Category: General

This YouTube video reminds me that my newest personal computer, a Lenovo ThinkPad T440s, is already 10 years old. My other personal computer, a Lenovo ThinkCentre desktop, is 12 years old.

There was a time when users had to keep upgrading their computers in order to run the latest operating system or software. For example, if a new version of Windows was released, it was guaranteed that one’s current computer would not be powerful enough to run it properly. One had to upgrade either the RAM or the CPU (or both) if not buy a new machine altogether.

Between 1991 and 2001, I owned three different computers: a Sanyo MBC-16LX 8088 PC, a no-brand 486DX33 PC, and a custom-built Pentium II PC. On the first one, Windows 3.0 barely ran, and when I asked about the possibility to upgrade it, I was told that I would be “fitting a combustion engine onto a wooden cart”. Shortly after, I was given the 486DX33 PC, which was used for playing an unhealthy amount of Aces of the Pacific and Indiana Jones games. When I started working, I built my own Pentium II-based computer and ran Windows 2000 on it. I foolishly thought that Windows 2000 was the endgame and I wouldn’t need to upgrade again.

After 2001, I mostly used a second-hand Compaq workstation that I won on eBay. In 2003, I bought an iBook G4 (or maybe G3) as I went through an Apple phase. I also built a PC with an AMD Athlon around that time. In 2006, I replaced the iBook with the first MacBook Pro that had an Intel CPU inside. The problems with that computer (and the previous iBook G4) ended my fascination with Apple. In 2009, when the AMD Athlon PC stopped working, I bought a Sony Vaio laptop.

Sometime in 2014, I saw a deal for a Lenovo desktop, which I could not pass on. I bought one, despite the model being two years old already, and sold the Sony Vaio. I succumbed to the hype of the time and bought a Samsung netbook too. However, the user experience was so bad that I sold it and bought the Lenovo ThinkPad T440s in 2015.

So�

Between 1991 and 2001, I owned three PCs; between 2001 and 2014, six; and from 2014 to now, only two. The interesting thing about this progression is the usefulness of each computer kept increasing. My first computers were almost obsolete by the time I got them, and the 2001-2009 computers needed replacing to keep up with the requirements for the software that was being released. But since 2014, the baseline for computer performance has remained relatively high, making any gains from upgrades only marginal.

My personal computers are now noticeably slower than my work laptop issued in 2023. However, the difference in speed is not convincing enough to replace them. I believe they will remain useful for at least another five years, especially since they both run Linux, which does not have the demands of Windows (or Mac OS on Apple hardware).

I was recently asked by a colleague whether it was by choice that I was still using my 2017 Samsung S8+ phone, and last Christmas, my nephew and his friends made jokes about this same phone.

So, maybe not a Luddite yet, but definitely behind the times.

Merry Christmas!

After a lunch with my mum and two of her sisters in Quatre-Bornes, P and I drove to Les Salines. P had submitted to my plea to go out and shoot the massive COSCO container ship holding position at sea outside Port-Louis. Her terms were that I should leave the aircon running in the car where she would wait for me. Eco be damned, I agreed.

Unfortunately, the ship was hidden behind the reclaimed land that extends out to sea at Les Salines, blocking the view to the west. Making the best out of a bad situation, I took pictures of the bulk sugar terminal instead. (Here are exact coordinates: -20.153906, 57.488283.)

After Les Salines, we went to Bain-des-Dames public beach, on the other side of the reclaimed land, hoping to spot the COSCO ship from there. But we had no such luck. As it was now getting dark, we headed back home, I reflecting that Pointe-aux-Sables and Albion would have been better viewpoints.

From home in Coromandel, the ship could no longer be seen. It had either left Port-Louis or had docked. In any case, I was not getting my photo.

Here are the views from where we’re staying, which explain why I’m getting obsessed with photographing ships. And mountains.

Here are a couple of pictures from my mother’s garden.

From November 2019 to January 2020, P and I holidayed in Tahiti. When COVID locked down England a couple of months later, the experience of our trip was quickly effaced and replaced by the anxieties of the day.

Since then, viewing the pictures that I had taken in Tahiti reminded me of COVID instead of the joy of visiting these beautiful places. But now we have reached the point of normalcy where I can appreciate them again.

