sdbillin.kicks-ass.org

Kodak kills kodachrome

Kodak have killed off the Kodachrome film.

I’m a digital kind of guy. I like my laptops, iphones, streaming media, massive MP3 collections, digital TV, blah blah blah.  But this saddens me a little.

There’s nothing quite like setting a camera up right for a shot, getting your F-stop right, using the right speed film, setting the exposure you want and pressing that button. Knowing that you only hav 27 shots per film makes you think about composition. Even better, developing the film yourself is a bit of an artform – choosing the right paper, exposing for just the right amount of time, playing around with obscuring the paper as it develops for weird effects. There’s something wonderfully analogue, something direct and satifying. Of course it’s not as immediate as a digitial photo, and there’s more chance for it to go wrong but a chemically developed photograph has something a digital snap will never have. It has soul, effort, substance.

Digital photos, for all their convenience just don’t have the same sense of event. My digital camera takes up to about 900 pictures per memory card, which means I can just click and click without bothering too much to set the shot up – one of them is bound to come out right. If not I can just tweak it a little in photoshop. As brilliant as digital cameras are, they aren’t a patch on a decent film camera.

Click, clunk, whirrrrrr.

Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria

It turns out that pringles are crisps after all.
How long before the Jaffa Cake case is brought up again?

Hacking a cheap GPS

So the other week my boss got me to buy another printer for the office – a very nice Xerox Phaser 8560. Decent printers, no nasty ozone stuff that you get with laser printers plus there’s a nice smell of melting wax when they warm up in the morning.

I digress. Anyway, ordered the printer and it came with a free Navigo GPS unit. Trouble is the GPS software is bloody awful – something called TurboDog. In short, it’s a piece of crap. The 3d perspective is unusable, the 2d one is unclear. It would be so much better if it could run Tomtom… turns out that it can.

Like most cheap GPS systems the Navigo runs Windows CE, but the explorer shell is hidden away behind a nasty custom interface. If only there was some way to get around this…

One
Connect the Navigo to your Windows PC running active sync.

Two
Run a remote registry editor, I used CeRegEditor

Three
Connect with ActiveSync, click Explore
Open the SDMMC folder and create the following folders: Application Data, Desktop, My Documents, Programs

Four
Open CeRegEditor & click connect

Five
Deep breath and make the following changes:

• HKey_Local_Machine\init\Launch50
  Change to exporer.exe
• HKey_Local_Machine\System\Explorer\Shell Folders\Desktop
  Change to \SDMMC\Desktop
• Hkey_Local_Machine\System\Explorer\Shell Folders\Programs
  Change to \SDMMC\Programs

• Hkey_Local_Machine\System\Explorer\Shell Folders\My Documents
  Change to \SDMMC\My Documents

• Hkey_Local_Machine\System\Explorer\Shell Folders\Application Data
  Change to \SDMMC\Application Data

Double check all the above. Really, you don’t want to get anything wrong or you may have effectively killed your crappy GPS, which may or may not be a good thing.

Close remote regedit, disconnect the Navigo and power off the device. Scratch your nuts and restart it. You should now have a rather cramped Windows CE desktop. It’s not really usable for most things as the screen resolution is 320×240, but you can now install your (legal) version of Tomtom. Version 6 works well apparently. You can them put Tomtom in your Start menu startup items so you go straight into it on boot.

AVforums proved useful.

Avoid the flotsam, drink the tea

I have a problem with being right; I have to be. Right, that is. I wasn’t making some sort of pseudo-descartian comment.

There are so many people (far too many) who will blindly requote some probably made up fact-ette without the slightest addition of critical thought. I work with some people like this. Example: The other day someone in work claimed that there was more caffeine in tea than coffee. I knew this not to be true (it isn’t) and said so, backing up my claim with a few citations. Some percussive re-education may be needed.

What I’m getting around to is explaining why I update this blog and its previous incarnations so infrequently. I often have an idea for a post, but I would have to back it up with some research and fact checking. I usually don’t have time for all that stuff, so most of my ideas end up as rapidly fading electrical pulses in my aching noggin.

Which brings me to a completely unresearched claim based solely on my opinion and experience; Successful artists either lack full self awareness or have a developed a technique to ignore their screaming inner voice as it pores criticism on their developing work, realizing that in order to create good they must also create shit. Unfortunately the good/shit balance often spills across artists, leaving some artists to produce nothing but shit (see Coldplay, Damien Hirst, Barbara Cartland).

I will endeavour to ignore my screaming inner voice and create more shit in future. I might even write something worth reading one day.

Test post from iphone

Just a quick post from my phone, because I can.