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How I mounted my 120-year-old Bausch & Lomb + Beck lens
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How I mounted my 120-year-old Bausch & Lomb + Beck lens

Several people have contacted me privately and asked for information regarding how I actually mounted my 120-year-old Bausch & Lomb + Beck lens on my µ4/3 camera. I hope in this article to shed a little light on how one can make such an old lens and seemingly-incompatible lens actually stay on a modern mirrorless…

120 year old Bausch & Lomb + Beck lens, in action, on Portsdown Hill
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120 year old Bausch & Lomb + Beck lens, in action, on Portsdown Hill

Regular readers may know that my 2023 Christmas project was to make this 120 year old Bausch & Lomb + Beck lens fit on my µ4/3 cameras and actually capture some pictures with it. Unfortunately, at the time, the weather was too wet to take the thing outdoors. Fortunately by early January the weather became…

Making a 120-year-old Bausch & Lomb + Beck lens work on a modern mirrorless camera
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Making a 120-year-old Bausch & Lomb + Beck lens work on a modern mirrorless camera

Over Christmas I set myself a little task of trying to make a 120-year- old Bausch & Lomb + Beck lens fit on a fairly modern camera. The lens was given to me in the late 1980’s by one of my very first models. It was a nice thought but to be honest, I came…

BBC-broken
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BBC deliberately breaks its internet radio service

Editor’s note: a list of new BBC AAC HLS internet ratio streams can be found here. Seems the BBC has decided to make all its AAC HLS streams only available to wealthy people who have Apple or similar devices. And the good old-fashioned “shoutcast” MP3 streams have gone altogether. Seems that if you can afford…

Donald Trump’s court calendar

Donald Trump’s court calendar

Date Trial 2023-10-02 Start of Trump’s civil trial where AG Letitia James is seeking $250 million. 2023-10-23 Start of Kenneth Cheesebro’s and Sydney Powell’s joint trial 2024-01-15 Start of E Jean Carroll’s defamation trial 2024-01-29 Federal class-action trial against Trump 2024-03-04 Trump’s federal criminal trial in Washington DC 2024-03-25 Start of  Alvin Bragg’s Stormy Daniels …

Wagner Group rebellion presents further serious difficulties for Putin

Wagner Group rebellion presents further serious difficulties for Putin

Wagner Group rebellion presents further serious difficulties for Putin Seems that Vlad the Invader and the leader mercenary army he hired to bolster his own failing army in Ukraine have had a major falling out. Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin claims that Russia bombed his Ukraine HQ killing 2000 of his men and has vowed…

Simple street photography
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Simple street photography

My experience of street photography is to make oneself looks as insignificant and unprofessional as possible – which comes rather too naturally to me, TBH! 🙂 Kit should be small, light and ideally somewhat battered looking – a “distressed” look that most of my kit usually acquires after a few weeks’ service. No expensive-looking kit…

Bye Bye Boris, again

Bye Bye Boris, again

Amongst his many sackings for lying, he was sacked by the Times for making up quotes. So yes, the Daily Heil does indeed seem to be the perfect place for Boris to get paid stupid money for making up more asinine far-right crap. A more detailed list of Johnson’s more egregious lies… And as ever,…

A very near miss
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A very near miss

Seems during the wee small hours of this morning, our little blue planet had a very near miss, as we narrowly avoided a collision with a speeding asteroid. At 2023-01-27 00:29 UTC, an asteroid codenamed “2023 BU” came within about 3,589 kilometres of the planet’s surface, around the southerly tip of South America. To put…

More about my new Ultrastar 20 TB hard disk backup system
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More about my new Ultrastar 20 TB hard disk backup system

I don’t quite know how I managed it but my personal/business dataset has now grown to around 17 Terrabytes. Most of it is spread across multiple smaller disks. This is becoming increasingly difficult to manage. In fact, we are decommissioning our 4TB drives. This is partly because they are well beyond recommended end of life,…

UA1101l power storage unit

UA1101l power storage unit

For my little IT business, the possibility of power cuts is very bad news indeed. So we invested in one of these things –  a “UA1101l” power storage unit. On paper, it stores about 3.6 MJ (megajoules) or 1 kWh (kilowatt hour) in EV (electric vehicle) grade LiFePO4 (lithium iron phosphate) batteries. My tests suggest…

Raspberry Pi Sonos replacement
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Sonos alternative

We’re busy replacing a customer’s ageing Sonos distributed sound system with a Linux Media Server (c/w SAMBA for remaining Sonos kit) c/w these tiny Linux-powered SBCs (single board commuters) as replacements. Granted, this is merely a prototype. This unit us based upon a Raspberry pi 4B c/w 8GiB RAM, a capacitative touchscreen and an external…

Brass monkey weather
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Brass monkey weather

Here on the central south coast of England, it is rare for temperatures to drop much below freezing. This cold snap we recorded -4.5 °C at night and barely rising above 0°C during the day. And thanks to economies we’re making due to the ridiculously high price of natural gas, the house itself seldom rose…

BR-9C combined Geiger counter and EMF meter – initial impressions
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BR-9C combined Geiger counter and EMF meter – initial impressions

I just bought a Geiger counter from a seller on AliExpress. Well it’s actually a Geiger counter and EMF (electromagnetic field) meter, all combined into a single device. I have no idea who actually makes these things. There is no branding other than a model number “BR-9C”. Though I did discover that the enclosures used…

Rishi Sunak – yet another unelected pro-Brexit British prime minister
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Rishi Sunak – yet another unelected pro-Brexit British prime minister

So it seems we have yet another unelected Tory prime minister. In addition to being Britain’s first British-Asian and Hindu PM, and the youngest PM in over two centuries, Rishi Sunak also has the distinction of being our third PM in seven weeks! This time there wasn’t even ballot for Tory Party members. He just…

Blown lithium battery
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Blown lithium battery

A lot of buzz on the interwebs about Samsung mobile phone batteries. Whilst Samsung devices do seem particularly problematic, it can be an issue with lithium polymer batteries generally – especially the super skinny type. They really don’t like getting hot. I confess I documented this repair rather badly but I did remember to capture…