I took my D40x to Nikon with a CCD problem last week - bright pixels on photos. This is the second time I’ve had the problem since buying my camera in November last year. The first time they just mapped out the bad pixels in software. This time they agreed to replace the CCD.
All well and good (except for the 1000+ photos I took in Hiroshima which are partially ruined with white and blue dots - not visible on the reduced size photo above), .. or so I thought. Today I was supposed to collect the camera and I received a call from Nikon: “The camera will not be available until July 31st because there is a crack on the casing so the top of the casing needs replacing.” They then told me that I need to pay 3000 yen (about 30 USD) to have the casing replaced.
I am 99.9999% sure there was no crack on the case when I gave my camera to Nikon - I would have noticed if there was. Trouble is, it is my word against theirs, and dealing with someone who only speaks broken English, it is difficult to get any point across. I can say that I’m sure that there was no crack and that if there was, they would have noted it down when I gave them the camera. They can say “well we didn’t do it”. It’s also deeply suspicious that they didn’t call about it until the day I’m supposed to pick up - spanks of someone dropping the camera after fixing it and trying to cover their tracks.
What worries me more, though, is the lens: If my camera has been subjected to enough force to crack it under Nikon’s care, what has happened to the attached 900USD lens? The 18-200 VR lens might not show any cracks on the outside and might appear to be functioning correctly on quick inspection, but there are plenty of bits inside which could feel the effect of a knock. Misalignment. Back/front focus issues. VR issues. All difficult to detect and prove. Nikon are probably going to argue about the crack, so I doubt they will take responsibility if the lens has problems. Should have kept the lens myself.
On the positive side though, apparently Nikon has also replaced the external display LCD which had a faulty pixel. When I bought my Nikon I returned it to the store the next day because of the faulty pixel. The store agreed to replace it, but the replacement had focus issues with one of my lenses (hence my worry about lens issues now) so I kept the one with the faulty LCD.
Oh well, no point fretting about things. What will happen on Thursday will happen. Hopefully everything will be hunky-dory and they will wave the charge.
Here is one from the creep-ware department. Japanese tech reporter Nobuyuki Hayashi reports that Apple is equipping the new iPhone 3G models for the Japan market with a country-specific feature to stop local perverts from snapping so-called “up-skirt” or “down-blouse” photos of unsuspecting women.
Evidently, this form of “gotcha!” amateur photography is becoming an increasing problem in some public places in Japan, like on the escalators of Tokyo subway stops, Cult of Mac reports. As a result, camera phone manufacturers have been selling handsets that make a distinctive shutter sound to warn women (or, anyone nearby for that matter) that someone is taking a photo with their mobile. The first generation iPhones, however, had a silence mode that disabled this warning function. The new models, now on sale in Japan, however, “do make a sound if you take picture even when it is set to silent mode,” Hayashi writes.
In the UK and USA no sound is required because the iPhone doesn’t have a wide angle lens - the arses are just TOO GOD DAMN FAT to be captured with an iPhone.
But this is not new. In Korea and Japan all cell phones need to make a noise when taking photos. It has not been possible to up-skirt or down-blouse in Japan or Korea for a long time… not that you need to in Japan, the skirts are so damn short that no “upping” is required.
The iPhone is not available in Korea, so that is probably why it is country specific to Japan - the only country where the arses are small and sexy enough for people to WANT to photograph them secretly.
By the way, “hayashi” is “chopsticks” in Japan - so this man is called Mr Chopsticks. Lovely.
My Mac has been pissing me off lately. In Mac OS when I put the display to sleep, it has an irritating habit of waking again 10 seconds later. When I boot into Windows, the display never sleeps - it just goes to screensaver and stays there. It has been infuriating the hell out of me because unlike a laptop, if an iMac screen decides it is “on”, there is nothing you can do - no lid that you can close to say “no, you’re off buddy”.
Last night I was in Windows via Bootcamp and I couldn’t get the display to sleep. I ended up having to sleep the whole computer - something which I never do (because usually I have things running in the background). Something didn’t go right though, because this morning the computer was wide awake - and then when I rebooted to Mac OS and then later back to Windows, I received this error:
Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
<Windows root>\system32\hal.dll.
F*ck.
Couldn’t get into Windows via Bootcamp or VMWare Fusion. Reading around, missing hal.dll seemed a problem for Parallels, but I couldnt find anything related to sleep or bootcamp or VMWare Fusion.
Many results in Google basically said “I tried for hours to fix this and couldn’t - eventually had to reinstall XP”, so I wasn’t expecting to be able to solve this easily.. but thankfully it wasn’t that tricky. Hopefully these steps will be useful to other who have the hal.dll problem in bootcamp.
The problem basically came down to BOOT.INI being missing. When that happens, Windows defaults to WINNT for the Windows installation. My Windows installation (XP Pro SP2) is under the WINDOWS directory, so it couldn’t find hal.dll.
I fixed it by doing this to recreate the BOOT.INI file:
1. Put Windows XP install DVD in the Mac
2. Reboot and hold down the Option key, and then select the Windows DVD
3. Go into the recovery option
4. When the command prompt eventually appears, enter: bootcfg /Rebuild
One Windows installation was found and a new boot.ini file created. After reboot, Windows started normally.
I suspect simply creating a text file with that in it and placing it in the C drive would have had the same effect - but before following steps 1-4 above, I didn’t know what should be in the BOOT.INI file, so that wasn’t an option! I’m definitely keeping a copy of BOOT.INI handy in case this happens again, then hopefully recovery will be as simple as copying the file in place.
I have to wonder though - why did BOOT.INI disappear in the first place? Is it because I put Windows to sleep under bootcamp?
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A Manga Guide to Akihabara