he actually looks shinier now than when we bought him.
Sad day today. Said goodbye to “Mr. Cube”. I got him in 2010 and he’s been in the family for the last fourteen years. I’ve very fond memories of my Cube motoring days; one of the nicest cars I’ve ever owned. And he has worn extremely well. But, rather sadly, it is time for a change. If you see him out and about be sure to give him a wave and totally confuse the person driving him.
We’ve decided that it might be fun to have a printed programme for our 50th Anniversary event. Inside we are going to have some stories from folks from the past. If you’ve got any tales of times you spent in Hull it would be lovely to hear from your. Send them to stores@hullcs50.com
One of the problems with film photography is that when you scan the film negatives you get an image file that doesn’t contain the metadata (called exif data) giving details of when the photograph was taken, the camera used and whatnot. I’ve found a lovely tool called ExifTool which I can use to set the required values in a image file. But what I really wanted was a little program with a Graphical User Interface that lets me select a folder full of images and then set all the images to the specified camera make and model.
I had a quick chat with ChatGPT and it wrote two programs for me. One in Python and the other in PowerShell. I fired up the Python one and it just worked. It made the menu you can see above, using the TkInter interface. The formatting of the window could use a little work, but the program itself seems to do exactly what I want. All I had to do was describe what I wanted and out popped the code. This is both highly impressive and deeply scary.
I’ve now decided that I don’t want to have to enter the make and model of the camera each time, I want the application to use the folder hierarchy to work out what the name should be (i.e. for the above image I would have a parent folder called Mamiya which contains a subfolder called Mamiya Press 23 Standard in which the image files are stored). I’m going to tell ChatGPT about my idea and then get it to create that instead. When I’ve got it all working I’ll put it on GitHub for anyone who has the same problem as me.
So, I’ve got seriously bitten by the Mamiya Press bug. These are big old cameras designed for press use. I’ve just bought invested in another one.
I actually bought this one for its lens. It has a 65mm lens, which on a negative this size counts as wide angle. It is usually much more expensive than this whole outfit. The lens has such a wide angle of view that you have to use the special viewfinder you can see on top of the camera above. When the lens was made Mamiya decided that it wasn’t sharp enough at the designed aperture, so they simply limited the maximum aperture to 6.3. This means that you get a “free” dose of depth of field, which helps keep images in focus. The downside is that in low light conditions you’ll have to reach for a tripod much sooner than you might like.
The camera was sold as in only average condition, but I reckon it is actually in pretty fine fettle. The rangefinder gives pretty sharp focus and everything works as it should, although it does bear the marks of time here and there. We took a little trip to the seaside yesterday and I grabbed some shots.
I’m very happy with how they turned out. The camera is a bit of beast to carry round, but it is totally worth it.
While we were in London we had a look in the Uniqlo store to find out what they are wearing in Japan at the moment. Turns out that they had a range of T shirts for the Kaiju No. 8 manga series at very tempting prices. So I bought a bunch. And also the first book of the series (it’s rather good).
If you like this kind of thing it’s worth keeping an eye on their site. Neat designs pop up every now and then at very tempting prices.
We had a fairly quiet hardware meetup last night. But I was able to give out some sage life advice for someone who asked what their kids should be learning about. Two things:
Take a look at 3D design. Have a play with one of the many tools out there that you can use to learn about this, for example TinkerCad or BlocksCad. If you are feeling super brave you could even take a look at Blender. These are free to use and you can output things that you can 3D print. A knowledge of the language of 3D design is always going to be useful, whatever you end up doing in real life.
And, talking of language, the next thing you should get kids doing is blogging/journaling. Writing about what you’ve been up to is a very good habit to get into, whether you want the world to see it or not. It gets you used to putting your thoughts into words and gives you a sense of where you are going and what you have done. It is also a great way of dealing with things that have gone wrong. You can write them down, along with a list of the things that you will do different next time and kind of “put the issue to bed”. I write a journal and then take bits out of it for the blog (this thing). I don’t do this for anyone in particular. I do it because I enjoy it and find it useful for me. Your journal can be as simple as a Notepad document that you add to, or you can use one of the online tools (Apple even have a journal app built into their phones now)
More advice in the next Hardware Meetup, which will be in 3 weeks on the 25th of September.
HackSpace and MagPi are now one magazine. And in this month’s edition you can find my article about converting an old Polaroid camera to Fuji Instax film and adding internal leds to make the pictures more interesting (as if I need to do that). You can buy the magazine here.
