I mentioned the Cokin filter system. It's a system of square filters, with holders and adaptor rings which really opened up the filter business in the early eighties. The adaptors are flat disks, with a hole and filter thread to fit the lens, and the outer diameter set by the holder. There were two sizes, 'A' and 'P'. Now, I've not tried this, but you can get plastic edging strip, a U-section, from various sources, and with the right sise it should be possible to fit two Cokin adaptors face-to-face, which would let you fix the two lenses together. Would it be strong enough? I'm not sure. Anyway, the Cokin system had conventional close-up lenses.

UK, and maybe within reach, but I'm still not fully recovered from breaking my leg, and I'm wary of a long drive. Northern end of Lincolnshire... There are some good things happening at Lincoln Castle in the summer, but parking nearby can be tricky.

There's a brief special offer on at Daz, and if you were on their mailing list you'll know about it. Got a free cinema ticket this week, about three days before the local cinema changed owners, so I'm feeling a trifle cynical.

Just to add to the detail -- one recent Paypal scam has used "Paypa1" instead of "Paypal". Look very closely at the fonts you use if you don't see a difference; they are different. It isn't like the old days when some typewriters didn't have a numeral-1 key, and people used lowercase-l.

The 50mm lens will be about 20 dioptre, so it's effectively a pretty extreme close-up lens. A SLR wide-angle would give an even bigger image, but the retrofocal design ( to keep the rear element clear of the mirror) would help give some working room. There were reversing rings made, which let you mount a lens back to front, which was supposed to give a better macro image -- the lens optical design would expect the film to be closer than the object. I don't recall ever hearing of an adaptor to do what you did. It might be possible to do something with a pair of Cokin adaptors, for something a bit more solid.

You may need more RAM, start with something simple which doesn't use any trickery. No transparency maps, maybe not even using a texture map. But that's only a guess based on my initial experience.

Can't help with the Poser 5 model problem... Even the basic P5 stuff imported into DAZ Studio will lock up my system, although I can accept that I'm at the low ened of the memory scale. I tried some P3 stuff I still have, and models loaded, but texture-maps still had problems. Used to be that a half-gig of RAM was an incredible amount... I'm afraid it isn't going to replace my working P5 install if I have to do a major OS/RAM upgrade to do the same stuff.

I hadn't realised it was Open GL, but my experience with that is that the Open GL version can make a huge difference. Trouble is, I've had programs work better with an older version. It's a bit of a crap-shoot :(

Last week there was a general Q&A session being run on copyright issues, and one of the things that appeared was a link to a boiler-plate cease-&-desist letter. Worth following up on if you're in the US. For somebody like me, a bit less useful since I'm not in the US and cross-border copyright involves different stuff.

Multiple solid-state is the way to go. Can be worth picking up a USB reader to go in the camera bag too, if you ever get the chance to transfer to a PC and burn a CD-R. Unless you really really need the extra capacity on a single card, I wouldn't go over 512MB, because that will fit nicely on a single CD-R.

Note that the quote from the original scam email appears to be missing the critical detail. You have to look at the actual URL, not the label which the browser will display. And then there are some tricks in how a URL can be written which will obscure the actual destination. I have several different userIDs on my machine. Most of the stuff hits all of them, not just the one I use for Paypal

A while back, else-net, I was discussing CD-R with some people I know in the music business. Apparently, writing CD data at high speed is more likely to lead to read problems. The laser doesn't go from 0 to 100 in zero time, and the high-speed write burns a fuzzy-edged mark, For something to work reliably in older audio-CD readers, you have to burn slow. Which is frustrating for people with lots of data. Anyway, it may be worth holding back on the write speed. The modern drives can switch the laser more rapidly, but the top write-speed is still pushing the limits.

Has anyone ever tried doing anything like the wall roundels with bump maps, or similar?

Don't delete anything from the card until you have checked with warranty support for the camera and the memory stick. Laws are different where I am, but here you would be able to get your money back on the grounds of defective goods. You've done right in recovering your data. It very possibly could be a fault in the camera, and the data is evidence of what the fault may be. Could be the firmware, and just needs the latest version. But you paid for something that works, and it doesn't.

I'd be happy if anyone quoted me as a source for an idea, but I don't think I've said anything original. At most, I've pointed out another metaphor. But the balance between the critic and the actual art in explaining something is more complicated that it seems. For older works, or those from unfamiliar cultures, we don't have the context the artist is working in. How many people today know about the town of Guernica? What does not knowing do to the painting. And a good critic will add context. There are things which I write that have overloads of meaning that I'm not immediately conscious of. When I was fiddling with a fox=headed humanoid Poser character, and put it in an SS uniform, I was echoing a picture of Heydrich which I'd once seen. I wasn't actually conscious as I worked that his forename happens to be one of the literary names for the fox. The jokes about the final solution to the chicken problem came later. Sometimes my mind scares me.