Category Archives: Photography

The side-cutting can opener

Cooking

A better mousetrap.

For an index of cooking articles on this blog click here.

‘Nerd’ is a derogatory term used by the incurious to describe anyone with an inquiring mind. My friends tend to be nerds. Call me one and I want nothing to do with you for yours is a second rate mind. I have the same contempt for users of this noun as I do for people who tell me they cannot set the clock on their electric gadget. Can’t they read the manual?

Note that membership in my exclusive club does not dictate advanced math skills or a postgraduate degree. What it does mandate, however, is curiosity. Show me a successful person and I will show you one who is curious.

As someone who graduated engineering school at the top of his class with ease in the study of ergonomics (we called it ‘occupational psychology’ back then) I have long been interested in understanding how machines work and also greatly frustrated how often they work poorly. So when a better mousetrap comes along, in this case a can opener, I am interested. “With ease” you ask? When something fascinates you, the design of the man-machine interface in this instance, it’s easy.

I would suggest that no commonly encountered field suffers from poorer ergonomic design than the kitchen. Few ‘standard’ tools found therein seem to even be aware of this field of engineering.

You can learn all about the history of cans and openers in this excellent Technology Connection video well presented by someone with an inquiring mind. A fine, inquiring mind.

The presenter relates, in wonderment, the fact that the side-opening can opener has never really caught on. You get that technology in some electric can openers (about as poor a dedication of engineering effort as the electric carving knife) but the humble $10 hand held device is largely unknown. Yet it is superior to the traditional design which cuts into the top of the can leaving deadly edges for your fingers and coating the cutting wheel in the can’s contents.

The design I am referring to can be had for just $10.

And if the traditional cutter exposes nasty sharp edges to your fingers, the pull-off top on cans with a key is even worse. No matter how hard I try I still occasionally cut myself on these and they invariably need great effort to remove, not to mention the need for a tool to pry the key up or risk damaging your manicure. Bad, bad, bad.

You want to get the linked model of the can opener, not the one with the L-shaped extension arm with a magnet attached. First, there is no need for a magnet to remove the severed lid. Second, that magnet interferes with the pull-open key on cans thus equipped, rendering it useless. How do I know this? Please spare me the embarrassment of answering.


No interference with the key.

The cutting wheel makes no contact with the can’s contents:


The cutting wheel.

Note that the contents of the can are nowhere near the cutting wheel.


The arrow indicates marginal contact of the
cutting wheel with the inside of the lid’s seam.

How about those rectangular sardine tins with those deadly pull-off tops?


No problem with rectangular tins.

And be assured, it is impossible – impossible! – to cut yourself on any newly exposed edge on either the lid or can after using this opener.

Few things in a kitchen are more disgusting than traditional can openers with their cutting wheels encrusted with the contents of who knows how many cans past. And that legacy, replete with bacteria, is waiting to infect the contents of the next can you open. Yes, I always washed mine, but really, that should not be necessary in a properly designed tool.

Drawbacks? Because you are cutting through one layer of a seam which is considerably thicker than the surface of the lid (check the video), the torque required to turn the cutting wheel is, I estimate, three times as great as with traditional models. Meaning it’s non-trivial. No problem for me but this may be an issue for those with arthritic joints.

Secondly, because the can opener cuts from the side of the lid not through the top, you cannot see the cut as you operate the tool. Further, it’s very smooth, so you don’t get that ‘click’ at completion that you do with the traditional style of opener. So as to minimize effort, meaning you want to stop turning the handle the minute you have completed a circle, I make a note of where I have started the cut and wait for that start point to come around again.

Overall, this tool is so superior in every conceivable way I do not see going back to the traditional can opener, ever.

Remove ads from Apple News

iPhone

Too much of a bad thing.

Like any news reader seeking to preserve his sanity, I installed AdBlock on my desktop computer and laptop years ago. At no charge this removes intrusive ads from news feeds, replacing them with a blank space or a grey box.

And it has worked well for years.

But when Apple’s iOS devices added Apple News, there was a handy news consolidator whose content you could curate. Well, whose feeds you could curate as the content, which started with light and bearable advertising a couple of years back, has let greed rear its ugly head. AdBlock did not work on Apple News content. Read a typical Washington Post story on your iPhone or iPad and you will get a blaring ad every two paragraphs of text. I already pay for the subscription and see no reason why it should include unsolicited ads, especially as those increasingly include politician lookalikes to make them doubly irritating. You want to lie to me, steal my money and then pay for the privilege? I don’t think so.

