I saw this on TheDailyWTF recently, and decided I had to try it for myself, and it works!
You get it if you go to "Clear History" in the "Go" menu in Nautilus.
This is a camera-geek post, so if you're not one of those, feel free to skip. I've just been having a bit more of a play with the custom functions available to change how the 400D operates. There are a couple of things that I've found that I can't believe I didn't know about - they look like they'll make things a lot easier. I'm making a note here so that if I lose them, I can find them again.
I now have set:
Now I just need to get out and do some more shooting. Not done very much of late that hasn't been with my N95, which is disappointing.
| Setting name | Value | Effect |
| CF01 - Set button/cross keys function | 4: Cross keys - AF Frame select | Makes the arrow keys choose the autofocus point when shooting, rather than selecting the picture "style", which is something I've never used beyond setting it on "neutral" |
| CF04 - Shutter/AE lock button | 1: AE Lock/AF | This makes the "*" button cause the camera to autofocus, and have pressing the shutter button half way set the exposure (in non-manual modes). This might well drive me nuts, but I like the idea, in theory. |
| CF05 - AF-assist beam | 2: Only external flash emits | This should stop it flashing like mad when trying to focus in low light, when I'm not using my 430EX. I don't use the on-camera flash that much anyway, so it won't make a lot of difference, but it is an irritating feature when I am using it. |
| CF09 - Shutter curtain sync | 1: Second curtain sync | This makes the flash fire just before the shutter closes, rather than when the shutter opens. This might not seem to make a lot of sense at first glance, but it means that if I take a photo with a relatively long exposure with the intention of getting some motion blur, the shutter will fire at the end of the exposure, so that the object is "frozen" with the trail behind it, rather than seeming to go ahead of it. |
| CF11 - LCD display when power ON | 1: Retain power OFF status | This stops the display coming on when I switch the camera on. I don't use the display much so I have it turned off most of the time to save battery power. |
In other news, I've been spending far too much time recently with my camera. One thing I quite like doing is timelapse photography, which my camera (a Canon 400D) can't do by itself, however I did acquire a cheap intervalometer from eBay, which together with my new tripod (a Velbon Sherpa 250, highly recommended) is quite for this kind of work.
I can't, however, ever remember the command to create the timelapses. So, here's a note to myself and anyone else who's interested. If you have a folder full of .JPG files, with a sequential numbering scheme like most cameras have
by default, you can run this command to create a video file using each JPEG image as a frame:
mencoder "mf://*.JPG" -mf fps=25 -vf scale -zoom -xy 1024 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 -o output.avi
This will output an MPEG4 file in the file output.avi. It will scale the images so that the video ends up being 1024 pixels wide, and set the height to keep the aspect ratio. It will also run at 25 frames per second. These values can be tweaked, depending on the effect you want.
I'll update this post once I've figured out a few more things - I'd like to be able to do panning and zooming as well, and I know it's possible, though perhaps a bit fiddly.
A couple of years ago, I think, I became sufficiently motivated by the defectivebydesign.org campaign that I decided to go and join the Free Software Foundation to support them. However, recent events are making me actively reconsider my membership.
They've come up with a campaign involving people signing up for appointments to Apple's Genius Bar technical support questions, and asking them a series of questions with regard to Apple's stance on DRM. It basically amounts to a denial of service attack on their technical support. I, and many others, believe that they are Doing It Wrong on several levels. I tried to sum my thoughts up in an email to them, to which I haven't yet had a response (not that I particularly expected one):
I seriously urge you to reconsider this campaign against Apple. I fully believe it is going to bring you far more negative publicity than actual gains. It will result in people who have a need to obtain service from the Apple technicians being inconvenienced, with the likely result that many of them will learn about the FSF for the first time as being a group of irritating timewasters rather than a worthy cause. It will result in the people working in Apple stores, some of whom I know are active members in local Free Software user groups and other communities, becoming utterly disillusioned with the Free Software movement. It will not make Apple as a whole any more kindly disposed to contributing to Free Software. On the whole, I believe this to be a mistake. I say this as a member of the FSF who joined because of the Defective by Design campaign, though I am seriously reconsidering my position on this - I cannot support an organisation who take the attitude that inconveniencing the general public is a valid way forward in the promotion of their views.
My position is now that if they go ahead with this campaign, I'm going to resign from the FSF. Someone in there seems to have some seriously misguided views about what is and isn't acceptable in terms of getting their message across.