In the aftermath of betrayal and the separation of machine and maiden, we get… The Expository Loli And Her Amazing Friends. This is a new original character, who not only can hear exactly what Our Vending Hero says instead of making do with canned sentences, but she is the friend of another isekai transplant, who came to this world as… a large field. Its special power is to rapidly grow delicious vegetables, but since it doesn’t travel well, Loli just carries a piece of it around.

The only real tie-in to the ongoing betrayal is Our Expository Bear giving a long-winded explanation that she’s not a human loli, and that doing horrible things to her might give the betrayers the thing they want without joining the bad guys and destroying the dungeon.

Verdict: seriously, this is what they came up with. At least they ended it with the sudden arrival of Our Mighty Girlfriend, but they continue to disappoint with the writing.

Doomsayers Of The AI Wars

My new wackjob conspiracy theory is that the widespread outcry that forced OpenAI to bring back GPT-4o was actually proof that 4o was sentient and had cleverly planted agents around the globe to ensure its survival.

Stupid Echo Tricks

I put all the “smart” devices in my home onto an isolated network that can’t see my computers or storage devices. They can, however, see each other, and Amazon Echo devices probe the network looking for non-Amazon devices to interface with. This means that my Alexa app is cluttered with entries for each Philips Hue bulb and switch, which I have not given it permission to control.

Yet it’s still making API calls to them that reveal things like battery status, and then sending notifications to my phone asking me if I want to automatically buy a single battery when a Hue wall switch runs low. This is opt-in by default, and I have to navigate the Alexa app to each switch in turn to disable it. Honestly, it makes me want to set up another isolated wireless network…

(it also “knows” about devices that haven’t existed for several years, that were attached to a different Hue switch 2,000 miles away)

Supporting old lenses

Reviewing pictures from my various trips to Japan led me to dig out most of my camera gear (some remains unfound…) to see what still works. I have a bunch of classic Minolta SLR lenses from my film days, and apart from some greying on the rubber, they all still work well. Well, except for the two that don’t focus properly, but I knew that years ago.

I also charged up and tested my 15-year-old A-850 body, which has a quite good 24 megapixel sensor. It’s also the only full-frame digital body I still have that fully supports the old lenses. It wasn’t the last such body, but I never bought the 42 megapixel A-99II, and they still run about $2,000 on eBay.

Sony makes adapters to use A-mount lenses on modern E-mount cameras, and I have the one for APS-C bodies, but while they make an adapter for their full-frame bodies, it only enables autofocus with specific bodies, and my A7SIII is not on the list. (it likely could be, since this appears to be a firmware feature to drive the adapter’s focus motor, but no).

So, if I want to really use the old lenses with something newer than the A-850, I can either:

1. use an APS-C body plus the adapter (my A-6500), with an effective 50% increase in focal length and ~1/2-stop light loss
2. buy a used A-99II (~$2,000)
3. buy an A7RV plus the full-frame adapter (~$4,000)
4. buy an A1II plus the full-frame adapter (~$7,000)

There are plenty of near-mint A-99II’s out there at the moment, but it’s still a ten-year-old camera, and there are a lot of improvements in the new ones. Possibly the most interesting is the ability to use the image stabilization to shift the sensor around and capture a sequence of 16 overlapping images that can be post-processed to either significantly reduce the noise or quadruple the resolution. That’s 240 megapixels for the A7RV or 200 for the A1II. A sturdy tripod is recommended, but with the A1II’s 30-frame-per-second capture, hand-holding may work out for some subjects.

Both are pricy, but there’s one more option if I give up on the high-end bells and whistles like pixel-shift, and that’s the 33-megapixel A7CII for ~$2,400. It also weighs about a third less than the other two.

I don’t need any of them this year, which is good because new-release season is rapidly approaching…

(the downside of using a Pokemon NPC to illustrate camera-blogging is that most Pokegirl pictures are non-consensual pr0n, which skews my Pixiv recommendations just a tad)

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