Year: 2020

  • Black Women Photographers

    Laura Beltrán Villamizar, writing for NPR, describing the website Black Women Photographers: Her site, Black Women Photographers, is a forum where members can celebrate each other’s work. It’s also a platform both to elevate the work of Black women in the photo and documentary industry as well as to help financially support photographers whose livelihoods have…

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  • For those wondering, everything is going great in the darkroom.

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  • Firebase is awfully nice. Wow. Side note: I had an idea rolling around in my head for 13 years that I’ve wanted to try and I was able to make a prototype of it in just a few hours.

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  • Simon Collison on personal websites

    Simon Collison: You tend your domain like you steadily improve your home, and it can take years of false starts and incremental commits. Don’t think of it as urgent work, or — heaven forbid — a “side-hustle”. Don’t I know it. Well, well over twenty years on. Still loving it.

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  • Music at Lucky Hare Brewing – March 2020

    Music at Lucky Hare Brewing – March 2020 Just prior to lockdown, we were able to listen to this lovely chap play some music at Lucky Hare Brewing in upstate New York. I rescanned this 35mm negative to get a better quality version than my first scan. Shot on Kodak Ultramax 400 using the Canon…

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  • Panther’s Falls 2 – December 2020

    Panther’s Falls 2 – December 2020 I’m pretty happy with how this exposure, and the previous one, came out. This one was handheld, f/11, about 1/60s, on HP5+. I have a fairly steady hand but 1/60s is about my limit personally. If you want to see much larger versions of these digital scans you can…

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  • Understanding ProRAW

    With iOS 14.3 and the new iPhone, Apple has introduced an updated RAW image file format spec that extends on the already robust editing capabilities of RAW. They call it ProRAW. Ben Sandofsky, of Halide, goes long on explaining how digital image sensors work, what RAW is, and how Apple has extended that spec and…

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  • Matthias Ott on having a personal web site

    Matthias Ott on CSS-Tricks: Personal websites still deliver on that promise. Nowhere else do you have that much freedom to create and share your work and to tell your personal story. It is your chance to show what you stand for, to be different, and to be specific. Your site lets you be uniquely you…

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  • Apple Maps continues to improve

    Justin O’Beirne is still at it, and at more detail than ever: This is the tenth time that Apple has expanded its new map since its public launch twenty-six months ago in September 2018. I appreciate the amount of work O’Beirne puts into these updates. Over the weekend Eliza and I tried Apple Maps to find a…

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  • Should I update to Big Sur 11.1?

    In early November I wrote that I’d be delaying my update to Big Sur. Specifically, I wrote: I’ll be waiting for at least two releases before I update. Well, 11.1 came out today. Depending on how you count, it is sort of the third release of Big Sur. There was 11.0, 11.0.1, and now 11.1.…

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  • Chrome is bad

    From Loren Brichter comes Chrome is bad: So it turns out that Google Chrome was making everything on my computer slow even when it wasn’t running, because it installs something called Keystone which is basically malware. I made a website because this shouldn’t happen. I’m currently using Safari every single day. It is lightning fast…

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  • Jack Baty’s bad film experience

    Jack Baty, 11 years ago: I ran out of film while on a deserted island. I set the ISO incorrectly on my OM-1, overexposing the roll by 2 stops. I opened the bottom of the Leica M7 before rewinding the roll. I had only a 28mm prime lens with me when what I needed was…

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  • Panther’s Falls – December 2020

    Panther’s Falls – December 2020 As a kid I’d walk to these falls every chance I got. I had many bear encounters, caught tons of snakes (even though my mother forbade it), and swam a bunch. It was nice to visit them after nearly a few decades of being away. I shot this on Saturday…

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  • Lost 30 frames of film due to the camera not advancing the film. C’est la vie.

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  • A diagram of my current photo storage footprint. Not the process, just the storage. I’m hoping to detail the process in a future post.

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  • Looking forward to participating in an upcoming 127 Day.

