SERIOUSLY DELL, WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?

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Late last year, I purchased a Dell Studio 17 laptop which features a high definition LCD (1920 x 1200), a powerful Core2Duo processor, 4GB of RAM, among other neat specs along with a nice and comfortable full sized keyboard and a numeric keypad—seriously, very nice to use as a desktop replacement. By late last year, I meant July 2008 so you know it’s fairly recent. Save for the XPS ultimate gaming supremacy laptop, the Studio 17 is about as high end you can get for a “home user”. This home user, by the way, happens to be a freelance professional photographer and who uses professional industry standard equipment—Canon EOS 5D Mark II—which uses Compact Flash media storage. Now, the Dell Studio 17 comes with an 8-in-1 card reader and for some out of this galaxy reason, Dell engineered this laptop to support every other media card except Compact Flash—the de facto storage media for majority of digital SLR cameras today—entry level, semi-pro and pro bodies.

The Nikon D3 has simultaneous support for dual CF cards, Canon 1-series handles 1 CF and 1 SD. Dell, Dell, Dell, what were you thinking? With the EOS 5D Mk II camera comes support for high speed CF reads and writes through UDMA. The trouble with this is the prior generation of High Speed readers cannot support UDMA. Case in point: a full 8GB Sandisk Extreme Ducati Edition card would take close to 45 minutes to download to the  Studio 17—this is unacceptable. Period. Even the “high speed” how-many-in-one reader on my Dell desktop fared slightly better but still a hopeless 30 mins to download the same.

One afternoon, my sudden urge for coffee had me grabbing a bottle off Soi Heng coffeeshop (yes, I know, it sounds weird having coffee in a bottle but they do this for take outs). Right next door to it is a shop that sells mobile phone accessories along with PSP game titles and stuff and I noticed this rather interesting and rather new APACER media reader. I inspected the item and immediately noticed that it supports “Ultra II, Extreme” and without much hesitation I bought one followed by a second the next day. It’s B$28 each and if I hesitate anymore I’d be obsolete downloading at 45 minutes from each card! There, I’ve said it and I feel much better. I mean, come on, surely CF is one of the big “8”-in-one (no pun intended)? And incidentally, the 8GB Ducati card downloads dropped from 45/30mins to around 9 minutes the last time I tested. Now that, I’m extremely pleased.

CANON HOTSHOE MICRO SWITCH FIX

It’s been a while since I made a DIY repair or modification post as I thought I had seen the last of the problems that can sometimes plague us. I’ve had my share of problems from annoying issues to camera failure at the worse possible moments. Yet no matter how careful and forward thinking you may be, Murphy’s Law follows us everywhere. I know this because the number of photographers who have encountered flash-related problems are more than a handful. Just check out the number of forum posts that link to my Speedlite 580EX-II Hotshoe Fix post including a new threads that I discovered this morning on Fred Miranda and also Canon Board.

It all began two nights ago when I fitted the now notorious Speedlite 580EX-II on the EOS 20D and it wouldn’t fire. My first reaction, Oh, here we go again. The hot shoe screws on the camera probably needed tightening.”  Careless me, after removing the whole metal assembly, I fiddled with the plastic micro-switch and the whole piece fell inside. There is no way to recover it and since it’s plastic I am not at all concerned about the possibility of shorting the circuits. While the idea of using something so readily available such as a paper clip sounds so inviting and practical, I’m concerned about it getting lost (again) so I looked around the house and found a hairbrush bristle made of strong plastic and it fitted perfectly as a replacement to the original item.

How about that eh, an American solution (USA made hair brush) to fix a stupid Japanese design flaw that’s caused by the carelessness of a Chinese owner? I say stupid because there has got to be a better way to design a micro switch that isn’t a piece of unsecured 0.5 cm plastic. Incidentally, professional SLR bodies such as the EOS 5d and 1 series do not have this switch as they don’t come with a pop-up flash. This micro-switch tells the camera if an external flash is being used so that the pop-up flash isn’t activated either automatically or intentionally.

I have done a number of tests while I was looking at fixing this. In the camera’s confused state (should the micro-switch trigger is missing like mine), pressing the pop-up flash button while an external flash is being used, the camera attempts to pop the onboard flash up but after 3 failed clicks on the actuator, you’ll see ERR 05 on the LCD. This is designed to prevent damage to the mechanism (the person behind this logic was smarter than the one  responsible for the 0.5 cm plastic idea)

So here we have one of the freshly snipped bristle (my wife has not noticed her brush’s newly acquired defect and she doesn’t have to either). Note that it should be precisely 0.5 cm and no longer. Not even a wee bit longer as I discovered that it didn’t work so I had to have it filed down to the exact length. According to Conrad’s article, 0.4 cm worked too. ** To avoid any confusion as a reader pointed out, 0.5 cm is how long the bristle needs to be cut, not the thickness of it.

Note the stub that appears through the metal bracket. This picture was taken before I filed it shorter. In my tests, this is what I noticed. If this micro-switch trigger or stub goes missing, power to the hot shoe contacts is cut off. ie the Speedlites do not fire at all. I tried the 580EX and 580EXII and they consistently failed to fire. I think in most cases users may have a stuck stub in which case the pop-up flash would not pop because camera thinking an external flash is present.

