Monday, July 20, 2009
Stuff I Don't Leave The Beaten Path Without (2).
A Pentax W- series waterproof point-and-shoot camera. Mine is a W-10 that's about three years old and goes everywhere with me. I take many of the photographs for this page with it, and have sold as many shots from it as from my pet Nikon SLR. The latest iteration is the W-60, with the W-80 just introduced.Battery life is very good - roughly a week's messing around without too many flash shots, and the thing is *durable*! I've taken this sailing in salt water, crewing on race boats, sticking it out into the slipstream at altitude and on all kinds of hikes and adventures and it refuses to malfunction or die. For whitewater rafting I just tuck it on a lanyard down the front of my vest. Mine has a few scratches and dings on it but those are badges of honor. It will shoot video underwater (to about 10 feet / 3 meters) and closeups very well, and its small size guarantees it goes along with me everywhere, which means that I get to blackmail everybody who went skinnydipping.
Its only annoying features are that the battery is perfectly rectangular, which means you can put it in upside down (contacts facing inward, but on the wrong side) and the camera won't work. Marking the battery slot and the camera solves that one. The focusing system makes a lot of gear noise during video shots that the microphone picks up, but this seems universal in point-and-shoots.
Also, in *this* model (W-10), the video comes out in Quicktime (.mov) format and has to be converted for windows work. Newer models output video in .avi formats, with the most recent being 720p HD which looks pretty good given the lens size etc.
Pentax has produced this series for some time, and their habit of regularly superseding models with increases in functionality at each generation works to your advantage. For example, when the W-20 series was being superseded by the W-30, I found a backup W-10 on closeout for $100 on Ebay, new in the box. Problem is, I don't use it -- the original refuses to die!
So, if you're willing to have 10 Mp* and not the latest 12 Mp* (just think of the poor guy who had to count all those) with all the most recent iteration's bells and whistles you can have a very good camera at a very good price. This guarantees that not only are your adventures saved for posterity, but you can tell "No shit, there I was..." stories with accompanying pictures or HD video.
Of course, if you're making it all up, you'd better get busy with Photoshop.
(UPDATE: Fortuitously, the New York Times has a review of watertight point-and-shoot cameras.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/technology/personaltech/23basics.html
Make your own choice, but having a small, sturdy, waterproof camera along is a joy ).
* Unless you like to clog up your memory cards and computer with huge photo files (and/or are doing it for money) setting the file size choice to 2 - 6 Mp suffices for nearly everything.
Trangia Mini -- $ 1 Modification For Use With Snow Peak And Other Ultralight Cookware
I love the Trangia burners -- they're incredibly sturdy, run hot and will store excess fuel in the stove by simply putting the lid on. I purchased a Trangia Mini cookset some years ago at an REI sale ($12, I think) and it does a great job. Came with a little pot, lid/frypan, a windscreen and a pot lifter (that all work better than you'd think).
I've tinkered with beer can stoves and other cult favorites, but after bandaging my fingers and putting the squished wreckage aside, I keep coming back to my quiet favorite.
Ultralight (usually titanium) cups and tiny pot-sets are great too -- weigh almost nothing and do just fine for small amounts of whatever it is you're heating up. Unfortunately, many of the ultralight cooksets such as those offered by Snow Peak and others are sized to *juuuuust* fit a standard pressurized gas fuel canister.
Also unfortunately, the windscreen on the Trangia Mini cook kit has a diameter that is slightly larger than this, and using a mug or mini-cookset that is sized for a gas canister will guarantee that the windscreen can't keep it above the flame -- it just drops down inside the windscreen and puts the burner out (or something even more entertaining). The obvious solution is to bend the tips of the windscreen slightly inward , but when you do that, the tips no longer engage an embossed ring in the bottom of the Trangia pot, allowing it to sit askew or to slide off.
A better solution is to get four #8 x 1/2" aluminum sheet metal screws [or their approximate metric equivalent]. Any good hardware store should have some specialty trays for these (I think they're used in screen and door repair) at about a quarter apiece. No bonus points for looting the neighbor's screen door.
Drill a 3/32 pilot hole about 3/8" below the top of each windscreen tip and put the screws through the holes, point facing inward.
So you wind up with four aluminum screws facing inward as supports for slightly undersized cookware. You can sand or file the tips off to reduce snagging as you handle the burner (use a fine wood rasp rather than a metal file as aluminum will clog the teeth of the latter).
A couple of things here:
- The 3/32" pilot hole is slightly undersized for the application. This is intentional to get the aluminum of both the screw and the windscreen to deform and abrade at the expense of having to work a little harder to get them in. You can see how it's actually pushed the windscreen's metal out a bit. This provides a good tight fit, and with some luck as the aluminum oxidizes slightly that will fuse everything together very tightly.
- This uses aluminum screws instead of, say, stainless steel. I'm not a total gram weenie, but the screws are lighter. More importantly they're the same material (if not exactly the same alloy) as the windscreen, so there's very little likelihood of electrolytic ("bimetallic") corrosion from fuel vapor, salt water, spilled beef bourguignon, and the like. Also, the metals will expand at about the same rate, so thermal cycling won't make them come loose. Yes, I overthink things, but it works and this is playing with fire (fun!!) after all.
This way, both the original pot and any small cups or pots are supported. This is the bottom of a Snow Peak 600 mug. The Snow Peak Mini -Solo set fits similarly.
And the original pot support ring still engages. Woot!
Why bother?
If you already carry a cup that can be used for heating, as many people do, you now have a small pot, small frying pan and ability to heat things in the cup all in one at no significant additional weight. Not bad for a buck.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Stuff I Don't Leave The Beaten Path Without (1).
A Garmin Foretrex 101. Simple, inexpensive (less than $100 online) and will-get-you-home. I splurged for the bike clip and use it as a bike odometer when in civilization. I've carried it all over the world and geotagged all sorts of places in typical geeky fashion, but on and on it goes. Unfortunately it has a serial interface and what computer has a serial port these days (yes, you can get interface adapters).The 201 is rechargable, but I'd rather carry extra batteries than spend my time trying to find a wall socket. My experience with lithium batteries in these is that they work in the coldest of weather, but the battery indicator doesn't work all that well with them and the cell life seems about the same. Lithium disposables have a weird, flat voltage curve, so if the battery indicator says anything but "full", get ready to change them.
My first good portable GPS, a Garmin GPS III+ (which I still have) has saved my dyslexic bacon from time to time, but was a big lump to carry. I can navigate boats and my feet with this little thing. It's not convenient in driving airplanes, but it does work. No frills -- it won't replace your IClone 9000 GonzoMatic Satellite-Uplink touch screen, but I haven't broken it yet and it goes and goes on a single set of batteries. It also comes with a strap extender so you can wear it outside a jacket (or even thick foulies as I found out boat racing with it). Very waterproof -- never gone diving with it but dousing with rain and saltwater hasn't killed it (yet).
The very-similar 301, which has just been released claims a higher sensitivity reciever, slightly better battery life (18 vs. 15 hours per set of AAA batteries) and a USB interface, all good things, plus a slightly smaller box for the same screen. It's not clear if the timers available in the 101 version (sailing countdown timers etc.) are in the 301's software.
If someone wants to donate one, I'd be happy to look.
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