camera shopping ; flat tire ; etc
Sat Sep 26 19:41:58 EDT 2015
I've finally mowed the lawn. The 12v/40amp circuit breaker worked fine on the 24v circuit. The mower didn't shut off at all. I didn't push as hard through the thick growth as I might have, and there was a lot of tall stuff after all these weeks, but there weren't any problems.
The forecast for today was rain, but it hasn't happened yet. The sky was strange, heavy clouds but little bits of blue sky peeking through. From the RADAR it looks like the rain will be here soon. With the crazy work schedule this weekend, I went back to bed at noon, so I'm lucky the rain didn't get here earlier. But it looks like this won't be the weekend to try to get any of the boundary stones I missed last weekend. And the forecast for tomorrow night is cloudy and rain, so it doesn't look good for seeing the full eclipse of the harvest super moon.
Sunday 11:23
Today's forecast is cloudy, but there's broken clouds now and lots of sunshine. It's great cycling weather. Maybe we will be able to see the moon tonight....
Total Lunar Eclipse 2015 Sep 28
Sunday 19:24
I worked very late Friday night (02:30), and was up early Saturday, and then went back to bed. When I got up again mid-afternoon, anniemal and OkCupid buddy were gone with the van. They got back this afteroon, but they'd left no note about where they were going and when they were planning to be back.
And the Mazda is at the new Japanese-car repair shop, so if I'd needed to drive anywhere, I'd have been stuck.
We've had some rain this afternoon, and I looked outside a little while ago. There's clouds, possibly broken, and moving. So they could be gone - or thicker - by 20:11, when the eclipse starts.
Moonrise 18:49; full moon 21:10:05.
Sun Sep 27 21:18:20 EDT 2015
Clouds with occasional breaks. I may see some of the eclipse. I'm up on the roof (with the laptop).
Sunday 23:29
The eclipse is well past its mid point, but there's been nothing visible of it here for the past hour. There were a few glimpses through breaks in the cloud as it was reduced to a sliver. And of course it became less able to penetrate the clouds as it lost brightness.
woot! has refurbished Fujifilm FinePix S1 cameras for sale for $200. I've never been satisfied with the image quality of my current camera, the Panasonic DMC-FZ18S, so I was interested.
My first digicam, a Casio QV-3500EX, took really nice pictures (until it died). My next camera, a Canon PowerShot S1 IS, did not focus well. Both the Canon and the Panasonic have smudgy image detail when your look closely. I also occasionally really miss the Canon's swiveling display screen. But the main problem is the small image sensors these cameras have. Reviews on line show that the Fuji isn't any better, although it would give me much more zoom, the articulated display, time lapse, and WiFi remote control. But if I'm still going to be disappointed with the actual photos, there's really not much point.
But looking around the review site led to one of my current camera's successors, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ1000. It's got slightly less zoom, but a much larger sensor, and the image detail is really nice. But it looks like it's going for $800 ($650 grey market), so it's not under serious consideration. It's also twice the weight of the DMZ-F18 I'm using. (That seems to be a consequence of having a bigger sensor. But smaller sensors receive less light, capture less information - and that limits the image quality.)
Side by side 4 cameras compared
I didn't realize my camera was 8 years old.
Monday 03:40
The few pictures I took of the eclipse are winnowed and captioned. I took the camera to work Thursday and took a few pictures; those are in too. A lot of those are blurry because I didn't realize how little light there was. I'd thought I might take some pictures of the changes in DC for the Pope's visit and then the President of China's visit, but I seem to be rather purposeful during my commute and not inclined to stop to get a camera out. I'd also rather not flash things about that look like they're worth stealing. (Yeah, kinda silly on that bike to begin with. But people who don't know bikes aren't going to know how nice a bike it is.)
Tuesday 19:00
I expect most of you are accustomed to ads tracking your browsing behavior. I am not, in part because I block a lot of the sites' tracking, but probably more so because I block the ads.
