Retrospective review (and comparison) of the Minolta RD175 [Agfa ActionCam]

If you’re not the reader type, I made a video of the review and you can find it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/piUh2j2vdf4

The beast.

Many years ago my rather estranged dad gave me an old workhorse of his, the RD175 — at the time he was working for the police doing photos of people (bodies, or more precisely body parts half the time) that have violently died one way or another. I remember seeing a pic of the remains of some guy that was hit by a train. Anyway, for some reason I decided to keep the camera and then shoved it in a cupboard where, a bit like the One Ring sat waiting to be found again….except that I moved to the UK then to NZ and then back to the UK and the camera was still in Hungary — I finally got around to reclaiming it a few months ago only to find that powering it up became quite a hassle.

If you are reading this then you know what the RD175, nonetheless for a quick reminder the camera uses a PCMCIA 131 megabyte HDD, as well as a SCSI-2 connector. The HDD must be formatted to a specific layout/format and the usual FAT12/16 (whichever) will render the camera unusable. Stupidly enough I did format the HDD back in the days and never managed to get the camera working again, until recently.

See, it works — slightly processed image, May 2019.

That was half of the issue. The other half was that the HDD requires more current than what the USB standard can supply so getting the HDD itself to work without an old laptop at hand was not possible. Eventually I settled for a CF card + a PCMCIA converter plus downloading a specific image from online and using that to format the card — which eventually worked. For those of you that need this guidance, google a bit and the image you’re after is here — just make sure the card you’re using is not bigger than 512 megs as the camera might refuse to work with it altogether…even if you format it to 250 megabytes (which you will have to, otherwise guess what…it won’t work.). As the camera uses the NP-F500 series batteries, which are readily available online, getting the camera back on wasn’t difficult once the disk issue had been sorted.

I think the camera needs little introduction to the readers. It was the first “portable” DSLR manufactured in 1995 and was largely based on the Maxxum Super 500si with a 1.5mpx sensor (or 3 to be precise) and a crop factor of 2, iso of 800 and shutter speed between half a second and 1/2000th So for fun purposes what I went out and took a few shots with it. Also took alongside a Nikon D810. While I appreciate they are 20+ years apart the Minolta is still fun to play around with.

For comparison’s’ sake, here are two unprocessed shots from each camera (all Nikon shots are [basic] JPGs, shrunk to ~1.5mpx) :

RD175 when it’s doing well.

D810 same spot

Minolta doing a lot less pretty.

Comparison to the D810

There are plenty more in the video. The conclusion is of course that the Minolta shows its age and there’s nothing surprising about it. Generally it has a blue/magenta hue and shoots odd F-values (usually in the vicinity of F11-F19) and oddly enough it reminds everyone of the pic quality of the early-ish Nokia phones that had cameras. I did think of doing a comparison to those but 1) I don’t have one at hand and though they’re easy to come by they all have ~24mm-ish focal lengths, not something I can easily reproduce on the Minolta due to the 2x crop so it’s not a sensible idea. Nonetheless it’s fun-ish.

The next project will be actually more fun if I get around to it. Planning on getting a Nikon E3S and maybe a 80-200 AFD lens (or just use the 70-180 AFD I have) and then take a few shots with that. The thing is, the E3S is 1x crop, works with lens I have already and is a lot more advanced than the RD175 as it allows for a lot more setting changes, lightning and focus is a lot more advanced etc and so it’s actually an amusing experience to shoot with it. Just need to find a working model.

Being without a phone is a totally OMFG experience — not.

As this is my more personal blog I think it’s vaguely appropriate to share my recent experience here. Please do read it with a pinch of sarcasm.

My Huawei Mate Pro 9, which turned 2 years old about 2 weeks ago had an apparent battery issue, where the battery has inflated itself to the extent that the screen unit has been pushed out of the frame by the battery. I figured it was high time for it be replaced (the battery that is, and the phone isn’t willing to boot up without one, not even on charger) and so I ordered a new one off eBay for £8 — that also meant being without a “modern” phone for a few days [technically that’s a distortion of the facts, I do have a Samsung S5 but since most of my accounts are bound by 2FA to the Huawei, I basically had a blank phone].

