Old School Camera Equipment Finds

I've been out of the camera/photography end of my blog topics for a while now, but I recently jump back into it in a big way! Along with the misc digital camera items that I buy and use, I've also been accumulating a sort of "ad hoc" collection of old photographic equipment. This stuff has ranged variously from rather ancient selenium light meters all the way to "user-grade" film cameras. I won't say SLR (although the vast majority have been 35mm cameras of the that type). There have been the occasional 35mm "rangefinders", vintage flash units and even some old little 16mm ultra-compact "spy cameras". However, the majority of my energies have been put into acquiring Tamron Adaptall lens. Why those you ask?

The Adaptall-ness of them of course!  Yes, some of it has to do with the fact that they are very fine lenses and in some cases (particularly the zooms), stack up quite nicely against the far more expensive OEM brands such Nikon, Canon, Minolta etc. However, it's really their unique Adaptall/Adaptall-2 system which allows these lenses to be used on a wide range of cameras made by a variety of manufacturers. .....And since my collection includes (among others); a Minolta XE-7, a Konica TC, and a Contax 139, I'd like to have one set of lenses that I can use with everything. The Adaptall lenses allow me to do this.

 

I had already found a couple of the Adaptall-2 lenses (the 28-50mm, 70-150mm) that I've been very happy with; then a couple of weeks ago; this happened.....

 

These 3 lenses (along with a Soligor 28mm/f2.8 in M42 threadmount) appeared on the Goodwill Industries auction site listed as a "untested" package. So $20 later with $10 of it as shipping, I more than doubled my Adaptall-2 inventory without even duplicating any of the lenses that I already had! The top one 35-135mm/f3.5-4.2 CF zoom, the bottom one an 80-210mm/f3.8 CF zoom, and the capper in the middle..... 60-300mm/f3.8-5.6 zoom from the SP (Super Performance) line! They all work fine and came to $5 per lens including the Soligor and a whopping $$6.67 per if we just count these Tamrons. Wow! Granted, one came with an Olympus OM mount and two came with Canon FD mounts, so I'll have to buy some more Minolta, Contax mounts if I don't want to switch out, but that's fairly inconsequential considering.

 

 While I was on a roll this week, I also scored a Vivitar 285 flash from a local charity resale store for $5...... no, you did not mis-read that. It was $5.... well, actually $4.99, but who's counting that penny anyway! When I got it home, put new batteries in it to check for function, I also pulled out the voltage meter to check out the trigger voltage. These can range from 6v all the way up to 300v+ which will kill modern digital cameras; my unit came in at 6v! Score again!!! I'd say it was a pretty good photographic equipment week.

It Can All Be Stored..... But Then What?

In today's round of email ads, came something called the Seagate Backup Plus 4Tb.... that's, as opposed to the "Slim" which is 2Tb. It's being sold for $150 from Newegg, which of course means that, that's the de facto online price now. I'm always looking at storage because we all know, no one has enough storage and it's something which is always nibbling at the edges of my consciousness. Especially right now while I'm in the process of rebuilding my own file server. Anyway: so here's this huge (capacity-wise), "portable" (form-factor-wise) drive for a pretty amazing price. So I started digging around a little. 

 

This whole shindig started about a year ago with the Backup Plus Fast 4Tb drive. It sold for about $210 and was even thicker. It turns out that the "Fast" was fast  because it had not 1, but 2 Momentus M9t 2Tb drives in it set up in a RAID "0" (striped) setup, making it's read/writes the fastest out there among bus-powered drives. Of course, stacking 2, 9.5mm drives on top of each other makes for a FAT drive.... plus the extra hardware made for an expensive one as well.

