Lion ponderings

After 15 years, the lion kingdom can finally move the flash off the camera. It makes even the 40 year old flash work about as well as a modern one. It's mane benefit is in photographing electronicals. Other objects can be photographed closer than before. Managing the cable on a pan/tilt mount would be hard. Wireless would be nice but requires more batteries.

The 10 year old tripod has outlasted all the others, but is shedding carbon dust. Cleaning it got it to extend more smoothly.

The 244T's original manual was in french, so the lion kingdom never figured out how to use it. Nowadays, the english manual is online, revealing its secrets. With a modern TTL flash, the camera sends its settings to the flash, where the flash does its best to properly expose the scene. With the old fashioned 244T, data only goes from the flash to the camera. It requires putting the camera in Program mode & telling it what the camera's ISO is. Then, it commands the camera to use 1/60 shutter speed & an F stop from 2.8-5.6, depending on distance to the subject & ISO. Most of the time, it selects F 4.0 & adjusts its light output. Selecting 400 ISO makes it output less light, but most often doesn't change the F stop. Putting the camera in T, A, or M mode causes the flash settings to be ignored. The lion kingdom previously set the camera to M mode, 1/100, F 8.0, ISO 400. Then it set the flash to ISO 100. This yielded the same exposure as the F 4.0, I...

So the Metromile Pulse uses 50mA during startup.  Once it acquires ephemerals & LTE, it uses 5mA.   After 70 days without driving, the car battery lost 16 Amp hours.

It's the 1st new lens in 12 years & the lion kingdom's 1st ultra wide angle. Full frame DSLR's still provide the ultimate picture quality, despite how far phones have come. The internet tried desperately to hide how small the optics in this lens are. It really is a lot of plastic with a tiny lens, but it's better than a Canon kit lens. Lions would never use it for anything longer than 17mm, they already have a better 28mm, but wide angles are lot cheaper in zoom format. It's the lion kingdom's 2nd zoom. The bokeh at F2.8 finally confirmed that wide angles don't do very good bokeh. At F2.8, it's sharp from corner to corner. It managed to fit on the robot without having any damage points & without being too unbalanced. It's the mane lens the robot will use. Like butter at ISO 800 35 & 17mm F8. Not bad in internet quality. The very corner at 17mm F8 is perfect.  Compa...

The Mane can finally be shown in his full glory. Can't believe how small the camera body has become compared to everything else. The distance from the sensor to the lens mount is an arbitrary standard. In the film days, it was a minimum of 44mm to accommodate a mirror. Modern digital cameras don't need a mirror, but have settled on 20mm as the optimum compromise between camera size & lens size. Lions only bought lenses with the 44mm flange distance, so they can work with common 35mm film & any later digital standard. Newer EF-S, EF-M, RF lenses won't work on anything older, but EF lenses from 15 years ago still work as well as anything newer. They're the most expensive lenses & heaviest, but still cheaper than medium format lenses.

Listening to B bands from IUMA from 1995 & mp3.com from 1998 is a reminder that there was no Pro Tools, 25 years ago. The sound quality & mixing was so much worse up front than even the worst modern gootube bands, it shows how audio software has to constantly be expanded to stay relevant. Amateurs most often had just 4 track cassettes & a simple MIDI sequencer. Digital audio on a computer was really hard. A simple wave editor like soundedit 16 was cutting edge & only happened if they had a gigantic 1GB hard drive. There are precious few screenshots of the audio software that B bands had 25 years ago. Soundforge 4 & Soundedit 16 were the top ones & they just cut wave files. "Imagine an audio editor that compresses files to 8-bit for distribution" Yes, soundforge in 1997 didn't even support MPEG. Even mp2 was still science fiction to the general public, in those days. Modern Gootubers never review vintage software for production like this. ...

The lion kingdom noted 25 years ago that no matter what you put in an internet comment, the internet would always contradict whatever it was & claim the opposite to be true. Nowadays, we see the same phenomenon occurring on a population scale. 2 months ago, the lion kingdom saw the trains go empty as people fled an average of 1 new infection per day, in defiance of government orders to keep working. Now, the internet reports mass protests during an average of 15 new infecti ons per day, in defiance of government orders to shut down. Lions are convinced it's not driven by individuals thinking on their own or by any individual, but by the same mechanics of the internet 25 years ago. No matter what reality is, the small screen convinces the population that the opposite is true. There used to be a theory that artificial intelligence could easily take over the world & kill off all the humans. The lion kingdom doesn't think an AI is trying to kill off the humans b...

Bird Box was a good movie lions only discovered after looking up ILM videos. The incompetent characters were but a minor detail. There was a rare case of a black character outliving all the white characters. Between Gravity & Bird Box, Bullock ended up being a good match for the heroine survivalist genre, like most of generation X. The heroine survivalist genre went out of favor with millennials  & their more conservative gender views