Mate 9 Pro on death row — the battery should look totally flat.

Here are my observations. Again please read this with a pinch of sarcasm.

• weather forecast: as I use the BBC Weather app I now had to go on the web to get the same info, so that was like 3 clicks instead of 1. Oddly enough the default LineageOS 16 doesn’t have a weather app so meh. Then again I ended up installing the apk from an alternative store and on the one occasion it had rained over the four days, I still got rained on.
• gym logs app: initially I planned on taking paper notes but ended up doing the same as above, installed it from whichever alternative store. Typing in my 20+ chars random password was fun tho’ [long live lastpass, which I didn’t install on the S5]
• no mobile banking — luckily I don’t need it too often. Of course I could have logged in through the internet, but then as I’ve moved on to the digital key solution, which is the other phone itself, not having it around would have required a call to the banks customer service proving who I am by providing them the hex/rgb conversion of my mum’s dead parrot’s shit’s colour.
• similarly reduced access to some of the investments I have, which in reality haven’t moved much over the past longer period of time and I rarely poke them anyway.
• access to my favourite Chinese dictionary app was non-existent (pleco) — which would have been a thing if I was giving a more thorough fuck about my Chinese studies…also in all fairness I’m sub-HSK2 at the moment so I’m not conversing with anyone properly as I don’t know it well enough.
• all the eye bleach bunny accounts I’m following on insta were almost unavailable to me…except I have a login on the other computers and they are faked to be Androids UAs so it looks almost the same and gives the same content.
• no photos with the phone. Note though that over the 10+ years I’ve had an Android phone I’ve taken a whopping 200-300 pics total, and in all fairness even for the one above I used the laptop’s camera rather than the D810 & Macro lens combo I otherwise have. Not a likely instagram-star of the future…
• it took probably an extra click to find out which tube lines were disrupted…which would have mattered if I’d been to the office more than 3 times over the past 2 months, so for all the difference it made to me, even if the whole network would have been suspended I wouldn’t have noticed.
• ebay/amazon were unavailable through the app obviously…I still managed to order 3 bags of coffee and live track it on the map. It was cheaper than buying it in the shop.
• I’m generally off facebook so I don’t particularly care about missing out on it.
• same for Tinder/etc.
• messenger/emails come in through the laptop so in the morning it’s an extra 10 seconds to see if there’s anything noteworthy (rather than it being on the phone’s screen) — nothing of such nature ever happens tho.
• whatsApp indeed does not work without a phone but those that had to know I was off had been told.
• I should be pressing the shift key on Chrome to get capital letters, as unlike on the phone there’s no autocorrect. As you can see I don’t always do that.
• one of my old friends even asked for my phone number

All that begs the question why I need a flagship phone. No clue.

A bunch of things to note though: I’m glad all this didn’t come up on my three-months-long Asian trip, albeit in parts of those countries it would have been swifter and less expensive to get the stuff sorted than it would be here in London, and in other parts…well there was no electricity so nobody was looking for/could have found me anyway. Also I did have the backup phone (S5) there with maps etc so if this had been unavailable, at least I would have still had the maps on me.

Another thing as a takeaway learning is that it’s useful not be afraid to open up the phone. Basically nobody really offers repairs on the Mate 9 Pro but the ‘normal’ Mate 9’s battery replacement starts at £40, which is 5x the price of the actual battery and all you need for it is a special screwdriver set that you can get on Amazon for a tenner. I had done screen replacements at home for Xiaomis and other phones, doing a battery change in a unibody phone isn’t a biggie.

Thirdly, Huawei’s customer service can do me a favour….I initially assumed there was something about the screen unit and not the battery so I’d emailed them on Sunday what their suggestions were in terms of repair locations and they still haven’t gotten around to replying. I figured I can write in Chinese “my phone is dead what should I do?” ( 我的毛机是死我应该干什么 ？ ) but then whatever they’d reply I wouldn’t understand.

The Corsair 380T case’s real internal dimensions [max graphics card length and PSU length]

I got a Corsair 380T (used as it’s end-of-life now) some time ago because I figured it looked super cool. Since It took me an awful lot of time researching what length graphics card fits and what doesn’t, I took a gamble. I’ll be using some search keywords here because it is really not easy to find this information.

