Last week I bought a flash unit on eBay, and
nowadays Australia Post supplies emails
with something like tracking information, and eBay does its best to second-guess. It arrived
at “Napoleon” (Australia Post's name
for Napoleons) on Monday.
Today Yvonne picked it up on the way back from shopping. The
emails read:
From bounce-1441751_HTML-1600721773-30696508-10784680-53441@bounce.notifications.auspost.com.au
Mon Aug 19 10:05:03 2019
From: Australia Post <noreply@notifications.auspost.com.au>
To: groggyhimself@lemis.com
Subject: Your delivery is ready to collect
Date: Sun, 18 Aug 2019 18:03:52 -0600
From ebay@ebay.com Mon Aug 19 11:15:04 2019
Date: Sun, 18 Aug 2019 18:10:14 -0700
From: eBay <ebay@ebay.com>
To: groggyhimself@lemis.com
Subject: ???? ORDER DELIVERED: METZ Mecablitz 15 MS-1 Digita???
From bounce-1441751_HTML-1600721773-30696513-10784680-317195@bounce.notifications.auspost.com.au Wed Aug 21 14:45:03 2019
From: Australia Post <noreply@notifications.auspost.com.au>
To: groggyhimself@lemis.com
Subject: Your delivery has been collected
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2019 22:42:01 -0600
I particularly like the time zones. I can understand eBay using a time zone UTC-7, but why on Earth does Australia Post use UTC-6
(presumably North American Mountain Time), and 16 hours behind local time?
Mail from Ben Sturm today, somebody whom I don't know, but who seems to have been active
in Ballarat for 15 years. He's running
a workshop next week with the title “Contribute to Free and Open Source Software
Workshop”, and was hoping that I could find participants. I can't, but it sounds like a
good idea. It seems that it's part of a government-sponsored Digital Information Festival which will start in a couple
of days' time and run for 2 weeks. I wonder how that will pan out.
It's late winter, a month before the equinox, and I've decided to change my monthly photos
to match equinoxes and solstices. Gradually spring seems to be coming. This month has been
particularly wet, nearly 80 mm in the past 31 days, and some of the plants seem to be
suffering from it, like maybe
this Epazote that I planted only
last week:
At the top of the list of other sick-looking plants is most definitely
this Corymbia ficifolia that
we bought only two months ago. Here on planting and now:
So when I saw a mecablitz 15 MS-1 on sale on eBay, it seemed reasonable to put in a bid. And how about that, I got it, brand new, for
$104. Google knows places that sell it in the same condition for between $600 and $709.
It's not as if the mecablitz doesn't have its own issues. The biggest ones are that it's
relatively heavy, and that it's a slave flash: you need a master flash as well. Sure, I
have flashes—at least four that would come in question for the master function, probably one
of the toy ones that Olympus delivers with its cameras. But I need to understand how to use
them.
OK, put in batteries, turn on. There's a flash test button, something notably missing from
the STF-8. It has a display and three buttons behind it. Initially the display showed
something about modelling lights, not the most obvious thing I would expect. OK, leave
modelling light off, press OK (middle button), and get more selections with a wandering OK,
now the right-hand button—something that I know from other mecablitzen—and end up with a
display with the letters CAN at top left and a light balance display that I can
change with the left and right buttons. What does CAN mean? Short for channel? How
do I get out? I would expect the middle button to do that, but it was dead. Broken? I
already have that issues with the Viltrox unit.
Nothing for it: RTFM. Lots of images of
displays, but none with CAN at top left.
More details. Somehow this Metz documentation is hard to read; I've seen it with the
documentation for the 58 AF-2.
But gradually it dawned on me: it's the emulation, one of (the instructions say) CAN
REMOTE, NIK REMOTE, OLY REMOTE, PEN REMOTE, SAM REMOTE
and SON REMOTE. No display that I could find showed REMOTE, but clearly the bold
text is a tasteful abbreviation of the emulation mode. The instructions note that the most
flexible modes are CAN REMOTE, NIK REMOTE and CAN REMOTE, OLY
REMOTE, and interestingly most of the examples show OLY (without REMOTE).
OK, how do I control the thing? With the on-camera flash, of course, along with the
thoughtfully supplied infrared clamp, which, they say, is intended to block visible light.
I need to look at it more carefully, but so far it seems to be designed to give the visible
light a chance to shine through the hinge. But then I read:
The slave flash unit is remotely controlled by the master or controller flash unit.
A master flash unit contributes to the lighting and at the same time controls the slave
flash units.
A controller flash unit only has control functions.
OK, I'll bite. How do I choose one or the other. Ah, see operating manual of the camera or
external flash unit.
OK, time to look at the camera manual, which shows that Oly is just as confused as mecablitz
and I. The chapter on flash (page 57 to 60 in the OM-D E-M1 Mark 2 Version 3.0 manual (PDF)) doesn't mention remote flash. Ah, the
advantages of search functions in PDF documents. It's described all over again on page 153,
apparently written by another group of people. It also seems that a different group of
people wrote the firmware. Basically, what you do is:
In Camera (“Shooting”) Menu 2, select Flash RC Mode. This replaces the standard “Super
control panel” that controls most aspects of the settings, and which this documentation
calls the “LV super control panel”, with a flash-specific display:
How do you get back to the SCP? Press INFO to toggle. What a clear indication of
poorly adapted configuration menus!
