Colin
Devroe

Blog

On ad blocking

Wednesday, 29 November 2023

When my blog goes quiet you know I'm very busy. I'm looking forward to announcing some personal news in early December. This morning I've made what is likely to be my final update to my personal website until 2024 (I added my projects to my homepage).

Thursday, 23 November 2023

I discovered a small bug with GUID in my RSS feed that likely existed for an entire year. Of course I fixed it. But that also means if you're subscribed you very likely received all of my posts in your feed reader again. My appologies. I really do try to avoid such things.

Thursday, 9 November 2023

Yesterday, by pure chance, I met local photographer Rolfe Ross - whose work I've followed on Flickr for many years. It turns out his photos were being exhibited in the same venue as Eugene Lucas, whose photos I was there to see.

I took some very hasty photographs of the exhibit - which I shared on my Instagram Story if you're interested. I also managed to take two color film photographs of Mr. Ross (with zero expectation of them turning out since we were in a dark, cooly lit basement). Mr. Ross agreed to sit for a portrait in the future.

Thursday, 9 November 2023

If you're reading this that means that Tuff, my now 1-year old static site generator that I've been rewriting from scratch for about a month, works. I'm going to write a detailed post about this rewrite but for now - if you see anything amiss on my site please do let me know.

Wednesday, 8 November 2023

This evening I fixed a few longstanding CSS issues on my website. Many more to go.

Back in April I built my own light box thingy for my portfolio images. Example. I'd like something more comprehensive, but I want to keep it light weight. Would it be terribly difficult to build something like the JPL uses?

Sunday, 29 October 2023

Photos from Chisholm Vineyards in Feburary 2020

Wednesday, 18 October 2023

Colin Walker on what he gets from blogging

Monday, 16 October 2023

My less than typical day

Monday, 9 October 2023

I haven't shared new photographic work in a while. I've been struggling to find the time - even though it is easily my favorite hobby. To help unclog my creative pipes, I'm slowly releasing unfinished work.

Here is a new photo series, Where I - a collection of images of specific locations based on vivid childhood memories.

Starting in December 2022 I began capturing these locations digitally. I will return to photograph them on black and white film before making darkroom prints.

Thursday, 21 September 2023

Talkers and writers

Tuesday, 19 September 2023

How to fix the web

Thursday, 31 August 2023

Dear Arc

Wednesday, 30 August 2023

Reducing my personal hosting complexity

Monday, 14 August 2023

Static first

Tuesday, 8 August 2023

Stripe Transfer continues to grow slowly. The latter half of this year I hope to grow it a bit more. As a start I've turned on Google Adwords and also wrote a post about migrations subscriptions from Chargebee to Stripe over on Medium.

Monday, 17 July 2023

For the first year we'll be in a phase with visionOS where designers will be updating their interfaces to be translucent, dynamic rounded rects. Personally, I am looking forward to when they break out of the windowed world we've all been living in for the last few decades and find all new ways to communicate and interact in a spatial setting.

Weather apps can just be an actual cloud in a room. To dos can be attached to the real world object they reference. Notes can be all over the house.

Wednesday, 12 July 2023

Apple Vision Pro is exactly what I hoped for

Thursday, 22 June 2023

Will Apple's headset enhance productivity?

Thursday, 25 May 2023

Making Tuff improvements

Thursday, 11 May 2023

Humane Leap of faith

Monday, 24 April 2023

How I'm using ChatGPT as an accelerator

Thursday, 6 April 2023

Over the weekend I finished Looking At Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art by John Szarkowski. Szarkowski is, as of this moment, my favorite photographic writer and curator.

Monday, 3 April 2023

Using Wavelength to chat with darkroom printers

Thursday, 30 March 2023

Yesterday I finished reading Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford and Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang. I'd recommend both. Chiang is great. I think I need to read more by him.

Friday, 24 March 2023

What I saw somewhat recently #100: March 23, 2023

Thursday, 23 March 2023

I deleted my Twitter account today.

Tuesday, 7 March 2023

Doubling down on Mastodon

Tuesday, 28 February 2023

Testing Tuff on macOS Ventura.

Tuesday, 14 February 2023

Tuff, my static site builder, can build a simple directory for me to view my entire photo library. It creates views for each year and month and also checks various backups - both local and cloud - to make sure the files are properly backed up. It warns me if a file isn't backed up.

The entire process takes 3.328 seconds and I have 153,000+ photos and videos in four locations.

Thank you modern computer.

A directory listing of months and years built by Tuff

Thursday, 9 February 2023

Will my next Mac be my last Mac?

Thursday, 9 February 2023

Simon Reynolds on blogging

Tuesday, 7 February 2023

I'm refactoring Tuff - my static site builder - to support multiple websites so I've been posting more on Mastodon than here the last week or so. That should change now as Tuff is able build 3 very different websites. Lots more to do but I see the light.

Tuesday, 7 February 2023

Recently finished reading Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ Copious detail. Fast read if not for the length. Author a bit gushy.