So, this year, Seagate brings out the Momentus M018 drive that's 15mm thick, but is 4Tb all in one case! Yes, they crammed 5, 800Gb platters into one case! I'm not a Seagate fan, but all I can say is..... WOW!!! Am I going to run out and buy one of these things? Uhhh, no..... but it is very interesting. I'm still in the middle of acquiring more 2Tb Hitachi Deskstar so I can get to a 5-drive ZFS array on the FreeNAS file server. I know it's kind of quaint in these days of huge 4 and 6Tb desktop drives, but I'm conservative and paranoid! Now, if I can get my hands on one of the Backup Plus Fast drives at a good price, I might strongly consider doing that, so I can pull the drives to go in my Drobo Mini, bumping it's 5Tb (2, 1.5Tb, and 2, 1Tb) capacity to 7Tb.... then putting a couple of SSDs into that case to make for one very fast external drive! But what does one do with all that storage?

 

Media of course! I've found that backing up just doesn't use up much space. However; media file storage and serving does! While I was getting out the 200 DVD "Mega-Changer" and putting that beast back into the A/V cabinet, I came to the conclusion that I really wanted something easier. That thing was fine "back in the day" and has more than served it's purpose keeping the kids from handling the physical media, but we all know the day of physical media is over. As it sits, I have over 300 movies ripped already AND routinely carry them ALL around on a portable drive/access point from which they can be consumed via pretty much any digital device. Of course, I don't just have the crunched down MP4 files for iPad use, but also the original decripted files as well. Yeah, that takes up a LOT of storage space.

I don't think anyone would argue that the up-to-date delivery method of the computer file is way more efficient and convenient. The issue is the time it takes to rip all the movies and then to store all those file! This is going to take a whole change in mentality for me.

Up until this point, my servers have always been Friday to Sunday machines..... that is a file server that I turn on over the weekend, so that our laptops can do their backup and play the occasional playlist on a quiet Saturday morning. But our needs for data are different now. We want them to server our media files 24/7. We want to get that picture to go on the Facebook page on Monday night. We want to play our iTunes playlist throughout the house on Tuesday evening. We want to pull up that the old Star Wars Ep. 1 (God help us!) on Thursday night. Well.... you get the idea. What's the purpose of ripping all our CDs and DVDs if we only carry them with us on vacation?

So, the concept is that the rebuilt "Spectre" server will be a high up-time machine. Maybe not 24/7, but at least maybe 6pm to 1am/most days of the week computer that's there to feed all those tablets and TVs scattered all over the house. 

An Update For the A/V System..... Finally

Yes; the Frugal Propellerhead household is entering the world of 4K! Actually, we (I) didn't set out to upgrade the video end of our system. Again, like most other things in our lives these days, it came as an outgrowth of the move to the new house. I might have mentioned that, in this new house, is a rather large "game/media room". It's fully twice the size of our previous living room. Not only that, but there's a completely separate living area that we didn't have before. Since this second living space is connected to the kitchen in an "open-plan", it's a likely location where our family and visitors would gather. It will be an ideal refuge from the noise generated by our teenage (and soon to be teenage) children and their friends that we're assuming will congregate upstairs! Why does this all this mean 4K?

Remember when I pointed out the size of the "game room"? The size of it pretty much swallows the not-so-old 48" TV. It's simply not big enough for the space...... making that one perfect for the downstairs "den". So, what would you do with a room that's roughly 20 by 30? If money was no object, I'd get either a 70" monitor and/or a front projector with 100" screen! We can probably afford to go out and get a 70" monitor, but technology rears it's ugly head! As you might have heard; 4K TVs are becoming fairly commonplace. The price has dropped to the point where 55"-60" units are available in our $1000 target range. Actually, "the boss" would prefer for it to be sub-$1000.... so, what's a good husband/Propellerhead to do? Stay in the $1K budget and get a regular HD 65"-70" TV.... break the bank and get a 60"-65" 4K TV, or stay in budget and get a 55" 4K TV. 

