Printers know just when to not work...

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Met my MEng project students today. The plan was to impress them with a nicely printed overview of the course content. But the printer had other ideas. For the last few weeks it has been waking up at odd times and emptying its ink tanks so that it won’t work when I need to use it. Cunning stuff.

There was plenty of black ink. But no yellow. The thing I was printing had no yellow in it. But the printer refused to play. The online help referred to a monochrome printing mode you could use in this situation, but of course that didn’t work. My plans to impress were in tatters.

The good news is that I managed to figure it out. If you want to use the monochrome mode properly you need to install the “proper” drivers that you get from Brother, rather than the ones that are installed automatically by Windows 11.

And I’ve ordered some more ink. Should be here tomorrow.

Bye Bye Mr. Cube

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he actually looks shinier now than when we bought him.

Sad day today. Said goodbye to “Mr. Cube”. I got him in 2010 and he’s been in the family for the last fourteen years. I’ve very fond memories of my Cube motoring days; one of the nicest cars I’ve ever owned. And he has worn extremely well. But, rather sadly, it is time for a change. If you see him out and about be sure to give him a wave and totally confuse the person driving him.

ChatGPT Exif Update

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One of the problems with film photography is that when you scan the film negatives you get an image file that doesn’t contain the metadata (called exif data) giving details of when the photograph was taken, the camera used and whatnot. I’ve found a lovely tool called ExifTool which I can use to set the required values in a image file. But what I really wanted was a little program with a Graphical User Interface that lets me select a folder full of images and then set all the images to the specified camera make and model.

I had a quick chat with ChatGPT and it wrote two programs for me. One in Python and the other in PowerShell. I fired up the Python one and it just worked. It made the menu you can see above, using the TkInter interface. The formatting of the window could use a little work, but the program itself seems to do exactly what I want. All I had to do was describe what I wanted and out popped the code. This is both highly impressive and deeply scary.

I’ve now decided that I don’t want to have to enter the make and model of the camera each time, I want the application to use the folder hierarchy to work out what the name should be (i.e. for the above image I would have a parent folder called Mamiya which contains a subfolder called Mamiya Press 23 Standard in which the image files are stored). I’m going to tell ChatGPT about my idea and then get it to create that instead. When I’ve got it all working I’ll put it on GitHub for anyone who has the same problem as me.

Old New Mamiya

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So, I’ve got seriously bitten by the Mamiya Press bug. These are big old cameras designed for press use. I’ve just bought invested in another one.

I actually bought this one for its lens. It has a 65mm lens, which on a negative this size counts as wide angle. It is usually much more expensive than this whole outfit. The lens has such a wide angle of view that you have to use the special viewfinder you can see on top of the camera above. When the lens was made Mamiya decided that it wasn’t sharp enough at the designed aperture, so they simply limited the maximum aperture to 6.3. This means that you get a “free” dose of depth of field, which helps keep images in focus. The downside is that in low light conditions you’ll have to reach for a tripod much sooner than you might like.

The camera was sold as in only average condition, but I reckon it is actually in pretty fine fettle. The rangefinder gives pretty sharp focus and everything works as it should, although it does bear the marks of time here and there. We took a little trip to the seaside yesterday and I grabbed some shots.

I’m very happy with how they turned out. The camera is a bit of beast to carry round, but it is totally worth it.

Adventures with T shirts

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While we were in London we had a look in the Uniqlo store to find out what they are wearing in Japan at the moment. Turns out that they had a range of T shirts for the Kaiju No. 8 manga series at very tempting prices. So I bought a bunch. And also the first book of the series (it’s rather good).

If you like this kind of thing it’s worth keeping an eye on their site. Neat designs pop up every now and then at very tempting prices.