Troy Addicoat was due to erect the shed today, and to call me by yesterday if he couldn't
make it. Neither happened.
Called him in the morning, and he said that he would call back in 5 minutes. He didn't.
Over the course of the day I tried several times, only getting voice mail. Finally I sent
him an SMS threatening—once again—legal action
Yvonne back from shopping and wanted to know why her phone no
longer knew who I was. Instead of displaying my name and image, it just showed the phone
number.
Further investigation showed that almost, but not quite, all of her contacts had
disappeared. Checked on a real computer and discovered the same thing: somehow they were
just plain gone.
How can that happen? Yes, of course it's possible to delete contacts, but Yvonne doesn't
know how to do that, and I can't see her accidentally deleting 50 or so contacts. Went into
settings and discovered that it's possible to restore older versions of the contacts list,
and yesterday's seem to be OK. But what causes that?
To be safe, got her to change her Google password, though I don't really think that it was a
breakin.
And there was an answer that had been downvoted, pointing to this page. It seems
that there were dozens of still cameras using 35 mm film in the early part of the last
century. I need to spend more time looking at it.
What a useless site Quora has become! Why can people just downvote useful information like
that?
Finished off Sunday's choucroute today. Yes, definitely too little potato. Also too little
sauerkraut. And I already used much less than any recipe recommends. More modifications to
the recipe.
I am sorry but were we are working has not got A lot of service and can't Cole I will call
you tomorrow morning
Where's the email copy? I didn't see one. Yet another reliability issue with these
damned Android “devices”. Called him up, and it he tells me that the weather has not been in his
favour, and now it looks like it'll be the end of next week at the earliest before he can do
our job. He didn't take me up on the offer of equipment hire. I suppose that's a good
sign, though I'm reasonably sure that he's quoting an overly optimistic time. Still, the
real deadline was for the Anke Hawke clinic, which, barring further catastrophes, will start
tomorrow. Since he can't make that, a few more days won't make much difference.
While walking the dogs, Larissa found
a severed lamb leg in Spearys Road. Not quite the cut of meat you associate with roast
lamb, but still a lamb leg. She dropped it, Lena grabbed it and took it home with her:
“You have mail” slip from Australia Post in the letter box today. Finally the Kiev 3a has arrived
from, well, Kyiv. Off to the post
office to pick it up and unpacked it.
It's really in good condition, particularly the case:
And that proved to be more of an issue than I thought. I had difficulty getting it to
focus, and I wasn't able to find the shutter dial without a Google search. And even then,
it seems that there are no instruction manuals for this model to be found on the web. I
found an instruction manual for the Zeiss Contax IIIa, which seems to
be very different from the Zeiss/Kiev III, which were both almost identical to my camera.
And strangely the Zeiss Contax IIIa has a considerably smaller rangefinder base. This photo
is from the page above, but they make it almost impossible to link to it:
The shutter is set from the wind knob (and yes, it winds in the same direction as every
other 35 mm camera except the Exakta, from left to right). But unlike most other cameras, there's no separate shutter speed
dial: it's under the wind knob, barely visible:
To set the speed, you lift the knob and turn it so that the dot matches the fixed shutter
speed dial below.
And for some reason there's a lock for the lens, keeping focus at infinity. There's also a
wheel near the shutter release for focusing. A whole lot of interesting ideas that somehow
didn't survive.
Apart from that, it's interesting to compare the cameras. It looks bulky, and to an extent
it is. But what surprises me is the size of the lens. It's a Юпитер-8 (Jupiter-8) 5 cm f/2 lens,
basically a rebadged Sonnar, but
it's so small. Here next to the 5 cm f/3.5 Fed on the Fed:
One of the interesting things about this camera is the extremely wide rangefinder base. And
it makes itself felt. Compared to the Fed/Leica, focusing is much more precise. It's
strange that the Zeiss Contax IIIa reduced the base. I wonder why.
And the exposure meter? It seems to work. Here with the cover closed and then open:
But in bright sunlight it goes off the scale. Is there some range switch somewhere? And
how do you interpret the indication? The rewind button has something like a calculator on
it:
“ГОСТ” (GOST) is the old
Soviet film speed measurement system, and clearly there are apertures and shutter speeds
underneath. They can be turned relative to each other, but I don't see any relationship
with the meter readings. None of this is made any easier by the very small markings on a
reflective background.
Still, it's interesting to see the amount of technological innovation that went into this
camera. Yes, it was made in 1957 (the first 2 digits of the serial number show that), but
the design goes back to the 1936 Contax III; the only significant difference is the flash
synchronization (1/25 s!).
I've changed the pathname for obvious reasons, but it was really that simple. That's so
different from all the pain I've had with git in the past. Of course, it wasn't all
that simple. I've already established that for a normal commit to a repository I need two
steps, first commit, then push. But in this case, I also needed an add, though the file
already existed. I wish I understood this program.
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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