Today finds us in Sheffield visiting the National Video Game Museum. It was wonderful. So good that I completely forgot to take any pictures. Never mind, I’m sure that we’ll be going back there again before long. Strongly recommended.
This morning all the power sockets in the kitchen stopped working. Turned out the earth trip had tripped. I suspect a bit of dust in the tumble drier. Anyhoo, I had it fixed in around a minute or so. I told the rest of the family that there was no need to make fuss about my incredible efficiency. Perhaps just a small statue with “He brought back the light and power.” written on it.
Spent a bit of time today playing with a DeepMind 12 synthesizer. Apparently the best sound it makes is called 8Bit Piggy.
One of the highlights of my year is the Yorkshire Traction Engine. In Yorkshire. With traction engines. This year we were blessed with great weather and more engines that you could shake a stick at. Along with some awesome motorbike action. I took along a proper camera and pushed my luck a bit. I’m not unhappy with the results.
Last time I had a seven year hold car wash “helper” it ended with both of us laughing like crazy. And soaking wet. This time, but the use of heavy incentive management we managed to get the car lovely and clean and not have to change all our clothes afterwards. Which counts as a win.
Went to Leeds today and didn’t buy a camera. But did buy a light meter It’s cute. It has a little white hemisphere you can slide over the sensor so that you do ambient/incident metering. This measures the light falling on the subject. Hold it close to the subject with the hemisphere pointing towards the camera and you can get a reading that will make sure the subject is properly exposed whatever the light conditions.
This is a bit trickier than just pointing something at the subject and measuring the light reflected by it (which is reflective light metering) but much more accurate if you have light or dark areas around the subject. The meter also has a setting we can use to set the exposure for movie cameras, if we ever get rich enough to be able to afford film….
I take it that these wizards are very good at hiding
Still playing with the Rabbit R1. Asked it to take a picture and add some wizards. The picture is OK, but it isn’t quite what I wanted.
Makes a nice torch too
It is often very useful to have something you can use to add a splash of light to a photograph. These lights are packaged to look like 35mm film cassettes. They give out a nice solid light for around half an hour or so and you charge them up using their USB connection. Very nice and not too pricey.
Still Got it
The Cube has been part of our lives for the last fourteen years. It has never let us down and is one of the coolest cars I’ve ever driven. We’ll be parting with it soon, succumbing to the lure of an all-electric vehicle. We gave it a wash, took it for a drive and grabbed some pictures.
Even the back looks cool
I hope that when the time comes the Cube will find an owner who appreciates it as much as we did.
If you are lucky enough to have Apple TV you should take a look at Pachinko. It’s a tough watch. For a start there are a lot of subtitles and some of the material is quite hard going. It’s not a show all about nice things happening to nice people. But it is well worth getting into.
At the same time as I was taking a tiny Pentax camera around I was also carrying my great big Pentax 6x7 camera about and shooting a few proper colour pictures.
I’m very happy with the pictures, although I need to work on holding the camera horizontally.
The Pentax Auto 110 is a tiny single-lens reflex camera that was sold in the 1970’s. It takes tiny pictures on a little cassette. I picked one up a while back for a very low price. Just for laughs I got some Lomo Turquoise film and took a bunch of shots with it. It was great fun, and really easy to carry round. The results were…. interesting…
All the colours are wrong, but in a really interesting way. Greens don’t really go anywhere, but all the other colours go all over the place. People turn cyan. The Pentax did a lovely job of taking a bunch of properly exposed, sharp pictures. My advice; get yourself a Pentax 110 and a roll of Lomo film (it is surprisingly cheap) and then go out and have a ton of fun.
It turns out that if you only get eight shots from each film you end up with lots of rolls to develop. I thought I had the answer to this. A while back I bought a cut price developing tank which can process three films at the same time. The first problem was the height of the tank. It won’t fit under the sink for rinsing. This turned out to be quite an easy fix.
Half an hour with OpenSCAD and I had the above adapter design. It took three goes to print out one with the correct size to grip the hose pipe and fit in the top of the tank, but all I needed to do was buy a shower adapter, cut the end off the pipe and then pop this on. It works very well.
The only snag that I hit was the difficultly of loading the film onto the spirals that fit inside the tank. The film kept getting stuck. This was not fun for a variety of reasons. Mainly that I had my hands in the dark bag when all this was going wrong. Eventually I managed to get two films into the tank and was able to process them,
The images came out quite well, but fighting to get them into the spiral took its toll, with a few scratches here and there. I’ll have to decide whether the hassle of loading up the film is worth the time saving.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
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