Sad, sad news from the camera repairs.
As I posted earlier, the mechanical problem was already fixed
and the camera was essentially working...

...but I decided to go all the way and fix that stupid flash too.
I had a suspect in mind and behold when I opened up the camera one
"last time", there was in fact a loose wire on the flash electronics.

Soldered it back to where it belongs, screwed everything together for
I don't know how many times it's been... and yes, camera fires up the
flash and there's the distinct buzz of a charging capacitor. Yay!

But... the release wouldn't work at all. The half pressed button would
cause the metering and autofocus to kick in but no reaction to the pressed
release. It turns out that somehow one of the flexprints finally gave in
and decided to break. Three of about ten lines on the PCB are snapped.

The next best option was to find out what these points are connecting and
add some thin wires to bypass the broken lines. Which I did. But now
there is no reaction at all... put in the battery, nothing.

Therefore: either there's another loose wire which I can't see even after
one night of searching, or there's a short somewhere in my soldering which
I also couldn't find after hours of measuring. Or the camera's main
controller chip is gone. Or there's another snapped line on these stupid
flexprints. Either of which I don't have the resources nor the spare parts
to fix.

To summarize: I'm highly disappointed. Partly in Canon for causing the
root of the problem with bad plastics in the first place, partly in my
bad luck with flexprints. And I'm angry because I wasted almost an entire
week trying to get this thing to work and almost had it.

Today I opened the gearbox of the camera yet again to find one of the switching gears stuck in an awkward position. It blocked the main drive gear from reaching the gear that serves the film transport roll. Move gear, screw together again... insert film... cross fingers... close back... *zzzz-click* [1] - YAY! It makes pictures again!

The internal flash still doesn't charge... I think there might be a short somewhere inside since when the flash is open, the viewfinder-display is gone. But I don't want to open the top again. There's an almost-entirely-gone screw holding it in place...

Besides, right now there's a film inside to test for picture quality and light-tightness. Anyway, so far I'll just call the operation a success!

Or: "I never thought it possible to combine electronics and origami, but Canon found a way!"

Another little story... ( read more... )

I went to a trade show today and listened in on some of the new features of the CS6 creative suite just like I did a year ago with the 5.5 version. Back then I deemed it a "luxury object" because there wasn't one single feature that would ease my workflow. But with CS6 I saw some nifty stuff that I missed before. Here's the highlights that I remember:

• Adjustable mask feather in After Effects.
  
  I know you always could adjust the mask feather value in AE... but now you can actually draw a spline around the mask outline to specify changing feather as you need it. That makes masking off areas for effects a lot easier as it reduces the number of masks required.


• Content aware patch tool
  
  The patch tool in PhotoShop can be configured to be content aware - like the delete/fill in CS5. Nice but no killer feature.


• Content aware move
  
  PhotoShop again. A person standing on the wrong side of the picture? Lasso select, and drag them wherever they should go. Done. Well, you can and should fine tune but overall it saves lots of time again.


• Auto-Lip-Sync
  
  An incredibly nifty feature is put into Audition... record live audio (including noise!) and then later have the actor re-read the lines in the studio. They will probably not be able to lip-sync. But Audition CAN! Audition tweaks the tempo and placement of words to the original recording - auto tune for time you could say. Awesome! It even worked with a totally different dialect in the demo.


• Color Grader
  
  Adobe has bought some color grading software and semi-integrated it with their toolset. There's a bit of a long way to go still but at least you can export/import the settings from and to Premiere and AfterEffects. Easy to use, focussed on the task and lots of preset save options.


• Editing editing lines
  
  Premiere Pro can now select the editing lines (=clip edges) and offers more control over the type of edit (ripple/roll etc.) than just selecting the right tool up front.


• Multi-cam support improved
  
  The multi-cam support has lost it's 4-cam limit. Now you can have as many as your system can show in parallel. Also it is much easier to set up than before.


• Layer effects on groups
  
  Finally! I can't count how many times I tried to apply THE SAME drop shadow to multiple text layers. Now Layer Groups in PhotoShop also take effects for all the layers they contain.

There are of course numerous other enhancements and additions but those above are the ones that stuck out for myself. Performance with large documents in PhotoShop is improved by further targetting the GPU - so you'd have a decent CUDA card to take advantage of it. Illustrator is now a 64bit app... somesuch things.

Overall the trade show was a mixed blessing. Canon had the EOS-C models on display (Cinema) which are essentially digital movie cameras for the 1080p resolution which can use the typical movie lens systems instead of the EOS lenses. The base model is 13k Euro. A tad bit outside my price range and I didn't dare ask what the lenses are.
I saw a small camera crane and dolly system that actually could be within my price range... not cheap but at lest the prices per piece were well in the 3-digit Euro range. Same holds true for some decent microphones.

Then there were some presentations that worked well on putting me to sleep. WHY are corporations putting up their "product managers" to do a presentation in front of 300 something people? They will FAIL. I actually felt sorry for one of them because you could hear the stage fright from every single word. Argh.

