Category Archives: Gadgets - Page 2

New camera: Braun Paxette Electromatic II

Posted by on May 12, 2010 3 comments

Hana went to a car boot sale recently. I half-jokingly asked her to pick up anything photographic if it was cheap, hoping to sell it on eBay for a few quid (and maybe even use it).

Girl done good – she found a early 1960s Braun Paxette Electromatic II for not many pounds. The seller assured her it was fully working, so she bought it.

Braun Paxette Electromatic II

The camera

For those that aren’t familiar with the Paxette series of cameras (I had never even heard of them until this week!) the Paxette Electromatic II has a fixed shutter speed of 1/40s and a variable aperture between f/2.8 and f/22.

It has a crude light meter which shows a red marker in the viewfinder if the light is insufficient and a green marker if there’s enough illumination. I think it’s broken on mine, because it always shows red. I don’t mind though, because it almost feels like cheating to use any electronic or automatic features on a camera like this. I will use the sunny 16 rule to help me expose the photos properly.

Unfortunately it seems quite hard to find much information about it on the Internet. Almost all information refers to the Paxette Electromatic I which seems to be a very similar camera, except with fixed focus. You can tell the I and the II apart because the I has striped ridges around the barrel of its lens while the II has a slanted chrome ring, which also twists for focussing.

Mending it

All day I was hopping with excitement until I got my hands on it. Unfortunately the shutter mechanism seemed to be jammed. Unlike many modern cameras, the shutter is composed of 5 or 6 metal leaves that open in the same way as the aperture leaves. I couldn’t find any service manuals online (without paying – bah) and my heart sank. Anyone who knows me will tell you I have as much dexterity and patience as I have oestrogen. But I thought “what’s the worst that can happen?” and went to fetch my precision screwdrivers.

I wasn’t able to get into the back of the camera because it was very well put together, to say the least. But it didn’t take too much work to get the various elements of the lens out, and I poked the shutter leaves with a tiny screwdriver and suddenly they pinged into place. Apparently they had simply seized up from lack of use. I reassembled the lens in reverse order.

Results

I shot a roll of Ilford Delta 100 black & white film in it, and this evening I developed the film. The results are quite nice. Most of the outdoor shots are overexposed, so I guess everyone else’s definition of “Slight overcast” is different from mine. I’ll know for next time – shoot one stop slower.

A greater shortcoming of this particular set of photos is the focus. The camera has a viewfinder so you don’t get to see the results of your focussing. The focus ring has numbers printed on it – the distance to your subject in feet or metres. I just guessed (or paced) how far it was in each case. Apparently the focus ring is not at all accurate, so most of the portraits and other close-ups are quite badly out of focus. The landscapes and architecture (effectively at ∞) are in pretty good focus.

As I mentioned above, the shutter has a fixed speed of 1/40s. This is a pretty slow shutter speed, and through most of my film there is a fairly large amount of camera shake. Obviously I could use a tripod or monopod to steady the camera, but there is no self timer. It looks like there might be a small hole for a cable release, but it’s filled with half a century’s worth of fluff.

I’ve published all the best photos from this roll of film on my photo blog.

Other thoughts

Loading film into this camera is an absolute pain. It doesn’t hook into the spool very strongly and kept pinging off as I tried to wind the film onto it. Eventually I managed, and closed the back of the camera. I shot about half a dozen frames and then the film apparently became unhooked again. No idea how – you’d think the film being wrapped around the spool several times would be enough. So I couldn’t wind it on, but I couldn’t wind it back either, because it had got snagged somehow and rewinding it tore the sprocket holes out of the film. I had to open the back, ruin all the photos I’d taken so far, cut the spoiled film off, snip the corner off to make a new leader, and reload the film. This time it stuck. Next time I will probably stick it to the spool with a square of sellotape.

Winding the film on doesn’t always advance it by the same amount. Some of my frames were touching, instead of leaving a few millimetres between frames. Not the end of the world – just makes it a bit annoying to scan because my filmstrip holder has a plastic frame round the edge of each picture.

In future I will be using a tripod with this camera, because the 1/40s shutter speed is just too slow for the focal length of the lens. I also noticed by looking at the inside of the shutter (without film) that you can take long exposures by holding the shutter release.

I will calibrate the focus (or at least figure out by how much it’s out). This should be quite straightforward, simply by opening the back of the camera and holding some tracing paper where the film would be. I can place a subject precisely 5m away from the camera (for example) and then see what the focus ring needs to be set to in order to achieve focus at that range. It might even be possible to adjust the alignment of the focus ring.