So the official internal dimensions for the Corsair 380T is that it can take cards up to 290mm length, ruling out the Asus Strix 1070 and 1080 which isn’t entirely true. The 1070/1070Ti/1080 cards are actually 297mm long and see below, it/they fit(s). I actually got a Strix 1080 Advanced. So here it is, cards up to 297mm fit.

[note the area marked by the arrow]

At this stage I’d point out that anything beyond 297 won’t fit. Not even a hair string longer. It’s already a bit of an art fitting it in due to some plastic screw protruding in the case’s front, hence I’d not suggest to anyone trying to fit the Asus Strix 1080Ti or the 11G edition of the 1080 as according to their website it’s/they’re longer.

The other thing is that Corsair’s site says the case can fit 180mm PSUs in length, which isn’t the case. If you have the standard HDD cage in, anything beyond 140mm will be a pain, and beyond 150mm it won’t fit. This has to do with cabling and the lack of space, see below for photo. Regardless of the HDD cage, 180mm PSUs won’t fit due to a fixed-position element in the case [the cage connector]. In other words, don’t buy any of the fully modular semi-quiet Corsair PSUs. I ended up buying a Seasonic 850W modular PSU, and it fits (the link is affiliate Amazon, but at least you know what I got that works.).

Grey arrow: end of 140mm PSU. Blueish arrow: fixed-position element that cannot be removed.

A thing to keep in mind with this mini beast is that it’s f…ing mini. If you’re installing the HDD cage as well as a water cooler (like the H100i v2, which is what I have), you’ll have very little space left for cabling so you’ll want to get a modular/semi-modular PSU that’s certainly not longer than 140mm.

All that aside, as of late 2019 the product still seems to be sought after and commands a rather hefty price on ebay when available. Having used it for 2 years now, I’d generally caution about/against it. It’s a very poor quality build and there is very little free space inside. Not really a fault of the case but getting to the underside m2 slot on an ITX mobo really means unpacking the whole shebang. Want to replace the CPU? Not enough space to comfortably do it in the case, so unpacking is a good idea again.

One thing that Corsair kinda forgot to mention was that the only 20cm fan that fits is that of their own, which is a very thin and therefore loud fan. You want something quiet like the Noctua 200mm fan? Cool beans but you will need to forget about the front mesh (won’t fit any more, fan too thick compared to the mesh’s plastic connectors’ reach) and by the way you’ll also need to drill a few holes into the front metal panel yourself because the holding points aren’t standard on either the fan or the case.

Good luck working with this if you get hold of one.

Partial workaround for Windows 10’s Guest Account “flicker” issues

The Guest account in Windows 10 (builds 10240 and 10525, 10532 as well) is a largely problematic thing. It’s difficult to turn on, and once it’s turned on, for most people, it doesn’t work properly because explorer.exe keeps restarting infinitely and this makes it unusable.

To enable the Guest account in Win10:

1. Launch the Local Settings Management lusrmgr.msc,
2. Go to Users/Guest and uncheck Account is Disabled
3. Launch the Local Security Policy secpol.msc
4. Go to Local Policies/User Rights Assignment/Deny Log On Locally
5. Remove Guest from the entry
6. Log off

There’s a partial workaround to the flickering problem as well.

The culprit in question is the c:\Windows\System32\SettingSyncCore.dll  file and given that I can’t debug DLLs I’ll show a bit of a more crude option to dealing with the issue – delete it. This however isn’t entirely simple because the file manages, amongst others elements of the Start menu and sync, so both will be lostish…

1. Since it’s owned by TrustedInstaller, first thing is that you’ll need to take ownership of the file and make sure that you have full control over the file – admins by default don’t have that.
2. It’s quite possible that you’ll need LockHunter (free) to do the deletion job, as it can be set to delete a file upon login – if that’s the case then be creative and press the relevant button.
3. I’ve read that supposedly deleting the file will render the whole Start Menu unusable but this isn’t entirely true. For the admin account your Start Menu should work okay but for the Guest it won’t. You’ll need a substitute for it – I use ClassicShell (also free) and I suggest that one for the task. I’d suggest installing this before logging out.
4. Upon restart, log back into your own account so that LockHunter can delete the DLL file.
5. Log off and log into Guest
6. You should be able to use the account as intended. Note that generally there’s an option in ClassicShell to bring up the proper Start Menu but if you click on that now it will do nothing. If you exit ClassicShell you’ll lose your start menu and you’ll need to restart to get it back.