It turns out there’s a simple solution which actually improves on the desktop/AdBlock experience, for the ads are stripped out with no empty spaces testifying to their absence.

It’s called NextDNS and you can download it from the App Store for just a one time charge across any number of iOS devices.

Installation is simple.

After downloading, go to the Smart DNS app and touch Enable on its home page:


Enabling

Then touch the dots at the base of that page to get to the configuration screen, touch ‘Custom Configuration’ and enter this code in the ‘Configuration ID’ field:


Enabling

Now jump to the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad and go to Settings->General->VPN, DNS, & Device Management->DNS and touch ‘NextDNS’:


Enabling

You are done. Exit AppleNews, restart it and the ads are gone.

If the custom configuration code does not work generate your own code using the instructions here.

The app is free for the first 300,000 ad removals per month (that’s a lot), and $19.90 annually thereafter.

Who owns the company? Best as I can find out, it’s a Delaware company owned by two Frenchmen. No obvious indication of dirty Russkies trying to infiltrate your system.

Is it perfect? No. The process is somewhat akin to catching a drug addled Russkie athlete cheating in the Olympics. No sooner does detection technology catch up with the latest drugs than the Kremlin finds new and improved ones which defeat detection. The process here is the same. The maker of the app has to maintain a database of offending sites so as to know to block them. So the occasional ad does get through, but it’s still night and day compared to the original with no ad blocking.

The obsoleting of expertise

iPhone

Denialism rules.

The first time a driver lapped the famed Nürburgring racing circuit in under 7 minutes was in the mid-1970s when Niki Lauda accomplished the task in a Formula One Ferrari. No, you could not buy one at the corner store. Lauda almost died at the ‘ring in 1976 when his car crashed and was consumed, along with Lauda, in flames. Niki survived and added two more championships to his total, but accomplished something far better for the sport. His fiery crash saw to it that henceforth no more Formula One races would be held at the 13 mile circuit, built in the 1920s when tires were slim and drivers were fat. Getting speedy help to an injured driver on a circuit so long was simply not possible.

But the fascination of the circuit refused to go away and, to this day, you can pay up a few Euros and have at it on a nice drive through the beautiful Rhineland mountains.

Niki was driving the old fashioned way, with three pedals and a gearshift. There were maybe two or three other drivers in the world who, given comparable machinery, could match his time. Certainly not you or me.

But Porsche well knows the marketing cachet of the ‘ring, so in 2013 they asked their racing driver Marc Lieb to have a go in a 918 Spyder which you absolutely could buy at the local Porsche dealership, albeit after a wait of a few months while they made it back in Zuffenhausen.


Lieb’s 918

That 918 Spyder only had two pedals – go and stop – and Porsche’s magic Doppelkupplung transmission, a device so complex that for once the German love of complex nouns usually reserved for simple descriptions was entirely justified. We know it as the PDK (Pretty Damned Kwik) and it first saw the (retail) light of day on late 1990s 911s. Today you can even get it on some Honda motorcycles! Anyway, the PDK provided two gearboxes in one casing, one waiting for the upshift, the other for the downshift. As there was no longer any need for transmission fluid to confer the force which advised the direction of the change, along with the attendant delays dictated by the laws of hydraulics, the gearbox shifted right now, faster than any human could shift a traditional manual box, like the one Lauda used. And Lieb delivered in spades, returning a time of 6 minutes and 57 seconds and you can see the whole glorious thing here. What that video does not tell you is that when Lieb tried in a regular stick shift version of the 918 he could not break 7 minutes …. Technology had obsoleted the skill of gear shifting for ever. You may still enjoy shifting, but you will never be as fast as a PDK automatic. One thing remains unchanged. Neither you or I could remotely match Lieb’s lap in that off-the-shelf Porsche, but the technology makes a better driver of us all.

This somewhat lengthy preamble brings us to an interview with famous Leica photographer Ralph Gibson, excerpted below. You know, the Ralph Gibson of such great 1960s works like The Somnambulist and Deus Ex Machina, which brought his own special vision of the world to the printed black and white page. Of course it was black and white. And in a book. What did you expect?