This review might sound negative. But it’s anything but! If I want an accurate camera with perfect focus and exposure that’s right every time, I can using my DSLR. Which is boring. This camera is fun, and I will be using it again! :)

How to waste £400

Posted by on April 16, 2010 1 comment

I dropped my iPhone 3GS this week. It fell perfectly face down on the pavement, and the glass front shattered.

The screen still works perfectly, and so does the touch-screen. Unfortunately some of the shards of glass are loose and they have an unpleasant tendency to stick in your thumb when you swipe to unlock the phone.

I will almost certainly have to pay for the repair out of my own pocket – and maybe even buy a whole new handset. Currently all of the iPhone handsets retail for over £400.

Broken iPhone

Broken iPhone

Google sat nav?

Posted by on April 6, 2010 5 comments

No, I’m not savvy to some leaked press release or anything like that. But I was wondering the other day how long it might be before we see a Google sat nav device on the market.

Think about it – they already have maps of most of the world and software that is capable of route planning and they have an operating system suitable for mobile devices (Android). It’s only a small step to create a small touchscreen device with a GPS receiver that it designed to be used primarily as a sat nav.

I expect such a device would also have 3G so it could get hold of live traffic information faster than a TMC receiver. It would be able to sync with Google Contacts so your sat nav would know where all your friends lived. It might be able to send them a text message if you were going to be late.

And, of course, it would track you wherever you went. Scary.

Review – Tamron 70-300mm lens

Posted by on March 23, 2010 6 comments

Recently I bought a Canon EOS 450D from Jessops. They were running a bundle deal, and it came with a Canon 18-55mm lens and a Tamron 70-300mm lens.

The long zoom was quite an important aspect to me, since I had upgraded from a Fuji S9600, with a huge range in focal lengths.

I’ve now owned the camera for a couple of weeks and I’ve had a chance to play with it a bit. Of course a fortnight isn’t nearly enough time to fully understand everything about a complicated device such as a DSLR, but I’ve tried a few things with it.

This review in particular is about the Tamron lens.

Obviously you don’t expect wonders from the cheapest lens in its class, but I am still quite disappointed. The S9600 was a jack of all trades (and master of none) and showed weaknesses at both ends of its range of focal lengths. That said, the whole camera cost around £200 and can now be bought for significantly less than £200. I think that represents fantastic value for money. During my 23-month ownership of it, I’ve taken about 10,000 photos. On average, that’s more than one every two hours!

Given that the Tamron lens on its own costs almost as much as the entire Fuji camera, I had hoped for significantly better images. Never mind.

At the shorter focal lengths, it’s OK. Nothing to write home about, but it’s fine. I took these self portraits at a focal length of 70mm and they seem OK.

But when you start to zoom in, the problems get worse. Some of this should have been obvious from reading the box – its largest aperture at 300mm is f/5.6, which is pretty slow. To make matters worse, there is no image stabilisation. You can’t complain about this – it says it on the box and if you want a fast lens, you have to pay more for it.

But I wasn’t at all pleased with the optical quality at 300mm. Take, for example, this photo of some distant horses. The first photo is the full image, and the second one has been cropped to show detail. Neither photo has had any other editing.

Horses in Hartshill

Horses in Hartshill

The first thing you might see is that the focus is very soft. It wasn’t camera shake because the sun was out and I used a tripod. The autofocus just seems to struggle at long focal lengths.

But then look at the chromatic aberration around the white horses. It makes the image look pretty terrible.

I also tried taking some photos of the moon last night, also at 300mm. As before with the horses, it couldn’t autofocus properly. The low light conditions made it much worse and the image was so blurry that there was no definiton on the surface of the moon.

I flipped the lens into manual focus mode where I was able to hugely improve the focussing. Unfortunately it seems in manual focus, as you approach infinite focus, the moon becomes sharper, but for the last little bit of the travel the lens goes beyond infinite focus and makes a garbage image. Not good at all.

In the end, this is the best I could manage. Here I used manual focus, spot metering and I’ve cropped the image afterwards.

The moon

It’s OK, but I’ve managed a better photo of the moon with my S9600.

I’m not sure if my lens in particular is faulty, or if these lenses are all equally bad. But I am very unimpressed with the results, even for a budget lens. Given how much more the 450D and this lens cost than the S9600, there is no excuse.

Tamron’s own website says:

Perfect 2nd lens for your DSLR kit

So they are certainly admitting that it shouldn’t be your primary lens. However I would also hesitate to say it’s “perfect” for anything.

