About those flash cards...

I bought a Kodak DC120 digital camera back when it was a top-of-the-line model, and equipped it with an 8-MB flash memory card, which increased the unit's capacity from 12 shots to 55. The camera is powered by four 1.5-Vdc AA size batteries, and I've always used the lithium variety since they have a longer life and appear to deliver more power than ordinary alkaline batteries.

Well, the batteries in the unit finally died the other day, at which point I found out the following:

Plugging in an external power supply does nothing unless the batteries in the unit are capable of turning the unit on. At least, that's how I figure it. Plugging in the power supply did nothing.

Removing the flash card and installing it in one of the VAIO's PCMCIA card slots resulted in an automatic recognition of the hardware, and the card appeared as an 8-MB disk drive on the computer. Neat.

Each shot was represented by a separate file, with a .KDC extension. Apparently, when transferring photos from the camera via its serial interface, the .KDC files are converted into .BMP files, but the process is slow, owing to the serial interface.

I figured I could transfer files about a zillion times faster if I took them off the card when it was installed in my laptop, but then the issue revolved around converting the files from .KDC to something more mainstream.

Snooping the web found precious little about such conversion, so the idea is on hold. Still, it's a tantalizing prospect.

In similar news, a customer came into the store the other day to ask if we could take photos from his flash cards - which he used in a Canon digital camera - and put them on a CD. We transferred the photos the "old fashioned" way: by installing his camera's software and dealing with the transfer that way.

Unfortunately, the VAIO was not operable when we did this, so I did not have the luxury of seeing whether the put-the-card-in-the-PCMCIA-slot was a viable option. In any event, putting the files on CD was a trivial task, and now we just have to make our new capability known, though the tourist season is better than halfway gone.

I'm still working on the ethnography text, and for some reason, progress is going very slowly. It seems no matter how much I translate - and the text is not all that difficult - I cannot see any advancement toward the end. Ideally, I'd like to have this finished by the time I leave for Houston next Tuesday, especially since I will probably not be taking the VAIO with me (unless some miracle happens in the fan department).

Back to work...

Cheers...

Proving you're a resident...

Drew has decided to go get some of that good old higher education. The only problem is that even though he's 22 years old and has been living here in Colorado since June 1997, the bureaucracy is making him cough up every sort of evidence that he is eligible for "in-state" tuition.

Example: show us your bank statements for the past 18 months and document the source of every deposit.

Kinda takes your breath away, especially since people of his age tend not to keep a lot of the records that are thrown at them by various banks, utilities, and employers. It was the case when I was Drew's age, and it is certainly the case with Drew.

My job is simple. I only have to cough up the past few years' worth of tax returns to demonstrate that I haven't listed him as a deduction.

Cheers...

Interesting Windows 2000 behavior...

I managed to hack together a new DLL for the Russian keyboard layout for Windows 2000 (and I also got another DLL from fellow LJer avva [thanks!]), so - paraphrasing the lyrics of Sixteen Tons, "if this file don't getcha, then the other one will." Or should.

Or so I thought.

Copying the new DLL into the \WINNT\SYSTEM32 directory succeeds, but upon rebooting the machine, the new DLL is gone and is replaced with the original. I then copied the new DLL into that directory and a subdirectory called DLLCACHE.

Same result.

It would appear that Windows 2000 has the capability to repair itself from deliberate (and, I suppose, inadvertent) changes to system files. It's nice, on the one hand, that it's so difficult for a naive user to mess with the system, even logged in as the Administrator. On the other hand, it'd be nice to be able to have a phonetic keyboard layout under Windows 2000, too.

I wonder if the key is to place the DLL into the directory under a new name and then edit (shudder) the Registry?

No time to experiment. Galina told someone that I'd go "on the Internet" to research what kind of cars one can buy for $2,000, and I haven't the foggiest notion of where to look, or what factors are important. As far as I can tell, nothing beats going out into the trenches and seeing what there is to see.

Cheers...