Leica has gone nouveau-retro with the digital Leica M series. Other companies, like Vivitar, have come out with digital cameras featuring current tech, but designs reminiscent of retro rangefinder cameras.

This retro camera beats them all. The maker shoehorned a Sony DSC-WX1 digital camera into a Leica (or, more accurately, what appears to be a Soviet FED Leica copy) rangefinder body. The text and video are in Japanese, but a picture is worth a thousand words, right?

The maker moved the digicam controls to the back, the flash and focus assist lights work, and the zoom lens looks like right at home in the body. Having the never-ready case fit perfectly is a bonus.

WANT. SOMEONE SELL ME ONE NOW.

[ bea.hi-ho.ne.jp/bokuto/kosaku via MIJONJU ]

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LOMO Beach at night

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I opened the shipping container to find a box roughly the size of a deck of playing cards. The outside is festooned with the FM3 logo and chinese lettering.

The box opens to reveal a retro-looking plastic slab resembling a 1970′s transistor radio. It’s the brainchild of FM3 (aka Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian) an ambient duo based out of China. The Buddha Machine plays “drones”, little low-fi downtempo ambient clips ranging from 2-45 seconds. Each drone plays continually, or at least until the 2 AA batteries run out. A 4.5v DC adapter (not included) allows the unit to play for longer periods of time.

The only controls are a  volume control/power switch, a push button to change drones, and a pitch-bending dial. The Buddha Machine plays through a small speaker and can fill a small room; the tinny response seems to improve the quality of the sound. Think of film grain improving an image. If you choose a more personal experience, there is a mini headphone jack on top.

Even though you could download the sound files from FM3’s site, it’s just not the same unless you hear the cracks and pops of the unit’s tinny little speaker. It’s deliciously analog, completely non-upgradable, and offers a warm, imperfect analog sound.

The Buddha Machine can only be found a few places right now, including Forced Exposure.

http://www.fm3buddhamachine.com/

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I read this post which talked about tweaking .xpi files – the files mozilla uses for add-ons. Changing the extension from .xpi to .zip results in a file you can open with Windows Explorer. Open it up and look at the install.rdf file. There’s a line in the file that reads:

<em:id>{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}</em:id>
                <em:minVersion>0.8</em:minVersion>
                <em:maxVersion>2.0</em:maxVersion>

Change the lines to reflect your current version, update the file, change the name back to .xpi and you’re good to go.

This won’t work with all add-ons, as some of them require specific versions. SwitchProxy seems to work just fine, however.

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My head is spinning.

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I installed Gallery on my web site and found a great script for exporting photos from Flickr to Gallery. Once I moved all of my files over to Gallery, I put up a signpost on my Flickr account pointing people to the new location.

If I want to post pictures with some level of security, I can create custom users in Gallery without gathering any information from my friends or family. Or spamming them, or selling their names to countless list marketers.

Mail is working well. I’m using IMAP on my webhost and using Portable Thunderbird on my key drive. My mail archive is still sitting on their servers; as soon as I’m sure I’ve moved everything over I’ll delete the archives.

Moving back to my own hosted services has inspired me to clean up my web site, which had gotten a little weed-bound during the Web 2.0 boom. I did some cleanup work, added a splash page to my site, found a new template for my blog (you’re reading it now) and cleaned up my photo blog.

IM has proved a little more problematic. I have my own Jabber server, but I do a lot of IM over my phone, and Google Talk seems to work better with their own service. Friends of mine are still married to their respective IM networks (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AIM, and others) and so I’m stuck there.

I am hosting the Yahoo! LOMO-SF list, a photo walkabout group that’s been on-again, off-again. I’m considering moving it to a mailing list or moving to an install of phpBB on my web site. Ditto for the SMC Barricade router support group I run.

Both groups are similar – low traffic, static storage needs (for pictures or router images) and email/web access. It should be simple to make one solution work for both equally well.