All of a sudden the software that makes everybody in the world a photographer also makes everybody’s photographs look exactly the same. My iPhone shots aren’t any better than yours and yours aren’t any better than the person next to you. There’s a homogeneity that comes with this.

I want to know how this technology, which we will consider to be a formal construct, impacts what I’m able to say in my photographs, which is the art that’s discussed in terms of form and content. Let’s say the form is digital imagery. How does this speak differently than analog film, silver gelatin? There is a difference, and it has to do with the fact that the image is somewhat compressed, in terms of its perspective. The laws of perspective were invented in the Renaissance. Prior to that time, painting was entirely two dimensional. That particular illusion of space, from the picture plane back, as we’ve grown accustomed to it in film, is foreshortened on the digital sensor.

What has happened to poor old Ralph, in all this denialism, is that his gear (shifting) skills have been obsoleted and, man, does he rue that loss. The premium his ability confers to manually focus, expose just so and brew the developer as he had learned over decades – all of these have become irrelevant. Stated differently, the iPhone is Gibson’s PDK. Not for one moment can he tell an iPhone picture from his Leica film snaps, although there will be hints. The cell phone version will be sharper, better exposed and come with lots of data missing in his film version. And it can be sent around the world in a matter of seconds, not days or weeks later in some stuffy old book decorating a coffee table.

Film cameras, stick shifts. So much technological detritus. Technology makes a better photographer of us all.

Rolex Datejust 41

Ramblings

A fine and expensive timepiece.


The Rolex 41 Datejust 16300

A year or so ago I wrote in disgust about my abandonment of Patek Philippe wristwatches and their replacement with a dirt cheap Seiko Solar. That Seiko is recommended every bit as much today as is my warning to steer away from Pateks. These may be the most elegant and desired of watches but they are like Jaguar cars of old. You need two. One on your wrist and the other in for service. In fact, it looks like you need two service men, in case one breaks down, and you can bet they are nowhere to be found in the US of A. It’s off to Geneva and many months of waiting, during which time your inquiries are disregarded.

So with the proceeds of the Nautilus and the Golden Ellipse burning a hole in my pocket, it was just a question of waiting for the wounds to heal after decades of association with the marque. The healing time was used for some serious research into alternatives.

And when the withdrawal symptoms faded with the coming of the new year I looked to a brand I though would never grace (darken?) my wrist, Rolex.

Frankly, all that bling and association with guys named Tony left me cold. Not my thing. While I do believe a good whacking beats our legal system as often as not, it’s not an activity with which I want to be associated.


…. guys named Tony….

But there are Rolexes and there are Rolexes as a glance at their extensive offerings confirms. As I wanted a classic, simple watch my attention fell on the Datejust, first offered in 1945 and the first watch with a date display. After a while Rolex added the ‘cyclops’ date magnifier, 2.5x unlike the 1.5x found elsewhere, and that was a must for these aging eyes. The look is simple, almost severe, ‘no gold’ options abound and you can even side step that awful machined bezel which screams ‘look at me’. So I went for a plain steel model with a smooth bezel and made sure it came with the gorgeous Jubilee bracelet – the one with the three rows of fine, polished links in the center in contrast to the single link of the clunkier Oyster alternative – and plunked down a (small) percentage of the proceeds from the Pateks. This is the Datejust 41 model, their latest, and obsoletes the thicker and clunkier Datejust II, which is more reminiscent of the fat onions of old. Roman numerals? You bet. An essential option on my timepieces. The trade-off is that the Roman numerals dial has no luminosity. If that is a desired feature, you have to go with the stick hour markers and stick luminous hands.

While Rolex claims a 41mm bezel diameter, that is a lie. It’s actually 40.1mm:


Little lies.

No matter. It looks just right on my 7 3/4″ circumference wrist and more discreet than some of the modern monsters from the competition.

