Skip to main content

IR Remote for Nikon

I didn't buy this for my Film SLR because I cost too much. Currently Nikon's brand (ML-L3) costs $15 on Amazon/Adorama etc. and on Nikon Mall costs $20. However, if you look here (bestofferbuy) you can get an 'alternate version', called the YN ML-L3, for $4.80 and free shipping. I was a little wary at first and wondered if this was a scam, but I decided to try it out and ordered two (aha, see how this works, they price it less and that gets the sucker customer to buy more). I guessed it would take a long time to get here, but it took about a week and a half. I tried out the first one and it works fine. The unit comes with battery installed but with a plastic tab to keep it from discharging. These shady Chinese operators are moving upscale. (Actually it ships from Hong Kong. Don't know if that's any different anymore).

I have plans for the other one. An intervalometer costs an insane amount of money. Say like $140. What I want to do is order a 555 and some pots from Digikey and modify the second remote for time lapse photography. Who knows, I may even get fancy and use a crystal and a binary decade counter with BCD encoding for accurate timing...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A note on Python's __exit__() and errors

Python's context managers are a very neat way of handling code that needs a teardown once you are done. Python objects have do have a destructor method ( __del__ ) called right before the last instance of the object is about to be destroyed. You can do a teardown there. However there is a lot of fine print to the __del__ method. A cleaner way of doing tear-downs is through Python's context manager , manifested as the with keyword. class CrushMe: def __init__(self): self.f = open('test.txt', 'w') def foo(self, a, b): self.f.write(str(a - b)) def __enter__(self): return self def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb): self.f.close() return True with CrushMe() as c: c.foo(2, 3) One thing that is important, and that got me just now, is error handling. I made the mistake of ignoring all those 'junk' arguments ( exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb ). I just skimmed the docs and what popped out is that you need to return True or

Using adminer on Mac OS X

adminer is a nice php based sqlite manager. I prefer the firefox plugin "sqlite manager" but it currently has a strange issue with FF5 that basically makes it unworkable, so I was looking for an alternative to tide me over. I really don't want apache running all the time on my computer and don't want people browsing to my computer, so what I needed to do was: Download the adminer php script into /Library/WebServer/Documents/ Change /etc/apache2/httpd.conf to allow running of php scripts (uncomment the line that begins: LoadModule php5_module Start the apache server: sudo apachectl -k start Operate the script by going to localhost Stop the server: sudo apachectl -k stop