Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Our Larval Engineer reported that her camera, which is my old Casio pocket camera, has begun fading away, so we’re getting her a shiny new camera of her very own. Being a doting father, I picked up a pair of Wasabi NB-6L batteries (and a charger, it not costing much more for the package) so she’s never without electrons, and did the usual rundown test on all three batteries:
Canon NB-6L – 2014 OEM vs Wasabi
Fairly obviously, the Wasabi batteries aren’t first tier products, but they’re definitely better than that bottom-dollar crap from eBay.
Used to be, back in the day, that when you got a box full of shiny new electronics, it bore stickers: “Do not accept if seal is broken” or “Factory sealed” or “Genuine product” or something like that. When you slit the seal, you had some confidence that the last person to look in the box sat at the end of their production line; I’ll grant you that counterfeit stickers have become cheap & readily available, but it’s the principle of the thing.
Nowadays, a shiny new Canon camera arrives in a box with a tab tucked into a slit:
Canon Camera box – unopened and unsealed
The box looked unopened and everything inside seemed in order, but … even though I’d seen this before on other cameras, it’s still disconcerting.
Just like fire extinguishers and bike helmets, you never know when you’ll need to use this thing in a hurry… then it’s too late to clean out all the crap that accumulates on any flat (or concave) spot.
Not that I’m completely innocent, of course.
The DSC-H5 had been outdoors for a few hours, hiking with us at 25 °F, so the lens fogged instantly when we walked through the greenhouse door.
Picked up a Sandisk 32 GB Micro SD Card from a reputable supplier for $0.62/GB, in the hope that Santa will deliver a helmet camera:
Sandisk 32 GB microSD card
Until that happy event, I verified that it can store and return 32 GB of white noise with absolute fidelity.
It came formatted with an empty FAT32 filesystem that allows single files up to 4 GB. Reformatting with exFAT supports vastly larger capacities and, in this case, allows single files up to 32 GB. Whether it’s actually legal to use exFAT on a Linux box remains up for grabs, but installing exfat-utils, which drags in exfat-fuse, does the trick.
Verifying the SD Card capacity went swimmingly, much along the lines of the original recipe. The data file size came from the card’s FAT-32 formatting and is a smidge less than the capacity after reformatting the card with exFAT. Close enough for this purpose.
dd bs=1K count=31154656 if=/dev/urandom of=/mnt/part2/Testdata/Testdata.bin
(This took the better part of an hour; I didn't record it.)
sudo mkexfatfs -i babeface -n SanDisk32GB /dev/sdb1
mkexfatfs 1.0.1
Creating... done.
Flushing... done.
File system created successfully.
sudo dumpexfat /dev/sdb1
dumpexfat 1.0.1
Volume label SanDisk32GB
Volume serial number 0xbabeface
FS version 1.0
Sector size 512
Cluster size 32768
Sectors count 62325760
Free sectors 62317504
Clusters count 973719
Free clusters 973711
First sector 0
FAT first sector 128
FAT sectors count 7616
First cluster sector 7744
Root directory cluster 7
Volume state 0x0000
FATs count 1
Drive number 0x80
Allocated space 0%
time rsync --progress /mnt/part2/Testdata/Testdata.bin /mnt/part/Test.bin
Testdata.bin
31902367744 100% 9.15MB/s 0:55:24 (xfer#1, to-check=0/1)
sent 31906262150 bytes received 31 bytes 9594425.55 bytes/sec
total size is 31902367744 speedup is 1.00
real 55m25.791s
user 3m16.088s
sys 2m7.808s
df -h /mnt/part
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1 30G 30G 4.0M 100% /mnt/part
time diff /mnt/part2/Testdata/Testdata.bin /mnt/part/Test.bin
real 28m43.878s
user 0m4.044s
sys 0m42.902s
ll /mnt/part/Test.bin
-rwxr-xr-x 1 ed root 31902367744 Dec 2 18:32 /mnt/part/Test.bin*
rm /mnt/part/Test.bin
df -h /mnt/part
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1 30G 4.1M 30G 1% /mnt/part
I’m probably easily impressed, but wow that’s a lot of data in a little chip of plastic… for $20 delivered.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 