As you may or may not know, I acquired 3 lenses from my dear old dad when I got my new Pentax K200D DSLR camera. These lenses were as old, or older than I am. Unsurprisingly, 2 of them had fungus problems.

One had clouding on the back element, the other had spidering fungus on the front element. Since I had nothing to lose I decided to have a go at opening and cleaning these lenses. To open the back element all I needed was a small phillips head screw driver and a butterknife layed flat across the notches in the rear screw and the back element was free.

Similarly on the front element all I needed was a rear lens cap of the right size to twist off the surround holding in the front element. No other tools required to get that one out.

On both elements all it took to get them clean was a good rub with a microfibre cloth. Pop them back together and I have two sparkling clean lenses again.

Fast forward to today and I’m looking at the fungus in my newly arrived, used Sigma zoom lens. Taking it apart was a little more complex than my Ricoh or Tokina prime lenses, but not a lot more. I have detailed the process below.

1. Remove the cover hiding the screws on the front element. This is glued down gently - I used a piece of cardboard and ran it around the underside of the cover then popped it off.

   

2. Remove the three screws holding the filter thread on. Remove the filter thread ring. Remove the 3 remaining screws holding the front element and pull the front element straight out (pulling straight is important as there is little tolerance and a slight angle will make it jam.



3. Time for the cleaning.  I donned one latex glove (Michael Jackson style) for handling the element. When cleaning my old lenses I was handling big lumps of glass but the Sigma’s front element is mounted in a metal surround and is much easier to work with.

   As you can see in the photo, the second element in the lens was perfectly clean. If it had fungus on the front it could be cleaned in place, on the back would require removal.

   I grabbed my microfibre cloth and gave the back of the element a polish. The fungus didn’t budge. At this point I was a little concerned. On my 30 year old lenses the fungus had come off with a good rub. This fungus wasn’t moving, and it also looked a lot clearer than the old stuff. I was starting to think the fungus had etched itself into the lens causing permanent damage.

   I hadn’t tried any cleaning products yet so I went in search of the metho (methylated spirits). Not being able to find any I fell back to vinegar.

   What do you know, one wipe with a tissue soaked in vinegar and the fungus was gone. My lens was clean an clear. Unfortnately the tissue had left quite a bit of fluff on the lens but that was easily dispatched with the microfibre cloth. When I was satified the back of the lens free of tissue bits I popped it all back together. The whole process took me about 20 minutes.

   Here’s a picture of the finished product:

The front element is now totally clear.

Since I hadn’t actually put the lens on the camera yet I took some pictures from my balcony to see how it went. 100mm on the left, 300mm on the right.

All in all I’m very happy with my purchase. If you have a cheap lens or the chance to buy one and the only thing wrong with it is a bit of fungus, don’t be afraid. You’ve got very little to lose and if you’re careful you’ll come out with a nice lens that probably as clean or even cleaner than the lenses without fungus.

Now I’ve dabbled with cheap Chinese batteries before. At $9.99 for a 4 Pack they were cheap, but not suspiciously so. Also Aldi has a very liberal returns policy. On top of that my battery review seems very popular and above all, I needed more batteries. I took my chances and dropped a pack on the conveyor.

They come from China, but my Imedions and Power Plus batteries do too, so that’s no big deal. Packaging is nice (shiny bits!) and no outrageous claims.

Having reviewed all I could by just looking at them, I whacked them into the MH-C9000 and fired up the 40+ hr IEC burn-in test.

The batteries performed well. The figures displayed on the Wizardone Charger were 2364mAh, 2329mAh, 2357mAh and 2330mAh.

• Consistancy - Check: If one battery runs down before the others run time is shortened and batteries can be damaged.
• mAh Rating - Check…ish: Out of all the batteries I have tested on my Wizardone, only 2 or 3 have actually exceeded their quoted specs. The others however have been no more than 100mAh off their rating. If you’re over 2400mAh consistantly I don’t mind if you bump your specs to 2500mAh, but if you’re between 2300 and 2400 I think it’s only fair to call them 2400mAh batteries. Not enough to call shenanigans, when you factor in their price, but a bit of a peeve.