Guest Start Menu w/ ClassicShell ON — the top button doesn’t do anything if the DLL file is deleted:

Admin Start Menu w/ ClassicShell ON:

Admin Start Menu w/ ClassicShell OFF (Start Menu still works w/ DLL deleted):

(Yes it’s a virtual computer, hence the few icons and I have an insider account.)

Cyanogenmod/Reset Phone Stuck as “Encryption was Interrupted” – a Solution on (Samsung) phones

Here’s a rather techy post for anyone who ends up cocking up their phones like I did a few days ago.

As many of you’re aware, Android devices have an option to encrypt the internal storage, so in addition to a password protection, accessing the data would be made more difficult for anyone unauthorised. One [two] of the caveats of the process is that it’s irreversible (at least on CMod) and if the encryption process is cocked up for some reason, the contents of the phone would be lost. In my case the Galaxy S3 (i9300) running CMod 10.2 (aka Android 4.3.x) encountered a glitch of some sort during encryption and had to restart, essentially sentencing the phone’s contents to death. In this case, the problem starts when a bug creates a boot loop on some devices when pressing the Reset Phone button (see above/left) and the device always reverts to the screen shown. Booting into Recovery mode and doing a Factory reset would not avail either.

I’ve googled around and not found anything that turned out to be useful, but after binning and taking out the phone from the bin, I came up w/ an idea. While this is Samsung-specific, it may work with other devices, obviously with appropriate changes. Here’s a possible solution (it worked for me):

1. Boot into Download Mode
2. Push a Stock ROM onto the phone via Odin or whatever else you use. If you have a Samsung device, consider using a 4.1.2 ROM else Knox might get into the way. (Or find a de-Knoxed ROM, it’s ok, as long as it comes w/ Stock Recovery)
3. Boot into Stock Recovery
4. Perform a Factory Reset
5. Push a decent Recovery via Odin
6. Reinstall CMod.

Once again, user data will be lost on the phone but this shouldn’t come as a surprise. At least you’ll have a working device.

Photography: Blurred Backgrounds for Dummies. (aka Aperture, Depth-of-Field, Bokeh, and so on)

As a somewhat experienced hobbyist photographer I reasonably often get approached by friends who are trying to get an idea on how to produce photos with blurred backgrounds. The actual question is something like: how expensive/what type of camera they’d need to get nice portraits or photos with background blur?  In this post, I’ll try to explain certain aspects of this, while assuming that the reader really doesn’t know anything about photography. So for many others, this might be a bit boring. Please note that this post does not deal with any software-generated effects at all, I’m merely attempting to explain what aperture does.

So then…Ignore photos for a moment. Think of a number. Say you’re thinking of the number twelve, right? (for now you are. I’m saying so.) Thinking of integers now (whole numbers), 3×4 = 12, 6×2 =12 but also 2×6 = 12. To take a photo, in very simplistic terms, you need a unit (a “certain amount”) of light to pass through the film or (digital) sensor of the camera. This ‘unit’ of light, can be produced by a number of combinations, just like the number 12. This is a bit theoretical but it does have a meaning, so relax and sit back: taking the previous example, you can have 3 bits of light passing thru the sensor for 4 seconds, and you may have 2 bits passing thru for 6 seconds (or the other way around.) You’re still getting a specific unit of light, thus your photo will be great (not too dark, not too bright. Ignore the rest for now).