My advice would be to avoid this lens, unless you’re on a particularly tight budget, or you don’t plan to use the higher end of the zoom range. Be prepared to switch off the autofocus, and focus manually if sharpness matters. Get a Canon telephoto lens if you can.

Update

I may have been a bit hasty in my critical review. As I said in my comment below, I had another go today at taking a few photos with the lens.

First here’s a chimney stack at full zoom, and a cropped version below.

Chimney stack at 300mm

Chimney stack at 300mm (crop)

As you can see, the focus is very sharp. There is a little aberration, but that’s expected from a cheap lens.

This photo of the seagull was also taken at full zoom. The autofocus can be pretty slow going from one end of the focus to the other, but if you focus on a similar object first, it’s much faster. In this case, fast enough to get a lock on a swooping seagull.

Seagull

Yes, it’s not perfect – but it’s acceptable for the price. I’m going to keep this lens and see what I can achieve with it :)

A crazy idea

Posted by on March 4, 2010 1 comment

As I cycled to work this morning, I had a crazy idea. It’s just daydreaming and will probably never happen, but it’s fun to think about. I’ve already posted this idea to the linux-audio-user mailing list in case anyone there has any insights on synthesising/sampling engine sounds.

I want to measure how fast I’m turning the pedals on my bike (the cadence) and synthesize/sample the sound of an internal combustion engine.

As far as I can work out, there are three major parts to this.

1. A sensor that can measure my cadence. A simple magnet switch that triggers once a revolution won’t be enough to measure the cadence with sufficient resolution, since my cadence is usually between 50 and 80 rpm, and I will need to sample more than once a second. I would probably need to mount multiple magnets spaced equally around the chainwheel and have a single sensor on the frame. Then I have to get it to supply this information to my control program.

2. I need a control program that can read in the input from my cadence sensor and convert a cadence reading of “66 rpm” into a frequency that should be sampled/synthesised, e.g. “500 Hz” (I’m making these numbers up). It will also need to be able to somehow smooth out the readings, perhaps by interpolation, so when I accelerate, the sound of the revs climbing doesn’t increase in obvious steps. It could also have other logic, e.g. when my cadence is 0 rpm, the sound of the engine is idling rather than off.

3. I need a synthesiser or sampler that can take an input from my control program and make the sound of an engine (or more likely, a sine wave to start with). I’ve never sampled or synthesised on a computer before but this engine-specific sampling technology already exists in video games, such as torcs.

I have absolutely no idea why I would want such a device – just for the fun of building it, I guess. I would like it to work in realtime (rather than later generating the soundtrack from recorded cadence data). The thought of sitting at the traffic lights with my earphones in and then hearing the mighty roar of a V8 as I pull away would be really satisfying…

Any thoughts – useful, interesting, humorous, or otherwise – are welcome!

An unlikely correlation

Posted by on February 5, 2010 1 comment

I just spotted that my Nagios/RRD graphs of my home server are showing a strange correlation.

From these graphs, it seems that the higher the outdoor temperature, the more free memory the system has available. I’m sure this is just a coincidence, though…

Outdoor temperature

Free memory

It's all getting too much

Posted by on February 4, 2010 No comments

Perhaps my job as a mobile IT specialist is getting too much for me.

Last night I had a dream that someone configured my alarm clock for push notifications and then signed me up to a high volume mailing list.

When it went off this morning, in a half-awake state I irritably tried to remember how to configure my push mail settings (aka “snooze”) and went back to sleep. Repeat in five minutes. Ugh.

Perhaps it’s time for a holiday!

My thoughts on the iPhone 3GS

Posted by on February 3, 2010 No comments

I’ve now had an iPhone 3GS for a couple of weeks, and it seemed only right to write something about it. This is not a review – there are many, many other reviews of the iPhone out there. This article is just a collection of my own thoughts, and a few comparisons to my other current smartphone (an HTC Magic) and my old smartphone (a Sony Ericsson P1i).

It might sound like a daft thing to complain about, but the iPhone doesn’t have an “alert LED” to warn you when there’s a text message or voicemail waiting. The P1i and the Magic both have this – and it’s great because you can see from across the room whether you’ve missed a message. I didn’t realise how much I used it until I realised that the iPhone doesn’t have such a feature. It’s annoying to have to walk over, pick it up and unlock it to check.

