The Issue: Pressing the shutter button halfway down works as intended, allowing me to lock focus. But pressing the button the rest of the way results in a temporary black screen in the EVF, then it just goes back to the regular EVF view. There is no shutter click, no photo taken. Bonus: Occasionally the EVF itself just goes black on its own, though this seems more intermittent.
Possible ways to find a solution:
Take the camera to a local camera store
Ask friends, family or other people I know
Do a web search on the internet
Issues:
May require an up-front fee, likely repair cost will be disproportionate to the cost/value of the camera (that is, way more than I’m willing to pay)
I don’t know anyone with enough expertise to diagnose
And let’s expand on #3:
What it comes down to is this: Web search now sucks. And yes, it’s because of Google and its push for ads, AI and other nonsense that has trained site builders to optimize (SEO!) garbage that will get pushed to the top of searches, resulting in a web that is mostly junk pages full of keywords, listicles and not much useful information. And if you use another search engine like DuckDuckGo or Bing (which is one of the engines used in aggregate by DDG) you still suffer because all those crappy pages are still going to turn up, thanks to Google’s dominance in search.
Shorter version: I expect a lot of garbage results, with no genuinely useful tips or solutions. And this ignores another thing that Google isn’t even responsible for: The tendency to find many people asking the same question, but no one ever providing an answer.
Observe: Someone posting on a public forum: “Hey guys. I have Problem X. Anyone know how to fix it?” Three days pass. Same person: “FYI, got a fix, you can go ahead and close this thread!” In which the person never offers to others what the fix was.
I mean, I’ll break down and do a search eventually, but it ain’t going to be pretty. I will, of course, provide full details here.
Google is a big company–so big they created a new one called Alphabet to stuff Google into. Since starting their search engine in 1997, Google has come to dominate both web searches (92%) and web browsers (65%), with Google search and Google Chrome, respectively. Google is a company built on advertising and harvesting user data. They are big enough now that they are trying and in some cases succeeding in pushing web standards that suit them, forcing others to follow along.
Part of the perpetuation of Google as the dominant player comes from writers using “Google” as a generic verb. You don’t search, you “Google.” This is bad because it entrenches Google needlessly, reinforcing in people’s minds that there is only one way to search on the internet, and that is by going to google.com.
Look at this screenshot from an article published today on engadget about finding a good productivity mouse:
I am honestly perplexed why any editorial staff on these sites would allow writers to do this. I wonder if the author of the piece had written “Bing around” (yes, I know, it is funny to say that out loud), would an editor have run a red line through it and suggested something else. What would they have suggested?
This may seem like a nitpick, but it bugs me because:
It is sloppy and lazy writing
It perpetuates a commercial product (Google search) as the “proper” way to do or use something
In conclusion, use DuckDuckGo. Or even Bing. Or one of the boutique search engines in closed beta that think people will pay for a “good” search experience (it’s possible!). But mostly, stop using “Google” to mean “search.”
This motto still exists in their official Code of Conduct, right near the end of the very long document:
And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!
Since changing their official motto to Do the right thing, Google has seen itself increasingly mired in controversy, most of it borne from the fact that the company makes its money through selling the data of its users to companies that then use the data to target users with ads, ads which often follow them around the internet. Google is essentially a series of services—most of which are free to the user—designed to harvest data and sell it for ads.
Put more simply, Google is an advertising company. Nearly everything it does is in service to advertising. This is the code of the company and is likely to remain so into the foreseeable future.
Is this bad? Is it evil? On a relative scale, not so much. To paraphrase Stockard Channing, there are worse things it could do. But what it does is enough to have finally given me pause after years of using their free services:
The Chrome browser is near Internet Explorer 6.0 levels of dominating the browser market, with sites increasingly being tailored for and only tested with Chrome. This is not good for the web, web standards and basically everything a free, open web stands for.
Gmail, Google search and other free services are tracking users across the web, feeding their surfing habits, random clicks and more to companies that use that information to target the users with ads and services. Most of this is done surreptitiously, without the user being aware.
Chrome is easing restrictions on some kinds of ad-blocking, for obvious reasons
Basically, I’m not comfortable supporting this model anymore. I think it makes for an unhealthy web. So I’m making changes. Some are days, some are more difficult.
Let’s start with the easy ones:
I haven’t used Chrome as my primary browser for quite awhile, having switched to Firefox long ago. If I need alternative browsers for whatever reason, I can use Edge (!), Vivaldi or Brave.
I’ve switched from Google search to DuckDuckGo. Plus DuckDuckGo is way more fun to say. Are the searches less comprehensive? Maybe. I can’t say I’ve never not found what I was looking for yet. In fact, the searches are more accurate because I no longer have Google trying to shape (or contort) the search results to better “fit” what I am allegedly looking for.
I no longer use Google Drive for cloud storage (I use OneDrive and iCloud Drive)
I have long abandoned Google’s office apps, like Docs and Sheets
And now the harder stuff:
Google Maps is still by far the best map site/software, though Google is doing its best to clog it up with services, suggestions and generally getting in the way of what should be simple directions on how to get from A to B. The alternatives are still not quite there. Apple Maps is improved, but it’s limited to Apple platforms (which, honestly, is kind of dumb—Apple should have a browser version, and I don’t mean one that requires Safari). Apple is also way behind on its equivalent to Street View. Then there’s Bing Maps. It’s okay, but it lacks in so many little and some major ways. I will keep using these and hope they improve, but it will be a meaning process. I don’t use maps much, anyway.
Gmail. This is the big one. I have had a Gmail account for a long time. I have thousands of messages and many subscriptions and services tied to my gmail address. I can direct new subs to an alternate email address—I have a more “serious” email address at outlook.com, for example, or I can use one from my own domain, @creolened.com, though that looks a little weird, really. This is a long term project, one I’ll probably tackle piecemeal. There is always the fear that whatever other service I switch to could disappear, while Gmail is one of the handful of Google services that seems relatively safe.
All said, I’m making these moves to help simplify my interactions on the web, to get less ads and less shaping, to find what I am looking for, without handing over information that really sin’t anyone else’s business. Excelsior, as they say.