I'm sure that most of my regular readers can figure out how this came out. I'm a little obsessed with "future-proofing" and I like to keep my wife happy...... so I found a 4K for under (significantly) the budget. Yup.... Neither one of us thought that it'd be a good idea to buy old technology just to get a bigger screen. We had actually decided to wait awhile and see how the price of 4K would shake out after Black Friday. Then, about a week ago, we found ourselves with some extra time on our hands after dinner with the in-laws. My wife decided to take the daughter and go to the cloth-store, so I chose Best Buy across the way. That way, I could look at the over-priced stuff and models that I can't afford. I dutifully examined all the new models and made my way over to the "open-box" and clearance section where I found some interesting stuff, including a nice 55" Sharp 4K for about $800. Then I saw a Sony XBR-55X800b, hanging on the wall but notated as "open-box" for $800. The description card showed it as having a scratch (which I could see) and "no accessories missing". To shorten the story; we decided to buy it after negotiating another $40 off. THEN, they couldn't find ANY of the accessories.....no remote.....no instructions.....no box (opened or otherwise)......and critically.....NO STAND!!! I made myself look frustrated and ready to bolt, whereupon, they took off $100 and included a $70 Logitech Harmony 650 remote. 

I was even able to act like I had to think it over before jumping at it! So; 55" Sony 4K TV, and Harmony remote for $700. On eBay, I found the original remote for $10, followed by the stand for $60. Now I can start putting the game/media room together!

House (and other) Stuff

If you've been wondering on the sporadic nature of my posts lately, here's the reason.... in the flesh/brick.....wood. Whatever! What it comes down to is that the house is still a big deal in my life. When you move into a much bigger house, it isn't just a bed of roses..... there are a number of thorns in there as well. Without concentrating on the negative; let me give you an idea what-all has been eating up a lot of my time.

Yep.... that's grass.... as in we didn't have much of it in the back due to the trees that we wanted (and got). So we borrowed a tiller and.... tilled up the yard back there, along with several sprinkler heads. We planted some shade tolerant fescue, replaced sprinkler heads (4, 3 of which were my fault). Plus there was the little aside of digging up 15 (!!!) hedges. My father-in-law had already cut the limbs off, but I got to dig out the rest with a pick-axe..... Hi Ho!!!

I also got to put in some new (aka working) solar path lights. We also did about 5 hours of yard weeding while trying to get rid of the old appliances, lawn mowers and other random non-working items that the previous owners left us during the neighborhood garage sale..... and NO, we did NOT sell the garage. Did I mention that we spent "Labor Day" ripping out the downstairs carpet? It was a lovely time.

On Saturday afternoon, I drove up to IKEA in Frisco and bought some of the "Lack" floating shelves for my son's room, then spent the evening and some of the next day painting and installing a closet system while he was out of town on a camping trip with the Scouts.

Sunday afternoon was mostly taken up with planning a backyard shed for the lawn equipment and picking up a set of unfinished cabinets that will occupy the back wall of the upstairs game/media room. The shed will allow me to get the lawn equipment out of the garage to I can finish up in there since we tend to be the odd folks that expect to park our cars inside. The cabinets (and the book cases that go on top of them) will allow us to finish getting everything else out of the boxes which currently reside in the dining room. Of course, getting the shed done will allow me to set up my tools in the garage to I can finish the "unfinished" cabinets. I don't know why, but my wife seems to take a dim view of my using my power tools to sand wood in the house. There are a few other things in the works as well, including.....

We have one of these Hot Tube/Gazebos out in the back yard which came with the house. We're not hot tube people. We don't know if it works. We don't want to fix it. It won't fit through the gate. I'm in the process of getting a friend to take it off our hands without ripping down our fence!

There is a pile of bathroom lighting fixtures next to the pile of sink fixtures that await installation. Call us obsessive, but we'd prefer to not have the Addams Family style pieces that came with the house. I think, both Home Depot AND Lowes (maybe IKEA too) will have us on their Christmas Card list this year.

Oh, by the way..... yesterday..... Columbus Day was the "Fair Day" for our school district, besides it being the hottest day of the month..... we did our once every 5th year trip to the State Fair of Texas. It was miserable. So miserable, the kids wanted to go home by 2pm! So yeah, we've had our hands full.

So There Was This Computer Case on Craigs List......