Wednesday, 1 February 2023

I've published a new YouTube video. It is a review of my portrait of The Engineer.

Monday, 30 January 2023

I'm continuing to whittle away at my to do list for Tuff - my static site builder. Every few days I'm able to check off a task. Lots of small improvements add up over time.

Thursday, 26 January 2023

I'm putting the finishing touches on a presentation of my portrait The Engineer that I'll be recording for my YouTube channel.

I'm hoping to record better audio without spending too much money. Each presentation I make I want to improve.

Wednesday, 25 January 2023

How to help Mastodon

Tuesday, 24 January 2023

We had a possible fireball explosion tens of thousands of feet above us in Pennsylvania. Shook our house pretty good at 10:49am Eastern.

Now I'm looking for how to properly document it with NASA.

I figured this worthy of jotting down on the weblog.

Thursday, 19 January 2023

What I saw somewhat recently #99: January 19, 2023

Thursday, 19 January 2023

Zero inside knowledge here; but my guess is an Apple Event in February announcing Apple VR dev kits that cost $3,000 that come with a headset + Mac mini. With the device shipping at least 6-9 months later for less than that.

Wednesday, 18 January 2023

Revisiting Simon Collison's Farewell to Twitter

Wednesday, 18 January 2023

Blogging is alive and well

Wednesday, 11 January 2023

After a 3 week break from blogging and social media (more like 2 weeks completely, 1 week just reading and replying), I'm ready to jump back in. I have lots of plans for 2023 for my website and personal projects.

Tuesday, 10 January 2023

I spent January 1 in the darkroom making prints from a 35mm roll of Tri-X that I finished over the last few months.

Selfie in the darkroom

A print from a speakeasy soaking

Negatives on a lightbox

Print of railroad spikes in sink

Print of misty beach soaking

Monday, 2 January 2023

Last day of work done. Just deleted all social apps from my phone. Going to put my nose in a book, some food, and some bourbon. 👋

Thursday, 22 December 2022

Building Tuff - A static site generator just for me

Thursday, 22 December 2022

My website has supported dark mode based on the user's system preferences. But now, those among you that prefer to toggle it on a per-website basis can do so.

There are options for On, System, or Off. I keep my preference at System but choose whichever option works best for you!

I'll be improving the UI of the toggle widget at some point.

Thanks to Sara Soueidan for spurring me to add this option.

Wednesday, 21 December 2022

I've just added a new watercolor sketch of a landscape in China to my portfolio. My grandmother photographed the scene in 1987.

A watercolor painting of a landscape in China

Sunday, 18 December 2022

Rewrote most of my static site generator over the last few days. Cut the build time in half at the same time as doubling the number of files it deals with. The latest update adds monthly blog post indexes.

Terminal output of Tuff showing statistics for building my site

Saturday, 17 December 2022

What I saw somewhat recently #98: December 15, 2022

Thursday, 15 December 2022

I'm trying to decide which text editor I want to write my blog posts in.

Three text editors side-by-side. Sublime Text, MacDown, and VS Code Left to right: Sublime Text, MacDown, VS Code

Thursday, 15 December 2022

Looks like we'll all be in line trying to buy the iPhone 15 EU running iOS 17 EU. iEU?

Wednesday, 14 December 2022

I don't understand the push towards self-driving cars? Do you really think a robot can merge onto a highway while eating a bowl of breakfast cereal and putting on eyeliner? I don’t think so!

Wednesday, 14 December 2022

Over many years of watching YouTube videos something has become clear to me; quite often, the fewer views a video has the more information I seem to glean from it.

A 3-hour presentation on fine art photography from many years ago? 55 views? <3

A poorly lit, hard to hear, video of some guy in his basement darkroom? 7 views? <3

Wednesday, 14 December 2022

By opening Slack, Teams, and Discord on your computer at the same time you’re running all of the JavaScript ever written since the time of the Egyptian pyramids.

Tuesday, 13 December 2022

This weekend Eliza and I tried some experiments in the darkroom with paper negatives that failed completely. It is good to be humbled from time-to-time.

Monday, 12 December 2022

Making backups of my site's content is easier than ever. Just like my photo library I now have 4 complete back ups that will seldom be very far out of date.

Saturday, 10 December 2022

Developed two rolls of Tri-X last night. One I have no idea where it came from - and it looks like the camera had a light leak (selective memory?). But the other looks terrific. I can't wait to spend some time in the darkroom.

Two canisters of Kodak Tri-X 400 broken open

A film negative showing two bar keeps

Thursday, 8 December 2022

Disbanding the POSSE

Thursday, 8 December 2022

Spent some time this morning making adjustments to dates in RSS feeds. I think they should be accurate now. Sorry to all subscribers for the odd RSS behaviour the last few days.

Thursday, 8 December 2022

I'm going into year 3 of learning film photography and darkroom printing. One thing is abundantly clear, both of these disciplines are wholly separate. If you find yourself good at one and struggle with the other, do not feel bad. Both require skill. Both can be raised to the level of art. It is OK to focus on one of them.

