I only got the old box camera for the latter at this stage, but I have been tempted to get myself a real medium format camera. Even if it’s just one of the Chinese Seagulls which can be had rather cheaply.

And thus I bought another used development tank on eBay, a Jobo 1520, which arrived fairly quickly this weekend and let me do some developing tonight. The tank seems to work fairly well, although the new size meant I had to re-do some computations for the amounts and dilutions of some liquids. I also had to set up some new developer, my love for ATM 49 still running high. It’s a great fine grain developer but I was disappointed by its labelling. Do you really need to label the packages 1 and 2 and then write instructions for packages A and B?

I also had to dilute some fresh fixer, which for some reason is supposed to be mixed at 30°C but used between 20°C an 25°C. It takes a while for liquids to change their temperatures. And for the first time in weeks I could find an advantage of distinctly autumnly outside temperaturs.

But now that I’ve got all that sorted, I’m fairly happy with the situation. Two more ISO 25 films developed, and drying in the bathroom. I’m keen to actually see their photos.

I think I quite liked the idea of getting an iMate USB to ADB adaptor ever since I got my first Powerbook. Not because I missed my own ADB keyboard but because my dad still had an unused Extended II keyboard sitting around. As I considered this to be more of a toy, I didn’t want to start a big spending spree for it and as I could easily get hold of used iMac and then ‘Pro’ USB keyboards over the years, I never really bothered.

Unfortunately neither of those keyboards are great. I find their touch a bit too soft and they certainly won’t be the instrument you need to keep the neighbours awake just by typing. Similarly Apple’s new external MacBook-style keyboards don’t feel particularly good to me. And hence I went looking for an iMate and finally managed to get a used one for an OK price on eBay.

And so far I’m quite happy with it. It’s pseudo-translucent design looks a bit aged today, but it ‘just works’: Plug it into a USB port, plug the ADB keyboard into iMate and you’re done. Even better, the iMate also lets you use an ADB mouse that’s plugged into the keyboard.

When first connecting the keyboard – not yet the Extended II but rather the ‘Apple Keyboard’ belonging to the SE – I was pleasantly surprised by OS X. It realised that it couldn’t identify the exact keyboard type (which I guess is quite tricky for old-school devices like this one, particularly when only been seen through whatever magic iMate provides) and the Keyboard Assistant came up. It asked me to press two keys on the keyboard, the one to the right of the left shift key and the one to the left of the right shift key and then deduced the correct keyboard type. I assume that those two may be enough to tell American (with one missing key) from other keyboards and probably narrow down the possible ‘other’ keyboards sufficiently to know which type is being used. The tiny old keyboard I am using is American I think and thus the keys I typed were ‘z’ and ‘/’, On a German keyboard they would have been ‘<’ and ‘-‘. I suppose it was fun/interesting to create a full yet minimal list of keys the user should press in order to identify the keyboard.

Actually this keyboard’s feel is rather good and it’s clicketyclick all over which makes me (or at least gives me the impression that I) indulge less in typos. Unfortunately the missing/mis-located key for ‘>’ (when using the American hardware with the German software keyboard layout) is driving me nuts, as is the all-horizontal arrangement of arrow keys that differs from the 3 horizontal one on the Apple Keyboard II. And thus I’m looking forward to getting my dad’s aircraft carrier size Extended II with a German layout soon.

And while I don’t actually use the caps lock key and have it turned off since I started using Mac OS X.4, I obviously enjoy the fact of having a mechanical caps lock key. And a keyboard with a power button (which at least works to bring up the shut down dialogue while the MacBook is running).

Looking around at eBay, I found that fake replacement batteries are ridiculously cheap. Something like €7,50 will get you one. And, formally, that’s €2 for the battery and some strange plastic thingies which allegedly help opening the iPod (and which are definitely broken after being used once) with the rest being for shipping straight from Hong Kong.

Such a price is so good – with the total being less than the shipping charges for many items within Germany – that I thought I’d give it a try. Unless the battery spontaneously self-combusts it should be better than the three hours my old battery gives me and even if it’s just good for a year, it’s a reasonable deal.

