All posts by Barry Mercer

VMWare and Netapp Storage engineer blogging about experiences and any gotchas that hopefully will be of use to someone in the future!
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Meike MK-910 Nikon Quick Review

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I bough the Meike MK-910 fro Ebay recently. I did have the MK900 but found it odd in some ways. It appeared to not fire the flash every so often. It would fire the TTL but then nothing. Seemed it was confused with the metering I believe. Forcing the camera (a d7100) out of auto-iso seems to make it work.

 

Anyway, the 910 does none of these things. It’s much better. The HSS Works well too. It works as a remote in Manual mode which I believe people had issues with on the MK-900. Not used it a great deal however, but all in all I’m pretty pleased. They seemed to have fixed the battery drain the 900 had too. This one doesnt instanlty drop to two bars the moment you put batteries in!

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2012 r2 dc lsass.exe crash

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Crashing lsass.exe on your shiny 2012r2 DC? It’s a known bug according to PSS. You have three choices. a) use a different DC to rename things. b) turn of all auditing on the DC (seriously) c) apply a hotfix that you can only get from PSS.

Personally, I’ve gone for option “a”. We need the auditing and option c had a number of “it’s your fault if it breaks” warning attached to it that scared me a little. I’ll await the real patch which apparently will be “soon”. THough that’s in Microsoft Minutes so don’ hold your breath….

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MK 900 and D7100

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I’ve had this flash for some time now, and whilst initially impressed I’m getting slowly more disappointed with it. It seems to consistantly underexpose photos. I’ve no idea why. There are certain combinations of having the cameras ISO on auto and matrix metering enabled where the flash will fire but it always seems to be at 1/128. Changing the iso to manaul (and keeping all the settings the same) fixes it. How does that make a difference? Another fix is to enable spot metering. I’m very confused. It seems most problematioc in contrasty areas or when I focus on something that is black. I can’t recommend this flash unfortunately. I’m now looking for another. I seem to keep spending £100 or so on flashes that arent perfect. MAybe I should bite the bullet and just get the sb910…

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Windows 8 Errors

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I’ve been getting a lot of weird errors on my Windows 8 install. Amlost as if the drive is corrupt and lots of DLLs are broken. Random things such as not being able to ope the firewal properties. Not being able to change network connections. The services windows shows “failed to read description. error code 2”. I can’t uninstall anything either! Sounds like a virus. However after a bit of googling it seems to point to AMD / ATI’s “Driver cleanup utlity”. It looks like this does not work on windows 8. Hopefully you ahve a recent restore point and revert, I didn’t and am having to do a repair in stall by running setup fro the CD and “upgrading” my win 8 to win 8.

Some links are here
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=373855
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=373750
http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m18x/710632-amd-uninstall-utility-messed-up-windows-8-a.html

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Scam

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Received this today, 070 numbers are expensive!

Hi

As a result your application, I would like to invite you to attend an interview.

You will have an interview with the department manager, Jenny Wilson. The interview will last about 30 min.

Please bring three reference (If available), as well as a copy of your ID, e.g. Passport, Driving License to the interview.

Please contact me on 07064848722, in order to arrange an interview

We look forward to seeing you

Best regards

Charles Brown