Reports on the death of film are [you know the rest]

Dave Farquhar Photography ,

Giddy Slashdotters are proclaiming the death of film since Kodak has announced it’s not going to sell film cameras anymore, at least not in the United States and Europe.
It proves to me that whoever wrote that story summary knows little or nothing about serious photography.

For many years, Kodak was a big name in serious photography. But come the 1960s, you started seeing serious cameras from a lot of other manufacturers. For the duration of my lifetime, Kodak cameras were pretty much relegated to the casual point-and-shoot arena.

But meanwhile, Kodak remained one of the largest producers of film. It remains so today. Go into any store and look for film, and the two brands you’re most likely to find are Kodak and Fuji.

Serious photographers have only recently begun to prefer digital. Some serious photographers still prefer the look of film. Pictures shot on film have a different look from digital shots, and they probably always will. Neither type of camera’s view on reality is necessarily more correct, but they’re certainly different, sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly.

Casual photographers like digital point-and-shoots because they can take hundreds of pictures and only print out (and thus only pay for) the good ones. And there’s the perception among certain laypeople that digital is always better. CDs sound better than cassettes, so digital pictures will look better than film, right? That’s what the girl I was dating a year ago thought, and I never convinced her otherwise.

The money is in disposable cameras, film, and digitals. There’s just not much money to be made in the traditional point-and-shoots–too many companies are making them, and the margins are too thin. So Kodak is concentrating on the areas where it can make money. And Kodak can make a lot of money selling $150 digital cameras to people year over year (people will want to upgrade so they can make bigger prints, after all), or disposable cameras to people who forget to pack a camera, or film to people buying razor-thin-margin cameras made by someone else.

Once you can buy a $40 digital camera with resolution comparable to film, you’ll be able to declare film dead. But you can’t do that yet, and you won’t be able to for a few more years.

But I’m sure you already knew all of this, so I’m not sure why I’m writing this. But I feel better now.

Myths about the 1904 World’s Fair

Dave Farquhar St. Louis
Myths about the 1904 World’s Fair

The 1904 World’s Fair was the stuff of legends, especially in St. Louis. St. Louis has a bit of an inferiority complex, so the 1904 World’s Fair gives it a rare point of pride. But there are a number of myths surrounding the 1904 World’s Fair. Let’s look at three of them: the ice cream cone, hot dog, and hamburger.

According to legend, the ice cream cone, hot dog, and hamburger as we know it today were all invented at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. But in all three cases, there are earlier examples in history, though one can make a case that the 1904 World’s Fair helped popularize all three.

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I hope someday I’ll understand this model railroad electronics page

Dave Farquhar Toy trains

Rob Paisley has a page of model railroad circuitry, including, most interestingly to me, a driver for stepper motors. You’d use stuff like this if you wanted to have people moving around inside your buildings, or if you wanted other moving parts on your layout.
I used to build electronic circuits, when I was a sophomore and junior in high school. It’s been so long now that I don’t even remember what all of the symbols mean. It’s almost sad.

But the good news for me is that I’ll be able to build all kinds of cool stuff once I figure it out. I’ve got lots of old 5.25-inch floppy drives in my basement, with stepper motors ripe for harvesting. A stash of 5.25-inch floppy drives with amber LEDs would be a railroad scratchbuilder’s dream, wouldn’t it?

Making two-part plaster molds

Dave Farquhar Toy trains ,

One of the station platforms from Dad’s old Lionel set only has one of its three supports. I could possibly track down new ones, or fashion new ones out of wood or some other material, but the easiest thing to do would be to just cast two new ones, using the first one as the original.
This guide to two-part plaster molds is written with action figure parts in mind, but the same principle applies for any solid three-dimensional object.

Keep in mind it’s illegal to do any of this stuff except for your own personal use, unless, of course, you’re casting copies of something you made yourself.

