How to distinguish AI and AI-S lenses

The old time manual Nikkors from circa 1977 had the designation of an AI lens and then sometime leading into 1981 the AI-S lenses replaced the AI; both AI and AI-S lenses will fit onto all modern day Nikon F-mount bodies with no issues and the lens are functionally identical.

With the release of the AI-S lenses however, there were some subtle changes external to the lens: the primary reason for AI-S was to use enable cameras to use program or shutter priority modes - this was important for the upcoming release of cameras with this function at the time and the AI-S lenses were designed to facilitate this. With this said, the lenses that had a AI and then an AI-S counterpart were typically optically identical.



But why does this matter to be able to distinguish between an AI vs AI-S lens, if the optical formulas were the same?

Going Long: Nikkor 200mm f/4 AI

A 200mm can be a useful focal length in the bag, albiet a less frequently used length. However the modern and autofocusing xx-200mm zooms are heavy and expensive and therefore options to satisfy the 200mm can be better sourced from the legacy Nikkor AI/AIS catalog.

Going Wide(ish): Nikkor 20mm f/3.5 AI

The circa 1980 Nikkor 20mm f/3.5 AI lens comes with a reputation for being flare resistant and reasonably sharp as well as being very lightweight.



Nikon have failed to produce a (effective) wide and lightweight prime for their DX systems and the 20mm f/3.5 AI can potentially fill this gap (giving a 35mm equivalent FOV of 30mm) with the added benefit that the lens would not overlap with any 24-70mm focal lengths.

Upgrading Synology DS209 storage

As with all storage, there comes a time where you exhaust the storage and you need to move up. After many years of service, the disks in my Synology NAS need to upgraded and we'll see how we can repurpose the existing disks - but as you'd expect, there's a few bumps to be aware along the way.

Orico USB3.0 enclosure inactivity/disconnect fix

Many hardware (especially cheap) vendors will sell the same product but replace and gut the internal electronics. This makes finding compatible/previously successful devices a PITA. One such recent example is a cheap Orico external USB 3.0 enclosure for 2.5" harddisks that is readily available on place such as Amazon.

Smallest hostap RPi setup

The original 2011 Raspberry Pi model B (rev1) with its 256MB is dwarfed by it's younger siblings now but this can still be used a very cost effective board for projects such as a portable wifi access point.



Whilst this use case is nothing new, trying to create an access point with the smallest SD card sizes can cause a few problems.

Simple Web monitor/maintanence for RPi

Basic maintanence and monitoring for your RPi can obviously be achieved by ssh into the machine but sometimes there needs to be an easier way.

RPi: bonding network interfaces

One of the big advantages of the Raspberry Pi is that it's form factor makes it so portable; I can have a RPi moved around the home depending on what I need at the time but it does mean I need to worry about which network interface is available to the RPi without having to log into the RPi, reconfigure to/from wifi to/from ethernet etc..