And the battery arrived, I installed it, now it’s charging and it remains to be seen how much of a disappointment it will be.

As it seems to be hard or at least expensive to get my Canon EF to work again (I spotted a cable that’s loose which could be the cause of the problems, but isn’t necessarily and soldering it back on will require either extremely fine soldering skills or pretty much complete disassembly of the camera, so I’m not sure this is going to happen. Besides, the last time I paid €16 just for a new set of batteries – that replace the original mercury batteries the camera is supposed to take, which makes just testing this a bit expensive), so I decided to buy a replacement camera on eBay. Many 1970s SLRs are being sold right now and it seems quite cheap to enter the field now as loads of people sell their complete equipment. When you’re looking for just a single element things are still cheap but a bit more expensive.

Well, cheap? Expensive? You tell me. Those machines are thirty years old. So if they were computers or digital cameras they’d be worth nothing now, so in a way they’re expensive. On the other hand, in comparison to their original prices these cameras are quite cheap. What does amaze me, though, is that despite many cameras being on sale there seem to be enough people willing to bid on them. So it’s really hard to get a really sweet deal. And it’s impossible to get a sweet deal for one of the more rare or high end models. Even the EF I have seems to be one of those, so I decided to save some money and settle for the fairly common AE-1 of which I managed to get a somewhat used model for €25 including shipping. It does have the fairly common battery flap problem (but unlike in my T-70 that’s non-essential as there’s no pressure on that flap and it can be easily taped shut.

I still had to spend another €9 on a new battery, though. Those half size AA 6V batteries aren’t cheap! But I was told to better get the more expensive lithium ones as the cheaper variants may just not work in the cold – and it’s winter after all! Once I had the battery, the camera worked like a charm. With a really smooth shutter button (apparently you just close a contact which triggers an electromagnet to open the shutter – which explains why – unlike the EF – the AE-1 doesn’t work at all without batteries).

More evil eBay shopping tomorrow…

Die Innere Sicherheit

German director Christian Petzold got quite a bit of good press for his film Gespenster last year. But I didn’t manage to see it on the few days it ran in local cinemas. So I hoped to simply rent the DVD later on – but it hasn’t been released yet, and according to the lady at the video store it frequently happens with ‘small’ films that getting the rights and publishing a DVD just doesn’t happen because it’s too much effort and too expensive. Which – of course – I find completely ridiculous. All the hard work to actually make the film has been done, all the public film subsidies have already been paid for it and publishing it on DVD shouldn’t add much to that. [I now learned that the DVD will actually be published next month, so there’s hope…]

So while I couldn’t see Gespenster I instead watched Petzold’s film Die Innere Sicherheit instead. It starts with a German family, Clara and Hans with their daughter Jeanne being in Portugal. But soon we learn that Clara and Hans have a ‘terrorist’ background back from the 1970s (interestingly this isn’t made explicit and we never learn what exactly they did) and are now fugitives from the government agencies.

Jeanne is growing up being home-schooled by her parents and constantly changing locations and identities together with her parents, so they don’t get caught. Things turn a little difficult when they run out of money and they return to Hamburg to sort things out. Even contacting old friends is dangerous because they could be (and are) spied on by the government. But the family moves smoothly in that world of danger. Quite naturally moving with the commuters in the morning for example and adapting a life style where they blend in smoothly.

In Hamburg they move into an empty flat that Jeanne learned about from a guy she flirted with in Portugal. And she meets him again as well. Which probably is where the trouble starts.

That’s our favourite coffee in the product placement, the pack of tomatoes isn’t unknown to student cooking either…

Up to that point the whole family situation had been amazing. Living in the constant danger of being caught and the constant fear of losing their daugher (or parents), the family lived a lifestyle that could be considered really cool. Unlike in most other families (or at least middle-class families) there were real dangers in their lives. And when the parents said ‘move’ because they thought it’ll be dangerous even their teenage daughter moved. The family is very reasonable, what needs to be done gets done and there’s no superfluous talking around. Even difficult issues are dealt with head on because they are comparatively unproblematic to being caught.