And what does it all mean? That image above is the only documentation. I had a bit
of an idea, but surely there must be some tutorials available on line? Went off looking for
olympus remote flash tutorial and found several, including a number that didn't
understand the details. I haven't watched them all yet, but what I see here is, for Olympus
and the mecablitz 15 MS-1:
Set the flash to OLY, of course, channel ALL.
Set the camera to remote flash, of course.
On the inscrutable menu, set (say) group A to TTL, 0.0 EV compensation (that's
the third column) and the last column (which looks like two) to the flash symbol. Set
groups B and C to Off, and the last row (camera symbol, implying
on-camera flash) to Off, which, I hope, will make it just trigger the other
flash(es).
And that's as far as I got today.
In passing, Olympus' flaky documentation doesn't end there. On page 152 of the manual I
read:
This table gives a guide number for ISO 100. But the camera has a base ISO setting of 200,
and 100 is very much an exception. In addition, the focal lengths are given in 35 mm film
camera equivalents. Why? This is a manual for a Micro Four Thirds system camera. So to understand this table, you first need to divide the focal lengths by 2 and
multiply the guide numbers by 1.4.
Mail from Harold Gutch today, with a reference to Monday's article about SD file limits, and pointing me
at Design of the FAT
file system. It seems that the root directory is handled differently:
This is a Directory Table that stores information about the files and directories located
in the root directory. It is only used with FAT12 and FAT16, and imposes on the root
directory a fixed maximum size which is pre-allocated at creation of this volume. FAT32
stores the root directory in the Data Region, along with files and other directories,
allowing it to grow without such a constraint.
The number of root directory entries available for FAT12 and FAT16 is determined when the
volume is formatted, and is stored in a 16-bit field. For a given number RDE and sector
size SS, the number RDS of root directory sectors is RDS=ceil((RDE×32)/SS), and RDE is
normally chosen to fill these sectors, i.e., RDE*32=RDS*SS. FAT12 and FAT16 media
typically use 512 root directory entries on non-floppy media. Some third-party tools, like
mkdosfs, allow the user to set this parameter.
OK, nothing for it. Is it even FAT-16? These limitations don't apply to FAT-32, and the
card is (just) small enough for FAT-16. And who formatted it? Time to take a look at the
card—mañana.
Into the office this more to find lots of log messages, repeating about every 5 seconds:
Aug 22 08:01:57 eureka kernel: pid 19289 (yreport), uid 0: exited on signal 11 (core dumped)
Aug 22 08:02:01 eureka wh1080: Can't read device: Device busy or Unknown error (16)
Aug 22 08:02:03 eureka kernel: pid 19292 (yreport), uid 0: exited on signal 11 (core dumped)
wh1080 is the program that controls my weather station and saves the results in a database. yreport is one of the
programs that processes the saved data, and it wasn't finding any. I should check why
it SIGSEGVs instead of producing a usable error message, but the more immediate
question was why wh1080 couldn't read the device. OK, this thing is really flaky,
and I continually had to physically disconnect the USB connector. But this time it didn't
work.
OK, fire up gdb, not something I do very frequently any more. Yes, no trouble
opening the device. But it hung on the read. Why?
Removed the batteries and tried again. Success. I suppose that's about as far as it goes
unless this starts happening more frequently.
More photovoltaic fun
Topic: Stones Road house, general, technology, opinion
Last week's photovoltaic system monitoring improvements have paid off: today I got a
long report of Yet Another “calibrating battery” status. This time it ran only one cycle, a
little over 4 hours from 15:12:22 to 19:28:41, suggesting that there was really something
wrong last month. But once again it discharged the battery completely, and presumably
there are also alarms from the battery. From 17:31:18 to 18:05:24 the state of charge was
under 5%, and from 17:40:49 to 17:55:03 it was at 0%.
Time for some answers. Sent a message to Fred and asked for a statement
from the makers of the battery and the inverter. Not one, but two replies by the evening,
saying that he was also getting the two to talk to each other. I wonder what will happen.
One of the the many obnoxious things about Donald Trump is his racism. In
particular his hatred of Muslims and other (non-US) Americans is clear. But in one country
he's a hero: Israel. He has turned a
blind eye to their territorial violations,
recognized Jerusalem as the capital of
Israel, recognized the Golan
Heights as part of Israel, not only turned a blind eye to the plight of
the Palestinians, but also cut
aid to them. No wonder the Israelis love him.
Ha ha, only joking. He discovered that most US Jews
vote Democrat,
so he blasted them.
What a man! Who can accuse him of being preferential? He hates everybody equally.
We're out of hamburger buns (bread rolls). OK, no worries, bake some more. But we were out
of one of the ingredients, “Manhattan Light Rye” bread mix, so I had to do it with only
wheat flour. That required more water, 635 ml instead of 580 ml.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
a day or two after I write it.
Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a
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