jinnantonnixx

As long as film has been stored correctly, it should be OK after date. The bulk loader is fairly straightforward. The only precarious part is loading the bulk reel at the start. This has to be done in total darkness or you'll ruin the reel. It's not too tricky though, you can use a changing bag or even under the bed covers at night at a push. Once you've loaded the reel, you can load up your reusable film canisters (I have a few lying around) in daylight. The clever design of the bulk loader means that only the two ends of the film are exposed to light. Feed the film into the reusable film housing, close the bulk loader door, wind the handle to load the film (it has a frame counter so you know how many exposures you wind on. I used to wind in 40 exposures per film. Then open the door, cut the film and bung it in your camera and away you go. An unexpected bonus of doing this is that it's much easier to develop the film if you use re-usable film canisters. Ordinary film canisters are sealed very tightly and must be opened with a bottle opener or similar. A tricky thing to do in the dark or using a changing bag. The reusable canisters, however, can be popped open with your thumbs so it's much easier to get the film out and onto the developing reels.

If you ever go for printing, get a Kodak print projection overlay. This is a little plastic sheet on which gradients are printed. Expose your negative for a minute and look at the resulting print. Choose the best gradient and read off the exposure value and hey presto - you know exactly what exposure to use for your final print. I'll take a photo of all my old gear and see if anyone want to make an offer for it.

I've got a bulk film loader if you're interested. I used to buy reels of bulk film. It marks you out as a pro when you have HP5 SAFETY FILM stamped on the film edges;) Ah, I came from the other way - manual camera, film, developing and printing then to digital. So I had an excellent grounding in photography before my first digital camera. Rodinal is excellent. You can change its effect by altering the dilution; a weaker mix gives you a sharper image. Download the data sheet for more info. Also, it lasts forever, which is ideal for the occasional photographer. It's out of patent protection now, I read it was invented in the late 1800s!!!! Go for HP5 and Rodinal - enjoy the old tech and relish in the grain. Good grief, what a pseud.

I learnt photography on a Praktica MTL5 manual camera. It's a great way to learn; with no auto mode you have no choice but to learn all about exposure. It's built like a tank and still works to this day, 25 years after I received it as a Christmas present. I've got tons of negatives sitting around, I've a good mind to scan them in and see what's there. Can anyone recommend a fast negative scanner? Preferably a standalone one, which can scan to a memory card or USB stick to dump to disk at a later point. Or even a postal service where I can send them away for scanning to a DVD or whatever.

That takes me back. I used to do my own film developing and printing years ago. I gave a lot of my stuff away, but I saw my old Meopta Axomat in the attic the other day when I put away the Christmas decs. Forget your Delta 100 and FX39, the best print I ever made was from a HP5 film developed in Rodinal, which even back in the day was a hundred year old formula. I've still got my top-line Nikon f2.8mm enlarging lens if anyone is interested..... I may sound nostalgic, but I don't miss any part of it; digital is ace.

Are you using the proprietary graphics drivers? Run the 'jockey' app to install these drivers.

I for one welcome our new fontulent overlords. Comic Sans Project Scroll through to find the BSOD in CS. Strangely fitting.

Agreed. Software Raid seems safer in this case. Thanks.

I've bought a HP MicroServer (good deal from Serversplus) and my intention is to use it as an XBMC multimedia server. My planned configuration is this: OS on the supplied 250GB disk (Ubuntu minimal 64 bit, Openbox windows manager, XBMC server - simple and fast.) RAID 1 (mirror) on my two 2TB disks. Now, the Microserver has a fake-raid system, you can specify a RAID array in the BIOS, and it appears that Ubuntu can see this as a mapped device. Which is best - a software RAID in Ubuntu? Or use the HP Fakeraid facility? As I understand it, the raid system on the Microserver can rebuild an array before the OS starts when you install a new disk. But this is only from what I've read on forums and I can't confirm or try it. Of course the software RAID is more transportable and not reliant on any hardware configuration should my machine go bang. Thoughts?

It's a common install-trojan-on-your-PC scam.

Check out this little guy... News I'd probably install XBMC live distro instead of Android, but the beauty is you can change the OS easily as it's on a micro-SD card.

What's the proxy at lancs? Is it MS-ISA or Squid? Ask the admin of that proxy to check their logs to see what your proxy is doing. Anybody 'upstream' in your organisation who can help you?

