Posted by Anders
Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:54:00 GMT
For various reasons, among which was the need for a “lab rat” for camera repairs and the flawed awesomeness of the movie Pecker, I got myself a Canonet 28.
It’s much like my fancier Canonet QL17 GIII, but without the manual control, the great lens and basically everything else that is good. The only thing the 28 still provides is a decent automatic mode, which also works with flash.
So far I’ve used it for practicing a small camera “repair”, i.e. cleaning the viewfinder. It took around 30 minutes to take it apart and clean it, excluding the time to find suitable tools for opening it (pliers and a rubber glove(!)). The same operation then took just 15 minutes on the QL17.
Because of the automatic exposure the 28 is dependent on a working light meter. There is some small glitch in the circuits somewhere in it, so the meter doesn’t always work. Without fixing that it’s not reliable enough to use, but maybe I’ll be able to solve that too one of these days.
Posted in Photo | Tags cameras, repairs, vintage | no comments
Posted by Anders
Sun, 06 Apr 2008 12:57:00 GMT
Efter ett par år med bara en stor digitalkamera så kompletterade jag med en liten digitalkamera. Det blev en Panasonic Lumix LX2: Liten, skarp optik, bred vidvinkel, bildstabilisering, manuella kontroller, ... Det mesta man behöver.
Den är så fånigt dyr att man får en Nikon D40 för samma pris, men i Bangkok gick den att köpa till ett rimligt pris.
När jag väl upptäckt att jag kommer åt nästan alla funktioner via den lilla joysticken (tryck ner den en sekund) så blev den lätthanterad. Bilderna ser också bra ut, helt ok även uppåt ISO 400, även om de inte är i närheten av systemkamera-nivå. Under ideala omständigheter ger den fantastiskt bra bildkvalitet. Kombinerat med att den ryms i en jackficka så lär den här kameran följa med mig rätt mycket framöver.
Det enda jag egentligen saknar är en optisk sökare. Det är lättare att fota med en kamera framför ansiktet, än att hålla den på utsträckta armar som en zombie.
Posted in Photo | Tags cameras, gear, shopping | no comments
Posted by Anders
Sat, 05 Apr 2008 16:12:00 GMT
Today Last.fm Player almost exclusively plays me songs from bands tagged as “post-punk”. I had no idea I was into post-punk, but the statistics don’t lie.
Tags music, post-punk | no comments
Posted by Anders
Mon, 03 Mar 2008 17:35:00 GMT
Jag var i Thailand några veckor och satt och läste under ett träd på stranden. Några snabbrecensioner:
Gold (Dan Rhodes)
Sentimental humor är Rhodes specialitet, som i novellsamlingen Anthropology. De längre historier han skrivit senare var inte fullt lika bra, så Gold var en positiv överraskning. Rolig och oväntad och stannar kvar i huvudet långt efteråt. Porr för melankoliker.
Sightseeing (Rattawut Lapcharoensap)
Noveller om livet i Thailand, främst den mörkare sidan av det, skrivet av en thai-amerikan. Fattigdom, korruption och även turister drabbar karaktärerna. Ironisk som semesterlitteratur, men den gav lite mer insikter. Klart läsvärt, så jag hoppas han skriver en roman.
Naked Lunch (William S. Burroughs)
För tankarna till regissören David Cronenberg (som inte helt oväntat tydligen har filmatiserat just den här boken) och Thomas Pynchons “stream of consciousness”-stil. De små fragment av handling och en del idéer i den är briljanta, men de är alldeles för få. Efter närmare hundra sidor fyllda med insekter, inälvor, hallucinationer, sex och droger blev jag paradoxalt så uttråkad att jag gav upp och lämnade boken.
Independence Day (Richard Ford)
Några dagar i frånskilda fadern och fastighetsmäklaren Frank Bascombes liv. En story om en livskris och om det sena 80-talets USA, berättat genom Bascombe själv och de människor han möter. Ford har en författarteknik som får Bret Easton Ellis Lunar Park, min favorit från förra semestern, att blekna. Bascombes tankar, dialogerna, miljöbeskrivningarna, allt smälter ihop perfekt. Semesterns vinnare!