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  • The story of the Studebaker darkroom print

    If you follow me on Instagram or Twitter you may have seen that I was in the darkroom this weekend. In March 2020, I purchased this Ansco Speedex from a local hip shop On&On. Around that same time a family member gifted me some expired Kodak Tri-X that he’s had frozen since 1982. A few…

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  • What I saw somewhat recently #72: December 3, 2020

    I haven’t made one of these lists in a little while, opting instead to publishing far more status updates to my site that include links. I go back and forth in my head all the time which I prefer.

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  • I password protected a few notes in Apple’s Notes app and didn’t store the password in 1Password and now I have no idea what that password is.

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  • I started rewriting my photo moving script in AppleScript but ran into an odd permissions issue roadblock that I can’t seem to search my way out of it.

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  • My answer to my own askATP question (again)

    A little over a year ago I sent in a question to the crew at ATP and subsequently I blogged my own answer to that question. This past week I sent in another question and they’ve kindly answered it (time stamp: 1:57:16) so I thought I would answer my own question again. My question was…

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  • Help! What should I do?

    So I’d like to earn a few extra reoccurring dollars for my habit using one of my skills. But I’m having a bit of an internal dilemma as to what that should be given that I have such a limited amount of time between my day job and my volunteering. Here are a few ideas…

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  • M.G. Siegler on The Mandalorian

    M.G. on Ev’s blog: The Mandalorian feels like the true successor to the original Star Wars trilogy. I agree with M.G. While I liked The Force Awakens and Solo, the other two I could do without though I’m glad they exist.

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  • Snap introduces Spotlight inside of Snapchat

    Snap: Submit your best video Snaps to Spotlight for the opportunity to earn a share of more than $1 million that we’re distributing to creators every day! Go big or go home I guess. Snap puts a TikTok-like feed right inside of Snapchat and is giving away a million dollars per day to ensure they…

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  • Apple Arcade recommendations?

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  • Using Spotlight and Shortcuts to create daily notes in Simplenote

    While trialing Obsidian I became fond of a core plugin it had called Daily notes. Activating the plugin adds a button in the interface that creates a new note with a name based on today’s date. It makes keeping a daily log extremely easy. Since I primarily use Simplenote I wanted the same thing on…

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  • Attending Venture Idol 2020 via Zoom

    Last night I virtually attended Ben Franklin Technology Partner’s Venture Idol 2020 via a Zoom Webinar. That’s a sentence that I hope I only write in 2020 and not too far beyond. I’ve written about attending previous Venture Idol’s at Ben Franklin TechVentures, the building in which a previous employer of mine was in for…

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  • It is nice that you can subscribe to Exposure’s Publications via RSS. I’m now subscribed to their Adventure pub.

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  • It is this time of year that I become more aware of, and have more ire for, Earth’s tilt. But hey, at least we don’t have to deal with Neptune’s crazy 97º tilt. Imagine that!

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  • A new theme for my site

    Update December 10, 2020: I tried. And I’ve now reverted. For the last several years I’ve been using a customized version of the Davis theme by Anders Norén. I started using the theme right out of the box and slowly customized it to my needs as I had time to do so. And for that…

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  • Unmark chosen for GitHub’s Archive Program

    Unmark, the open source bookmarking app that you can use for free on our hosted service or grab your own copy on GitHub, was selected to be included in GitHub’s Archive Program. GitHub describes this program’s purpose “The mission of the GitHub Archive Program is to preserve open source software for future generations.” This happened…

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  • Delay updating to Big Sur

    macOS Big Sur will be released to the public tomorrow. As I did with iOS 14 this year, I’ll be waiting for at least two releases before I update. Josh Centers for TidBITS: We recommend delaying upgrades for your production Macs. We’ve heard similar stories from many beta testers and TidBITS readers: Big Sur is…

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  • Jack Baty on being burnt out of film photography