I visited a camera-review website at work yesterday. Now I'm getting ads for photography classes. I'm wondering why I'm not getting ads for cameras. Is it because the kinds of cameras I was looking at were more serious than the point-and-shoot crowd? I'd expect to just be getting ads for similar (competing) cameras....
It's 20:58, and I usually like to be gone by 21:00, because the walk out of the building gets much longer. But it's raining. The forecast said it would rain. Acuweather said there would be some breaks, but just as they did last time, they're shifting those breaks later, messing up my commute. Looking at the RADAR, I think it's likely I'm not going to get those breaks. At best, I can hope it will lighten up.
Wednesday 00:20
I left work at 22:50. The rain had stopped. I took the alternate route home, all paved.
Wednesday 21:30
I got a flat tire on the way home tonight, the bike's 3rd. Since the first 2 flats were in exactly the same spot, I knew exactly where to look for this one. I didn't even take the tire off the rim nor remove the tube. But looking in the cut in the tire I did find a tiny shard of glass this time. The question is:
Another question is
I guess I'll see whether the tire is flat again when I'm ready to leave for work tomorrow.
I did buy a couple of tires when I ordered brake pads and cables. Or I could use a spare I had for the Vision R40. (It's front wheel is 20".) I really hate discarding a (relatively expensive) tire with so little mileage on it, but this is 3 flats in 4 months. This would really not be fun in cold weather - which is coming.
Thursday 13:43
It's raining. It doesn't look like it's going to stop soon, and Acuweather says rain in the evening too. (And since they've generally been off in the direction of overestimating any gaps in the rain, I'm going to figure it will be a bad night for biking home.) It looks like this will be the first day I've taken the Metro to work since April.
And I guess I'm not going to check on the patched tube, or swap the tire.
Thursday 14:28
I guess I'm going to work from home today (what's left of it). I just missed the bus, and the next one seems to be in an hour(!). I haven't taken the bus/subway to work for 5 months, and I couldn't find things. I couldn't find my Kindle. It was 6" (15cm) from where I thought it should be, but buried. And its battery is at 4%, so it wouldn't have been useful anyway, although it could charge at work for the trip home. I couldn't find my jacket. It was still packed for Pennsic; haven't needed it since. (It hasn't been cool, nor wet when I was out.) I found another pair of bike shorts in the Pennsic stuff too. (They're great under a tunic; not scandalous if someone catches a glimpse.) But is it really worth going to the office if I won't be there until 16:15 or 16:30? If it were not raining, the bike would have me there by 15:30. If I hadn't been looking for non-biking stuff, I would have left earlier than now, and been there before 15:00.
I also seem to have lost a lot of weight. The (new) bike's seat has gotten less comfortable, like I've lost some padding. I figured I was just riding harder, and the butt muscles were sore. The pants I keep at the office are cavernous now, but I thought they were loose when Anniemal got them. But I tried on a couple of pairs of pants I haven't worn since March/April, and they're very loose too.
Thursday 23:16
I'm still looking at cameras. I mentioned taking my camera to work one day last week. Besides not wanting to take it out while I was biking through town, I could also feel the added weight on the bike. (I notice the weight of my small (11.6" (29.5cm)) laptop too, and even the Kindle.) And the cameras that had my initial attention, with larger sensors, are a lot heavier. This camera is already more than I would ever carry casually. I don't like the idea of walking around Pennsic all day with twice the weight in my belt pouch.* You get great pictures by taking lots of pictures, and you take lots of pictures (in part) by having your camera handy. Since I seldom go places for the purpose of taking pictures, if I'm going to take pictures, I'm going to have to go the opposite direction in my camera search - I need something smaller and lighter, easy to carry.
To my surprise, my new front-runner is another Panasonic - Lumix TZ70/ZS50. It's a 12 mega-pixel compact camera with 30x optical zoom (24mm-720mm eqiv). Alas, the screen does not tilt, but it supports remote WiFi operation and you can frame shots on a tablet or cellphone. (This is a biggie for birders, who can put the camera on a tripod outdoors pointed at a feeder and zoom, focus, and shoot from indoors.) It has a viewfinder, which is not so common on compact cameras. (Easier to see your shot in bright sunlight, and important for holding the camera steady at long zoom.)
