I'd been planning to go and see a remake of Indiana Jones, that some kids made back in the 80s, there's details about it here, but it was sold out.

There's an encore showing on Thursday, but I'm supposed to be at work, so that's the end of that.

If this had been like 2 weeks later, then it wouldn't have mattered. Gees I can't wait to get my license back.

I rang around and let everyone who'd been planning to go about it.

I decided to clean my bike, and work out what I need to do to get it to pass the inspection next week.

It actually doesn't look too bad. I spent a couple of hours cleaning and polishing it, and I think the only thing I'll need to do is fix the rear indicator that's been held on with tape for the last 2 years or so.

I decided to sort through the boxes of junk that are cluttering up the place after that.

I managed to empty out 5 boxes of junk, and find my desk under more junk.

I found some fairly interesting things while going through it all, like a shopping docket from September 11 (yes, 2001), the end of a pool cue that someone snapped and pinched from the club a few years ago, and the laser pointer I bought in 98.

The rest of it was just miscellaneous crap, which I threw out, because it's of no value, and will never be useful for anything.

While cleaning, I came across a digital camera I forgot that I had. I don't know that I ever got it working, because I didn't have the drivers for it.

I decided to find out what would happen if I plugged it into my linux laptop (expecting nothing to happen), but it actually detected it.

The following dialog box popped up:

Warning
Import photos from camera?
There are photos on the plugged-in camera. Would you
like to import these photographss into your album?

(and that extra s typo was there in the message).

I hit "Import Photos" and the dialog goes away, but that's it, nothing happens, nothing pops up.

I'm not really surprised, since the camera only has 2MB of SRAM, and it needs batteries to hold the images, and it has no batteries in it, so there were no photos in it.

I looked in dmesg, and noticed the following:

FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sda2)
    fat_get_cluster: invalid cluster chain (i_pos 8639471)
    File system has been set read-only
FAT: Filesystem panic (dev sda2)
    fat_get_cluster: invalid cluster chain (i_pos 8639471)

with that second error repeated 30 times.

It doesn't seem to like a spot on the disk my ipod mini for some reason. I hope that's not something I need to worry about.

Anyway, what I was looking for, stuff related to the camera, was just the following:

usb 1-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 10
usb 1-2: USB disconnect, address 10
usb 1-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 11
usb 1-2: device descriptor read/all, error -71
usb 1-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 12

Argh, that -71 error again.

I rmmod'd uhci_hcd, and ehci_hcd, which resulted in my usb mouse stopping working, and a bunch fof stuff about deregistering in the kernel log.

I loaded them back again, and the mouse came back, but the camera didn't do anything.

I unplugged and replugged it again, and it came up with the warning message again. This time I cancelled importing the images, and got asked again about 4 times.

I looked in the kernel log, and it was the same, -71 error again. I don't think it matters though. I just needed to find some software that can interact with the camera.

I googled around, and found gphoto2, I looked in the apt cache, and found that it was available, so I installed that.

It would see the ports, and the camera, but only when I did it as root (which you're not supposed to do, yeah yeah, but I just wanted to test it).

gphoto2 --auto-detect
Model                          Port
----------------------------------------------------------
sudo gphoto2 --auto-detect
Model                          Port
----------------------------------------------------------
Argus DC-1510                  usb:
Argus DC-1510                  usb:001,009

I found this was because even though I added myself to the camera group, that hadn't taken effect. I managed to take, and then pull some photos out of the camera.

They were crap. This camera is useless.

Grainy pictures, and a couple were just orange, and other times it would refuse to take a picture at all.

I continued mucking around, and I found "gtkam". I tried to install this, but it said something about the package not being available.

I updated apt's cache, and then I was able to install it. I had to run it as root for it to be able to connect to the camera (yeah, again, I know, not supposed to, but I couldn't be bothered logging out of everything).

That seems to work ok, it's just too bad the camera is so crap. Now that I see the camera support on linux is ok, I might finally buy a proper digital camera.