Here in Southern California you will attract a bunch of them by putting out a ripe banana. They will magically appear.

Learned the hard way. I’ve lost remotes, flashlights and other electronic devices. The real burn was a $300 set of Bose headphones. Then a second set a few years later. Those were my last use of Alkaline batteries. I’ve switched to Lithium Ion. Higher voltage and have never heard of them leaking plus they operate at much colder temperatures and they are lighter. Well worth the extra money.

My Nikons both use the EN EL15 batteries. I just noticed today that you can get original Nikon or second source batteries for about the same price. It seems like the prices have come down for these batteries, so buy Nikon if it makes you feel better. I have purchased one off brand and it has functioned exactly like my Nikon batteries. I just checked to see what brand name it was sold under and it had no brand name on it. I bought it at a camera swap meet in Southern California about 10 years ago.
I don't think that Nikon makes their own batteries but purchase them from other sources, so these other sources may have the same batteries in the pack.

I think One Eyed Pete has the correct approach until a new technology surfaces for home color printing. Since most of my photographs end up being viewed on a computer or tv or some other electronic media I will just have what I want printed. I always have an 8 x 10 laser printer for text and a nice B & W print occasionally.
Technology will eventually come up with something new.
Thanks for all the input.

I have a huge collection of 35mm slides that need digitizing. I also inherited several thousand more from my father after he passed away. I had many of my slides stored in Kodak carousel trays. I have mostly the 140 count variety of slide trays as did my father. Then in large plastic, acrylic, boxes I also have them stored loose. These are still bulky and difficult to get the slides out of, usually requiring the use of tweezers. What I wanted was simple box to store loose slides in, but could not find any. I have been searching for something for years.
I finally solved my problem. Turns out that coin collectors seem to use 2 x 2 coin holders and then they want some way of storing numbers of those. Well by looking for coin storage I hit the jackpot. On Amazon look for Guardhouse 2 x 2 coin storage boxes. If you go to Guardhouse you can choose other colors, but they end up costing more because of their shipping costs. The boxes are 9 inches long.

Be advised that the temperature requirements for automotive electronics is tougher than military specs. I would never leave my camera equipment in an automobile, unless it is in a garage, in hot climates.
On another issue, I did lose a Sony movie camera because of humidity issues. Went to my son's graduation in New Haven. It was raining that day so my gear all was a little damper than normal. I shot video of graduation and spent the week touring New England.
Then flew down to Orlando for a nephews wedding. The humidity was 100%, it was raining and the hotel room had just had its carpet cleaned and was soaking wet. Outside temperatures were over 90F but the hotel room was cold because of AC. At one point I pulled out the video camera to look at some of the New England video and the camera would not run. Lights blinked. Turned out that a high amount of moisture had precipitated out onto the video head, remember those spinning heads that depended on the tape sliding on the rotating head. Well that was all gummed up and the camera was never able to run again even after I got back to California. So beware the temperature and humidity changes in climates you are not totally familiar with.

After losing two sets of Bose headphones to battery corrosion, plus numerous other devices damaged by batteries, such as electronic flash, remote controls, and some other very expensive instruments. I'm an EE.
I made the decision to switch over to using only Lithium based primary cells where ever possible. I have never had a set of Lithium batteries damage anything and I have never heard of any of them damaging products from other sources.
You get the advantage of higher battery voltage, lighter batteries and ones that operate under freezing conditions. They may cost a little more but in my opinion worth the extra money.
I did send in a set of Bose headphones to Duracell because of battery damage and they sent them back after removing the battery to tell me that it was an Energizer battery and to send it to them. So I did and they did sent me a check for $200 rather than the actual cost of $300. This was, according to them, because the batteries were being used beyond their expiration date. So if you have an expensive item be sure and send it to the battery company. I needed no packaging to accomplish this. Also note that I have a small Canon S3 camera that will not hardly operate when the Alkaline battery voltage drops slightly, so using Lithium that problem disappeared.

I have had similar issues. I just don’t think Apple software does not do well with external hardware unless it is also made by Apple. You should be able to connect a thumb drive to an iPad and view both movies and still pictures but Apple just can’t seem to handle that without difficulty. Even the newer Android products seem to be losing their flexibility. We are almost better off with a cheap small laptop.

