Being arrested because a cop thought you might be carrying a pocket knife. Not brandishing it, not openly using a clearly-illegal type of knife, but having a slight bulge in your front pocket suggesting that there’s a knife clipped there.

All part of an ambitious District Attorney’s plan to crack down on the scourge of modern pocket knives purchased at major retailers by law-abiding citizens. Because if it looks scarier than a butter knife, it must be a criminal tool that no normal person would own. This may sound familiar to anyone who’s seen the laundry list of cosmetic features used to define “assault weapons”.

Personally, I carry a 555 and a 710, so no Big Apple for me!

Now for the real question. Is this District Attorney:

A. running for re-election.
B. pretending to be "tough on crime".
C. raising revenue with easy arrests.
D. improving cops' personal knife collections.
E. ruining lives with bullshit convictions.
F. diverting police resources from actual crime.
G. all of the above

...the other three were of a breed Verkan Vall had learned to recognize on any time-line --- the arrogant, cocksure, ambitious, leftist politician, who knows what is best for everybody better than anybody else does, and who is convinced that he is inescapably right and that whoever differs with him is not only an ignoramus but a venal scoundrel as well.
Last Enemy, H. Beam Piper, August, 1950

I was doing some lens-testing around the house this morning, and one shot in particular struck me as interesting for laptop wallpaper.

Sadly, the result of the testing was that my 35/1.4 is busted; mechanically functional, but severe circular aberration wide open, and horrible back focus. My camera’s micro-AF adjustment can compensate for the back focus, but unless I want to shoot dreamy soft-focus landscape and architecture photos, it needs fixed or replaced. Sony’s current 35/1.4 lists for $1,369, or I can send it to the last remaining authorized service center for Minolta lenses, Precision Camera, for $250. If I don’t want to eventually pitch it, I might as well get it fixed now, while there’s still someone willing to do the work.

I originally bought it used, and it never seemed quite right, but most of the time I prefer to shoot with much longer lenses, so it didn’t bother me too much. Testing it with my newly-acquired LensAlign MkII allowed me to quantify the focus issue, and direct comparison to my other f/1.4 lenses made the CA flaringly obvious. Some of my other lenses benefited from a small micro-AF adjustment, but that was 1-3 units of tuning; the 35 was so far out of spec that it needed -18 units, and the scale only goes to 20.

My previous uses had been at f/8-f/16 at 20+ feet, which mostly masked the defects, but the LensAlign test was done wide-open at 2.9 feet, with only an inch of depth of field on each side of the focus point. And it was off by nearly an inch.

The picture above wasn’t shot with the bad lens, by the way. It was done with my Tamron 90/2.8 Macro (which, I discovered, falsely identifies itself as a Minolta 100/2.8 Macro!), and the lack of focus was deliberate. It’s a dusty old compact disc that was sitting on a shelf, reflecting the blinds from the nearby window.

When I was shooting for Glamourcon, my rig was pretty silly. Heavy pro SLR with vertical grip, 80-200/2.8 lens that stuck out a mile, big honking flash with a belt-mounted battery pack, and a Newton rotating flash mount. Not so strange for a wedding photographer, but a bit over the top at an autograph show. I often didn’t have the footroom for the 80-200/2.8, so I’d switch to the old “secret handshake” 28-135/4-4.5, using just the 50-135 range with a decent hood. Still, the rig was so bulky that I’d ditch it in my hotel room as soon as I got all the official shots of the guests, and walk around with something more reasonable.

The only thing I owned that was bigger and heavier than the 80-200/2.8 was the mighty 300/2.8, which is great fun outdoors, but not suitable for grab-and-go shoots with models. More of a lug-and-go, really.

Which is why I found Jeffrey Friedl’s recent street-photography shoots intriguing, since they were shot with a 300/2. My 300mm lens weighs 5 pounds. His monster tips the scales at 16 pounds.

The price? “If you have to ask…”

[incidentally, IIRC I’m the one who first described the Minolta 28-135/4-4.5 as the “secret handshake of the Minolta user’s group”, so it was amusing to see the term used frequently in the reviews on the Dyxum site. It really is a terrific lens, but many people have been disappointed with their results; this appears to be a tolerance issue, where certain combinations of body and lens result in a touch of back focus, eliminating its sharpness. Mine was fantastic on three different bodies, and if I ever reclaim it from its current home, my new body supports per-lens micro-adjustments to eliminate any back/front focus issues.]

This morning, I stumbled across one of the small things I bought in Japan, a souvenir keychain from Toudaiji.

Turns out this little fellow has a secret.

more...

The AsoIku web site has finally been updated to reflect the real release date of the OVA, and also finally includes a description of the contents (as well as extras available if you buy through specific dealers).

What’s the focus of the story in this special?

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The Kindle for Mac application is crap. Not in the sense of “limited functionality and poor UI” (although those are true, too), but in a more serious “corrupts user identity every time it does its (weekly?) auto-update”. I had originally thought the problem was with the version available in the Mac App Store (which, thanks to Apple, is much, much older), but no, the direct download from Amazon does it as well.

Basically, if I open the app and it asks me to accept terms and service, I know that it just wiped out my account credentials, and I’ll have to delete:

~/Library/Application Support/Kindle
~/Library/Preferences/com.amazon.*

then deregister it on the web site, launch the app, register it again, and then re-download everything (painfully slowly, thanks to the poor UI).

I note that no one ever responds to people who have this problem on the Kindle support forums, and the last response I got to a direct email report was “gosh, we’re sorry; I’ve forwarded your message to the team!”.

[Update: and again! This time when I finished re-downloading everything, I made a tarball of the known good copy. Next time it blows up, I’ll have a before/after to send them. Grrr.]

The Rick Brant adventure novels are scarce and tend to be priced for collectors. I hadn’t realized until just now, however, that nearly half of them have fallen into the public domain and are available through Project Gutenberg. Cleaned-up versions are also available at Manybooks.

I’m pleased that this includes the first one I read, The Egyptian Cat Mystery, which does an excellent job of introducing the real science of SETI, unlike, say, every other boy’s adventure novel I’ve ever seen that dealt with aliens. Why? Wikipedia says, “During the 1960s, Goodwin served as Special Assistant to the Administrator of NASA…”