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New parts: cycle computer and camera
The cycle computer had been giving extremely erratic results (speed obviously under-registering, recorded mileage about half what it should have been) for some time, despite repeated attempts on my part to reposition the transmitter unit correctly and make sure the sensor was close but not actually physically striking it in passing.
I eventually decided that the problem must be due to battery expiry in one or other of the units, and that the balance of probabilities favoured the wireless transmitter down on the front fork rather than the actual cycle computer on the handlebars, given that all the other functions on that appeared to be working. I managed to get the battery cover off again with the unit still in situ, although it's a fiddle, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the necessary small-but-not-watch batteries were available over the counter at the local hardware shop, and that replacing this battery did in fact seem to have cured the problems. (So this unit has a battery lifespan of only a year or so under relatively light use -- not great!)
I'm still not entirely confident that it is working properly, however, since my only trip since was taken on a rainy day where the entire cycle computer system and its display was obscured by my cycle cape for seventy-five minutes or so! When I got off at the end of the journey the mileage was still only about half what it should have been, but the magnet was hanging askew on the front wheel where it had evidently been knocked at some point, which might have accounted for that. Normally I would notice if I was getting funny readings while going along, but as the display had been invisible since I got on the bike I had no idea what might have been going on...
I have also been having a lot of trouble with my digital camera, an HP PhotoSmart R607, which was a very nice piece of equipment when it was new (circa 2004), and perfect for my needs when I first acquired it second-hand ten years or so ago. It has an actual optical viewfinder (so you can take pictures in bright sunlight and without the live screen preview chewing up the battery, enabling you to squeeze a lot of extra shots in when power is low), an optical zoom that gives genuine magnification at distance rather than just cropping the image, a corresponding close-up and super-closeup mode that can focus on the detail of individual stitches at a range of a few inches, a self-timer that makes it possible to take posed photos with a ten-second delay (and a two-shot feature that gives you a chance at two poses at a three-second interval, surprisingly useful given the high chances that one or both self-portraits will be an abject failure!), and various flash modes (force on, force off, low-light exposure length, pre-flash to trigger red-eye reflex).
It also has a useful lighting adjustment feature that brings out detail within shadows, and various pre-set modes, of which I only ever used 'Portrait' (short focal length to blur background) for flower pictures and 'Action' for fast shutter speed on moving objects -- not all that helpful, since the shutter delay on the digital camera is dreadful compared to manual shutter release speeds. At least a second's wait between pressing the button and hearing the shutter click... possibly, to be fair, because I left it set on auto-focus, so it has to calculate what it is focussing on every time you take a photo! The press-photographer-style 'burst mode' helps with action shots, in that you can hope to capture your target in at least one of the series of photos.
The ability to film short movies exists, but I found it pretty useless. There were various in-camera processing features that I never used because I prefer doing my image editing full-size on a computer. The preview screen is small, but since it is normally only in use for super-closeup pictures (where the viewfinder is offset too far from the lens to be useful in framing a photo) that wasn't a problem; the main issue is that you really can't use it to tell whether a photo was in focus or not or whether it was grainy due to low lighting, since they all look fine when 'played back' in miniature on the camera :-p
It 'only' takes photos up to 4 megapixel resolution, but since I was never attempting to print them out but always sampling them down to small filesizes for internet purposes, I always used the 2MP setting anyway, which gave me more than enough resolution (larger than 1600x900px) and meant I could theoretically fit more photos on the card. In practice I think I only filled it once or twice -- even the camera's onboard memory allows for 32 photos at 2MP, which is more exposures than the average reel of film!
If you know what you are doing, it does give you full manual aperture and F-stop control, as well as simulating different film speeds; I never knew enough to use any of that, and the Auto settings seemed to give good results on various different subjects, especially as I was mostly doing close-ups anyway. Importantly for me, you *don't* have to use any of the bundled Windows/Hewlett-Packard printer software/connection features; you can simply access the photos as plain image files on the SD card, or by attaching the camera via a cable to your computer's USB port.
Unfortunately it had been giving an increasingly large number of errors when trying to save its images to the internal storage, in addition to having problems with the flash (triggered before the shutter release as blinding white or not triggered at all). In the last couple of weeks I ended up reformatting the SD card twice because the camera was reporting that it had become corrupted, losing all the images on it each time -- fortunately I have always been in the film-induced habit of downloading, processing and wiping each batch of photos once taken, so I didn't have much stored data to lose.
Finally it failed altogether; I had the bright idea of removing the SD card and experimenting with letting the camera default back to using the small onboard memory, and that seemed to work (mostly; there was still one alarming error when it failed to write), so I thought it might be worth getting a new SD card. I'd already had a replacement battery years ago. I do rather suspect it may well be getting to the stage when it needs another one, and that they are no longer that easy to acquire...
