RectFish with a Peleng 8mm fisheye is pretty neat. Compare:
RectFish‘d
And yes, I know there is watermarking, but without paying $30 for a license I can’t export non-marked full res images.
I’ll research other apps for it later. OSS stuff, things which remove all distortion (resulting in a dogboned image), etc.
Oh, and click each image for a full size copy, if you’d like. Now, off to the post office. And my parents house.
Well, the Peleng 8mm f/3.5 (photo gallery retired) lenses have arrived. I’ve only opened the one used in the photo above, but this one looks pretty good. The lenses appear to be completely metal and glass and the bits move pretty smoothly. The aperture ring has a very nice, solid action to it, and except for its English markings (I think this is an export version) the whole lens has a very Eastern Bloc feel to it. Focus is a little rough, but nothing to cause any concern. Overall I really like the feel of it.
The lens is also a lot smaller than I expected. With front and rear lens caps and M42 to EOS adapter fitted it weights 470g (~1 pound .5 ounces), is ~72mm in diameter (aperture ring), and 78mm in length. It easily fits on a 20D and doesn’t stick out very far, and except for the large inverted bowl-like of glass, doesn’t look much bigger than a ‘normal’ lens.
I only ran into one problem, and that is that the set screw to hold the M42 to EOS adapter (yes, the lenses are natively M42 mount) to the lens doesn’t really work. The entire body of the set screw isn’t threaded, so it can’t actually be screwed in. Since the set screw was small enough that it may have fit anyway, I attempted to screw it in anyway, but ended up chewing up the head of the screw. Fortunately friction holds the adapter on plenty well, so I’m not using the set screw. I may add a small drop of a Loctite thread locker compound to the adapter, a drop of cyanoacrylate adhesive (super glue) to the edge of the adapter, or just leave it.
When the lens arrived the front element was a bit dusty, but most of the dust blew off with a bulb blower. I then cleaned it with some lens paper and cleaning solution and it looks great.
Image-wise, the Peleng 8mm f/3.5 (photo gallery retired) seems pretty nice, although I haven’t tested it out much yet. With the camera on a tripod right in front of my workbench (approximately the same distance at which I was taking the other photos with the 24-70 f/2.8L (photo gallery retired)) I was able to capture the entire workbench, floor to ceiling. There is a bit of lens flare from the floods, but I figure that this is very difficult to avoid on such wide lenses.
Two other interesting things to note about the lens: It comes in what can best be described as a patent leather case I’d swear this is the same vinyl used to make all manner of club pants and fetish wear.
The lens also can be used with filters, and ships with a total of four of them. The filters are small threaded metal discs attach to the rear of the lens, inside of the mount. The lens ships with a clear filter fitted, and packaged separately are UV-1x, YG-1,8x, and O-2,8x filters.
So, that’s about it. The total cost for each lens is US$239 when purchased in bulk as we did. After I have a chance to check over the lenses I’ll email everyone who is getting one with cost including postage and such. And yes, this will probably be expanded into a page on my site too. I figure more information about such a strange, interesting lens will be rather worthwhile.
If you would like to see more photos of the lens, including the boxes they shipped in, mounting on a 20D, sample images, and other such things, take a look at the Peleng 8mm f/3.5 (photo gallery retired) album in my photo gallery.
Ah, I’ve now done a write-up on nuxx.net. So, feel free to give it a read if you are curious what sort of things are running behind the scenes on the box which hosts my (and others) sites to… well… host things.
Back in 2000 while still living at my parents house (this is both pre-apartment (photo gallery retired) and pre-condo) I ended up building a MAME Cabinet from scratch. (Yes, just a pile of wood.) While it has been in my basement, used on and off for years, I’d never taken the time to properly photograph it, nor write up anything about it. Well, now I did.
This past weekend I spent a fair amount of time on it, making a number of hardware and software changes, slightly upgrading MAME, moving to Compact Flash for storage, and generally cleaning it up. All in all, it looks like new again. Sure, it plays as it always has (read: excellent) but I feel as if I’ve rediscovered it.
