which came in a complete kit in a case: portrait lens and viewfinder attachment, UV filter, flash gun with two bulbs, original leather strap in good condition. All for about $65 including shipping. (Plus about $15 for a pair of fresh batteries.) The fatal flaw was that the electronic eye, which controls shutter speed, was not functioning. I am in negotiations with the seller who had reassured me before I bid that the camera was functioning. 

So, I plonked down $100 from a reputable seller, who sells lots of Land Cameras. It's a Frankenstein: the main body, including front lens and electronic assembly, combination viewfinder/rangefinder (by Zeiss), and bellows, are from a Model 350. The back is cannibalized from a different model. (In addition to the color, which was not a 350 color, the battery compartment was labelled to use a 4.5V battery while the 350 uses 3V batteries.) The battery holder had been modified to take 2 AAAs instead of a weirdo size. A good cleaning and fresh light seals rounded out the refurbishing.

Now, the standard Polaroid films of the time came in speeds of 75, 150, 300, and 3000. However, Polaroid no longer makes them. Fujifilm has a beautiful 100 ISO color film, the FP-100C, and a high speed 3000 ISO B&W film, the FP-3000B. Using the 100 ISO film means tweaking the exposure compensation dial (up to +2 stops, and -1 stop).

I shot a pack of film to figure out how to compensate exposure without manual controls, with one exposure wasted because I managed to rip the paper pull tab on one.

And just now, I found that someone had uploaded basically all the packfilm Land Camera repair manuals to Scribd. Brilliant! Maybe I can figure out how to fix the broken 240.

What is a leap second? Well, the Earth's rotation rate is slowing down. So, as time goes on the length of the day is longer. This rate is very slow. Every few years, the added length must be taken into account, much like the leap day takes into account that the orbital period of the Earth around the Sun is not exactly 365 days. When a leap second must be inserted is not predictable. The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service is tasked with making observations of the Earth, and producing a twice-yearly report on whether a leap second is due to be added. This comes out by email, and on their website. The report gives a 6-month or so lead time before the leap second is inserted, at midnight on Jan 1 and on Jul 1.

So, apparently, a leap second was inserted last night: all standard atomic clocks around the world paused for a second. This caused all sorts of havoc with computers and networking devices, causing lots of sites to go down. Notably, Google was prepared.

(via Gizmodo and Wired)

Can't resolve dependency "xcode (>= 3.1.2)" for package "gcc47-4.7.0-1001" (no matching packages/versions found)

Even after re-running fink configure, the error persisted. And I did have the latest Xcode installed from the Mac App Store. Turns out, one needs to do:

sudo xcode-select -switch /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer

That tells fink where Xcode resides.

I hadn’t even noticed that it had been open sourced in 2006. It was created in June 2003 by Blacktree Software, and received rave reviews. It was quick, unobtrusive, and extensible. Apparently, the project languished between 2006 and 2010. Then, development picked up again last year. I’m not sure when the current version was released.

If you have never used QuickSilver, LifeHacker has a brief tutorial. And here is another one with a list of common tasks that can be performed with QuickSilver.