I am 80 and have been taking photographs since I was 13, using my Dad's Kodak Pony camera for slides. I now own two Nikon DSLRs, with a large collection of lenses, and still enjoy taking pictures. Since printing color pictures at home has been viable I have gone through more than a dozen inkjet printers. These printer print several nice quality pictures then in a short time they are clogging or malfunctioning. I have spent literally thousands of dollars with these poor printing devices.
I know that there are Dye Matrix printers but they are hard to find, difficult to get much information on them and only very few businesses sell them. The color laser printers all seem to be of low resolution and not really intended for photographic quality prints.
I am an engineer with an advanced degree and have spent most of my career working in the field of electro-optics, so you don't' have to talk down to me. I sure would love to be able to print good quality pictures at home on reliable hardware. I tend to print in spurts and then be idle for some time, which may be one reason inkjets don't work for me.
Another thing that is driving me crazy is that I cannot find a B&W home laser printer that will print on 11 x 17 inch paper.
Any ideas or any new technologies that I may not be aware of. I'm not donating another dollar to the inkjet world.
Thanks in advance.

If you have Microsoft Office you can do this with Publisher, Power Point, and even Word. I find Publisher nice to work with though and it seems to be designed to do just this. Also Microsoft Visio will allow both vector graphics and bitmap files to be handled together.

First of all one must understand the operation of a focal plane shutter. The shutter has two curtains. At very low shutter speeds one curtain opens then when it reaches the other side of the sensor, the second curtain starts its trip across the sensor after some time and closes depending on what the shutter speed is. During that time the entire focal plane for sensor is fully exposed. As the shutter speed is increased the second curtain starts its trip before the first curtain gets to the other side. So at some shutter speed the shutter becomes a traveling slit that will get narrower in width as faster shutter speeds are required. That crossover point is where the full sensor is being exposed and that is the fastest speed an electronic flash will expose the entire sensor. This is the max speed for an electronic flash to synch with the camera. If you try to expose your picture at higher shutter speeds you will get one side of the picture to be black
To more fully understand this operation get an old SLR. Open the back, remove any lenses and look through the shutter. At slow shutter speeds the entire focal plane will be exposed. Then keep increasing the shutter speed. When you get to about 1/60 sec the full opening shutter will be reduced and become the a slit. Once you get past that shutter speed you will no longer see the entire film area being exposed. As you keep going faster the shutter will become a slit which keeps getting narrower as the speed increases.
The actual electronic flash speed is much higher than typical shutter speeds and even our simple flashes can achieve times as short as 1/50,000 sec. Makes for good fun freezing those water drops.
Some SLRs used a vertical shutter to reduce the shutter travel time down resulting in a higher flash synch speed.
This was always and argument about whether a leaf shutter was better than a focal plane shutter. The leaf shutter was put into the lens at the optical crossover points so it could uniformly expose the film. These were found in Voightlander and Hasselblad cameras, although Hasselblad also offered focal plane shutters in the different backs they provided. Flash synch speeds were much higher with leaf shutters.
Another thing to note is that the speed of each shutter curtain is fixed. They do not go faster at shorter shutter speeds, the traveling slit just gets narrower.
If this explanation is not clear I can expand it with some drawings.

Don’t do anything except to keep it clean. I inherited a set of WWII Zeiss 7x50 binoculars. They were made out of Aluminum which until the 70s was considered an expensive rare metal. I sent them out for optical cleaning and alignment. I got a call from the person working on them asking if I wanted the leather and body painted, but in the same breath recommended to not paint them. They were in great condition but worn. He said the value would go down significantly if they were painted, so I left them alone.
If you have ever watched the Antiques Roadshow you quickly learn to not do anything to most antiques because it lowers the value.

I have thousands of slides. Both my fathers and mine. I also have the Epson V700 scanner that can scan 12 slides at a time. I found this way to slow, so I bought a dedicated slide scanner, actually a complete image sensor that captures the slide in a second or less. I think the brand name was Fox, sold by Costco online for $70. Comparing the two different processes I found the results virtually identical so I am saving tremendous amount of time and no stress on the Epson flatbed scanner.

I have the 18-200 VII and am very happy with it. When the 18-300 came out I bought it also. I don’t think it’s my imagination but feel that the 18-300 is a tad sharper over all than the 18-200. Just my feelings and studying my pictures. Very happy with it even knowing it’s not the sharpest lens I could be using.

The shorter flange to focal plane distance allows more lenses to be mounted on the camera. Back in the day Canons like the FT and AE1 had the shortest distance over the other many SLR cameras. The mirror would hit some lenses and had to be locked up to use them.
I owned an old Canon rangefinder and had the 0.95 lens. It was so large in diameter that it partially blocked the FOV of the rangefinder window. Compared to a regular 50mm lens it was very heavy. Sadly mine was stolen when I was robbed one time.
I once held the giant Nikon fisheye when they first came out. It was very heavy and expensive for those days. About $3000. I think in the 60s.