Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Guaca-holy-mole! John Speno noted some interesting news regarding a potential avocado influx!  Be warned: All-powerful voracious overlords consume avacado delights *overtly*! ...over at the Christian Science Monitor, Jim Regan finds rutabaga's "inherantly funny" (along with umlaut and hornswoggle) in that Wacky Wikipedia. 11:49:44 PM    , comment [] Fun with CompactFlash pins, Ubuntu Although the Compact Flash card and slot are keyed, we managed to bend pins on both ends of the connection. I learned this was probably the case while on the phone with Canon tech. support. Of course that's only a possibility, but I would have appreciated them mentioning that bent pins are not covered by the warranty.  I probably would've taken them up on the nifty $75 refurb offer on the spot.  Instead I spent about $5 to ship it to them for a. validation, and b. $100+ repair or refurb option.  I asked them ship it back. After at least 45 minutes of slow but unmeticulous unscrewing and gentle prying I had the case open accordian fashion and awkward access to the pins. A barbed sewing pin to hook and pull, then tweezers to tweek (arg, they're buckled, not just bent).  One broke off, the other stands straight.  I cut my losses with a sigh and tinkerers glint but decide to reassemble the necessary parts and give it a whirl. Woohoo! The camera boots up, RAM reads 248M (of the 256M card) and *I* fixed it!!  That card is never coming out, Tam is getting her own camera, and I'm claiming this one for my own. Here's the best part: I had no problems extracting pictures with RedHat, so figured it would be similarly painfree on Ubuntu.  Synaptics Package Manager provided any salve needed for null-response in #ubuntu, while #gphoto was present and inspiring.  Grabbed gphoto (searched spm for 'photo'), then after reading those googled docs got gtkam, which worked nicely.  Somewhere after the journey my system refused mouse clicks, but I was able to close the apps before a most newbious reset. The camera is a PowerShot A310. Nice pictures, sucks and requires non-cheap batteries, long flash recharge time, along with seemingly long click-to-pic time, although I'm working on the half-click-focus bit.  This is the feature that helped my wife write off the camera quickly. Our old similar Vivicam seemed snappier. Kid quote of the day: I don't need to eat breakfast, I just had a lot of burps. 11:14:15 PM    , comment []

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