Random Bits from Boredom

My Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 AI-S was a favourite for many years and was one of my first manual focus lenses and the dampened, but not stiff, focus...

The Nikkor 80-200mm f/4.5 AI was a compact professional grade zoom produced from ~1977-1981 - it was regarded highly at the time with some p...

Hand held light meters relevance may been less common with photographers but they arguably still have a niche, particular in studio/flash ap...

The Micro-Nikkor 105mm f/4 AI was released along side the Micro-Nikkor 55mm f/3.5 AI in 1977 and offered a more comfortable working distanc...

The Micro Nikkor 55mm f/3.5 AI is an ~40 year old lens and my copy has various "dry or uneven" areas over its focus range after a...

Maintaining older Nikkor lenses has become easier with resources such as Richard Haw's website and also Kenneth Olsen's YouTube cha...

The final 50mm f/1.8 AI-S manual focus lens, with its 0.6m minimum focus distance and missing rabbit ear/coupling prong, was a lens that was...

The 50mm was the "standard" kit lens in the 1970s and there were a number of iterations across the AI and AI-S variations from the...

The Nikkor 180mm f/2.8 ED AI-S released in 1981 seems to have acquired lengendary status over years but this lens but this prime focal lengt...

The Nikkor 135mm f/2.8 AI was released ~1979, and whilst it seemed to have been shadowed somewhat by its 105mm f/2.5 AI-S sibling, still had...

Phone cameras have steadily been improving over the last decade but one issue for serious photographers has been the ability to obtain full ...

Ensuring your delivered code is memory leak free is a standard concern for C/C++ developers and valgrind is a great tool to assist. One pr...

The 2022 facelifted Mk4 Focus, announced in Oct 2021 , replaces the orginal Focus Mk4 (2018-2020) - only available in Europe - is to be the...

The fedora packager manager takes care of all your dependancies but how do we deal with user compiled binaries and misisng dependencies?

Having documented other people's difficulties with replacing their Herman Miller Aeron gas lifts , it was finally time to do the same fo...

Fedora 32 introduced debuginfod which is meant to provide dynamic debug symbols to debugging tools. The problem I've found is that usi...

Having access to dev OpenShift 4.x cluster that you control is invaluable - Redhat now provides this ability through their Code Ready Conta...

At work we are getting pushed into a hot-desking setup and each member of staff is being moved onto a thin client ThinkPad. Of course a thi...

Whilst audacity is a well known and simple sound editor it has some limitations when compared to digitial audio workstations (DAWs): this ...

With the Thunderbolt enabled laptop there are now more options available to integrate with your different workspaces; a docking station is ...