The big change from the previous year's model is dropping the resolution from 18MP to 12MP to decrease the noise in the images. Last year's model also had GPS; I don't think I'll miss it, and it's a huge battery drain. This is still a camera with a small sensor - something I was hoping to get away from - but a bigger sensor means bigger lenses and a bigger, heavier camera. And I don't think that's going to work for me. I've ridden my bike with my camera slung around my neck; bigger is getting unworkable, and smaller would be a lot better. The TZ70 photo samples on line are a big improvement over what my DMC-FZ18 can do.
I think a compact camera will less intimidating to my subjects than larger cameras resembling SLRs. And it will be less conspicuous.
If I decide this is the right camera, do I wait until January? That's when Panasonic will probably announce the next model. It might be significantly better; it might mean a price drop for this year's model. Apparently the optics in this line change every 2 years, so the zoom might go beyond 30x.
GiselaSony is the only brand I'm flat-out not considering. I still haven't forgiven them for putting software on their music CDs 10 years ago that broke their customers' anti-virus software!
(Their objective was to protect their music copyrights by preventing people from ripping CDs, even though anyone who bought a CD had the right to make a copy for backup purposes, and had the right to listen to music they purchased on their computer or their MP3 player, not just on a CD player. And Sony in using this software violated programmers', copyrights.) As far as I know, they haven't apologized for this, either. Sure, it's OK for us to break our customers' anti-virus software! And we don't need to tell them we're doing this. Sure, it's OK for us to ignore other people's copyrights to protect our own, while we deny our customers their legal right to use our product they purchased in the way they choose. If you think I'm still angry with them, you're right. No company should treat its paying customers that way. I really don't understand why there wasn't a consumer revolt. (I also don't understand why there weren't any DMCA violations with huge penalties.) Anyway, I haven't bought anything from Sony since. I've thought about boycotting their TV shows too, but I don't see the commercials anyway so whether I watch has no effect on their earnings.
I've got all my Mom's cameras too, including some real DSLRs. Big sensors, clean images. And interchangeable lenses (standard, telephoto, wide-angle). I did that for years, and I could swap lenses pretty quickly on my (35mm film) Pentaxes. But an ultra-zoom is so much less to deal with.
Friday 10:58
The Lumix TZ70/ZS50 may look intimidating after all. I just found this picture in a review. It morphs into something rather imposing for the little package it comes out of. How the heck did they do that? And this is why you read every review you can find. 95% of the content is the same, but that last little bit - when it is not in error (like the one twothat didn't seem to realize that the GPS was dropped from the previous model**) - things the other writers didn't find worth mentioning, might matter a lot to some readers. None of the photos in the other reviews (I've seen so far) shows that kind of extension, or it isn't apparent from the angles of the photos.
*I have 2 belt pouches all the time at Pennsic. One has my wallet, pens and pencils, flashlight, Swiss-army knife, multitool, earplugs (You never know when there will be pipers!), and (in past years) cellphone. The other had just my camera.
**Bzzzt - incorrect:You can geotag your images with the built-in GPS.
GPS, Wi-Fi and NFC are built in.
Almost every review says the 2 changes from last year's TZ60 are (1) dropping the resolution from 18MP to 12MP and (2) dropping GPS.
Saturday 12:57
I have lost weight. My bathroom scale says 138lb (62.6kg). It's probably been 10 years since I can recall weighing anything other than 160lb (73kg).
☺
Wed Feb 3 13:06:07 EST 2016
Belatedly from my capricious memory: Apparently I looked pretty hot/studly after taking my (Huffy!) bike to England for 2 weeks - that was May/June 1993.
[This entry was originally posted as https://syntonic-comma.dreamwidth.org/769875.html on Dreamwidth (where there are
comments).]