Currently, two of the batteries are being discharged at 500mAh to confirm capacity with a moderate load. The other two will be stored for 1 month and then discharged to see what their self discharge is like.

So far, for $9.99 you can get 4 x 2500mAh NIMH from a store down the road with a good returns policy. They’re not the highest capacity on the market, but very good $/mAh ratio. Recommended. Check back in 1 month for the self discharge results and see if i change my mind after using 2 of the batteries for general use in Xbox 360/Wii controllers.

“nOObs” I scoffed to myself. Where’s the 1337 things to do before you die book?

So when I got home I went in search of my 1337 Things book. It doesn’t exist. At least the last 100 times I’ve had some brilliant idea, someone had thought about it before me. Not today. I even found that 1337things.com wasn’t even registered.

So guess what I did?

Yep, 1337things.com is up and rocking. Submit your 1337est suggestions and vote things up and down. It’s hopefully going to be the ultimate time wasting site of the 1337, the uberpro and the gosu.

Sites like this rely so heavily on user participation so we (Dr axOr, and I) decided we’d run a comp for the month of March. A high end video card seemed to be the most fitting prize for someone who is 1337 beyond 1337, with a 1TB HDD as a participation prize to encourage voting.

Will it work? Who knows. Dr axOr and I are pretty 1337 and we’ve been having a great time making submissions and laughing at the quips. Hopefully it will appeal to other people out there.

So I went away with friends for Australia day. I came up with the idea that it might be cool to take a projector along with the Xbox 360, Wii, PS3 and laptop full of movies that will be going. I check out what’s on EBay and find I’m not overly impressed with the specification:price ratio. Sadly I mentioned in an email that I would try to get my hands on a projector and my friends got very enthusiastic. I was locked in.

After failing to win the only decent priced and specced projector available for a couple of days (a 720p LCD Panasonic a couple of years old). I turned my attention to the Dell website. Their newest model projector, the Dell 1609WX has been out for several months now. I was quickly impressed with the specs, 1280×800, DLP plenty of inputs etc etc. and even more impressed with the price. Dell just happened to be running a $300 cash off promotion on this puppy.

I whipped out the old credit card and went for it. At the checkout I also made sure to take another 10% off (thanks NRMA) for a grand total of $782.08 delivered.

A few hours shy of a week and the delivery guy is knocking on my door.

I set up on my coffee table, pointing at the grey wall above my TV.

First up, this thing is pretty bright. The claimed 2500 ansi lumens and 1:1900 contrast ratio, while nice enough numbers, mean very little to you when there’s nothing to compare them with. With the blinds closed in the middle of the day it was very watchable on a grey wall. I watched a whole episode of Generation Kill, including night scenes no problems in a darkened, but not dark, room.  I was projecting a 16:9, 3.5m (138″) diagonal image from about 3.5m away. Max image size is a whopping 9m or 359″ at 12m away. I haven’t tried this but I doubt it would look good in anything but pitch darkness and even then, 12m is a very deep room - most likely this would be an outside setup.

I had built myself a ghetto screen to take away. I picked up about 3m x 1.5m of curtain backing material. Good stuff that stops 100% of light going through. Unfortunately it only looks slightly better than my light grey wall but it will do the job nicely for setups away from home.

The projector has some oddities:

• DVI but no HDMI - Trivial to buy a converter and it does have HDCP so PS3 here we come. You will need to make other arrangements for audio. (This will take a 1080P signal and downscale it, so you get better res out of blu-ray on PS3 that would otherwise upscale 480p for a 720p signal)
• No component connector - Once again you can use a VGA > Component cable and the unit does have 2 x VGA ports so no big deal.
• 16:10 Aspect Ratio - This is a little wierd. Since it’s DLP, black is pretty much no light so when displaying 16:9 media it looks fine. I guess it’s torn between the PC vs TV/Movies and 16:10 does accomodate both.

