Dad’s retirement

Recently on my blog I posted about using flash bulbs with an old box camera. The photos in this post are taken with said box camera, and the indoor ones are using flash bulbs. This is my first attempt at using flash bulbs, and indeed at any flash photography on film.

I had a bit of trouble getting it to fire reliably at first[1], so the first photo is exposed twice, once with flash and once without. Most things in the non-flash exposure are invisible, except for the lamp.

Once at my parents’ house in Nuneaton, Dad demonstrated that while he may be retired now, his knees are still good enough to kneel by the fireplace.

Clearly photos by the fireplace did not offer a sufficient thrill to entice my brothers home, so I went to pick up Edmund from Nuneaton railway station a little later on. Of course,any excuse for some photos…

Here I knelt as close to the edge of the platform as I dared while a train passed. You can see the concrete kerb-stone at the bottom of the picture. The driver gestured that I should get back a bit, but I wasn’t likely to mess up a photo with the price of film these days!

On Sunday, we ate at the Courtyard. Edmund’s girlfriend Lara came along too and I finally managed to get everyone to pose together for this photo. Nobody was quite ready for the snap, but having spent about quarter of an hour setting the camera and flash up, I wasn’t likely to try again! I think the not-quite-posed nature of the picture adds a lot to it 🙂

After the meal, Oliver took custody of the camera and after some tuition, managed to make it work.

After the meal on Sunday, Hana and I returned home to Bristol. I processed the film, dried it, scanned it, and uploaded it here – long before my parents had even looked at the photos on their digital camera. They’re probably still looking for the USB thing-a-ma-jig that plugs into the digital-ma-bob right now! 😀

Who says film is impractical?

[1] I disassembled the flashgun and cleaned the internal copper contact strips with cotton buds and spirit vinegar. I also found out that you have to scrape the oxide off the terminals of each flash bulb before use.

Building an email server using ClearOS

I’ve had a server at home for years now, and I’ve also been a professional sysadmin for at least three years. I know my way around Linux pretty well and for some time I’ve run my own web server and also other services.

But one thing I’ve steered clear of until now is running my own email server.

I’ve always thought it would be fairly easy to set up, but much harder to make secure. I don’t want to receive tonnes of spam and I don’t want spammers using my SMTP server as an open relay. In the past I’ve read about building SMTP servers with sendmail, postfix and exim but there was all sorts of conflicting information when it came to integrating milters and so on. Different guides all seemed to give contradictory advice and require all sorts of strange configuration steps that I couldn’t understand.

But all that changed when I heard about ClearOS. In short, it’s a spin of CentOS which uses a custom web interface to configure various software “modules”, including things like web server, email server, firewall gateway, database server, and so on.

I installed it on a virtual machine and after only a few clicks I was running a mail server: an MX for receiving mail for my domains, an authenticated SMTP server for personal outgoing mail, and a secure IMAP server for storing and accessing my mail. The frontend sets up postfix and cyrus to do its dirty work.

For ultimate ease, users (just me, in this case) are authenticated using a local LDAP directory, rather than by using system accounts. All SSL certificates for IMAPS and HTTPS were added automatically. Email antivirus scanning is done by Amavis and spam filtering is done by Spamassassin.

I had a little bit of trouble setting up Horde to access webmail and a web interface for configuring sieve rules. By “trouble” I mean the default Apache virtual host declarations needed some changing around and some aliases adding. If you’re familiar with Apache this won’t be a problem.

There are some aspects of ClearOS I don’t like so much, and I would prefer to use CentOS. But now ClearOS has written out all my configs it should be trivial to move my new mail setup to a plain old CentOS installation, where I already run my websites from. I have definitely learnt a lot about how email works by simply reading and understanding the config files written by the frontend.

So if you want to build an email server but don’t know where to start – try ClearOS. It’s a great introduction to the “scary” parts of setting up an email server, like milters and certificates.

Flashbulbs

A while back, I bought a Conway Synchronised box camera which came with a Coro Flash included. More recently I managed to get hold of some flash bulbs for it, but had trouble using them.

Using a multimeter and some paperclips I tested each stage of the flashgun and the synchronised trigger mechanism in the camera and found that each stage of the system worked in isolation, but still no joy taking photographs with a flash. I think some of the connections were a bit loose due to corrosion.

I took the (very simple) flashgun apart and washed all of its copper connectors in spirit vinegar to make them red and shiny again. Most importantly, I found it was necessary to scratch the corrosion off the contacts of each bulb before use, using the handle of a teaspoon or similar.

Now I can enjoy reasonably reliable retro flash photography, using Philips Photoflux PF1b flashbulbs. They’re quite expensive but I bought 15 bulbs from eBay for about a tenner. They’re good fun to simulate “proper” retro photography.

A note to anyone who is old enough to remember this stuff from first time round: Sorry for being so excited about obsolete technology. I’m just discovering this stuff for myself and I think it’s great! 😀

“I’m just…”

If there’s one phrase I hate, it’s any phrase starting with “I’m just…”. Worse yet, “But I’m just…”.

It particularly annoys me how many people think that using a phrase including the word just is sufficient to get around rules, or to allow for special dispensation.

“I’m sorry, you’re not allowed to use your phone in here.”
“But I’m just calling someone.”