What I didn't realise was that shops no longer *sold* SD cards of less than 4GB -- and no longer sell anything but micro-SD cards in holders, so far as I can see, presumably because the commercial market is for tiny cards to fit embedded devices, but the consumer market still requires postage-stamp-sized cards that are large enough to handle without dropping them :-p
I had my suspicions as to whether anything that large would be compatible with my camera's operating system, given that my previous computer was unable to address more than 512Mb due to addressing issues (the sheer *length* of a memory address in the gigabyte-range was too large a number for the hardware to handle -- it simply couldn't be held in the registers). So I decided not to spend ten pounds on the 4GB card, but went home and checked the camera's manual, which helpfully mentioned in the small print that the device was capable of handling a maximum storage size of 512Mb (or 1GB untested -- I suspect that means that the addressing would go into negative numbers (top bit set) at those ranges, which would theoretically work in terms of storage but might have unexpected side-effects elsewhere in the programming).
So it was then a question of trying to source a second-hand replacement 128Mb SD card, a task which was made much harder by the modern existence of 128-*gigabyte* SD cards as a highly marketable resource, such that any online search for the size I wanted tended to get auto-corrected by the search engine to throw up unusable cards a thousand times larger :-O I had to be very careful not to accidentally order the wrong size.
I spent a week bidding on a second-hand SD card that was being offered for 99p-plus-postage on eBay, only to be outbid when the price went up. I think the other bidder put in a last-minute 'snipe', but I had already decided that I wasn't going to increase my bidding any further -- it wasn't an objectively large amount, but I wasn't that desperate. Afterwards I slightly regretted this decision, as it turned out there didn't seem to be any further 128Mb cards on offer at all!
But I had the idea of looking for 512Mb cards, and these are much easier to track down. I succeeded in buying one of those for less than I had previously bid on the 128Mb card, and tried it out. I had a scare on my first tests, since the camera kept reporting 'card locked' whichever way I had the lock toggle set, but it turned out that this simply equated to 'card not formatted'; once I had forced a full format, the camera happily reported that I had 708(!) photos remaining.
In my limited testing, it seems fine so far... although the camera *is* old and does have other known problems, which is why I didn't want to spend too much money on experimenting with this 'fix'. I suspect that the problem was, ironically enough, the result of my engrained habit of deleting photos once I had finished with them, given that an SD card has an inherently limited number of read/write cycles. Given the huge size of the new card I possibly ought to allow myself to fill the camera to capacity before wiping it, but since each image takes a significant time to render when previewed on the computer and the display starts with the oldest files, there is a practical disincentive to this in terms of actually processing and using the pictures...
I eventually decided that the problem must be due to battery expiry in one or other of the units, and that the balance of probabilities favoured the wireless transmitter down on the front fork rather than the actual cycle computer on the handlebars, given that all the other functions on that appeared to be working. I managed to get the battery cover off again with the unit still in situ, although it's a fiddle, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the necessary small-but-not-watch batteries were available over the counter at the local hardware shop, and that replacing this battery did in fact seem to have cured the problems. (So this unit has a battery lifespan of only a year or so under relatively light use -- not great!)
I'm still not entirely confident that it is working properly, however, since my only trip since was taken on a rainy day where the entire cycle computer system and its display was obscured by my cycle cape for seventy-five minutes or so! When I got off at the end of the journey the mileage was still only about half what it should have been, but the magnet was hanging askew on the front wheel where it had evidently been knocked at some point, which might have accounted for that. Normally I would notice if I was getting funny readings while going along, but as the display had been invisible since I got on the bike I had no idea what might have been going on...
I have also been having a lot of trouble with my digital camera, an HP PhotoSmart R607, which was a very nice piece of equipment when it was new (circa 2004), and perfect for my needs when I first acquired it second-hand ten years or so ago. It has an actual optical viewfinder (so you can take pictures in bright sunlight and without the live screen preview chewing up the battery, enabling you to squeeze a lot of extra shots in when power is low), an optical zoom that gives genuine magnification at distance rather than just cropping the image, a corresponding close-up and super-closeup mode that can focus on the detail of individual stitches at a range of a few inches, a self-timer that makes it possible to take posed photos with a ten-second delay (and a two-shot feature that gives you a chance at two poses at a three-second interval, surprisingly useful given the high chances that one or both self-portraits will be an abject failure!), and various flash modes (force on, force off, low-light exposure length, pre-flash to trigger red-eye reflex).
It also has a useful lighting adjustment feature that brings out detail within shadows, and various pre-set modes, of which I only ever used 'Portrait' (short focal length to blur background) for flower pictures and 'Action' for fast shutter speed on moving objects -- not all that helpful, since the shutter delay on the digital camera is dreadful compared to manual shutter release speeds. At least a second's wait between pressing the button and hearing the shutter click... possibly, to be fair, because I left it set on auto-focus, so it has to calculate what it is focussing on every time you take a photo! The press-photographer-style 'burst mode' helps with action shots, in that you can hope to capture your target in at least one of the series of photos.