For example when Jeanne steals a CD, she gets told off by her parents. But not because they try to teach her that stealing is bad but simply because getting caught will mean having to face the police which is to be avoided at all costs. Of course wanting to have a boyfriend is a problem in that situation as well. And again not for the parents wanting to safeguard their daughter’s virginity but mainly because he could (and does) ask questions about Jeanne’s family and none of the options of shutting up, lying or telling the truth are good ones.

And of course when they have to leave Hamburg again, there’s a dramatic situation where Jeanne is torn between her boyfriend and her parents.

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Ranty Interlude

I thought this was a rather good film offering not only a view on completely different people and lifestyles, on ‘terrorists’ (a word which I think wasn’t used in the film at all) before that word changed its meaning a few years ago. We see them as smart people, who know how to deal with difficult situations and will handle them without needing to be pushed. And who take care for their daughter even in that difficult situation. Somehow the 1970s left-wing ‘terrorist’ – while violent – seemed to be much more intellectual and fighting for a ‘good cause’ than what the word ‘terrorist’ is used for these days (where the meaning seems to be something between ‘person who wants to kill (or just disagree with) Americans (or Western people)’ and ‘person looking like he’s from the middle east’.

Ah, right, but that’s not what I wanted to rant about. My issue was that I would have liked recommending the film to people who don’t speak German. But it is in German only. Not even English subtitles seem to exist. Well done… shouldn’t that be another thing that’s relatively cheap to make in comparison to the total cost of making a film? Even worse, when digging through some pages of Google results on the topic, it seemed that some Goethe Institute (German cultural institutes abroad) actually have got English subtitles for the film and use them for screenings in England for example – the film’s title Die Innere Sicherheit (literally: The Inner Security / The Securtiy of the Interior) being translated nicely as The State I’m in (which in turn makes me think of that Idlewild son, but never mind…). So subtitles do exist and probably haven been paid for with tax money in some way or another. But they just don’t seem to be available for general consumption by the public. And that sucks because now there’s no way for me to reasonably recommend the film. (Actually I had the very same problem already some years ago with the wonderful film 23.)

Moving On

While Googling around for those subtitles, I learned a number of things. Most prominently that the main storyline of Die Innere Sicherheit was nicked from the American 1988 film Running on Empty. So I tried to get a copy of that one as well. In the video store they didn’t even know it existed, amazon Germany was better but they wanted to charge a ridiculous €30 – by far too much, particularly for someone who doesn’t usually buy DVDs because they’re too expensive at their normal price already. A quick look across the pond showed it’s selling for $10 at amazon.com which seemed much more reasonable (before adding shipping costs).

Then, thanks to more googling, I learned that the film had a different title in Germany (Die Flucht ins Ungewisse) which isn’t listed on IMDB (thanks!), so I didn’t know it. With that info, amazon Germany offered it for €15 which I still consider expensive but which was much more reasonable. Eventually I saw a cheap mass-seller in the U.S. selling those DVD for what ended up being $6 including the shipping to Europe if I didn’t want the jewel case (the original jewel case inlay was included though). And that’s what I went for.

It just took a ridiculous fight with PayPal (for some reason I couldn’t transfer the money through the apparently helpful handling site that the seller used, that site just broke down and had no good error handling, the seller (quite friendly and quick for someone who apparently sold 200000 items on eBay so far) told me that there was a problem with transfers from PayPal Germany at the moment – and I shrugged at the fact that those systems should be different in different countries in the software they use. But as they were using that extra ‘clever’ payment and shipping site and PayPal flat out refused to let me transfer any money without using it, I became a victim of incompetent / lazy programmers once more. So rather than waiting for them to figure out a different way for the payment to go, I asked Dan in the U.K. to transfer the money for me… which eventually worked although there was a certain unclarity in the process as I had entered my German address when first trying to pay and the site would only accept U.K. addresses when he paid. Somehow yet another bug in the site cancelled that bug, though, and everything arrived at my place ten days later… and I could finally see the film.

