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Forum: General Talk
04-15-2024, 02:23 PM
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I just saw their US portion of the concert tour is sponsored by AARP, which used to stand for the American Association of Retired Persons.
Anyway, I identify with all you cheap handy people. To prove my credentials I spent the morning on my new hobby, redoing our bathroom exhaust fans so they work instead of just collect water. I quit when the attic gets up to 90F. But my suggestion for people who want to spend less is to start with making your own food. It would be nice to grow it yourself but that's a big step. Just make as many meals as you can from scratch. It's way cheaper, it's likely to be healthier, and if you have to make snacks you'll eat less of them.
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Forum: Troubleshooting and Beginner Help
04-05-2024, 02:14 PM
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Practice helps a lot. You need to recognize the transitions between in and out of focus, so you can get that area where you want it. If you are using a DSLR, you can focus and shoot, then look at the shots to score them on how well you did. On film that might cost you some money.
Some old lenses are difficult to focus because the transition is not well defined. I have some lenses that will produce a good image at f8 but are kind of annoying to focus, so they stay on the shelf.
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Forum: Troubleshooting and Beginner Help
03-28-2024, 01:50 PM
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I'm pretty sure that lens does unscrew in the middle, so you have from the mount to the focus ring in one part and the rest in another part. That gives you easy access to the aperture blades and a couple of internal lens surfaces. Pentax and Takumar long telephoto primes (say longer than 135mm) through the A series usually come apart like this. No extra thumbs required.
But your spots also look a lot like sensor dust.
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Forum: General Talk
03-27-2024, 07:51 PM
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How many cars have these lug bolts? I thought it was just a Mercedes thing but maybe not.
 IMGF2654 by Dave, on Flickr
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Forum: General Talk
03-16-2024, 11:00 AM
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Imagination contributes greatly to less accidents.
I have a set of snow tires and wheels for my wife's car. It's work to change the wheels twice a year but the lug bolts come off and on easily. On my other vehicles, those tires stay on for many years. Getting them to budge requires some effort.
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Forum: General Talk
02-29-2024, 11:25 AM
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I de-acquisitioned my natural gas service. That only took six months to sort out.
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Forum: General Talk
11-15-2019, 10:22 AM
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You could move to Denver. Water boils at 203F so it's automatic!
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Forum: General Talk
01-31-2024, 03:01 PM
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My dog is great at a touch screen. He will pull up some screen I've never seen before by flicking his ear or whatever. Takes me a while to get back to what I was doing.
I just saw a Youtube video on how the touch keyboard didn't work at all in iPhone prototype testing. They had to add in the ability to guess the next letter you were likely to use and expand the touch zone around it. So you're not actually typing, you're confirming the keyboard's guess.
I think of an occasional accident in the finance world where a trader accidentally enters an extra zero and purchases or sells a million of something instead of 100,000. I think they blamed the May 2009 Flash crash on that. Other traders saw the mistaken order and were kind of twitchy because markets had slid since Sept. 2008. They reacted by selling their own stuff too fast. Anyway, they call it a fat finger error.
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Forum: General Talk
01-25-2024, 01:27 PM
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Some math: NZ vehicles cover around 48 billion kilometers a year (rounded up from the numbers I found for 2021). I am going to use 6 km per kilowatt as a consumption number, could be wrong but it's a number a lot of EVs can hit. That's 8 billion watts, 8 gigawatts. Let's make it 20 gigawatts to account for inefficient power transfers from grid to vehicle. Wikipedia says the NZ grid generated 42,858 gigawatts in 2020.
I keep looking at this to discover my math error and I don't see it.
Edit: I figured it out in the shower. I went from kilowatts to watts up there - so it's 8,000 gigawatts to 20,000 gigawatts which is a completely different result.
https://www.transport.govt.nz/assets/Uploads/Report/AnnualFleetStatistics.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_New_Zealand |
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Forum: General Photography
01-18-2024, 10:15 AM
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
01-18-2024, 12:41 PM
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The coatings are very durable in my experience but there is always that kryptonite-like solvent. "Glass cleaner" can be a mix of alcohol and ammonia and does attack some lens coatings. In my experience, Windex does not harm Pentax coatings, but older photographers often have dire warnings about it.
Heating up the screws should help. The idea is that everything expands, then you let it cool off. When the screw and mount cool off and shrink, the bond between them breaks.