Now, these four screws tighten the entire hot shoe and hold the flash in place. Over time, they work themselves loose and you’ll notice the bracket has a tendency to wobble. Of course, you don’t normally see the screws as they’re covered by a metal shim (picture below). You can refer to Conrad’s article on how to get the shim off.

If you have a Canon EOS 300D, 350D, 400D … 20D, 30D, 40D, 50D and future  four, three and two digits models, this post applies to you although I sincerely hope you never have to fix yours this way. There is a saying that creativity is born out of isolation and where I live, I’m fairly isolated from where I might get this DIY mess fixed. However, I would be happy to hear from non Canon owners to post their finding as to whether their camera’s hotshoe has the same brilliant design.

Trivia: The Goody hair brush has (yes I counted) 60 bristles. Each bristle is good for two fixes so one brush (quite possibly an obsolete model too) gives you a solution for 120 micro-switch replacement. Hahaha—keep your woman’s hair brush away from me—when I run out of spares, I might have to go look elsewhere! 🙂

NOKIA E71 DELIVERS INTERNET RADIO

Seven months after I published my personal Nokia E71 review claiming it’s Everything and More I hadn’t realised that Nokia would continue to develop new functionality considering by today’s standard, a phone more than 6 months old had to be old somewhat. Perhaps the economic downturn has slow things down and product lifecycles are now stretched much longer than it would have survived the attention span of buyers.

Regardless, I love surprises like this especially when it’s completely unexpected. I had the phone connected to my PC to do a routine calendar sync and midway running Nokia PC Suite (curious, is there such a thing as a Mac Suite?) and received an alert that a new firmware 200.21.188 was available. I hadn’t even bothered to find out what the new firmware was supposed to fix much less the opportunities it would bring. Today I discovered by accident that the new firmware had installed Internet Radio and something dodgy called “My Nokia” along with some new themes.

Palringo continues to be my preferred IM app on the E71 and I know that the developers have been actively rolling out new releases which I’m most pleased. It can still be further improved in the usability department but let’s not get me started about the the one thing that irritates me most in Palringo. Moving on, when Nokia introduced FM Tuning years ago, I thought the concept was quite cool before MP3 monopolised our conscience and that someday we’d be able to listen to a good FM station while we’re waiting for the bus (not necessarily a Brunei past time) or waiting to see the doctor (a common post-festive celebration phenomenon) etc. There is and has been usually just one problem with this concept—radio reception that requires the earphones to be plugged in and is never with me when I needed them!

With Internet Radio, ear phones are completely optional (unless where privacy is preferred). The Station Directory allows you to browse stations sorted by Genres | Language | Country | Top Stations … all no brainer stuff and sound quality comes in Standard (less than 48 kbps), High (48—128 kbps) and Best (> 128 kbps) for those discerning listeners . At home, Internet Radio access by WiFi and comes up with a list of internet stations (you can access them via GPRS or 3G too). Curious, I entered “MIX FM” thinking that this would be the same station as the Malaysian one that I’ve found to be a lot more entertaining and interesting. In just a few seconds of buffering, the E71 changed personality and became a good friend—one that I quickly discovered to require content filtering of some sort. I remember but vaguely the title of a Pussy Cat Dolls track where a certain f word is used in the lyrics and the DJ doesn’t speak a word of English except when he’s saying the name of the station: Mix FM 😛 Nice huh, a station that plays uncensored hits!

Then I moved on to see what MY NOKIA is about and got the following screen. Oh well, at least some content isn’t available. No big deal—we’re used to not having most stuff anyway like really fast and reliable broadband. Just two nights ago, a photographer friend in Hong Kong had 30Mb fibre broadband installed at his home and he said that new bandwidth should allow him to upload Vimeo  HD video files a lot quicker than before! Tsk Tsk.

A behind the scene shot of the setup. I must be out of my mind to go through the steps to shoot the E71 but I was in the mood and even while setting it up, MIX FM kept me entertained. Oh, before I forget, check out also a station in Singapore called “247 Music Radio—24 Hr Non stop Commercial Free Music” Yeah baby, no commercial sounds right! No DJ even better 😛

Now, those who are interested in Internet Radio and do not possess a Nokia E71 or similar, there’s this neat little USB powered dongle called iRadio Pop. Plug it right, install the software and you have access to more internet radio stations (the guys at Concepts have pre-programmed your favourite local Brunei stations too) than you can imagine. Perfect for those who fancy a foreign dialect such as Korean (not me but some members of my in-laws are those kind who only very recently became fans of Jan Shim Photography—sure took your sweet time eh girls? 🙂 Those interested in the iRadio Pop can pick one or two up at Concepts Computer store. I understand from a source that they now have the new and  attractively priced Acer Aspire M7720-492X that’s powered by Intel Core i7 920 (2.66Mhz / 8Mb cache) CPU. Mighty tempting considering I’m just venturing into resource intensive apps such as Photoshop CS4 and Lightroom for my photography workflow. Am I defecting from Dell? We just wait and see!