All in all, this doesn’t feel as 2001 as I thought it would…

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Nick Saber isn’t happy now. Monday afternoon, after lunch, Nick came back from lunch to find out that he couldn’t get into his Gmail account. Further, he couldn’t get into anything that Google made (beside search) where his account credentials once worked. When attempting to log in, Nick got a single line message:

Sorry, your account has been disabled. [?]…

[via chrisbrogan.com ]

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It took a long time to get used to leftclick/rightclick for pasting, but it grew on me.

I looked around for a java SSH applet for my site – while intending to find MindTerm, I ended up running into TeraTerm Open Source- it’s now fully SSHv2 compliant. It’s a little wierd getting used to it again, but I think I might stick with it.

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I’m tempted to go back to the way I did things pre-web 2.0. Host a box on my home network, host my mail there. Host my pictures there. Run my blog from there. The only issue I have now is that my provider blocks SMTP, as a “security measure”.

It takes a lot of time to host on my own, it was nice when I was consulting. Now, I’m not so sure. There’s more to break, more to get hacked, and more downtime when it does. Hard drives go south, power supplies fail.

I’m tempted to hack a SD card onto my Linksys router and use it as an endpoint.

Danny O’Brien has a good talk about this at OpenTech.

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• Just so you know…

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I’m intrigued by what you can do with SMS and some of the sites out there – push rss content to your phone, update a micro-blog, keep up with other people’s lives, and with programs like Sandy, you can  SMS yourself meeting reminders and updates. You can do the same with Google calendar, as well as get daily agenda sent to your phone.

I have a BlackBerry with Blackberry Enterprise Server service, so my work Outlook is already synced to my phone – contacts, calendar items, tasks, etc. But using a low-tech solution is always intriguing. I may get a personal cell phone for political reasons at work and implement a SMS-only plan.

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Comcast — or someone who really, really likes Comcast — evidently bused in its own crowd. These seat-warmers, were paid to fill the room, a move that kept others from taking part.

They arrived en masse some 90 minutes before the hearing began and occupied almost every available seat, upon which many promptly fell asleep.

One told us that he was “just getting paid to hold someone’s seat.”

[via savetheinternet.com ]

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I’m going to set up QoS on it and try to prioritize VOIP and VPN traffic over Bittorrent, see if I can gain some control over bandwidth usage.

I’d like to see if I can get it to work on a Belkin F5d7230-4 router, similar to the Linksys but with only 2MB of flash RAM. I’ve tried loading the mini version of DD-WRT, but could never get it to load.

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I used Eudora at several jobs and at home, until HTML formatted email, SPAM, and IMAP became the norm. Eudora never handled either of them well. In a world of free or GPL email clients, Eudora had a hard time competing.

I heard that Qualcomm was throwing in the towel and going open source. I just found Penelope, a series of plugins for Thunderbird. Running it reminds me of the old days. It seems a bit faster than Thunderbird, which always had the clunky feel and slow rendering of old Netscape 4.7.

Version 8.0.0b1, the first public beta is now available -check it out!

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Nothing, but NOTHING bugs me more than seeing a flashing/animated ad on the page while I’m trying to compose an email.

Merlin Mann has a good thread going at 43Folders regarding webmail versus IMAP. Check it out.

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This program is definitely worth a look. It uses Plink from the killer Putty distribution for the connection and wraps a nice GUI around it. Windows Only, folks.

I have no idea why people would pay for a GUI windows SSH client nowadays. Some people swear by SecureCRT, though. Shrug.

[via nemesis.qx.net ]

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With all of the press dedicated to professional consulting services to SEO or cleansing search results, here’s a self-help article showing how to remove your own items from Google cache as well as how to remove external links.

[via Zhongg Internet Digest ]

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Do you work from coffee shops or communal public wireless presences (like FON) and want to keep your internet traffic safe?

With an SSH account on a server outside of your wireless location (through a web hosting service Dreamhost, my service that includes SSH access to your server) you can create a SSH tunnel and use that to encrypt all traffic from your desktop to the host on the outside.

Snoopers can’t sniff, any content filters can’t see what you’re doing, and passwords remain secure up to the point where they exit the SSH tunnel on the far end. VERY COOL.

[via lifehacker]

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When NOT to use email  [via How to Save the World]

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