The ability to film short movies exists, but I found it pretty useless. There were various in-camera processing features that I never used because I prefer doing my image editing full-size on a computer. The preview screen is small, but since it is normally only in use for super-closeup pictures (where the viewfinder is offset too far from the lens to be useful in framing a photo) that wasn't a problem; the main issue is that you really can't use it to tell whether a photo was in focus or not or whether it was grainy due to low lighting, since they all look fine when 'played back' in miniature on the camera :-p
It 'only' takes photos up to 4 megapixel resolution, but since I was never attempting to print them out but always sampling them down to small filesizes for internet purposes, I always used the 2MP setting anyway, which gave me more than enough resolution (larger than 1600x900px) and meant I could theoretically fit more photos on the card. In practice I think I only filled it once or twice -- even the camera's onboard memory allows for 32 photos at 2MP, which is more exposures than the average reel of film!
If you know what you are doing, it does give you full manual aperture and F-stop control, as well as simulating different film speeds; I never knew enough to use any of that, and the Auto settings seemed to give good results on various different subjects, especially as I was mostly doing close-ups anyway. Importantly for me, you *don't* have to use any of the bundled Windows/Hewlett-Packard printer software/connection features; you can simply access the photos as plain image files on the SD card, or by attaching the camera via a cable to your computer's USB port.
Unfortunately it had been giving an increasingly large number of errors when trying to save its images to the internal storage, in addition to having problems with the flash (triggered before the shutter release as blinding white or not triggered at all). In the last couple of weeks I ended up reformatting the SD card twice because the camera was reporting that it had become corrupted, losing all the images on it each time -- fortunately I have always been in the film-induced habit of downloading, processing and wiping each batch of photos once taken, so I didn't have much stored data to lose.
Finally it failed altogether; I had the bright idea of removing the SD card and experimenting with letting the camera default back to using the small onboard memory, and that seemed to work (mostly; there was still one alarming error when it failed to write), so I thought it might be worth getting a new SD card. I'd already had a replacement battery years ago. I do rather suspect it may well be getting to the stage when it needs another one, and that they are no longer that easy to acquire...
What I didn't realise was that shops no longer *sold* SD cards of less than 4GB -- and no longer sell anything but micro-SD cards in holders, so far as I can see, presumably because the commercial market is for tiny cards to fit embedded devices, but the consumer market still requires postage-stamp-sized cards that are large enough to handle without dropping them :-p
I had my suspicions as to whether anything that large would be compatible with my camera's operating system, given that my previous computer was unable to address more than 512Mb due to addressing issues (the sheer *length* of a memory address in the gigabyte-range was too large a number for the hardware to handle -- it simply couldn't be held in the registers). So I decided not to spend ten pounds on the 4GB card, but went home and checked the camera's manual, which helpfully mentioned in the small print that the device was capable of handling a maximum storage size of 512Mb (or 1GB untested -- I suspect that means that the addressing would go into negative numbers (top bit set) at those ranges, which would theoretically work in terms of storage but might have unexpected side-effects elsewhere in the programming).
So it was then a question of trying to source a second-hand replacement 128Mb SD card, a task which was made much harder by the modern existence of 128-*gigabyte* SD cards as a highly marketable resource, such that any online search for the size I wanted tended to get auto-corrected by the search engine to throw up unusable cards a thousand times larger :-O I had to be very careful not to accidentally order the wrong size.
I spent a week bidding on a second-hand SD card that was being offered for 99p-plus-postage on eBay, only to be outbid when the price went up. I think the other bidder put in a last-minute 'snipe', but I had already decided that I wasn't going to increase my bidding any further -- it wasn't an objectively large amount, but I wasn't that desperate. Afterwards I slightly regretted this decision, as it turned out there didn't seem to be any further 128Mb cards on offer at all!
But I had the idea of looking for 512Mb cards, and these are much easier to track down. I succeeded in buying one of those for less than I had previously bid on the 128Mb card, and tried it out. I had a scare on my first tests, since the camera kept reporting 'card locked' whichever way I had the lock toggle set, but it turned out that this simply equated to 'card not formatted'; once I had forced a full format, the camera happily reported that I had 708(!) photos remaining.
In my limited testing, it seems fine so far... although the camera *is* old and does have other known problems, which is why I didn't want to spend too much money on experimenting with this 'fix'. I suspect that the problem was, ironically enough, the result of my engrained habit of deleting photos once I had finished with them, given that an SD card has an inherently limited number of read/write cycles. Given the huge size of the new card I possibly ought to allow myself to fill the camera to capacity before wiping it, but since each image takes a significant time to render when previewed on the computer and the display starts with the oldest files, there is a practical disincentive to this in terms of actually processing and using the pictures...