The only positive surprise was a presentation about "making money with video", on how to plan and work with customers in the field. Confirmed some of my theories and was a well presented half hour to get me awake again :)

Am I the only one who thinks all those "mouse over" links and menus are a pain in the behind?

I am having trouble with those all the time but recently I have a perfect example: I can't tell how many tweets I have "fav'd" just by trying to expand them. It's annoying as hell, especially if you are using one of those fabulous "smear-your-fingers-across-the-screen" devices where ther essentially is no mouse over. I mean you can try for a really really long time to hover your finger somewhere - and I haven't seen any "finger-over" javascript code yet.

I also know a case of "validation messages" popping up under the mouse, thus preventing you to click on the textbox in question. It's literally like: *mouse over to the empty texbox to select it* Popup goes under the mouse, saying: "This field cannot be left blank" *mouseclick clicks the popup* Me go "AAARRRGGGHHH!"

Disclaimer: This rant is aimed at nobody in particular, just something I noticed all around for several years now.

When the new year comes around, everybody reflects upon the old one... I can understand that. However arbitrary the point in time may be, it's still as good a chance to look back and rethink ones strategy on life as any other.

What I don't get is that for several years now I only saw messages and posts like " was the worst ever, it sucked!" and similar. What's with that? I mean, bad things happen all the time to everybody. But if I keep seeing only the bad things and ignoring the good ones... how is ANY year supposed to measure up to their expectations?

And in case somebody misreads the above statement: I'm not suggesting to ignore anything bad... no. Just DON'T ignore the good stuff!

For me, 2011 was a year of mixed blessings indeed. Still, bottom line I'd say: it was good and I hope that 2012 is at least close to it if not better.

During the Christmas time I got a bit nostalgic and remembered some old cartoons I kept watching around christmas as a child. I got sad that I couldn't re-watch them because of the long since lost VHS tape... so... waitaminute! Almost all of these are available on YouTube nowadays... But... what were they called? Some strange searches later revealed my two favorites to be:

• Pluto's Christmas Tree - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKVuL6xi8Rk


• Donald's Snow Fight - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AT1GdI0Rbo

Of course TV still shows them around Christmas every now and then... but! In my Childhood when I first saw them and recorded them (early to mid 80's if I recall correctly) they were in their original English version. Now they come dubbed in German... YUCK!
Thanks to YouTube's "suggestions" I also found several other long since forgotton gems:

• Donald, Fire Chief - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHSBCnDEsRQ


• Donald's Happy Birthday - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIdpIPgLcTU


• Donald's Gold Mine - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJsB_W0xtu0


• Donald Duck: Timber! - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWgMeMM_i4U


• Donald Duck: Clown of the Jungle - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCUm-agd5UE

Although I think even there, there are some bits and pieces missing...
The last one ("Clown of the Jungle") was recently "featured" as a christmas story in the German "Micky Mouse" comic book... but without the machine gun at the end.

I re-did the old "soundtrack of your life" meme because I still think it's funny and - depending on the size of your music collection - won't get old that fast.

So here's the soundtrack of "Atkelar: reloaded" - or whatever the second part will be called :) - some of these really fit the category... creepy, I tell you!

• Opening Credits: They Might be Giants: Kitten Intro


• Waking Up: Will Smith: Miami (Miami Mix)


• First day of school: Joe Jackson: Steppin' Out


• Falling in love: Erste Allgemeine Verunsicherung: Woodstock


• Fighting: Blondie: Heart of Glass


• Breaking Up: The Tramps: Hold back the night


• Prom: Klaus Badelt: Bootstrap's Bootstraps


• Life: All-4-one: I Swear


• Mental Breakdown: Wham!: The edge of heaven


• Driving: Level 42: Lessons in love


• Flashback: J.Blasco: Vortex3 (Remix)


• Making Up: Endgames: Waiting for another chance


• Wedding: Dana Gillespie: Move your body close to me


• Birth of Child: Scott McKenzie: San Francisco


• Final Battle: Sophie Ellis-Bextor: Murder on the dancefloor


• Death Scene: Ensemble and Tim Curry: I'm going home


• Funeral: Spin Doctors: Two princes


• End Credits: Belinda Carlisle: Circle in the sand

The rules, for those of you who wand to join in the fun: Set your media player of choice to shuffle for ALL your titles and take a note for each category as listed above. Don't skip any titles, each random title is one category.

Note: I did skip a few becuase lots of titles in my collection aren't music... and one of them just plain wouldn't be appropriate for public display ;P

As I wrote in my previous journal, I am now running without Apple products pretty much. Why do I say "pretty much"? Because for now the iPod is still running in the car...

The new player has gone through a week of typical use (about 60-90 minutes of audio per day when I'm in public transport) with one or two short videos played in between and it's battery is down to about 70%... I love it! Why is that thing marketed as an "internet tablet"??? It could be the first true iAlternative for all I know.

Oh yes, another thing: I was worried that Android would force me to connect to the internet and "register" or "auto-update" something or other... well, ever since I got it, it hasn't been connected to any internet - and it works fine.

More news to come by the end of the week...

Short version: I'm now "Apple Free"...

( Long version... )