I’m starting to look for problems

This afternoon my wife called me from Mana Pools. She has my Sony A1 II with her and needed some help with the settings. Sure, no problem. But guiding her through Sony’s menus over the phone isn’t that easy. They aren’t the most logical to begin with, at least for me after 20 years shooting Canon. Well, that’s not the story.

After we hung up, my mind did what it usually does and started trying to solve the problem. There should be a web app that simulates the Sony Alpha menu. I Googled it and couldn’t find one. Okay, let’s build it. We’re working on it as I write this.

Then there was the settings file. Sony uses CAMSET files to save and load camera settings, but what I wanted was to create one on my desktop and send it to my wife. She could import it and have the settings I’d chosen. I couldn’t find a way to do that without having the camera here.

So I Googled again and found some older work on GitHub trying to reverse-engineer Sony’s cam dat files, but didn't get very far more than reading the camera model from the file. Well, that was before the age of AI so let’s tackle that too :)

Tonight I took out my old A7R V, since the A1 II is obviously in Mana Pools. We started reverse-engineering its settings file and got far enough to recreate settings in a new file, which we successfully loaded into the A7R V. When the A1II is back in office we'll be mapping up the settings file. It’s not hard, it’s just boring work.

I don’t know how useful this will be. In a situation like ours, I can see the point: my wife is on a photo tour, I’m in the office, and I could make the settings here and send her a file over Slack, Messenger, WhatsApp, email, or whatever.

Am I solving a problem, or am I creating something just because I want to see if I can? I get pleasure out of just trying and succeeding :) My Sony alpha interactive menu is working after about 7 hours of work. Next step is to connect our reverse engineering of the Sony Camset files, so we can make the settings in our webapp, create the file, load it onto the memory card and import in the camera. All the problems is already solved now I just need to finish it. I just love living in 2026 :)

I find myself looking for problems that can be solved by building an app or some software. I’m getting to the stage where most of the business apps I’ve built are either running in production or almost finished. The ones already running need maintenance and smaller improvements. And I LOVE to build.

Some days I see that the seven-day usage reset is getting close and I still have too many unused tokens. A month or two ago, I never had enough. Now I’m checking my different repos, looking for improvements I could spend them on, and sometimes I have trouble finding where to use them.

I hate that feeling. I don’t want to waste them, and I want to build. It’s a dilemma. I can see myself six or twelve months from now, having built everything I need and being unhappy because all that’s left is maintenance and small improvements.

That’s why I gave my game project another go yesterday. I’ve tried building it a few times, first from scratch, then with Unity, and now with Unreal Engine 5.8.

For me, game development is the one thing AI hasn’t fully solved yet. It’s getting there, and I think it’s just a matter of time. So every now and then, when there’s been another advance, I give it another try. We’re not quite there yet, but the results I’m getting are more and more promising, and I have more and more tokens to spend :)