Sekonic Elmatic 8

This is the Sekonic Elmatic 8 motion picture camera.  It was a couple bucks at a swap meet.  The mechanical stuff all seems to run fine, so I've shot a roll of regular 8 mm film on it.  It's tricky to get this format developed, (Yale is widely recommended.) so it'll be a little time before I get to see if the ugly beast is actually functional.

Come to think of it, I'm going to need a projector.  This could be interesting.

Tru-Vue Junior 3-Dimension Viewer

I picked up this Tru-Vue stereo image viewer at a photography swap meet event.  It was dirt cheap.  It's for image pairs laid-out in a rectangular format, where you slide a card up and down to see different images in a sequence.

My thought is that I can print up Sputnik image pairs on transparency paper, in the right layout to work with this viewer.   It might also come in handy for looking at "proofs" of viewmaster shots, somehow.  A quick scan and print, and it'd be much easier to "preview" my shots without having to actually punch 'em out and stuff 'em into a real reel.

Apple's Missing "Insert" Key

The extended Apple keyboard lacks an "insert" key.  If you're running Windows in a virtual machine, there are some apps where that key would be very useful.  Well, it turns out that a Windows virtual machine sees your keyboard a little differently than MacOS does.  Press the "clear" button, and you're actually toggling the "numlock" setting.  Once out of numlock mode, pressing the zero key is actually hitting the "insert" key.

Minting an "I Owe You a Beer" Currency

"I owe you a beer."

A lot of people at work have saved my butt when things got too busy for one person.  I tend to say "I owe you a beer," when this happens.  How do you keep track of all those beers?  To solve that problem, I've decided to mint my own currency, pictured here.

I give 'em to people who I owe a favor to, and they can hand them back at any time and I'll redeem it for a real beer. I'm a central bank, with a private currency tied to "the beer standard."

There are still some details to sort out.  For instance, what's the exchange rate?  Certainly, a beer is about equal to a well drink ... but what about call drinks, or a roy rogers, or fancy wine?  (Is boxed wine the penny?)

It's pretty easy to get custom-made poker chips.  I used American Prom, who have an online design tool.  They shipped quickly and looked just like the on-screen mock-up.  There are jillions of other places tho.

The Storage Admin's DIY SFP Stylus

Check it out, the little rubber end-caps that come on some fibre SFPs are detected by a capacitative display!  It's only some of them.  We went through a pile at work and found that about one in five was able to impersonate a finger.  Dunno why it works, but it opens up some great possibilities for a DIY stylus.  (Maybe the rubber is doped with an EMF-blocking material.)

The discovery was pretty funny.  I was installing SFPs and tossed a bunch of the end-caps on my powered-on iPad for safe keeping.  The tablet went nutz from all the multitouches.