I've finally mowed the lawn. The 12v/40amp circuit breaker worked fine on the 24v circuit. The mower didn't shut off at all. I didn't push as hard through the thick growth as I might have, and there was a lot of tall stuff after all these weeks, but there weren't any problems.
The forecast for today was rain, but it hasn't happened yet. The sky was strange, heavy clouds but little bits of blue sky peeking through. From the RADAR it looks like the rain will be here soon. With the crazy work schedule this weekend, I went back to bed at noon, so I'm lucky the rain didn't get here earlier. But it looks like this won't be the weekend to try to get any of the boundary stones I missed last weekend. And the forecast for tomorrow night is cloudy and rain, so it doesn't look good for seeing the full eclipse of the harvest super moon.
Sunday 11:23
Today's forecast is cloudy, but there's broken clouds now and lots of sunshine. It's great cycling weather. Maybe we will be able to see the moon tonight....
Total Lunar Eclipse 2015 Sep 28
Sunday 19:24
I worked very late Friday night (02:30), and was up early Saturday, and then went back to bed. When I got up again mid-afternoon, anniemal and OkCupid buddy were gone with the van. They got back this afteroon, but they'd left no note about where they were going and when they were planning to be back.
And the Mazda is at the new Japanese-car repair shop, so if I'd needed to drive anywhere, I'd have been stuck.
We've had some rain this afternoon, and I looked outside a little while ago. There's clouds, possibly broken, and moving. So they could be gone - or thicker - by 20:11, when the eclipse starts.
Moonrise 18:49; full moon 21:10:05.
Sun Sep 27 21:18:20 EDT 2015
Clouds with occasional breaks. I may see some of the eclipse. I'm up on the roof (with the laptop).
Sunday 23:29
The eclipse is well past its mid point, but there's been nothing visible of it here for the past hour. There were a few glimpses through breaks in the cloud as it was reduced to a sliver. And of course it became less able to penetrate the clouds as it lost brightness.
woot! has refurbished Fujifilm FinePix S1 cameras for sale for $200. I've never been satisfied with the image quality of my current camera, the Panasonic DMC-FZ18S, so I was interested.
My first digicam, a Casio QV-3500EX, took really nice pictures (until it died). My next camera, a Canon PowerShot S1 IS, did not focus well. Both the Canon and the Panasonic have smudgy image detail when your look closely. I also occasionally really miss the Canon's swiveling display screen. But the main problem is the small image sensors these cameras have. Reviews on line show that the Fuji isn't any better, although it would give me much more zoom, the articulated display, time lapse, and WiFi remote control. But if I'm still going to be disappointed with the actual photos, there's really not much point.
But looking around the review site led to one of my current camera's successors, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ1000. It's got slightly less zoom, but a much larger sensor, and the image detail is really nice. But it looks like it's going for $800 ($650 grey market), so it's not under serious consideration. It's also twice the weight of the DMZ-F18 I'm using. (That seems to be a consequence of having a bigger sensor. But smaller sensors receive less light, capture less information - and that limits the image quality.)
Side by side 4 cameras compared
I didn't realize my camera was 8 years old.
Monday 03:40
The few pictures I took of the eclipse are winnowed and captioned. I took the camera to work Thursday and took a few pictures; those are in too. A lot of those are blurry because I didn't realize how little light there was. I'd thought I might take some pictures of the changes in DC for the Pope's visit and then the President of China's visit, but I seem to be rather purposeful during my commute and not inclined to stop to get a camera out. I'd also rather not flash things about that look like they're worth stealing. (Yeah, kinda silly on that bike to begin with. But people who don't know bikes aren't going to know how nice a bike it is.)
Tuesday 19:00
I expect most of you are accustomed to ads tracking your browsing behavior. I am not, in part because I block a lot of the sites' tracking, but probably more so because I block the ads.
I visited a camera-review website at work yesterday. Now I'm getting ads for photography classes. I'm wondering why I'm not getting ads for cameras. Is it because the kinds of cameras I was looking at were more serious than the point-and-shoot crowd? I'd expect to just be getting ads for similar (competing) cameras....