And while silver hands on a white background suggest poor readability, tilt the wrist a few degrees and the contrast is striking, courtesy of the facets on the hands:


No lack of contrast

The watch can be ‘hacked’, meaning the second hand can be stopped for precise alignment with Apple Time, and my early readings suggest it is losing 1.0 seconds a day. Compare that with the quartz magic of the Seiko which gains 2 seconds …. a month! The Rolex is automatic and the power reserve a generous 70 hours. The movement is made in house, unlike with most Swiss brands who buy in movements from mass market makers. Stated differently, your are buying a packaging and marketing exercise with those, not a statement of mechanical originality. You want your Porsche 911 with a Chevy motor?

A great deal of thought has gone into the making of this timepiece. Look at the perfect integration of that gorgeous bracelet with the lugs and body:


Perfect integration of band and lugs

And the attention is not all on the surface, as this detail of the clasp’s design and finish discloses:


Clasp detail

So for those seeking a mechanical watch which will never really be an heirloom – in the sense of a Patek Philippe or Audemars Piguet – but which nevertheless boasts high standards of design and execution, and if a 2 seconds a day accuracy is acceptable, add the Rolex Datejust to your list. Waterproofing is good to 100 meters below the surface.

If you want a Rolex with a stopwatch function, you should look at the Daytona model. This will run you 2 to 3 times as much as the Datejust, above, and be prepared to add 50-70% to prices on the Rolex website for any model. No jeweler will offer you those prices. Excuses will include “supply chain”, “sunken delivery ship”, “the European war”, “the pandemic”, “inflation”, and so on.

Provenance? Churchill was gifted #100,000, though like a true Victorian he preferred his Breguet pocket watch. Ike got #150,000 and the watch even made an appearance on the cover of Life magazine along with its distinguished wearer, in 1952. Elvis got a free one, but the number is unknown and he probably bought a few dozen out of his own pocket to give his closest hangers on. The Datejust has a distinguished history and has been around almost 80 years, so the kinks will have been well and truly ironed out by now. Plus the extensive USA dealer and servicing network means it’s not off to the land of the Gnomes of Zurich (Nazi and Russkie bankers to you) every time something goes wrong. This is a Swiss product after all and its reliability is most likely like that of a Mercedes. Stated differently, it’s no Toyota/Seiko.

Purchase the watch new from an authorized US dealer and it comes with a five year factory warranty.

For an interesting review of the history of the magnificent Jubilee bracelet, click here.

Update May 18, 2022 – after one month of operation:

The Datejust has lost 23 seconds in 30 days at a constant rate. This is comfortably inside the stated +/- 2 seconds a day specification. When resetting the date every two months for short months I will set the watch 23 seconds fast for minimum mean error across a two month period.

The bracelet has a tool less length adjustment feature allowing a 5mm change in length by clipping or unclipping one link inside the clasp. I find this to be most useful. My wrist shrinks during the day so I shorten the bracelet around noon for a perfect fit at all times. Very handy.

Update June 30, 2022 – after 72 days of operation:

July 1st will be the first time I have had to reset the date at which point I will also “hack“ the second hand to get the lowest error rate through the next reset, which will be on October 1st. For those 72 days, the average daily error rate sees the Datejust running just 0.4 seconds slow per day. That is excellent for a purely mechanical device.

Hide My Email

iPhone

Another great privacy enhancement from Apple.

Sign up for a new online service and the one thing you can be almost certain of is that next day’s email inbox will be inundated with spam. The reason is that the scummy vendor of the service you just signed up for – and most are scummy – just sold your email address to some other bottom feeder.

The other day I was signing up to a streaming service and I knew that these predators would immediately sell my email address. It’s lost somewhere in the ‘Terms of Service’ fine print which the scummy vendor had his scummy laywers write. Calling this a ‘service’ is like claiming the invasion of Ukraine was a denazification move.

Anyway, as I moved the cursor to the email field, iOS on my iPhone asked whether I wanted to hide my email, and I replied ‘Yes’. It issued me a fake email address which will be the one the scummy vendor sees and the one I signed up with …. immediately to be sold. The snag for Mr. Scummy is that anyone he sells this fake email to who emails me will have that email bounced as only emails from the original vendor will be filtered through to my inbox, using my regular email address which is visible only to Apple. And, indeed, that’s what happened – one confirming email from Mr. Scummy and nothing from his scummy pals.


Beating Mr. Scummy. Click the image for the full explanation from Apple.

Recommended for all your sign-ups. As a default assume that anytime you enter your email online that it will be sold – unless the vendor is Apple.