This could be a title for my spare time! To me, Craigs List is like a flea market or garage sale that never closes. Living on the outskirts of a sprawling metroplex like Dallas makes it both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, you can just about find anything, on the other, it can be just about anywhere. In the case (unintended pun), of this case.... it was in the far northwestern reaches of Carrollton! If it wasn't such a phenomenal deal, I would've let it pass. But it was $25 (the guy let me have it for $20 since he gave me bad driving directions), and I was headed up that way to go to IKEA to pick up things for my son's room anyway, so..... after a Saturday morning of daughter soccer, and a funeral, I found myself driving up to Frisco.

Did I forget to mention that it's huge? Oh yeah.... it's really big! There are 4, 5.25" bays, on top of 2 drive cages that hold 4, 3.5" drives each. And if that's not enough, you can actually order another drive cage to replace a fan that sits on the floor behind the bottom one, or move the bottom one back in case you want to put a big water cooling "rad" up front. The possibilities are pretty much endless. As it sits, you can put in 8, 3.5" regular HDDs, plus install one of those 5 in 3 cages in the 5.25" drive spaces, giving a total of 13 hard drives, AND still have room to have an optical drive as well! This case can be configured to hold a extended ATX motherboard, plus up to 3 water coolers of various sizes and just about as big of a PSU as you can possibly imagine. What are my intentions for this monster?

Although I don't have room for this, I've outgrown the little Silverstone PS07 that the "Spectre" file server calls home. As it sits right now, there are 4 hard drives in it. For a FreeNAS machine running ZFS, 4 drives is pretty much a minimum. As I become more serious about building a really secure storage solution, I need to do better than a bare minimum. Although, processing power isn't a "thing" with these sorts of builds, other issues, such as ECC RAM is, plus ZFS likes a lot of it. Although older server RAM is cheap and plentiful, it's expensive to buy in higher density sticks than current spec RAM in the. These higher needs require more motherboard real estate, thus requiring full sized ATX boards vs. mATX style. 

Based on my research so far, it appears that, what I need is something along the lines of this Supermicro X7DCL as depicted above. Although, I don't have a need for the dual CPU sockets, everything else on boards of this type is just about perfect:

• 6 RAM sockets that'll take ECC
• 6 or more SATA connections
• Dual Ethernet adapters
• PCI-e AND PCI expansion slots

The only thing that doesn't fit? The form-factor, of course! There-in lies the use of another big PC case. This time, it's a Fractal Design XL R2. You might have concluded that the "XL" stands for extra large,  and you'd be right. This version is the second revision or "R2" of the original design. This series from Fractal is of the quiet variety with sound deadening foam everywhere and a solid door which is perfect for a constantly running file server. That it was bought for $20 is just icing on the cake! OK, a little more than just icing since the original retail price ran north of $150! The only "fly in the ointment" will be where am I going to put this thing? It's predecessor, the Silverstone PS07 cased server lived inside of my "side-desk/credenza". However the XL R2, is a 22" tall by 22" deep case, so that's kind of a big question. At least, now that I'm not sharing the office, there are more options!

New "Propulsion" System for The Stealth

Let me start by apologizing for not having posted for over a month. Of course, you might remember that I was involved in a move, and any of you who have moved an entire family home with kids that's you've been in for over 10 years..... well..... you know! A big Thank You goes to everyone from my in-laws, to some of my students and to my friend Daniel who drove up from his home over an hour away! With all that support, we turned a difficult situation into a workable solution. Anyway, we're mostly done now and things are slowly going back to normal. There's no more sure sign of that than the "Skunkworks" getting back into operation.

For the "Stealth", that means a new "engine" along with a few other "bells and whistles". I'm a practical guy, and in light of that, I built the current version of my desktop workstation with pretty much only what was necessary, vs. what I really wanted. Since that time, the 256Gb SSD that held the OS has been upgraded to 512Gb, and the 1Tb "scratch" drive became 2, 1.5Tb drives. Even the fairly low-powered Radeon HD 7750 graphics card got upgraded to an HD 7870. So, pretty much the only major part from the original build that hadn't been upgraded was the CPU. Although, much of that could be attributed to the efficacy of the Intel Core i5 3450s "Ivy Bridge" chip, it's not as if I didn't dream of having a big-boy i7!