The iPhone suffers from poor battery life. Admittedly I tend to keep wifi and GPS turned on all of the time, but with an average day’s use (0 phonecalls, a handful of texts and maybe 30-60 minutes of app usage and web browsing) the battery gets down to 25% and I have to recharge every night. It’s OK provided I’m able to charge it every night. If I was going camping, I’d make the effort to turn wifi and GPS off, and maybe even get 2 days of use out of it! My P1i lasted for days before it needed fresh coal, and the Magic lasts for a few days between recharges with wifi enabled.

Some people have also complained that the iPhone’s battery can’t be changed by a mere mortal and have cited this for a reason for not buying it. I agree to a certain extent, but the battery isn’t likely to wear out for a couple of years, and by then I’ll be wanting a new phone anyway.

This next item might be seen as a pro or a con – the iPhone doesn’t really have many options. This is probably OK for most people, but it is not as configurable as the Magic. If an app or an aspect of the OS works the way you like it, then good. If not, it’s a bit tough. The Magic is inherently more geeky and everything has options. Having said that, the options aren’t in your face and are not intimidating for novice users.

The browser, as many have noted, is excellent. I won’t go into detail about it. The browser on the Magic is also good at rendering pages properly, but unfortunately lacks a multi-touch interface. This means you can’t do the pinch-zoom gesture, among other things. Other HTC handsets have multi-touch interfaces, though.

A minor annoyance with the iPhone is that it has to be registered with iTunes, and must be connected to iTunes when you want to update the firmware. It might not affect most people (especially if they already use iTunes for listening to music), but it could be annoyance for those who don’t want to install an unnecessary music player, and especially for me, as I had to build a Windows virtual machine to install iTunes. In contrast, the Magic simply receives its updates over the air, using 3G or wifi.

I prefer the feel of the Magic in my hand over the iPhone. The Magic is a bit smaller, a bit lighter and a nicer shape, I think. Doesn’t make a huge difference though. By this point, I’m just nitpicking.

Both devices have good screen, good onsreen keyboards and generally similar. The iPhone is a bit slicker, but I think my favourite phone out of the two is the Magic. I’d like it even more if it had multi-touch, too :)

GPS tracker

Posted by on February 2, 2010 No comments

Since getting my iPhone 3GS, I’ve been playing with a few apps. Today I tried one called Cyclemeter, which is a GPS tracker and can provide some interesting stats about your cycle rides.

I set it to track my journey to work (Speedwell – Clifton) and was quite interested by the elevation graph in particular. (N.B. this route is slightly shorter than my usual one, since the Bristol-Bath cycle path is currently closed near Lodge Causeway, so I’ve been taking a shortcut on main roads).

I’ve included some iPhone screenshots of my results:

Map of my route to work

Graphs of my route

Key points:

  • I start at home, taking the roads
  • At 2km, I join the Bristol-Bath cycle path at Rose Green Rd. You can see a dip in my speed where I stop and push my bike through the gate.
  • Most of the cycle path is gently downhill towards the city centre
  • At 5km, I reach the end of the cycle path and proceed through Old Market. It’s a bit stop-start in traffic.
  • From 6km onwards, it’s a steady uphill climb (Woodland Road today, sometimes St Michael’s Hill instead) from about 85m to almost 160m above sea level!

So long, Symbian

Posted by on January 22, 2010 No comments

This week, my phone contract came to an end and it was time to say goodbye to my old smartphone – a Sony Ericsson P1i. I thought it fitting to say a few words. Don’t confuse this with a review for a 3-year old phone – this is more like a comparison between the early days of smartphones, and the handsets you can buy today.

Sony Ericsson P1i

I’ve had the P1i for 19 months, during which time I have used it every single day – so I know it pretty well. I originally chose it because I wanted a smartphone – something that could handle web and email. My previous phone had been a Sony Ericsson K800i, which had GPRS, and a basic email client and web browser. It was slow, and it never really worked properly. I guess that’s what you might expect given that it wasn’t a smartphone :)

So I chose the P1i because it boasted 3G, wifi, a decent web browser, a more complex email client and other Internet-oriented features. It also had a QWERTY keyboard and a touchscreen with a stylus. There wasn’t a lot of choice because at the time, nearly all smartphones were sold intended for business, and the Apple iPhone had just been released but cost a weeks’ wages – even if you were the boss of Apple.

(I briefly owned a BlackBerry Pearl 8100, but it was so awful that I sent it back after 48 hours).

I had used a Sony Ericsson M600i at work, so I knew vaguely what I was getting. The P1i was pretty much the same, except with twice the memory, a newer OS, and wifi. When I started using it, I was excited that I’d be able to browse the web at will, read my emails on the move and never be bored again.

