Today we lost Actor/Singer Richard Harris from complications of Hodskin's Diease in London. Harris was 72. Also Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota was killed with members of his wife and daughter and 5 staff members in a plane crash in Northern Minnesota today. It appears icing may have played a part in the crash.
Also this week Richard M. Helms, 89, former head of the CIA and the quintessential intelligence and espionage officer died Tuesday night
Okay true confession time-- I've been out surfin' da'web all night in search of one of my holy grails: a NON-Nikon remote control for my Nikon Coolpix 990.
First off I need to give credit to the folks running the Digital Photography: Nikon Forum Group. If you own a digital camera, you should check this place out. To quote Jerry Pournelle: "Highly recommended. For a variety of reasons I won't bore you with here, I've been searching for ways to connect the Nikon 990 to either a shooting scope I own, or find a reasonable (cheap) telescope I could connect the camera. (I will tell you where once I get mine!) A funny thing happened while I surfed da'web happened: I found both.
Suggestion #1:Hook up the camera to a Palm/Visor to act as a remote control. It appears Vladimir Vyskocil is a frustrated programmer/astromomer had just enough time on his hands one weekend to figure out how to hook a Palm OS PDA to a Nikon 990. The connection works via a serial cable (SC-EW3) between the camera and the PDA with a null modem plug, via his freeware program called CoolRemote to emulate the Nikon MC-EU1 protocol. He also wants to mix this with the Sierra Imaging Protocol, Nikon's other language, to automate shots completely. Very cool. Very technical. If you have a Nikon 990 or other supported cameras it is worth diving to this subject. Down side for me-- I own a Handspring. It appears there are power problems in connecting the Visor to the Nikon 990. Anyone have an old Palm they can donate to the cause for me to play with?
Suggestion #2: Hang up the idea of using the PDA. Go straight to using the laptop to the Nikon 990 as a remote control. Greg Pruden appears to be the Wizard du Jour with his program called (drumroll) The Force. This freeware program will remote control nearly any of the Coolpix line of cameras by using the Nikon Serial cable (SC-EW3.) This is what I was looking for... And it appears Greg loves to drag his laptop out into the dark and do midnight astronomy, when he isn't programming something. Sounds like some of the men I hang out with. No smart comments about my social life, please. The Force is a remote control program for Windows and the Nikon. The program makes it possible to completely set up the Nikon to take time-lapse photographs and control the cameras functions from the laptop. For those of us who take time-lapse photographs of various things from sunsets, microscopic growth, to missles launching this sounds like the ticket. Now I need to find or make a cable. (Kudos to David Holmes for his tutorial on cable making.) The major reason this concept appeals to be is The Force does not require a high powered laptop run the program. So if you had an old laptop hanging around, this would be an excellent program to put it to use vs. to pasture.
I will try this out over the weekend, if I can find or make a cable and report back. Thanks to all those online community people over at Digital Photography Magazine. They made tonight very interesting and educational! [FRY's RUN!]