It's 20:58, and I usually like to be gone by 21:00, because the walk out of the building gets much longer. But it's raining. The forecast said it would rain. Acuweather said there would be some breaks, but just as they did last time, they're shifting those breaks later, messing up my commute. Looking at the RADAR, I think it's likely I'm not going to get those breaks. At best, I can hope it will lighten up.
Wednesday 00:20
I left work at 22:50. The rain had stopped. I took the alternate route home, all paved.
Wednesday 21:30
I got a flat tire on the way home tonight, the bike's 3rd. Since the first 2 flats were in exactly the same spot, I knew exactly where to look for this one. I didn't even take the tire off the rim nor remove the tube. But looking in the cut in the tire I did find a tiny shard of glass this time. The question is:
- Has that shard been there since the first flat and caused all 3?
- Did the shard work its way into the existing cut after the first flat and cause the 2nd and 3rd?
- Did the shard get there after the 2nd flat, and just cause this last one?
Another question is
- Why can't I apply a patch that holds more than a day on these tubes?
I guess I'll see whether the tire is flat again when I'm ready to leave for work tomorrow.
I did buy a couple of tires when I ordered brake pads and cables. Or I could use a spare I had for the Vision R40. (It's front wheel is 20".) I really hate discarding a (relatively expensive) tire with so little mileage on it, but this is 3 flats in 4 months. This would really not be fun in cold weather - which is coming.
Thursday 13:43
It's raining. It doesn't look like it's going to stop soon, and Acuweather says rain in the evening too. (And since they've generally been off in the direction of overestimating any gaps in the rain, I'm going to figure it will be a bad night for biking home.) It looks like this will be the first day I've taken the Metro to work since April.
And I guess I'm not going to check on the patched tube, or swap the tire.
Thursday 14:28
I guess I'm going to work from home today (what's left of it). I just missed the bus, and the next one seems to be in an hour(!). I haven't taken the bus/subway to work for 5 months, and I couldn't find things. I couldn't find my Kindle. It was 6" (15cm) from where I thought it should be, but buried. And its battery is at 4%, so it wouldn't have been useful anyway, although it could charge at work for the trip home. I couldn't find my jacket. It was still packed for Pennsic; haven't needed it since. (It hasn't been cool, nor wet when I was out.) I found another pair of bike shorts in the Pennsic stuff too. (They're great under a tunic; not scandalous if someone catches a glimpse.) But is it really worth going to the office if I won't be there until 16:15 or 16:30? If it were not raining, the bike would have me there by 15:30. If I hadn't been looking for non-biking stuff, I would have left earlier than now, and been there before 15:00.
I also seem to have lost a lot of weight. The (new) bike's seat has gotten less comfortable, like I've lost some padding. I figured I was just riding harder, and the butt muscles were sore. The pants I keep at the office are cavernous now, but I thought they were loose when Anniemal got them. But I tried on a couple of pairs of pants I haven't worn since March/April, and they're very loose too.
Thursday 23:16
I'm still looking at cameras. I mentioned taking my camera to work one day last week. Besides not wanting to take it out while I was biking through town, I could also feel the added weight on the bike. (I notice the weight of my small (11.6" (29.5cm)) laptop too, and even the Kindle.) And the cameras that had my initial attention, with larger sensors, are a lot heavier. This camera is already more than I would ever carry casually. I don't like the idea of walking around Pennsic all day with twice the weight in my belt pouch.* You get great pictures by taking lots of pictures, and you take lots of pictures (in part) by having your camera handy. Since I seldom go places for the purpose of taking pictures, if I'm going to take pictures, I'm going to have to go the opposite direction in my camera search - I need something smaller and lighter, easy to carry.
To my surprise, my new front-runner is another Panasonic - Lumix TZ70/ZS50. It's a 12 mega-pixel compact camera with 30x optical zoom (24mm-720mm eqiv). Alas, the screen does not tilt, but it supports remote WiFi operation and you can frame shots on a tablet or cellphone. (This is a biggie for birders, who can put the camera on a tripod outdoors pointed at a feeder and zoom, focus, and shoot from indoors.) It has a viewfinder, which is not so common on compact cameras. (Easier to see your shot in bright sunlight, and important for holding the camera steady at long zoom.)
