to say, comments like this one from AppleInsider's "Apple retail keeps it green during fire sale" will need a reevaluation in a few months. In particular, some resellers are offering discounts of $300 to $500 off the original sticker price of previous generation iMacs, who performance was recently shown to be on par with just-released models when strictly talking CPU performance. Folks with Intel integrated aren't going to be happy. Well, unless they've got an extra $300-500 floating around in their bank accounts. posted by ruffin at 3/07/2009 02:45:00 PM
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Can't export to iDVD from iMovie 09? The answer seems to be add a picture. Worked for me too. Go figure. Apple - Support - Discussions - Share to iDVD not enabled ...: Re: Share to iDVD not enabled Did a re-install with Apple support of just the imovie/idvd bits - still no joy. What we did find though is that adding a single image (gif/png) to the movie makes it work, share to iDVD becomes enabled... wierd! Must force some sort of conversion/recognition. shrug posted by ruffin at 3/07/2009 08:30:00 AM
0 comments
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
The Mini avec Nvidia Note: Apple, what the heck are you thinking? If you're billing the Mini to be the BYOKMM (Bring Your Own Keyboard Mouse Monitor) entryway for WinPC users to "Switch (c) Apple", you have to include a VGA adapter with the Mini. My G4 had one. Unfortunately I couldn't chain my mini-DVI to DVI adapter to my old DVI to VGA adapter, so I had to shell out a few bucks. Wish I hadn't opened the mini-DVI to DVI... could have gotten a few more bucks for it on eBay, I reckon. Still, Apple, please, add the VGA adapter back into the Mini box. The last thing you want is for a potential switcher to take their Mini home and find they can't attach it to their old PC monitor. Otherwise, that huge shortcoming aside, the new mini is, so far, pretty much everything it was billed to be. Only issues so far are some major black screening playing World of Warcraft, apparently an overheating issue (so far solved by adding smcFanControl to up the minimum fan rate) and some lockup with iPhoto trying to figure out Faces. iPhoto has also had trouble with importing my old pictures and dating them. I've been playing around with exifViewer to make sure the dates are a correctable; they are. That is, the EXIF data in the jpegs shows the correct "taken on" date. iPhoto doesn't, and the bad dates are apparently the symptoms of an iPhoto bug. Faces hard locked iPhoto after it'd spent all night grinding, which was bad, and iPhoto also told me that I had 52,000+ pictures when I only have 8k. Makes me wonder what someone has to do to get a good photo management app. Write one, I guess. Picasa is doing okay, but a few pictures, when expanded, came up blank. Not good. It better not be losing pictures somehow, though on WinPC Picasa was not particularly destructive. But yeah, the Mini is insanely fast compared to my G4s, runs iTunes without draining the processor, and allows me to once again do two things at once on my Macintosh. It's great. I imagine I'll shell out for max RAM in a few months, but otherwise, very cool and likely nearly worth the dough, assuming the economy picks up in the next, oh, two or three years. Next is downloading the iPhone/iPod touch dev kit, which only works with Mactel, which I (ob) finally have. And the Apple store had a hard time hooking me up with a Mini. Apparently they were too hot off of the truck, and it took about 10 minutes for them to track one down. The concierge looked befuddled, kept saying that she was finding a sales specialist for me, and one guy who asked if I needed help while I was waiting turned out to be the guy that would be assigned to me a few minutes later. At least he apologized for the mix-up. Also note that student discounts must be taken at the local Apple store; I received one that was $30 less than it should have been for being too far away. Crock. Labels: iPhoto, mini, os x posted by ruffin at 3/04/2009 08:14:00 AM
0 comments
Tuesday, March 03, 2009
From Big Three to the little many From an NYT Blog post entitled "The Big Three? Try the Small Many": Detroit a century ago looked a lot like Silicon Valley today. It was a city of small businesses, with an entrepreneurial genius on every corner. This is what I've been pondering when I hear about the bailouts. Of course, like seemingly every American male, I've wondered what it'd take to start up a car company. It would seem that the barriers to entry are simply too great. You could build a few kit cars in your glorified garage, but to really compete takes quite an investment, starting with safety regulations, which essentially bar the tinkerer from starting from scratch. Still, there are inroads with biodiesel and electronic engine conversions, and if you have mounds of cash, you can make something that bucks the old trend. Tesla Motors seems like an interesting new firm with some phat funding and a great idea. In any event, I'd rather see lots more Teslas than huge loans to GM. Ford can handle themselves, for now at least, so what's the problem next door? Obviously it's mismanagement, not that they're alone. The country has a hard time learning the lesson of the ant and the grasshopper. There's also a lesson around here someone about teamthink. Could more giant companies converge around the same practices and ideas? They're unable to invent. I'm looking forward to the Volt as much as anyone, yet look at Saturn. Initially a great, groundbreaking idea -- cheap, extremely reliable, efficient cars sold in a low pressure, fair [seemingly] environment -- and now it's dropped right back with the rest of GM. Saturn no longer has a bare bones car (the Ion has drive by wire, for heaven's sake), does have an SUV and a two-seater sportscar. They've tried to keep those who bought Saturns with Saturn, growing the line along with those initial buyers, rather than try to keep new versions of the same sort of buyer showing up at their doorstep. And anyone who has stepped on a Saturn lot in the last five years knows it ain't a bunch of shining happy people clapping when you get your keys. It's back to the shark stereotype at the three I've visited. Convergence teamthink. In the end, the lesson has to be that without planning some go hungry through their own fault. It's a shame that so many have their wagon tied to the same horse, but it's going nowhere, and, to ridiculously extend the metaphor, that horse's appetite is now potentially starving others as well. Let 'em go. Labels: Other Stuff posted by ruffin at 3/03/2009 08:48:00 AM
0 comments
Monday, March 02, 2009
Windows 2000 Install: SUCCESS - Mac Forums Windows 2000 Install: SUCCESS - Mac Forums: HOWTO install Windows 2000 SP4 on Intel Mac Mini Might be important soon. posted by ruffin at 3/02/2009 07:36:00 PM
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The mini cometh Well, I'm happy to see that we're quickly approaching critical mass on the new Mac Mini releases (here and here at the very least, with about 3-4 updates a piece today). They're due, but of course I'm not planning to be anywhere near an Apple store for several weeks. sigh Guess I'll have to shelf the instant gratification. If I've been sloshing along with a G4 this long (using the G4 Mini now), I suppose I can keep waiting. Wrath of the Lich King plays fairly well on the G4 so far... ;^) posted by ruffin at 3/02/2009 07:29:00 PM
0 comments