It also has some cool features:

• 1.1 Zoom - Critics claim this isn’t enough but I’ve noticed that when you watch a 25:9 movie, cranking that zoom makes the top and the bottom fit about where the 16:9 would have been. This means you can have a 25:9 screen and use it for 16:9 content with no zoom which reaches the top and bottom of the screen, then when you watch a 25:9 movie you zoom and don’t waste any screen space, in fact gaining more at the sides.
• You can do a screen capture and make it the projector’s idle screen. Cool for corporations, me I have a picture of my dog Dusk.

When DVDs came out I was annoyed that 16:9 content on my old 4:3 screen gave me letterboxing. When I bought a nice LCD a few years back I was hoping it was a thing of the past. Now pretty much every big budget movie is 25:9 leaving letterboxing on even a widescreen LCD. With a projector, you don’t have to lose out. Whack on the zoom and the image fills the screen. It’s very satisfying.

Now I’d be pretty  impressed with this projector at full price. At $782.08 with full warranty (and a 3 month bulb warranty that can be extended to 1 year for about $60 at the checkout) I’m very impressed.  2 year old projectors with thousands of hours on the bulbs are going for this sort of price on EBay.

Speaking of bulbs,  although it’s not currently listed, I believe the bulb costs around $250AU which is very reasonable compared to other manufacturers.

It performed admirably on the weekend away, we ended up projecting on a wall because the screen wasn’t big enough and was too hard to hang up. Even during daylight it was fine to watch movies and play games, most notably Rockband 2.

I leave you with my favourite line from the specs page : a line no man (or woman) could resist.

“Up to 359.4 Inches at Maximum Projection”

Get Some!

My current desktop image is this little guy.

http://pictures.1337it.com if you want to check it out.

3-Way Flash Mount Spirit Level:

While it looks bad arse, I haven’t found much use for it yet - I imagine it will be handy for portrait shots or landscape shots where the horizon might embarrass me if I’m not perfectly horizontal while shooting. Obviously completely useless without a tripod, but if you have a tripod and want one, I say go the 3 way since it will cover you for portrait mode shots as well. Cheap ($10AU shipped), looks very cool on or off the camera, fun to play with, choking hazard for small children. Recommended.

Remote Shutter Release:

Very handy little device for triggering the camera to take a photo from a (small) distance. I went with the corded one instead of the IR remote since it allows me to do two things the IR Remote doesn’t - 1. half press for focus 2. lock the shutter button for long exposure, repeat shooting or my new favourite mode of shooting with my manual lenses “catch in focus” mode.  At $9.90AU shipped you can’t go wrong. The 50cm cord is a little restrictive and as such I will probably get an IR Remote for longer distance operation. Can’t decide on wired or wireless? - get both I say. A must for anyone using a tripod although the  mirror flip + 2 sec time delay shutter setting on my camera certainly works just as well at eliminating movement from shutter presses but there’s still no substitute for the shutter lock.

“Gorillapod” Mini-tripod:

I ordered this thinking it would be great for macro shots. Unfortunately I didn’t pay enough attention to what I was buying and ended up with the small version. It holds up my P&S camera no problems, but buckles slowly and impotently under the weight of my massive K200D.  At least a medium size is recommended with large being used for Digital Video cameras. I’ll probably pick up a large just to be sure. Handy to whack in your bag when you don’t want to carry a full tripod and (hopefully) good for macro shooting when a full tripod it more of a hindrance than a help. You’re looking at around $25AU shipped for a large version which seems quite reasonable. Will report back if and when I get one.