Linux kernel 2.6.0 is in Debian Unstable

Dave Farquhar Linux

Fresh on the heels of the Linux Kernel 2.6.1 release, Kernel 2.6.0 made it into Debian Sid (unstable). I haven’t tried it yet, as I messed things up on my main Linux box when I tried to upgrade to a pre-release version of 2.6.
I really ought to put a Linux partition on my Athlon system and upgrade it to Debian Unstable with a 2.6 kernel.

For those of you who currently have a working Debian box, it might be apt-get upgrade time. See why I like Debian? You can upgrade to all the latest stuff with, at worst, two commands: apt-get update and apt-get upgrade, or apt-get update and apt-get distupgrade. No chasing down RPMs and dependencies, no waiting around for stuff to compile and wondering if it’ll work on your system. It lets you be cutting edge, yet conservative.

Slimming down the bird: A 2.6 kernel for PCs with 4-8 megs

Dave Farquhar Linux ,

In case you haven’t read about it elsewhere, a new branch of the Linux kernel called -tiny was quietly released last month. Its main intent is for embedded systems, but I can see all sorts of uses for it. The smaller the kernel, the faster it loads off a floppy, so it’d be great for boot disks. Likewise for diskless machines that boot off the network.
Some people claim that compiling the kernel with the -Os parameter, as this branch permits, causes faster operation than compilations with the normal -O2. The theory is that the system spends more time in user space than in kernel space, and therefore, the kernel will almost never be in system cache, and therefore, the smaller it is, the faster it will operate. I’m sure someone who knows some specifics of how CPUs and caches work could validate or refute this. Even Steve DeLassus, who has both an electrical engineering and a computer science degree from one of the best universities in the world for that kind of thing, admits that sometimes these specifics get over his head. So if Steve doesn’t always know, then how am I supposed to know?

But the argument sounds good on paper.

With this kernel slimmed down as much as possible (no networking), it can boot in 2 megs. With networking, it can boot in 2.5 megs. With a comfortable set of features, it runs in 4-8 megs, which a mainline kernel doesn’t always do anymore.

Obviously, this is a perfect companion for projects like asmutils and uClibc/Busybox/Tinylogin.

Vintage signs and lighting for your toy train layout

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , , ,

I couldn’t have possibly found this site too soon: http://www.gatewaynmra.org/download.htm.
Besides photographs of six vintage building signs, there are also numerous other photographs for download that might be useful, and also some articles with really good tips.

Emphasis is more on serious modeling in HO or N scale than in toy-train O or S gauge, but in the case of the photographs, all that means is you have to print them bigger in order to use them. And the tips for assembling and improving models from kits hold regardless of type.

I also found this tutorial on lighting your railroad buildings with Christmas lights. Seeing as most places have them on sale for 50, 60, or 75 percent off while they last this time of year, the timing’s pretty good.

One guy in rec.models.railroad suggested using yellow LEDs to light your buildings, but seeing as a strand of Christmas lights is dirt cheap and I don’t have anything to cannibalize yellow LEDs from, I may go the Christmas light route first.

Who will speak up?

Dave Farquhar General

In Germany they first came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me –
and by that time no one was left to speak up.
Those of you who don’t know what this post is in response to, be glad.

Those of you who do know, remember this: Bigotry is bigotry. Take it at face value.

Unfortunately, someone that people once associated me with has shown himself to be little more than a bigot. I can only say that I’m glad very few people, if anyone, associate me with this individual (he has a name but it’s not worth printing) any longer.

I’m a Christian, and I don’t think I’ve made it any secret that I disagree with Islam. But anyone who would advocate rounding up all Muslims and deporting them, and outlawing the religion entirely is completely out of line. He needs to be deported back to whatever rock he crawled out from under.

I can only hope that when this psychopath decides it’s time to come for the Christians and he comes after me, that there’ll be somebody left to speak up.

Those of you who own a copy of my book, please turn to page xiii, go to the third full paragraph on that page, and to the third sentence, and cross out the first name that appears. I wouldn’t want anyone to ever find that page and get the idea that I ever agreed with anything that sorry excuse for an American–and for that matter, a very sorry excuse for a human being–ever said.