Tags books, reviews | no comments
Posted by Anders
Thu, 20 Dec 2007 09:27:00 GMT
Charles Miller nicely summarizes my opinions on Maven:
Paradoxically, by trying to make dependency management easy, maven makes it incredibly hard. It becomes dangerously easy for a project to accumulate dependency cruft – at best unnecessary, at worst conflicting – and excruciatingly painful to remove them.
Managing transitive dependencies by automatically traversing the entire dependency tree, the basic strategy of Maven, must be an anti-pattern. Managing them “manually” is a little more work, but will probably save time in the end and definitely lower risk.
Posted in Java, Programming | Tags links, maven | no comments
Posted by Anders
Wed, 14 Nov 2007 22:40:00 GMT
Kom just hem från The Donnas konsert på Debaser Medis!
Jag kan inte påstå att jag gillar hair metal-produktionen på deras senaste skiva, “Bitchin’”, men den har ett par riktigt bra låtar. Live funkar de nya låtarna lika bra som de från min favorit, “Gold Medal”. Och självklart avslutade de alltihop med “Take It Off”. Yeah!
Trots att The Donnas varit i Stockholm några gånger tidigare, så var det här första gången jag såg dom live. Jag lär inte missa nästa gång.
(Är inte deras sångerska rätt lik Christina Ricci förresten?)
Tags music | no comments
Posted by Anders
Tue, 06 Nov 2007 21:45:00 GMT
I just bought a nice “little” Canonet rangefinder camera with a fast f/1.7 lens.
First impression: Heavy! It feels heavier than my late 70’s and mid 00’s Canon SLRs. Not surprising, since this early 70’s beast has an all metal body.
I haven’t used rangefinders before, so it takes a bit of getting used to. There’s a big focus lever on the side of the lens, but I’m still figuring out how hold it in my hands to comfortably focus it. It feels like a very big and a very small camera at the same time. But now that I’ve changed to my winter clothes, I can at least actually fit this thing in a pocket.
A low-end variant of this camera, the Canonet 28, is used by Edward Furlong in the excellent John Waters movie “Pecker”. See it! It is sort of how I got the idea of buying a Canonet. (Even though the actual photos shown in that movie are taken with a Nikon…)
I got the Canonet partially to do available-light photography, but without the right kind of battery (evil mercury batteries) the light-meter isn’t even close to being reliable. I know how to estimate exposure outside, but indoors is harder. At the same time my miserably un-ergonomic, battery-eating, low-value-for-money, hand-held Gossen Digisix light-meter seems to have gone south. But I’ll survive.
Anyway, I’m going to put some color film through the Canonet, which I haven’t done in 35mm format since I got the digital camera a few years ago. I hope I can catch some nice photos.
Update: After cleaning the battery compartment with a little vinegar the light-meter is reliable. Yay!
Posted in Photo | Tags cameras, vintage | no comments
Posted by Anders
Sun, 28 Oct 2007 17:12:00 GMT
I own this 1930’s camera, a Zeiss Ikon Nettar 516/2, which is a simple folder camera for medium-format film. While it’s really impractical to use, it also gives really large 6×9 negatives, bigger than any other camera I own.
In addition to being uncoated, the lens elements where also a little hazy, giving really bad flare if the sun was shining on the front. Earlier I removed the front lens and cleaned the back side of that, but I saw that the haze was on a lens deeper inside.
The only way to access it is from inside the camera. I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing, having never tried to repair a camera before, but this is what I did:
Opening
The back lens is visible when the film back is opened. To remove the ring holding the back lens in place a special tool is needed, a “lens spanner” (which cost me more than what the camera itself is worth).
I carefully removed the ring and shook out the back lens (with some mild violence), noting which side of it was front and back. This lens didn’t look dirty, so no special cleaning needed there.
Cleaning
This finally made the leaf shutter accessible, behind which the next lens is found. This is the one that was dirty. Unfortunately the only way to keep the shutter open was using “bulb” mode, but accessing the shutter meant having the camera unfolded and extended, putting the shutter and lens far away at the other end of the bellows.