I watch this guy on YouTube, Andrew Camarata. He's always fixing some old heavy equipment with frozen bolts. He'll try all the common techniques - more leverage, hammer taps, power tools, heating the bolt. Then he gets out a torch and melts it off. Not recommended for lenses. :)
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Forum: General Talk
01-10-2024, 12:28 PM
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Once you're beyond 50 years old, most advertisers don't care about you anyway. They already locked you into Coke not Pepsi 40 years ago, job done, where is the next group of kids. A small subset of products like drugs, insurance and scams still target older people, but you may notice those ads have a different feel about them.
I gave a younger person a ride in my 2002 pickup truck recently. When I got it, it was a mid-level trim, mid-size truck. Most purchasers were getting the equivalent thing. The younger person walking up to it said he needed to get his own truck "like this". But he was clearly disappointed - manual transmission, manual windows, no screen, no seat heaters, no subwoofer. Advertising has told him to expect a whole level of truck. I did the same thing in 2002 - someone down the street has a late 70s version of my truck and that was too bare bones for me.
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Forum: Troubleshooting and Beginner Help
01-08-2024, 09:51 AM
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Lenses that aren't very sharp wide open make manual focus difficult. The in-focus zone doesn't pop out. That's where focusing screens help because they exaggerate the detail in some way to make it obvious. You can see the difference if you have another sharper lens of similar focal length, like a 90mm macro vs. an 85mm portrait.
The green hexagon is an alternative. You can use that to locate a zone while turning the focus ring where the hexagon lights up and goes out. Sometimes the zone is slightly different going the opposite direction. The actual point of focus is between those points.
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Forum: General Talk
12-29-2023, 01:25 PM
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My wife and I grew up in the same town in Connecticut, so we almost always travel back for Christmas. It is the worst time of the year to travel to Connecticut. Sure, we have winter in Colorado, but we have a lot of sunshine too. This trip has featured three kinds of weather: fog, drizzle or rain. To complement the outdoors, everyone here has the dimmest possible interior lighting. My basement is twice as bright as any room here.
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Forum: General Talk
12-08-2023, 12:24 PM
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I generally don't subject people to my musical "tastes", but everyone has missed the Most Obvious Choice!
"Freeze Frame" by J. Geils
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Forum: General Photography
12-22-2023, 04:59 PM
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I like the idea of one photo leading to the next, but three rules is too many. I could almost do the blue sky thing here but NYC isn't sunny enough.
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Forum: Troubleshooting and Beginner Help
12-22-2023, 12:49 PM
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Your arrow points to the correct part. It is the flat black part between the chrome mount and the lens element. There are 3 or 4 screws holding it on. You can see the red lens alignment dot on the mount. The screw heads are on that same surface, pointed in toward the center of the lens. An eyeglass repair kit might have the small screwdriver you need. Remove the screws and pull the part out. The lens should mount correctly.
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Forum: General Talk
12-19-2023, 08:27 PM
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From 2002 to 2007 we lived on Kaua'i, and even the work commute was a great drive. My wife bought a Miata and the roads were a close match to the car. The island isn't that big so the longest possible road trip was maybe 3 hours, but still some very memorable drives. We would go to a movie theater maybe 25 miles away, and on the way back go through the Kaua'i Coffee Plantation with the top down. You could hear the ocean and see the stars. The island has a lot of microclimates and certain areas were prone to brief rain showers, but if you could stay at 35mph or so, the rain would mostly blow over the cabin.
The state got ambitious and decided to complete the road all the way around the island in the 50s or 60s. Apparently there is still some heavy equipment mired in the swamp they tried to cross.
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Forum: General Talk
12-13-2023, 02:14 PM
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I might be stretching "hobby", but my project for the last couple of years has been reducing my fossil fuel consumption, especially for my house. In honor of COP28 finally recognizing that fossil fuels are a problem, here's what I'm doing.
The cheap stuff first: air leaks and insulation. This house was built in 2004-2005 and the code at the time required a decent level of insulation. I made it a lot better, then had someone check it, and made it better again. We'll test again in January to see. I'm running out of practical ideas.
Then I got solar, about 10 kW peak power. That should make about 12 MWh annually. For 8 months, I make more power than I use. In the winter, not so much. I don't have enough winter data to be sure whether my annual production comes close to consumption yet.