But my dream never quite came true. Why not?

The web browser

As mobile browsers of the day go, it was pretty good. It was an integrated version of Opera Mini which is a decent browser. It just doesn’t cut the mustard these days, as you simply can’t do without Flash or Javascript. Many sites simply don’t work.

Like today’s smartphones, it had options for portrait or landscape viewing. Unfortunately, you have to go into a menu to switch your view.

There’s no automatic resizing or scaling, so if you are looking at a “real” website, typically you only see the top corner and there’s an awful lot of vertical scrolling and horizontal scrolling before you find what you want. You also can’t scroll the way you can on modern phones such as the iPhone – by dragging the whole page with your finger. Scrolling was done using traditional scroll bars, which had to be dragged with the stylus (because they were too small for a finger).

And, as we now know, the concept of duplicating all web content in a special mobile web doesn’t really work. Sure, some sites offer mobile-friendly versions (e.g. Bristol University’s Mobile Campus Assistant) but it’s just not feasible to expect that you will never need to look at a “real” website on your phone.

The overall experience wasn’t great, and was mainly reserved for needing to find information on the move, such as store opening hours or a postcode for the sat nav.

The email client

If you only have an inbox folder, then you probably wouldn’t mind the email client on the P1i. However on my work email account, I have dozens of folders that incoming mail gets automatically sorted into. This is a nuisance on the P1i, as you have to go a couple of levels into the menus to choose which folder you’d like to view, and you have to go into each and every folder to see if it has any new messages in it.

I only really used the email client for writing emails when I was out and about.

The contract

Data contracts were expensive at the time I bought the P1i. They were most definitely targeted at business users, and my domestic mobile contract only included 1MB of data a month. That might let you view a handful of mobile websites, but it’s really nothing as soon as you start looking at “real” websites.

So I only used it in emergencies, because I knew that anything more would start to cost an arm and a leg.

The interface

The P1i has a QWERTY keyboard which is great for quick typing. It also has a jog-dial and some navigation buttons on the side, and of course the touchscreen. Depending the app or menu in question, you can sometimes use the touchscreen with a finger if you’re careful. Other times you’ll need the stylus.

The problem is that you have to keep switching between different input methods. The number of times I’ve started going through menus with the jog-dial, been forced to intervene by touching the screen, pressing the wrong thing, being forced to get the stylus out and then ended up typing awkwardly while also holding the stylus shows that the interface isn’t really mature.

Today, it’s practically impossible to buy a smartphone with a stylus (or a keyboard, for that matter).

The menu system

The main downfall of Symbian UIQ3 was its excessive complexity. Basic tasks, such as writing a new text message, would mean the user had to find their way through several levels of menus. Everything seemed to be hidden behind several menus, and there were pages and pages of options that would frighten most people. Consider also what I just said about constantly switching between input methods, and you might get an idea of the pain involved in, for example, changing the time zone when you go on holiday.

If this weren’t enough, the menus are slooooow and laggy. Opening a menu with several items might take a second, maybe longer. Opening your SMS inbox sometimes took as long as five seconds. That is an eternity in the world of technology users, and I often found myself hissing “come on!” at the phone when I was trying to do something.

Apps

Symbian was the forerunner of today’s smartphones in that it allowed users to download and install apps on their phone. There was no app store, and finding apps involved browsing the web endlessly and downloading them. It was a bit of a pain to do so on the phone itself, so I usually would find and download apps on my PC and transfer them to the phone using the cable or Bluetooth.

That’s fine for a geek like me, but the main problem was the fact that there were two Symbian based platforms – Sony Ericsson’s UIQ3, and Nokia’s S60. As always, there was a platform war and S60 won. It’s now quite hard to find any UIQ3 apps, and when most software developers say “Symbian” they mean “S60″.

Incidentally, Sony Ericsson are still making Symbian-based phones (such as the new Satio) but they now use S60.

The good points

Despite what I’ve said so far, it’s not all bad. The P1i did have some great features, such as:

  • Hardware QWERTY keyboard. I was almost as fast typing on this as on a laptop.
  • Relatively small size – it’s a lot smaller than my replacement phone – an iPhone 3GS.
  • An LED on the base that blinks when you’ve got a text message or missed call. The iPhone really needs one of these!
  • A battery that lasts a million years. So far, the iPhone has needed charging pretty much every night.

It’s been a good phone. It’s just time to move on now :)