Light Tent -75cm³:

When I made up my Ghetto Light Box I found that it was great for small items but I had a lot of trouble getting anything medium size in there i.e. Maha’s Powerex MH-C9000 Charger. I figured I’d get a light tent and 75cm³ didn’t really sound that big, especially for $50AU shipped, until it arrived. It came inside a small round bag, not unlike the fold out beach tents. It also pops open just like a fold out beach tent. I didn’t pay a lot of attention when I popped it open and more than anything I was marveling at the size so it took me a little while to get the thing down the first time. It was also supplied with 4 different coloured backdrop sheets (1 was white which doesn’t really count) Blue, Red and Black. While I’m quite confident I could fit myself inside this tent with a little contortion (believe it or not I fancied myself a bit of a gymnast back in the day) I don’t want to destroy it. Instead I have used my dogs, Dusk and SCSI to indicate the size of the tent. This was taken outside in sunlight and you’ll notice that it’s reasonably shady inside - You really need to hit a light tent with powerful direct light. I picked this up from Online Digital Shop on EBay and I’m giving them a plug for being Australian, communicating well and getting the tent to me very quickly. Since you can photograph small items in a large light tent but not vice versa I’d suggest picking one up if you’re seriously about macro or product shots. I will note that while I could get away with 2 x 200w Halogens (and a desk lamp) lighting my light box, I’m going to have to buy several more, probably with stands to get the light tent effectively lit. The other good thing about a light tent this size is that if you go camping, you can take your dogs a tent of their own.

Today, we rectify this.

Sennheiser PC 350 Gaming Headset:

Well it’s sturdy, comfortable and works. Good start. Inline volume control for the headphones. Inline mute switch for the mic. Soft padding on the ear cups and the head band. Thick, solid plastic for the boom mic. Reasonably thick cable. All good.

Since they’re closed headphones they sound good with solid bass. They block out most outside noises and don’t let more than a whisper sneak out around the seals even at (very) high volume levels. Excellent for games (my CS and TF skills have definitely gone up). They also sound great for music, loud or soft, and general computer use such as movies, TV etc.

Their only real weaknesses are the fact that they are closed headphones and the price. Virtually useless in a co-operative environment as you can’t hear your buddies. Still this is only an issue with co-operative setups at LAN events, which is a reasonably small portion of gaming, if they were open they would have many more drawbacks. The price on the other hand is a bit different. If you’re gainfully employed or you have a generous partner, they can be found for anywhere between $200AU-$300AU. If you’re a kid or on a budget just grab a cheap headset and be done with it - One caveat. I would avoid Logitech headsets. As much as I like their keyboards (G15) and their mice (G7) their headsets have always been very flimsy. Every set I’ve ever owned I have broken in some way.

If you’ve got the cash, get some.

Every time she goes out she comes back with more of the things. She’s even admitted to owning 3 copies of the same book at times. The girl is a freak.

Now me, I’m not a big fan of books for entertainment. I love knowledge and as such am happy to read non-fiction, manuals and instruction booklets. I don’t however, read for fun. I’m a 21st century digital boy and as such have a multitude of ways to enjoy myself that don’t involve reading. I also think books tend to be a great waste of space and resources.  Since a whole library can fit on a single consumer grade hard drive now, I think it’s time libraries were relegated to museums and history.

My girlfriend does not concur. As such I salvaged and modded a sweet set of bookshelves that would hold every book she owns. My thinking was that at least they’d take up less space and maybe seeing them all in one place would get the point across that she has enough. Wrong. It merely seems to have encouraged her.

Now I get to wake screaming to this sight ever morning and yes, that’s another smaller bookshelf to the left just waiting for more books.

It’s only a matter of time before it assimilates me and then the world.

1988 Skyline GTS SVD: This was my first decent car and while I did manage to crash it several times it was always repairable - DrVJ has one crash (probably not her fault) - total write off. Had I been in the passenger seat I’d probably be dead. I take solace in the fact that it did a good job of protecting her (and got up on two wheels - a feat I never managed). The other, earlier incident that springs to mind was when I *was* a passenger and she was driving. Reverse parking into a spot in a shopping centre car park, she came to rest with the back bumper on a sign. I said nothing. Deciding she wasn’t quite in the parking spot far enough she let the car roll forward a bit then reversed into the sign post *again*. At this point I mentioned that she was actually hitting a pole - and I’m the arsehole! Now while this car wasn’t the most exciting or newest thing on the road it was a great (and fast) car and Nissan only ever released 200, 20 years ago, so it’s not like I can just get another one.

