Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog · Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

Fuji GF670 first impressions

2009-05-29 Photo Mylos Reviews

I just received my Fuji GF670 from Dirk Rösler at Japan Exposures. This is a folding medium-format rangefinder camera, an anachronism in many respects, but I regret not getting a G690 when they were still made and since this is a limited edition (apparently quite a popular one at that), I went ahead. I have not yet shot a roll, but here are my first impressions:

The unfolding mechanism is a bit finnicky. You have to be careful to get the front standard aligned with the film plane. Once deployed it seems fairly stable. Folding it back is also quite tricky.
The meter indicator LEDs and controls are very reminiscent of the Epson R-D1, not surprising since both are actually made by Cosina.
The leaf shutter is amazingly quiet. It makes a Leica sound like a clunker in comparison.
The camera is quite light for MF, it feels lighter than a R-D1 (even though it weighs nearly twice as much) and is not that much larger.
It does not exude quality like the Fuji-manufactured TX-2 (Hasselblad XPan II).
The rangefinder patch is bright and clear. The RF base length is very short as in a VC Bessa, and will probably not be as precise as a Leica, XPan or Zeiss Ikon.
The film loading mechanism is very easy to use, and built as well as other Fuji MF cameras such as the G617.
You have to remember to reset the lens to infinity focus in order to fold it.
You get a choice of 6×6 and 6×7, 120 and 220.
The optional case is a snug fit. I wish it included a belt loop.

In grand old techno-fetishistic tradition, I put up an unboxing gallery.

Update (2009-08-27):

I have finally uploaded a gallery of my first test roll from the camera. The lens’ optical quality is outstanding, unlike most older folders (well, apart from the Plaubel Makina, of course).

Fuji GF670

2009-05-29 Photo Photo galleries

© Copyright © 2009 Fazal Majid. All rights reserved.

Pablo Designs Brazo LED lamp

2009-05-11 Stuff Reviews

I bought one of these beauties from Room & Board (also available from Design Within Reach) in the bronze finish.

It’s a task lamp with 18 white LEDs. Light intensity can be controlled via a rotary knob, although the lowest level is still fairly bright. The Brazo can be adjusted in 4 degrees of freedom for maximal control. The base and arm are aluminum (available in bronze, natural silver, white and black) with a machined concentric reticular pattern that looks impressive, although I am concerned it will also be a very effective dust trap. Best of all, it’s designed locally in San Francisco by a Venezuelan-born designer.

Highly recommended.

City government waste in San Francisco

2009-05-01 Economics San Francisco Soapbox

A 33% hike in Muni fares was announced today. This will hit the poorest people in the city first, and to add insult to injury, this is accompanied with cuts in service.

San Francisco has a budget of over $6B, about the same size as much larger cities as Chicago or Paris, and exceeding the budget of 20 of the US states. It also exceeds the entire GNP of countries like Mongolia or Georgia (in the Caucasus). San Franciscans get little to show for it in services.

One reason why: SF has over 8,000 city employees making over $100,000 a year (the head of Muni is one of them, making $325,000, or more than US Cabinet ministers who make $191,000). The share of the city budget spent on those high flyers is over $1B…

Feedburner down again

2009-04-30 Web

I just tried unsuccessfully to subscribe to a feed hosted by the annoying bozos at FeedBurner. From my Temboz feed error counters, it seems FB feeds have been failing with 503 errors for at least the last 5 hours or so, par for the course.

Just another reason why outsourcing vital services to the cloud is not always a good strategy.

gondwana ~>GET -eUS http://feeds.feedburner.com/Fooducate
GET http://feeds.feedburner.com/Fooducate
User-Agent: lwp-request/1.39

GET http://feeds.feedburner.com/Fooducate --> 503 Service Unavailable
Connection: close
Server: NS_6.1
Content-Length: 62
Client-Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2009 01:31:18 GMT
Client-Peer: 66.150.96.119:80

<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>An Error Occurred</TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1>An Error Occurred</h1>
503 Service Unavailable
</BODY>
</HTML>

Update (2009-04-30):

It is possible the problem lies with my ISP (although I could replicate it at work as well). I can ping FB from my Joyent accelerator but not from home where my Temboz instance runs.

A work-around is to use the newer Google server feeds2.feedburner.com instead. For Temboz, all you need to do is run sqlite3 rss.db and the command:

update fm_feeds
set feed_xml=replace(feed_xml, 'feeds.feedburner.com', 'feeds2.feedburner.com')
where feed_xml like 'http://feeds.feedburner%';