Notices by Solderpunk (solderpunk@mastodon.sdf.org), page 6

@leeb Welcome to SDF! Happy to have you still in the Fediverse.

And thank you. We are almost done dealing with the things we'll be able to deal with on this visit, and I'm heading home at the end of this week.

@Cat It'll never take off!

In entirely unrelated news, apparently the Jolt bottling plant out in Welland is still up and running! This is a huge surprise. Back in my student days I would occasionally drive out there and buy 12-bottle cartons of the stuff, but when I last lived in Adelaide I got the definite impression that Red Bull et al had forced their business down to unsustainable levels and I assumed the end was nigh.

I don't always HACK THE PLANET, but when I do, I drink Jolt Cola.

@Cat That display is lookin' crispy in the dark, my friend!

@ckeen Excellent, and Godspeed!

@vfrmedia Thanks! I have been spending a lot of time at that site lately, the "$1 ATA" (http://www.rowetel.com/?p=26) really caught my attention. The idea of an RS-232 telephone excites me in ways that I'm not sure it should.

@ckeen Outstanding! I pledge to subscribe as soon as it becomes possible. And, depending on what you have in mind exactly, would probably be interested in contributing content, too.

@vfrmedia @kensanata Oh, that's weird. You gave me the idea that perhaps it just wasn't accessible via my VPN, but I can't get through without it, either.

@vfrmedia @kensanata Literally 99% of my technical bicycle knowledge comes from Sheldon Brown, his website is nothing short of excellent.

Oh, jeez. I was about to cite IPv6 pioneer and advocate Itojun as somebody else whose website (itojun.org) was alive many years after his death (2007), but apparently it no longer is. That's really upsetting. 😢 It must have disappeared relatively recently.

@pkotrcka The camera store had a nice Minolta Hi-matic F that was actually a little cheaper than the 35-ME. It had a beautifully bright viewfinder, but it took weird extinct batteries and we couldn't test it. The 35-ME works with a single SR44 and that's amazingly convenient, you can buy those anywhere on Earth.

I will have to keep an eye out for Kiev, FED, etc. stuff in Minsk.

@pkotrcka Thanks for the link! It also gets quite a nice mention in Japan Camera Hunter, where it is listed among "unsung heroes" and called "fast and confidence inspiring":

https://www.japancamerahunter.com/2014/03/unsung-heroes-35mm-photography-part-ii-rfs-dan-k/

And this guy seems happy with it:

http://blog.bkspicture.com/review_Yashica_35-ME.html

On the whole, though, it doesn't seem to get mentioned much on the web.

@pkotrcka Definitely!

Everyone is raving about brutaldon. It looks nice, but I can't get it to run. This "pipenv" thing complains that I don't have Python 2.6 installed (Debian stable lyfe! 🤘). Apparently I need the very latest Python in order to make Mastodon look like it's 1997? I'd put more effort into solving this, but I'm already put off enough that it uses Django, an SQLite database and pipenv. Feels excessive for what it is.

@pkotrcka Cloudy days? What are those?

I'm looking forward to shooting a few rolls across the Baltic states and Belarus starting next week.

@pkotrcka There were two Petris at the vintage camera shop I went to this morning, but they were both more expensive than the Yashicas, and I wanted something cheap as this was just kind of a spur of the moment idea. The Petri Racer was the most expensive. I've seen cheaper Petris at thrift stores here, though, who don't really know how to tell old cameras apart.

@pkotrcka I *nearly* bought a Yashica MG1 today to take on an upcoming trip because I'm tired of lugging around my AE-1 and all lenses and wanted to try something smaller/lighter. But the MG1 was not really much of an improvement on the AE/1 with it's 50mm f1.8, so didn't seem much point. I got a Yashica 35ME instead, a cute little zone-focus that fits in a pocket.

@pkotrcka You are, of course, very welcome at circumlunar.space, too. :)

Glad you still listen to the show - sorry I missed this week! Feel quite bad about that, but it was a really crazy week.