After finishing up the upgrades I wrote up a (hopefully) complete document on my MAME Cabinet. This, along with high-res photos of it completed (photo gallery retired), high-res new photos (photo gallery retired), and the original webcam photos (photo gallery retired) have come together with loads of text to (hopefully) provide a good background on the cabinet, how it was built, and what it contains.
Tonight I still have to acquire the ~16GB of MAME ROMs I downloaded for it and process them so that I can properly pick from as inclusive of a list as possible for play, but this should only take some time. And while it’s downloading I can play some Bubble Bobble. Or Ms. Pac Man. Or Asteroids. Or Capcom Bowling. Or Gal’s Panic. Or Dig Dig. Or…
This summer I could take a ferry to Skagway, hitch a train for four miles or so, then stay in the Denver Caboose Cabin, one of the USDA Forest Service cabins available for rental in the Tongass National Forest. It’s really not that remote.
I may. Everything is on hold until I figure out things with potentially moving.
I cannot figure out what is wrong here. Either the MAME devs seriously broke some things between 0.69 and 0.100, or something I can’t figure out is wrong.
See, I’m trying to run a nice, simple copy of DOS on my MAME cabinet. It should work fine, but… it doesn’t. In some cases. :D
Using MAME 0.69 I have no problems, and everything seems to run rather well. Bump the version up to 0.100 for DOS and everything gets really slow. From, say, 60fps in Bad Dudes down to 17fps.
I thought that maybe the increased size of the binary was being weird with SMARTDRV, or maybe it needed to write back to disk more, and the CF card I’m using is slow, so I copied everything over to a hard disk. Same problem. :\
I’m sort of at a loss for what to do.
So… My MAME cabinet is working great again. It’s at the point where I just have to finish the physical clean-up, resoldering of some connections in the control panel, and photography. As
1) I have Founder’s Breakfast Stout.
2) My MAME cabinet (photo gallery retired) is working again, this time running completely from Compact Flash. I played Bubble Bobble!
As soon as I figure out why the sound card keeps failing (it’ll just cease to work suddenly, for no apparent reason) and fix that, everything will be good. Oh, and once I get all the controls / display stuffs sorted out. But that’s not too difficult.
I just bid on another card on eBay. I think it’s the card failing, so it’s best to replace it.
Expect more on the MAME cabinet soon. There will likely be photos and a write-up in the projects portion of nuxx.net.
Also, today I:
· Smoked a power supply after replacing the fuse inside. I guess more than the fuse was bad.
· Diagnosed a motherboard bearing a rather nice AMD Athlon XP 1700+ chip as no longer powering on. I hope I can figure out why, as it was working fine a few months ago. (It’s not the power supply.) This was to be the board in the MAME cabinet. Fortunately I still had my trusty nine year old Abit BH-6, formerly of many different computers including bornslippy.nuxx.net (photo gallery retired). Seems to be working well enough with MAME.
· Ate Kraft Macaroni and Cheese w/ curry powder for dinner.
· Played with Compact Flash to IDE adapters, which work great.
· Installed DOS a few times.
· Ate an enormous salad for lunch which had completely too much blue cheese on it.
· Learned that RAMDRIVE.SYS RAMdisks can’t be more than 32MB.
· Found that AdvanceMAME runs horribly from flash unless you turn on write caching. (Not sure of why yet.)
As
I don’t have a wide enough lens to get the whole halo (the Tokina 12-24 would have been great about now), but I did get a fair bit of it. After seeing the blinding glare of the moon I went to take another photo with something (me?) blocking out the moon, but it was too late and the halo was gone.
So, there you go. Not a great photo, but it’s a halo none the less. I just hope I get to see another 3-4 ring halo like I did one night when I was little. That was amazing.
I know this is old news, but I finally banged together a page about my iSight Car Mount.
There are embedded videos of the tests I did, both driving around a bit and a stop-motion video of my drive to work.
And yes, this is related to the silly Flash question I had earlier. I was able to find a newer version of the player which has a click-to-play button available, so that should a noisy video be clicked on my the user, it doesn’t immediately deafen them.
I think there is still a lot to do with Gallery and it’s video support, and I need to figure out a better way to transcode files consistently and add hinting needed for lighttpd’s flv streaming support.
But, for now, it works. :)