With a cotton tip and a little window cleaner I managed to reach the lens and remove most of the haze. (You really don’t want the shutter to accidentally close on the cotton tip at this point). The cotton tip also left a fair bit of lint on the lens. (Did I mention that I have no idea what I’m doing?). With a dry cotton tip and some blowing I got most of the lint out. I also waited for the window cleaner to completely evaporate before I closed the shutter again.
I’m not sure that window cleaner is a good choice, but it seemed to work. With these old lenses there’s at least no anti-reflective coating that could be hurt by it.
Happy End
I put the parts back together, in what I’m pretty sure is their original places. The lens isn’t perfect, but it’s much clearer than before.
This was fun, so in the future I think I’ll attempt more complicated camera repairs.
Posted in Photo | Tags cameras, repairs, vintage | no comments
Posted by Anders
Sun, 28 Oct 2007 10:49:00 GMT
Transvision Vamp
When I was little we didn’t have cable TV (and every morning we had to get up at 5 to clean the lake). So the few music videos I watched in 1988 made a deep impression on me. One was “Theme from S-Express”, by S-Express, this great house hit, and another was the pop song “I Want Your Love” by Transvision Vamp. I got a real nostalgia flashback watching the Transvision Vamp video again on YouTube last year, triggering speculations that it was maybe Wendy James’ appearance that made the deepest impression on my 11-year old self.
But they’re actually really good. Their first two albums contain a handful of really enjoyable songs in the same style, and even a decent ballad.
The Raveonettes
I recall liking The Raveonettes’ song “Attack of the Ghost Riders” a few years ago, but didn’t get around to listening to the album. It’s from their 2002 “Whip It On”, which is this fantastic monotone noisy guitar thing with great vocal harmonies on top. Like a Rockabilly version of The Jesus and Mary Chain. In a good way.
Because “Whip It On” is maybe the best thing I’ve re-discovered in 2007, I was really disappointed by their later albums, “The Chain Gang of Love” and “Pretty in Black”. They left their original sound (and good song writing) and through those albums they descend towards sounding like the B-52’s doing sad Country & Western covers. In a bad way.
So I’m stuck with the much too short “Whip It On”, wishing that someone would make more music like it.
Tags music | no comments
Posted by Anders
Fri, 14 Sep 2007 15:11:00 GMT
When JUnit 4.1 was released last year, they added a nice feature that has gone mostly unnoticed.
RSpec envy
Consider this archetypical RSpec example in Ruby. One class, Stack, being tested in two different scenarios (empty and non-empty):
describe Stack, " (empty)" do
before(:each) do
@stack = Stack.new
end
it "should have zero size" do
@stack.size.should == 0
end
# ...
end
describe Stack, " (non-empty)" do
before(:each) do
@stack = Stack.new
@stack.push 'x'
end
it "should have size greater than zero" do
@stack.size.should > 0
end
# ...
end
Doing the same thing in JUnit would require us to either create two different classes, which makes our tests hard to follow, or to abandon the “before”-methods and initializing at the start of each test method. Other tools, like JDave, solve this by having an inner class for each scenario, but for various reasons JDave isn’t the solution for me.
Enclosed to the rescue
When browsing the JUnit source code, my colleague Rickard stumbled on the org.junit.runners.Enclosed class. Apparently it’s been part of JUnit since 4.1 released in 2006. Enclosed is a test runner that runs all the inner classes of a class as tests. It works perfectly within IntelliJ and other tools. Now you can have Rspec-style testing in JUnit, almost. Behold its goodness:
@RunWith(org.junit.runners.Enclosed.class)
public class StackTest {
public static class EmptyStack {
private Stack stack;
@Before
public void before() {
stack = new Stack();
}
@Test
public void shouldHaveZeroSize() {
assertEquals(0, stack.size());
}
// ...
}
public static class NonEmptyStack {
private Stack stack;
@Before
public void before() {
stack = new Stack();
stack.push("x");
}
@Test
public void shouldHaveSizeGreaterThanZero() {
assertTrue(stack.size() > 0);
}
// ...
}
}
Posted in Java, Programming | Tags bdd, jdave, junit, rspec, testing | 2 comments
