I keep saying it and I’m about to repeat myself, so try not to yawn too obviously: I love my Nikon EM. It’s small, light, basic and does everything I need in a camera. Unfortunately, it’s a film camera and, while I love film, I find myself without much time to process it these days. If it isn’t a digital shot, it’s unlikely to appear as a finished print this side of xmas.

So what I really, really want right now is a digital Nikon EM-alike.

BB was going to write about another horrendous Fedora upgrade experience, but right now we don’t want to go back to that place. Let’s talk about travel books instead.

Got a computer system? Got a problem? Take that dumbfounded look off your face and unknot that eyebrow. To accompany major reference works such as The Dummy’s Guide To The Internet, The Complete Tosswad’s E-Commerce Handbook and The Utterly Cretinous Imbecile’s Introduction To Managing IT In The Enterprise, BB brings you a ten step moron’s guide to fixing any computer problem. Sit up and stop drooling.

Should have blogged this long ago; a classic photo.net post from 2003, Evolving into a photographer.

(Compare “success” in Fedora terms: “doesn’t corrupt hard drive beyond repair”.)

Upgraded the Glamorous Research Assistant’s PC from CentOS 4.5 to 5.0 yesterday and…it actually went pretty swimmingly. Using the recommended Anaconda upgrade method took about an hour, including a moderately long pause after the final package update, after which it rebooted successfully. Only one major issue below.

Interesting URLs from the last day or two:

• qtpfsgui is a graphical frontend to various UNIXey HDR tools, if you want to experiment with the techniques suggested in this TOP post. Early findings: it’s tricky to get right without a lot of experimentation, and what’s wrong with blocked shadows and highlights occasionally anyway? If you want to see how easily it can be abused, put on some sunglasses and visit the Flickr qtpfsgui group pool. Help with the HDR algorithms was found at …
• The Open Source Photography wiki, a very useful resource for a number of free tools and techiques, which led to …
• The Focus-Blur (fblur) plugin for the GIMP provides lens blur effects, useful for simulating tilt and shift lenses (or jumping on the bandwagon for the “simulated scale miniatures” fad).
• The same thread on TOP caused me to look up Richard Sintchak’s Flickr stream, which has some beautiful medium format work and a host of other fascinating film-based work. While searching for this, I also stumbled across …
• Joe Reifer’s blog, which collects some interesting articles and links.
• And speaking of Flickr, 2point8, quoting Stephen Shore, unwittingly sparked a huge debate over its overall quality or lack thereof, something I too often find difficult to accept.

And now I feel sick and need some fresh air.

Scenario: you are running some proprietary VPN software under a Windows guest OS in VMware (e.g. Shiva/Intel NetExpress), and you want to share the connection back to the host OS (e.g. Linux) so that you can run native tools that access the VPN. I’ve used this to run the Linux Lotus Notes client to access my work email from home.

Preparing for an upcoming family holiday in the Lakes, I looked to update my aging copy of The Good Guide To The Lakes by Hunter Davies with the latest edition. Except the “latest edition” came out in 2003 and now appears to be somewhat rare and increasingly pricey on the secondhand market. Searching around, I found this entertaining article by Davies, describing how he got out of the self-publishing business and flogged his independent concern, along with the Good Guide, to Frances Lincoln (who also happens to publish the revised Wainwright guides). In the absence of an imminently forthcoming new edition, it looks like we’ll be taking the The Rough Guide to the Lake District (4th ed., May 2007) with us. I might pick up a copy of the last Good Guide if I find one in a dusty corner of a gift shop somewhere.

I did buy a used copy of Davies’s classic A Walk Around The Lakes (1993) via Abebooks though.

I made a conscious decision to use the Bessas last weekend, as they’ve been sitting around mostly unused for the past six months and I had a hankering for black and white film. If I were being a “rational economic actor”, I’d probably have come to my senses and sold them on long ago, but something about the build quality of these cameras makes sense go out the window. Just as well, because they can also be a pig to use.

Colin Jago briefly covers his top three photographer influences here (Blossfeldt, McCullin, Erwitt), and I thought it might be fun and time-wasting to list some of my favourite photographers so I can look back one day and laugh at how superficial and uninformed my tastes once were, while others of more refined sensibilities can indulge in that right now.