Sticking once again to this idea of 3 bits x 4 secs vs 6 bits vs 2 secs, the amount of light (the first part of the equation [“bits”]) you let in is the something related to the aperture (that in simple terms results in depth-of-field [DOF], aka bokeh which is an odd oriental word for more-or-less the same thing as background blur.). This is very often noted down as the F-number, and annoyingly enough the closer the F-number is to zero, the more light it’s letting thru to the sensor. Now answering the second half of the original question, cameras themselves matter reasonably little towards the outcome of the background blur, and the F-number is a property of the lens you use, thus you need lens with certain characteristics to produce nice background blur. (for anyone who wants to argue why a D3x is better than an iPhone, and how 50/2.8 is not the same as 300/2.8 for bokeh, for now, please don’t, because the readers who know the answer to these are not reading this post at all). Reiterating: Aperture depends on the lens you use.

The whole idea of background blur is an outcome of the physical property of light passing through elements of glass. Without trying to be confusing, if your ‘bits’ (refer to the equation) allow for a lot of light [F-number is reasonably close to zero, such as <=2.8], you will get background blur, whereas if your ‘bits’ don’t allow for a lot of light [eg. F>=8.0], you’re not going to have background blur.

Have a look at the picture below:

(image CC BY-NC-ND by voxphoto, click on the image for the original and more info)

Remember that the closer the F-value is to zero, the more light you’re allowing in. There’s a seemingly negative correlation between the values.
So in the first case, it’s like 6 bits x 2 seconds ( = 12 ) whereas by the third image these values kindof replace each other. In reality, referring to the photos above, the 1st image’s F = f/1.7, then f/5.0 and finally f/22.

Also, sadly or not, size matters in this case. This is just to contradict myself from a few paragraphs before. The larger your camera’s sensor, the more sensitive it is going to be to changes in F-values. In other words a phone’s camera with a f/2.8 lens is not going to produce depth-of-field like a camera with interchangeable lens of f/2.8. It’s just how the physics of light apply to sensors. (if you want to know more about this, find it on google/wiki, I’m trying not to confuse the hell out of ppl here.) What I previously meant was that within the same class of cameras, bodies’ additional properties have very little influence on the DOF property. In other words, a £200 interchangeable-lens camera’s body is likely to produce very very similar DOF outcome as a £1200 body, assuming the lens and additional conditions [sensor size, ISO, blah blah] are the same.)

So to answer the first half of the original question, you’d preferably want a camera with interchangeable lens that have F-values reasonably close to zero, in this case lower than 2.8. Why two point eight is the answer is ‘just because’. (In reality, assuming that the readers aren’t familiar with the detailed aspects of the topic, just take it for now as granted, but it’s kindof an unofficial agreement amongst photographers.) – there are lenses are often reasonably inexpensive and can produce such results/values on DSLR [simply: digital, interchangeable lens] cameras. As an example Canon’s 50/1.8 is roundabout £100 used, and other manufacturers have their own equivalents too. I’m by no means suggesting that a 50mm fixed (prime) lens will do all the things you’d love to achieve in photography, but merely pointing out that it’s a feasible option for the purpose that doesn’t cost thousands of $£$£s.

Hope this helps someone out there.

The thing about personal computers (demise and all…)

If you’re following the news, there have been a few comments in the past days from PC manufacturers regarding the allegedly poor sales of the new Win8. Furthermore, if you read some of the typical new year’s predictions articles regarding gadget usage for 2013, it’s a common thing to find that experts are predicting the continuing falling sales of PCs, and perhaps the sales of a few manufacturing organisations/departments (ie. companies quitting the market).

What many writers ignore to notice (I’m not saying they fail to, after all it should be their area of expertise…) is that people don’t need personal computers. Not even if HP would love to make them personal again. For the time being, I’m talking about households, not companies, that’s a different business, and I’m pretty sure that Dell and some of the others are doing okay in their corporate sectors. But there are two (three, four?) aspects to consider when looking at home PC usage:

1. the why,
2. the performance,
3. and for some people also mobility
4. and interconnectivity (not just in terms of cables.).

So why then? Most people aren’t working professionally in their homes on their computers, and even if so, they aren’t doing hardcore, CPU-heavy stuff. I’ll discount gaming from here for the time being. I’m sure I could get some statistics for this, but it’s in the morning and I’m sleepy, yet, out of my 700 so-called friends on Facebook, only about 10-20 of them are coders/designers/music people that do stuff on their home machine. Most of them have Macs, though they don’t tend to live in the USA. The other 680-odd people need their device for basic tasks, such as browsing, typing up stuff, occasionally watching videos (not everyone), and so on. Especially with the dawning of free internet file and media storage (dropbox, flickr, picasa, yt etc), there is now limited need for devices with a lot of HDD space. Devices can and do upload stuff directly to the internet, without intermediaries.

