Praecipe epops

Saturday, 19 October, Year 11 d.Tr. | Author: Mircea Popescu

So in other good ideas for self-amusement and entertaining (plus a shot at making the 9pm news), what you could do is always carry significant helpings of quick setting epoxy in your car ; and whenever some motorists engage in the slightest fender-bender, you run out there and glue their cars together. Just pour the goop all around the point of contact.

Oh and also, you could do this in hotels, too. Re-arrange all their furniture, move the beds in the livingroom and the TVs in the closet where the washing machine is (which in turn, you set to throning in the middle of the room, atop a coffee table or something), replace the window curtains with the shower curtains and vice-versa, glue all the lamps together by the shades, put the mirror in the fridge and the coffee pot inside the safe... then make a reservation for a few days later and be all indignant at the shape of the room.

These are just some ideas.

In other news, I replaced my older Sony DSC-RX100 with a DSC-HX90 (principally because as you've perhaps noticed, I managed to somehow dent the antiglare lens cover). Technically this'd be a downgrade, as the former had a 1 inch sensor while the latter has a 1/2.3 inch sensori ; but the lens assemblage is markedly better (formerly f=10.4 to 37.1 mm ; currently f = 4.1 to 123 mm), and indeed the apparent quality of zoom shots is markedly improved.

The one annoying thing about the HX is that its multi-shot function, while quite faster than the RX's, is hard-capped at 10 shots (whereas the RX will just shoot for as long as the button's depressed -- it slows down to about .3 SPS or so once its fast buffer is full and it has to wait for the write ; but it keeps pissing them into the memory card). I can't quite tell whether this is fucking stupid or actually a blessing -- whenever I shoot sluts currently I just tell them to get to it and hold the button down, which produces something ; but maybe a tighter communication style will produce better somethings with the faster shuttering, I'm willing to give it a shot.

Contrariwise, the annoying thing about the RX whereby it wouldn't charge the battery in "USB mode" ie when connected to a laptop is gone (you literally had to switch off the connection for it to charge, retarded dual-state nonsense) ; not to mention the HX's screen comes off, allowing for better dubious angle (also known as upskirt) shots.

In the whirlwind I also bought one of the new Ultra SanDisk cards, supposed to be able to handle 80MBps, to replace the older Sony SF-16NX, capable of a theoretical 22 MBps, which should come in quite handy, especially if it lives up to the hype), as well as a modest tripod (though it's entirely not clear to me how exactly these two go together just yet). But it has an air bubble, right, so how bad could it possibly be!

tripod-hat

This then'd be the last set shot by the memorable, venerable, and quite fucking bestest camera I ever had to date, let's all put our hands together for the RX 100!

safe-moneyz

———
  1. In theroetical sensor surface terms this is a downgrade from ~116 to ~61, ie halved ; but for some reason light sensitivity is rated ISO 125 to 6400 on the larger and ISO 80 to 12800 on the smaller. It's not at all clear to me how this is supposed to be even possible, considering photon starvation, as a physical reality, was supposed to be the limiting factor. []
Category: Zsilnic
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8 Responses

  1. Re room re-arrangin', cue Carlin's "Let 'em know you've been there!"

    And I'm not sure that tripod is on quite right. You need moar mounting practice. :D

  2. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    2
    Mircea Popescu 
    Saturday, 19 October 2019

    The bad news -- for you -- is that next that tripod ain't going on. It's going in.

  3. This is the first time on the Internet when such banter is actually preceded by full illustration of exactly how it would go.

  4. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    4
    Mircea Popescu 
    Saturday, 19 October 2019

    You too.

  5. Re: 1 -- AFAIK (and esp. in poor lighting) quality of optics counts for considerably more than the sensor. Most of what comes out of highres-sensor-cum-sad-lens (e.g. crapple pnoje cam, typical example) is thermal noise.

  6. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    6
    Mircea Popescu 
    Sunday, 20 October 2019

    I'd say that's certainly borne out in practice, it seems to me the new one actually takes much better shots in the dark, realising in half a second what the old one'd have needed well over a second to do.

  7. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    7
    Mircea Popescu 
    Sunday, 15 December 2019

    Speaking of the new cam : the other annoying thing about the Sony HX90 is that it comes with a pre-formatted ntsf card ; and if used to format a new card will ntsf-format it without any choice offered to the user.

    This further interacts unpleasantly with linux downstream, because obviously MTP mode fucking sucks (root_squash, or whatever the fuck -- it's just a dumb mode for peripheral cards, look it up sometime if you feel like getting enraged) and is the default. Normal USB (unhelpfully called "mass storage") mode is also available via settings, but the camera actually encrypts the underlying partition, because

    sudo fdisk -l
    Disk /dev/sdb: 63.9 GB, 63864569856 bytes
    255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7764 cylinders
    Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
    Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
    I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
    Disk identifier: 0x00000000

    Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
    /dev/sdb1 3 7765 62351360 7 HPFS/NTFS

    sudo mount -t ntfs /dev/sdb1 /media/sonycam
    NTFS signature is missing.
    Failed to mount '/dev/sdb1': Invalid argument
    The device '/dev/sdb1' doesn't seem to have a valid NTFS.

    If one attempts to format the card (say, ext4) that one will discover the camera fails to save pictures now (there's a C:14:01 error message blinking on the screen / it complains it needs to format the stick). One has to know the magic value (stick must be formatted MBR) in order to be able to both use his own peripherals like their boss and also have the camera use them, like a camera.

    Not the end of the world, except of course for the hour it looks like the item's headed to the trashbin.

  1. [...] I could say I've managed to dent the camera lens shield yet again and once more (as you can no doubt observe in the upper left corner). I've no fucking idea what to [...]

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