The next step was a heat pump and heat pump water heater. Those replace a gas furnace, conventional AC and gas water heater. It's been hot enough and cold enough to be sure the system works. I think it's better than the old equipment. It's a little annoying to use so much electricity in December, when I can't make enough.
The in-progress step is a giant battery (20 kWh) for storage and backup. It's been going on for over a year. The system is supposed to switch over to backup power so fast, it will barely be noticeable. My utility wants to approve it all because if it doesn't work right, I would be powering the area while they're fixing the outage. It seems reasonable but shouldn't take that long. I just got the bulk of the equipment yesterday. The other parts have a payback period but the battery economic argument is weak. I just wanted it.
In the future, we'll get electric cars, but we only drive like 6000 miles a year and the ideal electric cars for us are quite expensive. I could make a case for doubling the solar and tripling the battery storage, what we'd need for a long winter power outage like Texas 2021.
The project is unfortunately not a great photo subject. Here are 400 pounds of new batteries but unless you are familiar with them, they don't look like much.
 IMGF2555 by Dave, on Flickr
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Forum: General Talk
12-11-2023, 11:07 AM
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This is unfair discrimination against people who move, probably promoted by the nonmovist faction. "They" can keep stuff on shelves in the basement for four decades, but Persons Who Move are subject to microaggressions like this alleged rule. Do nonmovers support the bubble wrap industry? Do they subsidize landlords when the security deposit is revoked? Are they out there getting 8 miles per gallon going 56mph on the highways?
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Forum: Pentax SLR Lens Discussion
12-14-2023, 12:49 PM
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I only have APS-C cameras. So I'd get the D-FA 21mm f4, sell it and get lots of other Limited lenses. I always lusted after the DA21, DA35 Macro and DA70 with the special case. All these got cheap when the HD versions came out, so I got them. The tricky question: should I get Limiteds that I've always wanted, or ones I've overlooked because I'm not sure they'd work for me? I was not sure about the DA35 Macro but that's pretty awesome. The one I wouldn't get is the DA40.
Anyway, almost everyone won't win so I highly recommend getting used Limited lenses in the marketplace.
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Forum: Troubleshooting and Beginner Help
12-14-2023, 11:17 AM
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Yes! And gravity starts working against you. If you are up on a ladder with a small, unique, important part, that part is 160% more likely to fall and bounce into the twilight zone.
Anyway, one reason to buy a known brand of SD card is the case thickness is consistent. A slightly thicker card can be within the SD card spec but it's more likely to get stuck.
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Forum: Troubleshooting and Beginner Help
06-28-2014, 04:14 PM
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The film cameras you list all have a tab in the upper right of the mount that fits into a slot in a real K mount lens. The slot has a corresponding tab that moves with the aperture ring on the lens. When the aperture ring is set to something like f5.6, the camera's tab moves right along with it. The camera's meter reads that tab position so it knows what aperture the lens is set to, while the lens is still wide open on the camera for focusing.
Your LR to K adapter may not be setting this tab correctly. The Pentax M42 to K adapter moves it all the way to one side when the adapter is installed, so the camera's meter thinks the lens is wide open. Then you use stop-down metering on the lens. But if the tab doesn't move, the meter will be wrong.
My theory sounds great except for Nikon lenses work. I don't have any Nikon lenses or batteries to test in my film camera. So it's just an idea.
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Forum: Troubleshooting and Beginner Help
12-05-2023, 10:54 AM
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I have gotten used to a DSLR either having the tools onboard to get the exposure I want, or just taking a bunch of trial and error test shots until it's right. Since the test shot approach is not practical with film, I would add a good external meter. The meter should give you enough exposure information to use manual mode, so any camera with a manual mode is OK. That means there is no reason to use KA mount lenses. The M or K lens line has all the prime lenses you need and they're generally cheaper.
The P30 and siblings are OK. The seals are more durable than K series cameras. I like the extra grip, I think you need the n or t models for that. The viewfinder specs aren't as stellar as an MX or LX but good enough. I like the size and design a lot - notice how no controls or buttons stick out. It needs batteries to fire the shutter. Mine failed - the shutter doesn't cock reliably. That seems to be the typical failure. Electronics seem to last. The P5/50 seems like an interesting upgrade but with more electronics to worry about.
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