He sounded like a 100 octane nutter. But wait, there's more.... Top 10 Crazy Facts About Kim Jong Il

Any good? Squid 3 Transparent Proxy

Can you telnet to proxy.lancsngfl.ac.uk on port 8080 to check basic networking? telnet proxy.lancsngfl.ac.uk 8080 You should see some sort of response. Presuming you are allowed to reconfigure and restart Squid, You can enable debugging in Squid by adding this line to squid.conf debug_options ALL,1 33,2 28,9 Restart squid with the command sudo service squid restart This will log everything to /var/log/squid/cache.log You can browse the end of the log with the command tail -n 200 /var/log/squid/cache.log

Everyone should watch a few of his Youtube videos to get the measure of the man. An extraordinary lucid debater.

I heard on the radio this morning. Shame. I liked Hitch, his debates were something to savour. There are plenty of his debates on Youtube. A particularly good one is the Intelligence Squared debate with Stephen Fry (as a cohort)

Thanks @Driver. I'll see if I can hack my Squid back-end to get this to work.

This is a good article. Storage Top 10 Best Practices In a nutshell, arrange your arrays vertically to spread the risk of failure over different boxes, Keep data files and log files on their own separate arrays, RAID5 is normally OK for data, RAID 10 or 1 is best for logs. I used IOMeter to gauge the performance of different configurations. I think I've still got the performance logs and charts.

A two-wheel drive with winter/all weather tyres will be better than a 4x4 with summer tyres. My Dad uses Bridgestone A001 all-weather tyres, ideal for the crazy UK weather. It's the repeated thaw and re-freeze which makes conditions so bad. Our winter temperature oscillates around freezing point which makes road conditions worse than many parts of Europe, which tend to scoff at the UK.

Back to the topic of log files, truncation, size, etc, here's a good article on how it works. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms190925.aspx and the finder details of truncation... Transaction Log Truncation

Ah, that looks familiar! http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/80105-dbattach-issue.html#post711495 I prefer the simpler version as you're dependent on copying the structure of the sp_who2 and this does change! I think it's different in SQL 2005 or was it 2000; either way it broke some of my scripts. We really should put together a tool set of stuff; there's some good stuff floating around, but everything is scattered around.

Hey Vik, I'm sure you have this script (or some variant), but this tells you who (or what) is active on the system. It's not the same as who's left their workstations on because the SIMS application creates an SQL connection on demand, then deletes that connection so it can never be 100% accurate, but it's something. It works on multi-hosted servers, too, provided your database names start with 'sims'. Change as needed. You can schedule it to make a 'naughty list' of who to blame when your upgrades go wrong. use master; select sysprocesses.loginame as [Logged-in user], sysprocesses.hostname as [Machine name], sysdatabases.name as [Database name] from sysprocesses join sysdatabases on sysprocesses.dbid = sysdatabases.dbid where sysdatabases.name like 'sims%' order by sysdatabases.name

If you're curious to see how much of your SQL files are actually in use, as well as the physical size on disk, you can run this command in a query window. use [the name of your database] go SELECT Name AS [Logical Filename], Filename AS [Physical Filename], CONVERT(Decimal(15,2),ROUND(a.Size/128.000,2)) [size on Disk (MB)], CONVERT(Decimal(15,2),ROUND(FILEPROPERTY(a.Name,'SpaceUsed')/128.000,2)) AS [space Used (MB)], CONVERT(Decimal(15,2),ROUND((a.Size-FILEPROPERTY(a.Name,'SpaceUsed'))/128.000,2)) AS [Available Space (MB)] FROM dbo.sysfiles a (NOLOCK) Interestingly, we can see that there is a logical file name (Name) and a physical file name (Filename) for the database files and the log files. It highlights a gotcha - the DBCC SHRINKFILE command (which @Rawns uses in his excellent scripts) take the logical SQL filename, instead of the physical filename. Normally it's the same, but watch out for it.

Put on your rational head - the £460 you've spent is now irrelevent: it's a sunk cost and must have no bearing on your future decisions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs Now, you say if you spend £400, you'll get your car up to scratch? In this case, spending thousands to buy a different car seems irrational. But we're all irrational humans... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevant_cost#Example