As much as I personally don’t fancy the Chromebook because I do have a tendency to store 1TB of HD films and 115G of my own photos on my PC, the average user could actually well do with a Chromebook-style device. Tiny SSD to boot the OS quickly, and do everything online. No massive storage in the computer. For now, the platform isn’t there yet, given the lack of free wifi and black spots on the 3G coverage in parts of countries, but it will be there soon. Gamers are a bit of a different cup of tea, but face it, there have been strong pushes from Microsoft and Sony to convert gamers to the console market, with decent success.

Performance: for tasks like those above, nobody really needs an Ultrabook with an i7-3xxx. Intel is very keen to replicate the success of the Macbook/Pros but it will not happen as long as Apple products are chic to have, rather than being looked at as ridiculously expensive devices that restrict the user into a specific software environment and provide performance that the majority of people don’t even comprehend. Hands up, how many Mac users know the difference between an i5 and an i7? 2nd and 3rd-gen differences? Whoa. What’s a CPU? I’m not saying this is bad, from a marketing point of view, certainly for Apple, this is epic great.

The bottleneck in performance for years now have been the HDD in any decent personal computer. Strictly speaking of HDDs, their average read/write speeds are about 10-20 megs/sec because rather than really queuing those commands, HDDs are doing everything at the same time, slowing down to a grinding halt. Nobody cares if a SATA2-compatible device’s max speed is hundreds of megs per sec if that never happens. As long as computer manufacturers keep charging extortion-like amounts for SSDs that can otherwise be bought off eBay for less than half that much, and users aren’t educated about why say a Samsung 830 series device is actually good for them, they will only see that it takes a minute to launch the OS + Word on their PC and it takes 3 seconds to wake the tablet and open some word processor.

Tablets and higher-priced phones (SGS2/3, Note 1/2 and equivalents) are very good at providing the sort of performance that users really need. This, coupled up with fast internet services (provision) are likely to cover the needs of most typical PC user.

Mobility: desktop computers aren’t massively mobile, that’s probably not new news to anyone. Laptops are somewhat better, and the dawn of tablets had a good push on battery life for laptops too. There is now a need for devices that can play films while you’re flying from London to LA. Most ordinary computers fail at this, but many tablets don’t. Again, for someone who needs to render 3D, they will most likely need a solution that is less mobile and more workstation-like, so they are a different lot.

Interconnectivity: not just in terms of cables. Yes it’s very important for many people that they can hook up their cameras to their iPads (assuming they still use cameras), which is something that tablets aren’t really good at. This is due to marketing and is something I do hate, but then I don’t have a tablet. What these devices are good at on the other hand is synchronizing data between locations. Dropbox app, this-app, that-app. Needless to say. Many now offer offline/delayed data sync features, and the user can have their stuff backed up or distributed easily in minutes. Mums don’t need a lot more than that when it comes to gadgets.

+1: price: Kudos to Google on this one but now that decent tablets are in the <$200 range, there is really a limited reason why people would want a PC. Even for those who like big monitors and keyboards, there are solutions that cost a lot less than a computer. The problem with Microsoft’s new Win RT series is that they are ludicrously expensive, and again feature hardware that most people don’t need. Worst of all, it’s Windows, and it’s not compatible with most of the old Windows software. Kapisch?

In other words: It’s not an end, it’s an evolution. Personal computers served a need for a long time and since most users didn’t build their own devices, they were bound to what they were given, without neither understanding the underlying hardware issues, nor caring about them, nor having a solution to them. (sticking to the HDD/SSD issue as an example). PCs are a bit like many other things used by mankind in the past. Yes we had horse-drawn carriages that changed humanity (transport, logistics), yes we had film cameras, and yes we have PCs. There are a few film cameras and traditional means of transportation still in existence, just as PCs won’t die out completely, but home usage is shifting. The corporate lot is a different story entirely.