    Jack Baty: The trouble, I’m finding, is that I don’t really like the results I’m getting. I’ve shot maybe 20 rolls of film this year and a couple dozen large format negatives. Not a ton, but I’ve gone through them and there are only a handful that I really like, and most of those I…

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  • Learning SwiftUI is tough because it is still early days

    Back in early October I quipped that I was opening Xcode to start a new project. I have no qualms in telling you that the project was going to be a Mac app for Unmark. I was going to build the app for a variety of reasons but the main one was to learn SwiftUI.…

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  • We need to do more about light pollution

    Paul M. Sutter for Universe Today: For years we’ve assumed that streetlights are the main culprit behind light pollution, but a recent study has shown that streetlights contribute no more than 20% of all the pollution, and if we want to solve this vexing astronomical problem, we have to think harder. Tuscon, Arizona did a…

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  • But she’s a girl on Obsidian

    But she’s a girl…: I wanted something that operated on plain-text files kept in a local folder, and that also had a graph view: that was the feature in org-roam that really made the difference between me just writing notes and seeing how they fitted together and building ideas out of them. Obsidian has both of…

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  • Worst iOS feature by far; you open an app and you’re no longer where you left off. 13 years in this should be fixed.

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  • Om Malik: Why bother with film?

    Om: One aspect of film that I have personally found appealing is the restrictions it imposes. Film photography is about constraints. It limits the frames at your disposal. It limits the capability of the sensor (aka the film.) And in most cases, it limits the choice of lens and equipment. Such constraints tend to ultimately…

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  • What I’m looking for in a note taking app: works exactly like Simplenote, except it saves Markdown files to disk. Does this really not exist?

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  • I have an overwhelming number of personal technology tasks that I’d like to tackle that I’m not motivated to do any of them.

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  • Chris Coleman on The Mandalorian Season 2

    Chris Coleman, my longtime Star Wars sensei: I have some quick thoughts on The Mandalorian Season 2 that I need to get out of my brain before Chapter 9 is released in a few hours. Caution: There may be spoilers ahead. I’ve already watched Chapter 9 twice. The number of throwbacks to og Star Wars…

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  • My iPhone updated itself to 14.1 last night on its own. I have never had automatic updates on. That is very weird.

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  • Annihilation – Scranton, July 2020

    Shot on 35mm Kodak Color 400 with Olympus Stylus Annihilation – Scranton, July 2020 This ivy is going to find its way in.

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  • Andy Baio interviews the owner of the house on Blue Lick Road

    Andy Baio: But a larger question remained: what’s the deal with this place? Whoever owned it, they were too organized to be hoarders. The home appeared to double as the office and warehouse for an internet reseller business, but who sells a house crammed floor-to-ceiling with retail goods? With all of the mud slinging and doom scrolling…

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  • Sketch on native Mac apps

    Sketch: Native apps bring so many benefits — from personalization and performance to familiarity and flexibility. And while we’re always working hard to make Cloud an amazing space to collaborate, we still believe the Mac is the perfect place to let your ideas and imagination flourish. Lovely little blog post. Couldn’t agree more. I feel…

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  • I keep having coffee cravings at night.

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  • Brain Pickings turns 14

    Maria Popova: The challenge has never been more colossal than this past year — the most trying I have lived through, by orders of magnitude. Depression has lowered its leaden cloudscape over me again and again since I was fifteen, but no other year has lidded life more ominously, as the staggering collective grief we…

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  • Obsidian didn’t stick, for me

    Back in May I came across Obsidian, a knowledge base app that stores your information in Markdown files. I used it a bit here and there until, in July, I stumbled onto Ton Zijlstra’s post about Obsidian which motivated me to try it in earnest. I was excited to have a note taking app that…

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  • Do you use the Web Share API?

    If you use the Web Share API, Jeremy Keith is looking for more feedback. I’m not expecting anything to happen anytime soon, but it would be really good to gather as much data as possible around existing usage of the Web Share API. If you’re using it, or you know anyone who’s using it, please,…

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