That little fantasy finally came true about a week ago. Let me go off the path a little and talk about how this situation presented itself. Everybody pretty much knows that I'm pretty frugal and will only splurge if an extraordinary situation presents itself. So; here's what happened...

I bought a Dell! An OptiPlex 7010..... Oh No No!!! I don't mean I bought this vanilla appliance of a computer to use from myself. As soon as it arrived, I promptly removed it's processor (i7 3770), and put it into the "Stealth"! So, here's the story behind the story. These Optiplexes, the working "drones" of the office world are sold in the untold tens/hundreds of thousands, with the vast majority equipped with i3 or i5 processors. Sometimes though..... you'll find ones which were sold with an i7! .....and those are the diamonds found in the figurative pile of coal. Most surplusers don't bother to look closely at the palleted hundreds or thousands other than to occasionally pull the drives for crushing when required to do so. Generally, they have the hard drives DOD wiped and sell them for what they can get, quickly so to clear the warehouse and do it all over again. However, you do sometimes find an outfit that will actually pull the entire specification list and post it in their listing. Of course, there are buyer like me out there mining eBay, but not as many as you might think. So, I bought the whole thing for about $300. That's not much more than the typical selling price ($225-275) of the i7 3770 alone and therefore you get the rest of the computer "for free". When you take into account, a fully working machine of this type with a typical (i3 or i5) processor will often sell for around $300, you see where this is going, right? As they say; "the rest is history". I put an i5 back in it and have a client for it at the price of the machine. That's right.... i7 upgrade for free!

Did the Skunkworks do anything else? Well..... I always wanted more RAM and to try water-cooling..... therefore, I chased down a "customer return" Corsair H110 sealed-loop water cooler on Amazon for $80 shipped ($140 MSRP), and caught a sale for 16Gb (2 x 8Gb) more of the Corsair Vengeance RAM on Newegg for $75 (free shipping). With the much more compact water-cooler in place of the massive Cooler Master Hyper 212Evo, I could now access the RAM socket closest to the CPU, thus allowing the memory upgrade!

I'd say that the current version of the Blackbird is as close to being finished as it's going to get! It should be good for at least another year or two. Right now the specs my workstation are as follows:

• Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD4H Motherboard
• Intel "Ivy Bridge" i7 3770 CPU
• Corsair DDR3 Vengeance RAM, 32Gb (4 x 8Gb)- Maximum for this chipset
• Gigabyte Radeon HD 7870 2Gb DDR5 GPU
• Gigabyte Radeon HD 7750 2Gb DDR3 GPU
• Crucial MX-100 512Gb SSD
• Hitachi 1.5Tb/7200rpm HDD (2x)
• Hitachi 1Tb/7200rpm HDD (2x)
• Optiarc DVD+RW Optical drive
• Optiarc Blu-Ray Optical drive
• Seasonic M12 80 Plus Bronze 850w PSU
• Lenovo ThinkVision L220x (1680 x 1200) S-PVA Monitors (2x)
• Lenovo ThinkVision L1940p (1440 x 900) Monitors (2x)
• Cooler Master Cosmos II case

... So They Loaded Up The Truck and Moved To... Terrell!?!

Although this image is from the remake, those of you who grew up in the late 60's and early 70's will remember the Clampetts well! The reruns would be on the TV virtually every day during my childhood and of course the opening credits played with the scene of the family moving to "Beverly; Hills... that is...". That is exactly what I feel like right now as we're in the countdown till the big move next week. We finally have the closing dates for ours and the house we're buying nailed down (sort of) and are scheduling the move date. So, what am I up to?

This of course... well duh! Yup, less than a month before we head back to school. We teachers have less time than that. So yes indeed: we are walking the tightrope of prepping for school (both for ourselves and the kids) while moving to a new home. It's a little stressful....

 

This time is a little different than the previous 7 in that my son Josh is headed to middle schools (grades 7 and 8 here). I taught that age group for much of my career so I'm well aware of all the issues, so that part isn't so bad. Besides, I'm just down the street at the high school and he'll be in a school staff by my former colleagues. I do have to get ready for a one issue though. Perversely; from a technology standpoint, our school district is much better prepared to deal grades 5 and 6 as they issue those kids the Dell Latitude 2100.