Running on Empty

As I mentioned above, the story is Running on Empty is pretty much the same as in Die Innere Sicherheit. Just that it’s set in the U.S., that we are in the 1980s, that the parents had blown up a napalm plant in the 1960s, and that they have two boys with whom they move from state to state changing names and looks. Again I was impressed by the relationship of the kids with their parents (although the little brother looks a bit absent minded throughout). And once the older brother falls in love, confusion and problems arise, culminating in the situation where the family has to leave again. In addition, this film includes the story of the older brother being a talented piano player, talented enough to be asked to play in public and to sucessfully apply for the Juilliard school – which brings with it exactly the kind of public scrutiny the family wants to avoid. And thus a difficult decision has to be made which leaves the boy with either the piano or his family.

Oh and who doesn’t want to have a dad who answers a valid question of an outsider about some family habits with It’s a little family tradition resulting from a particularly good LSD trip I had in 1968?

[Buy at amazon .com, .uk, .de]

Conclusion

I thought both films are very good. With Running on Empty being the better one. That’s not only because it is the ‘original’ (unlike many American remakes, say for Abre los Ojos or Nikita, Die Innere Sicherheit does offer a new setup for the story to live in) or because its credits are in Palatino (hmmm) but because it handles the relation between the parents and their son more carefully, it also shows how things can go wrong and how hard it can be to do the ‘right’ thing.

On the other hand, Die Innere Sicherheit looks better. I think this is better filming. But perhaps I’m just fooled by it looking modern and not like the 1980s.

In this process of computer exchange I had to deal with two horrible web sites. eBay’s and Apple’s. eBay is just an insult. Despite checking the ‘remember my login’ checkbox once in a while for the past years, their site never remembers my login. And when it starts sending e-mails to me, they are 99% garbage with something like one line of the important message by a potential buyer who requests additional information. That’s just crap. And coming to think of this, charging a more-or-less fixed percentage of the final price is just one of the worst rip-offs ever. After all, the service they provide to me isn’t any better if the item I sell is expensive (in fact, I’d say it’s worse than as you’re more like to want a good presentation of your auction for potentially expensive items, so you’ll edit it more carefully and be cursed by their horrible web site even more).

That site hasn’t changed in years, it has things like three line message boxes to type your questions in, I find it hard to actually locate those of my data in the ‘my eBay’ section of their site every single time I use it. And I like to think that it’s not entirely my fault.

Apple’s site is much better, but it still sucks. Placing an order with them means that you’ll receive an e-mail that looks crap in both its proper and HTML versions. Even when using Apple’s own Mail client. So imagine I’m buying such a machine for the style alone… shouldn’t I be insulted and disappointed by such an e-mail. The fact that the dates they write aren’t localised or their sender address is do_not_reply_con_de@euro.apple.com makes you wonder as well whether anyone in the company knows a bit about software or treating your users well.

A multi-billion dollar computer corporation that can’t make a computer send decent e-mails… haha, funny joke. And things got even better later on. I placed my order and received a message confirming that it had shipped the next day. Which made me happy because the site claimed the shipping time was 3-5 days to begin with. Unfortunately, I completely lost the ability to track the order at that stage as it has yet to receive a tracking number… after almost a week! So perhaps it hasn’t even shipped yet? Who knows? At least the arrival date started off being 7-9th of June, then changed to 13th and today got a bit better by being changed to the 12th. I have no idea why, and it seems rather ridiculous to me. Do they actually ship each of the machines from Asia to your door? Wouldn’t that be very expensive and inefficient when you’re selling thousands of machines? Just wondering…

Of course I wonder whether differences between those batteries exist and how significant they are. The ‘original’ battery claims to come with a capacity that’s around 2^-1/2 that of the 1Ah offered by the cheap alternative. So that doesn’t look to bad. And in my first test run, each of them made around 100 photos. It remains to be seen how quickly each of them ages…

But little did I know about USB devices. While I had heard that USB can’t power high-powered devices like CD-writers over the bus, I assumed this wasn’t a problem anymore as I could buy a tiny bus-powered case for my hard drive. But it only took a few minutes of using it to learn that I was overly optimistic. Most USB ports I tried it on can’t power the drive. My old TiBook was the only computer doing that without problems. The new iBook can power the drive on its back USB port but not on the front one and both 15″ AlBooks I tried it with couldn’t power the drive up either. My externally powered USB hub is another device that can’t get the drive running. In short – things suck quite badly.