I hope you like them too.

I developed a third roll of Ferrania Solaris 100 today, and the pictures are meh, consistent with the previous two experiments.

Also, the grain in these pictures, and in the ones from previous posts, could be either because the film is old or because of over-development. The second reason is more likely, given this is the 11th roll with this batch of chemicals and the development time has been increased from 3 minutes 30 seconds to 3 minutes 45 seconds.

Previously I wrote that the Nikon FG-20 is not a suitable camera for practising photography. I argued that its flawed ergonomics did not make for a pleasant shooting experience and could even be the cause of exposure mistakes. And yet I found myself pulling it out of storage, fitting it with two fresh LR44 batteries, loading a roll of expired Ferrania Solaris 100 into its back, and taking it out to the garden for more pictures of flowers.

I have to say that using the camera was not as bad as expected, perhaps because with the camera fixed on a tripod, I did not have to fiddle its controls, thus avoiding spoilt exposures from accidental changes of settings. But the experience remained underwhelming, mainly due to the small viewfinder, which makes the exposure meter difficult to read.

In retrospect, I think that I needed to be convinced of the FG-20’s shortcomings one last time before putting it away for good, given my particular fondness for its looks and its size.

The pictures from the roll are not great. I was impatient and did not allow the temperature of the chemicals to stabilise before starting the development process. I am also conscious of over-agitating the film tank and potentially causing the negative to be overly developed by doing so. The final images are more grainy than they ought to be from ISO 100 film.

Some people say that the grain gives these photos the “film look”. But a well-exposed negative actually produces very clean images, such as the one below, shot on ISO 400 film.

Several factors must be considered in judging the quality of final pictures: age of the film, age of the development chemicals, accuracy of the exposure, development process, scanning process, and editing. Given my inconsistent results from consistent use of expired film, I think it is right to blame my amateurish development process for any quality shortfall.

I fancied doing some BASIC programming yesterday and wrote a prime sieve in PC-BASIC. It can list primes up to about 10,000 at a decent speed but struggles with larger numbers because of memory and data type limitations in BASIC. Here is a screenshot showing the program and its output.

Besides BASIC, other old computer tech has occupied my time lately. I run a VM with Red Hat Linux 4.2, which I first used in 1997, and code in C and C++ inside the VM. I also switched from the feature-rich GNOME desktop environment to the rudimentary Fvwm window manager.

My explanation for this trend is that I am rediscovering computers as a hobby, now that my new job does not require me to learn about them as an occupational necessity. I can enjoy using old operating systems and programming languages that I could not explore to sufficient depth as I speed-learnt to my present level. Take programming for example, I barely spent time coding in BASIC once I was comfortable with it and instead quickly moved on to Pascal, Clipper^[1], Visual Basic, Java, and so on.

I suppose I am in a similar situation with my photography. From lusting for the latest digital cameras, I now take more pleasure from the slow and intentional motions involved in operating old film cameras.

Either it is that, or it is simply nostalgia showing my age.

[1] Clipper is the first language that I used for serious programming. I did my project for GCE O-Level Computer Studies with Clipper.

This evening I developed a roll of expired Ferrania Solaris 100 film, which I bought on eBay. It was ideal for testing because it had only 12 frames, which I could expose within a single day. In contrast, it usually takes months for me to finish a roll of 36 frames. The flowers that my mother and I planted came in as handy photo subjects, as did the fruit bowl.

These results are decent for a film expired in 2008 and developed with one-year-old chemicals. Conventional wisdom says that I should err on the side of overexposure when shooting film, which I did when the light-meter gave me values that I could not set on the Minolta X300 camera — for example, choosing 1/8-second shutter speed on the camera when the meter gives a 1/10-second reading — but I find the photos are overexposed.

The same problem is present in some of the photos below, from another roll developed a couple of weeks ago. My Sekonic lightmeter is accurate, as tested with a Nikon DSLR, so I now worry that there might be a bit of shutter drag on this camera.

Je n’ai pas grand chose�� te dire
Et pas grand chose pour te faire rire
Car j’imagine toujours le pire
Et le meilleur me fait souffrir
� Indochine