“Can you call me back later? I’m a bit busy right now.”
“But I just wanted to say…”

The same rules apply to all of us in most circumstances. If I can obey convention by not using my phone in the library, not pestering people when they are busy, and not breaking the rules of the road when it suits me, why can’t everyone else?

I would like to conclude this blog post in the same way my mother used to cut short my childhood whines.

“But I just…”
“But nothing.”

</rant>

Audioboo

I heard about Audioboo – a sort of Youtube for audio clips – the other day on BBC Click. I decided to give it a go, since I fairly often embed audio clips in my blog, simply by hosting and linking to MP3s and letting the user’s browser handle the playback. This doesn’t always work out for the best.

So here’s my first attempt at uploading content to Audioboo and embedding it in my blog.

http://boos.audioboo.fm/swf/fullsize_player.swf

Sprocket holes

Sprocket holes in 35mm film are usually outside the boundary of the picture. But the other day, Paul showed me some of his pictures taken on an Ilford Sporti 4 which include the holes in the picture and it got me thinking*. I decided to run some 35mm film through my LOMO Lubitel and see what happened.

*About plagiarism of his work.

The Lubitel usually takes 120 roll film and produces images 6 ×6cm in size. With 35mm film, you get an image that’s 6cm tall, 3.5cm wide and has sprocket holes running vertically.

So here goes, with a customary view out of my balcony to get us started.

Some double yellow lines in the road. I hadn’t realised how shallow the depth of field was (or how inaccurate the focussing).

A nearby electricity substation. Ever tried shooting landscape with a TLR, looking sideways into the upside-down viewfinder?

And finally, at the end of the film, a snap of Hana. Shame it got cut off, because she looks great in this picture.

I’m pretty sure I need to calibrate the focussing in this camera. I took care to ensure that the image in the viewfinder was always in sharp focus, so I think the gearing between the viewing and taking lenses has fallen out of sync.

In several of these photos you can also see a white circle. This is the red window for watching the film numbers advance on paper-backed roll film. Of course, 35mm doesn’t haven’t a paper backing so any light leaks fog the film. The Lubitel has a little metal shutter to cover the window but clearly it’s not 100% effective.

Impatient drivers

The other day I was knocked off my bike deliberately by an impatient driver.

I was cycling along a stretch of road where there were no parked cars. I was probably doing around 20mph, which is a fairly typical speed for a city cyclist on a flat road. Ahead, there was a line of parked cars on the left hand side. I checked over my shoulder, saw that there was a decent gap, gave a brief arm signal, and moved away from the kerb to pass the cars with a foot or two’s clearance.

With the oncoming traffic in the other direction, there was no room for me to be overtaken. However, “the idiot” (marked on the diagram in red) attempted to overtake me anyway. He came extremely close to either hitting me, or crushing me against the parked cars. I managed to twist my shoulders and squeeze myself between the wingmirror of his car and that of the parked car without touching any vehicle.

Dangerous overtaking

His window was open, so I shouted “OI, TOO CLOSE!”. I thought no more of it, and waited for him to continue the very tight overtaking manoeuvre, assuming that we would both continue with our journeys. But the second he got past me, he abruptly moved in front of me, and jammed his brakes on. I know it was deliberate because we made eye contact in his rear view mirror, and his middle finger was up.

With the back of his car stationary, less than 2-3 feet in front of me, I slammed straight into it. I think I touched my brakes but there was no chance of stopping. I rolled over the boot. I don’t remember what else happened, other than that I think I avoided banging my head by bracing myself against the rear window with my arms.

He watched me hit his car and fall onto the road, and then drove off hard. I was lying in the road, several paces from my bike. The driver behind me waited patiently but nobody offered any help.

As it happens, I wasn’t seriously injured and I was able to get up and push my bike home. I have many bruises: on my arms, legs and ribs, and I’m still sore two days on. But it could so easily have been much more serious.

As for my bike, the rear wheel is buckled and the rear derailleur is bent, so changing gears doesn’t really work properly. The brake cables are stretched, so I must have hit the brakes really hard. It’s going to cost a bit to have that mended. That’s going to have to come out of my pocket, since I have no idea who the guy was. He’s clearly an unpleasant character if he’s willing to risk damage to his own car just to bring down a cyclist who pointed out his mistake.

It really gets to me how there’s nothing I could have done then, and that he got away with it without any trouble or any expense. Meanwhile I’m injured and pushing my broken bike home.

There’s also nothing I can do now. I’ve reported it to the police but they don’t care that a person I can’t name gave me some bruises. I’d never know if I saw him again so there’s no hope of identifying him or his car.

All I can do is hope he doesn’t continue behaving in this ridiculous manner until he injures or kills another cyclist (or pedestrian or driver).

Photos from a Soviet camera

These are the first photos I’ve taken with my Lomo Lubitel 166. It’s my first TLR, and my first camera which takes square photos. You might not think it would make much difference, but I like the square format because it saves having to decide whether to go landscape or portrait.

The Lubitel has geared lenses to keep them both in focus. The viewing lens shows the true focus and has a ground glass centre to make it easier to adjust the focus correctly. However I think my two lenses have slipped and come out of alignment, because all of these photos are a little out of focus. This will be something to fix in due course 🙂

Here’s my mother, sitting in the garden. I like how the picture could almost be of a Victorian lady; somehow timeless.

This is St Paul’s Church, Nuneaton, and my family standing outside it.

And finally, a shot of Barton Fields, Bristol.

I like this camera!