And it’s even worse than that. From time to time, while doing heavy file copying, the drive would stop working on the iBook as well. Which sucks quite badly as it makes it rather difficult to make a complete and reliable backup. At first I assumed that this was an issue with OS X, but asking around suggested that it could very well be a power supply problem where during a phase of high activity the drive needs a little more power than the bus can provide and just kills itself because of that. And afterwards – in the spirit of excellent hardware and software engineering on parts of the chipset maker, the drive maker and Apple – the drive keeps rotating but not writing, and the computer will simply stall all applications that try to access the drive in question – without even bothering to write a message to console.log or system.log about what’s going wrong. Arrrgh, nothing like quality engineering.

Once you’re in this state, the only thing you can do is to physically unplug the drive. That’ll make the computer realise that there is a problem and the affected volumes will be force-unmounted, usually letting the stalled applications go on running. This, of course, isn’t particularly good for the drive, its directory structure and possible the files on it. So that sucks a lot.

As people hinted to me this might be due to a power supply problem, I considered building a cable that takes power from two USB ports and provides it to the drive. Haha, smart idea Mr Sven! But the thought of having to get all the components for that and the prospect of spending a while to find out all the relevant details and having to use a soldering iron just to create some ugly cable put me off. So I was happy to see that I was not the first one with this idea and that you can buy such cables, ready-made, on eBay. Which I did.

And what can I say? It sucks. To begin with I had to discover that my external hub is too ‘clever’ for this cable. It seems that it only activates the power supply when there’s a data connection as well. This means I can’t plug the cable’s second plug into the hub and thus lose my ability to simply hide the whole mess somewhere off my desk. I end up with one of the plugs in the iBook and the other one in the hub – ugly and inefficient.

But the very worst part comes last, the external drive still dies when it’s under heavy usage. Perhaps less frequently than it did before, but it still does. So this whole exercise looks like it’s been a waste of time and money. Yikes! I hate technology. Or the people who make and sell technology. Or whoever is responsible for this mess. Why can’t even such basic things ‘just work’. As in: any drive in any drive case connected to any computer with any cable will work without having to worry or seeing things break every other minute. Isn’t that what ‘standards’ like USB are designed to do?

In fact, my broken Powerbook is currently on sale at eBay. Let’s hope that auction goes well. Among the other things I still want to get rid of are:

• Apple Airport Card – sold
• Powerbook G4 Titanium battery (bought in spring 2004 with about 3,5Ah capacity of the original 4,5Ah left) now on eBay – sold
• Three Four handmade Powerbags for the 15 inch Powerbook G4
• Mac OS X.3 Panther – sold
• Linksys Wireless-B broadband Router

All of the above even come in their original packaging. In addition, I have a number of CDs I stopped liking or which I won and never liked to begin with:

• Neil Young, Harvest Moon CD
• Gary Moore, Ballads & Blues CD
• Jeff Beck, There and Back CD
• Peter Gabriel, 4 CD
• The Break Let it Burn EP
• Murderdolls, White Wedding Promo Single
• Mustasch, Black City Promo Single
• Clipper, Allein auf allen Bühnen EP
• Apocalyptica, Seemann (feat. Nina Hagen) Promo Single
• The Blood Brothers, Ambulance Vs. Ambulance Promo Single
• Pinkostar, The trick is to keep breathing Promo EP
• David Kitt, Snippets from The big Romance Promo

I don’t really expect to get that much for all the latter CDs but throwing them away would feel wrong… so offer something interesting or I’ll have to put them up on eBay.

And people are selling tons of those on eBay. I ended up paying just €2 for the device. So even after adding the usual excessive shipping charges, the price wasn’t too bad. And can do iChat talking now without my flatmates complaining later on that my brother was blurting out of the stereo or something…