The big change from the previous year's model is dropping the resolution from 18MP to 12MP to decrease the noise in the images. Last year's model also had GPS; I don't think I'll miss it, and it's a huge battery drain. This is still a camera with a small sensor - something I was hoping to get away from - but a bigger sensor means bigger lenses and a bigger, heavier camera. And I don't think that's going to work for me. I've ridden my bike with my camera slung around my neck; bigger is getting unworkable, and smaller would be a lot better. The TZ70 photo samples on line are a big improvement over what my DMC-FZ18 can do.
I think a compact camera will less intimidating to my subjects than larger cameras resembling SLRs. And it will be less conspicuous.
If I decide this is the right camera, do I wait until January? That's when Panasonic will probably announce the next model. It might be significantly better; it might mean a price drop for this year's model. Apparently the optics in this line change every 2 years, so the zoom might go beyond 30x.
GiselaSony is the only brand I'm flat-out not considering. I still haven't forgiven them for putting software on their music CDs 10 years ago that broke their customers' anti-virus software!
(Their objective was to protect their music copyrights by preventing people from ripping CDs, even though anyone who bought a CD had the right to make a copy for backup purposes, and had the right to listen to music they purchased on their computer or their MP3 player, not just on a CD player. And Sony in using this software violated programmers', copyrights.) As far as I know, they haven't apologized for this, either. Sure, it's OK for us to break our customers' anti-virus software! And we don't need to tell them we're doing this. Sure, it's OK for us to ignore other people's copyrights to protect our own, while we deny our customers their legal right to use our product they purchased in the way they choose. If you think I'm still angry with them, you're right. No company should treat its paying customers that way. I really don't understand why there wasn't a consumer revolt. (I also don't understand why there weren't any DMCA violations with huge penalties.) Anyway, I haven't bought anything from Sony since. I've thought about boycotting their TV shows too, but I don't see the commercials anyway so whether I watch has no effect on their earnings.
I've got all my Mom's cameras too, including some real DSLRs. Big sensors, clean images. And interchangeable lenses (standard, telephoto, wide-angle). I did that for years, and I could swap lenses pretty quickly on my (35mm film) Pentaxes. But an ultra-zoom is so much less to deal with.
Friday 10:58
The Lumix TZ70/ZS50 may look intimidating after all. I just found this picture in a review. It morphs into something rather imposing for the little package it comes out of. How the heck did they do that? And this is why you read every review you can find. 95% of the content is the same, but that last little bit - when it is not in error (like the one twothat didn't seem to realize that the GPS was dropped from the previous model**) - things the other writers didn't find worth mentioning, might matter a lot to some readers. None of the photos in the other reviews (I've seen so far) shows that kind of extension, or it isn't apparent from the angles of the photos.
*I have 2 belt pouches all the time at Pennsic. One has my wallet, pens and pencils, flashlight, Swiss-army knife, multitool, earplugs (You never know when there will be pipers!), and (in past years) cellphone. The other had just my camera.
**Bzzzt - incorrect:You can geotag your images with the built-in GPS.
GPS, Wi-Fi and NFC are built in.
Almost every review says the 2 changes from last year's TZ60 are (1) dropping the resolution from 18MP to 12MP and (2) dropping GPS.
Saturday 12:57
I have lost weight. My bathroom scale says 138lb (62.6kg). It's probably been 10 years since I can recall weighing anything other than 160lb (73kg).
☺
Wed Feb 3 13:06:07 EST 2016
Belatedly from my capricious memory: Apparently I looked pretty hot/studly after taking my (Huffy!) bike to England for 2 weeks - that was May/June 1993.
[This entry was originally posted as https://syntonic-comma.dreamwidth.org/769875.html on Dreamwidth (where there are
comments).]