True: it's not the most advanced notebook ever with it's 10" screen and Atom processor, but it was rugged and came with 2Gb of RAM. No I'm not joking. That 2Gb is FAR superior than the 1Gb they put in the ThinkPad X200 that they bought for the high school and don't get me started on the 512Mb that was spec'd for the X61 of the middle school machines!!! It's so bad that the majority of the students don't check out school machines any more, preferring to BYOT (Bring Your Own Technology), or the most prevalent solution, use a smartphone. You can imagine what that does for efficiency when they have to actually have to do something productive; oh like type a paper.... 

 

You're probably thinking: "surely your son has a notebook computer", and of course, he does and has had since he was 4 or 5. In fact, he's now on his 5th or 6th generation of notebooks, having started with an A22p and most recently using a T500. Which gets me to my story. If you're the least bit familiar with that 15.1", 6+ pound machine you'll understand that it's a wonderful "workhorse" computer eminently suitable for the combo school work-Minecraft job it had been doing..... while sitting immobile on his desk. However, the concept of having a slightly built 12-year old packing it to and from school daily in a backpack probably isn't an ideal solution. At first I considered moving him to a smaller-lighter-slightly derelict T400 I have sitting around, but really; it isn't that much smaller and lighter. "What to do", says the propellerheaded dad?

The obvious solution is to buy another computer, right? You guys know me too well! In this case, there's more to it than my losing battle with TAS (Technology Acquisition Syndrome), but hey; we all have our little issues, right? Anyway; lets look at the decision matrix. Starting with the fact that school desks are NOT any bigger than when you and I went to school with nothing more than paper and pencils. Despite what the politicians would like you to believe, they are not building the schools any different than they used to. Sure, they add projectors, some Ethernet jacks and a WiFi AP in each room, but the rooms themselves are the same. As in the same size, with the same sized desks in there, with more students by the way (but that's another issue altogether). So you have a desk surface with the same size that they used to have, but the students are expected to have a notebook computer AND paper and pencil on there as well! Which gets us back to the original issue with the model of computer. If you compare the actual difference between the T500 and T400 side-by-side, there's not that much to give between them. Sure the T400 feels lighter, but the reality is that even the "S" model isn't that much better. Solution? You're lookin' at it..... The X-Series of ThinkPad! These machines were designed from the ground up to be "sub-notebooks" meaning between 3 and 4 pounds of carry weight, and a footprint based on a 12" screen. I kind of already knew this as my experience with them go back to the original X20 way back in my IT days in Chicago. In fact, I've owned every model between the X2x, X3x, X4x, X6x, and up to the X30x that have been my personal machine before the current X1. However, my detour through the X300/301/X1 had left me in the bigger screened branch of the line and have forgotten about the 12" machines since the demise of my daughter's X61. At this time, I'm not going to regale you with the process of deciding between relatively recent 12" models, but will simply say that I ended up at a working X220 at $59, but missing parts.

If you haven't read my old stuff before or I haven't made my point: here's the deal. These are ABSOLUTELY, the notebook computers to target!!! Let's start with that it was $59..... less than $80 after shipping. It was missing the A/C adapter, hard drive, drive bay cover, but had the critical battery! It was missing everything I had and mostly didn't want and had the one relatively expensive piece to replace. The X220 is the "Sandy-bridge" i5/2520m core version of these machines and is only 2 generations off of being current. Additionally, the 4Gb of RAM it did have was in the form of 1 module, giving me the ability to simply put in another to max it out to 8Gb (which I did immediately). The missing hard drive was going to get pulled and replaced with a 120Gb Intel 330 SSD out of his old machine anyway. Oh yeah, least I forget that I had to spend $1.96 to buy a drive-bay cover. Woe is me! Need I say that I have a drawer full of ThinkPad A/C adapters and that he'll be able to go anywhere in the house without having to move one. And since his and my schools have both been equipped with ThinkPads for years, there'll be A/C adapters everywhere! This might very well be the slickest upgrade I've done in years!

 Now that I'm feeling good about myself.....