R.I.P.

1988 Honda NSR250: A very sweet (and illegal) bike I rode for the duration of my Ls and Ps on my motorbike license. It did 0-100 as fast as an R1 at the time (although probably not with me on it). DrVJ runs it into a gutter, bending the front rim and fuel tank. I ended up selling it after it gave me a 3 month “License Vacation” and I couldn’t be bothered fixing and registering a bike I couldn’t ride. The problem with bikes that can do 100km/h in about 3 seconds is that you tend to spend a lot of time doing 100km/h, even in 50 zones.

I hope you’re out there making someone happy!

Now admittedly these things happened a few years ago now. As I said before, I tune out all the little things she destroys now. Two recent examples have been in my current car. Both times I have lent my car to her in the past year (while her car was being serviced or more correctly “unfucked”). First time she gets a flat tyre, second time she breaks a windscreen. Both times on a motorway and Sydney, we’re not talking dirt tracks here people.

She also breaks her own stuff. The radio in her car likes to mysteriously turn on at max volume when you start the car on cold quiet mornings, and there’s been a disc stuck in the CD player for over a year now. She also merely needs to park her car and walk away to have people repeatedly remove and deposit paint on the rear driver’s side wheel arch. Every other week there’s a new scrape there and if I didn’t know that she’s actually an excellent driver and parker I’d just blame her.

She can break any form of electronics just by turning it on. She tells stories of 4 car pileups happening in merging lanes as she drives past (also not her fault). She is Girlfriend: Ruiner of Worlds and I wouldn’t trade her for anything.

Edit: She also told me that the bench power supply in my header pic should be made to say “1337″ for the photo. I had to tell her that it maxed out at 30V and 20A and if I made it say “1337″ it would catch fire.

Knowing my dear old Dad was himself a bit a keen photographer back in the day I paid him a visit and raided his stash of old goodies. They may not have been new and interesting, but they were certainly interesting.

I came away with 3 very nice manual lenses, a 2x Teleconverter and a tripod.

The lenses are a Vivitar 28mm, a Richoh 135mm and a Tokina 300mm. Both the Vivitar and Ricoh have apertures that open to 2.8 which I found pretty interesting considering the fully automatic and *not* 30 year old DA lens that came with my Pentax will only go to 3.5 @ 18mm - move the zoom a touch and it stops down to 4.0 then 4.5 and ultimately 5.6 at 55mm. Since my Pentax has a a sensor that is 2/3 of the 35mm film standard these lenses are designed for I have to multiply their focal length by 1.5 to get their 35mm equivalent value when used on my camera. They become 42 mm, 205mm and 450mm lenses. Seems everything is bigger in the future. I worked out the focal length equivalents to try and work out where my new manual lenses slotted in compared to the 18-55mm zoom lens the camera came with. Of course after I did the research and got the figures I found that the lens on my camera really is 18-55mm and not marked as a 35mm equivalent. It does of course make sense because focal length is merely the distance from the lens to the sensor, but it means DSLRs with different sized sensors will produce different results when coupled to the same lens

The 28mm, while a very nice (and fast) lens, sits in the middle of the range of my nice new auto lens so  I don’t think it will get a lot of use. The 135mm and 300mm however are awesome. I went out to Parramatta Park yesterday shooting with my good friend Dr Ax0r. The 300mm lens barely left the camera, and when it did, it went straight back on. We were mainly shooting birds, but also the odd person if they did something interesting.

The 300mm was the hot favourite until we headed to Lake Parramatta and tried to take some landscape shots. At this point we realised just how much zoom we were playing with. We dropped the 18-55mm back on, zoomed it out and popped a couple of shots before heading home to check out the shots and play Pixel Junk: Monsters (until 3am - damn).

Some of the better shots below - all were taken with the 300mm Tokina except the landscape which was the 18-55mm Pentax DA (@ 35mm).