Wednesday, 7 December 2022

Zhenyi Tan is on a tear

Wednesday, 7 December 2022

Added a changelog to keep track of updates to this site, Tuff, and my overall workflow.

Wednesday, 7 December 2022

What is Apple's policy for updating things like rsync on macOS? The preinstalled version is very old.

Tuesday, 6 December 2022

Learning more about rsync this morning so that I can develop a few rolls of 35mm film this evening. As one does.

Tuesday, 6 December 2022

iCloud+ email sometimes misclassifies replies as junk mail. I would think that my having emailed the person first would be enough for Apple to know the email isn't Junk?

Monday, 5 December 2022

If you're subscribed to my RSS feed (first, thank you!) you might notice the feed will refresh. That is because as of this morning my personal website is no longer running on WordPress. Eeek!

Monday, 5 December 2022

I'm getting dangerously close to switching away from WordPress and onto Tuff - my personal static site generator. Like any well tended garden, I'll need to pick weeds and cast seed, but the important bits are done.

Sunday, 4 December 2022

Hello World 2

Friday, 2 December 2022

Spent about 90-minutes in the darkroom making this print. It is an 11x14 print from a 6x6 neg taken in 2020 at Keuka lake in New York State.

Tuesday, 29 November 2022

I must be out of my mind. I started building a static site generator.

Monday, 28 November 2022

Yesterday I took a stranger’s portrait. It was quick, likely poor lighting, and may not turn out at all. But I’m super happy that I worked up the courage to ask.

Sunday, 27 November 2022

Cleaned and organized the darkroom for winter sessions.

Saturday, 26 November 2022

My favorite ways to view photographs, in order: books, iPad (someone’s website, or in Flickr app), YouTube on TV.

Friday, 25 November 2022

On vacation days I spend a lot of time on my iPad rather than my Mac. Which limits me on what I share - particularly photographic work. I need to create a better workflow for publishing from iPad.

Friday, 25 November 2022

I have the whole day off and I have so much internet to do.

Thursday, 24 November 2022

Why use 1 hashtag when 25 will do? 😊

Wednesday, 23 November 2022

Jeremy Keith's post about Twitter from two days ago caused me look up the first time I mentioned Twitter here on my blog. It turns out is was exactly one day after Jeremy did on his blog - 16 years ago yesterday. I have been subscribed to Jeremy's blog this entire time so I likely have him to blame for my Twitter, umm, issues.

Wednesday, 23 November 2022

WSL is no longer in preview mode. I wrote about WSL for a few years. It is an amazing addition to Windows and the team should be very proud for how good it is.

Wednesday, 23 November 2022

What I saw somewhat recently #97: November 22, 2022

Tuesday, 22 November 2022

Recent Mastodon vibes

Tuesday, 22 November 2022

Brent Stitcher on owning your audience

Tuesday, 22 November 2022

Copper Fox Distilling in Sperryville, Virginia makes a mighty fine whiskey.

Tuesday, 22 November 2022

I don’t know if this collage by Mark Clennon of Mike Tyson is actually a film contact sheet or was a composite made in Photoshop to look like it is…

I don’t care. It is awesome.

Tuesday, 22 November 2022

My Mastodon favorites script got a fair bit of traffic over the last day or so. So today I added a very simple cache (I want to be very nice to Mastodon's servers!), some updated styling, and an indicator to show there are images in the post. More to come!

Tuesday, 22 November 2022

I’m committing to no longer asking for boosts. My intent was to bring attention to Mastodon features I thought useful. But it comes across as gross and a ploy to gain reach. Sorry about that y’all.

Tuesday, 22 November 2022

The bricking of an iPhone in three waves

Monday, 21 November 2022

Imagine owning a domain name. Imagine you syndicate when appropriate to various other communities. Imagine being stress free about whether you should use Twitter, Tumblr, Mastodon, or something else. That is what it is like having your own blog.

Monday, 21 November 2022

Work-in-progress: I've created a page to show my most recent 50 favorites on Mastodon. Mastodon doesn't currently allow a public favorites page, so I built my own. I'll be slowly working on the script, caching, and styling. Feedback welcome as always.

Monday, 21 November 2022

I took a nap. Can’t recommend it enough.

Saturday, 19 November 2022

We’re going down down in an earlier round, and sugar we’re going down swinging. 🎶

Friday, 18 November 2022

TIL Vivaldi, in addition to building a browser chocked full of features like email, to do lists, contact management, and note taking, also has a blogging service and now a hosted Mastodon instance. Productive team!

Tuesday, 15 November 2022

Poll, of sorts: How do you balance creation vs consumption? I often wrestle with myself on how much I read or watch compared to how much I write or make or create. My desired ratio is 90/10. Unfortunately it is more like 10/90.

Monday, 14 November 2022

I'm at the age where I totally understand why Mister Rogers changed his sweater and shoes when entering his home.

Thursday, 3 November 2022

I wish Apple would transition away from using photos from Yelp in Maps. First, license the photos in such a way that we no longer need to navigate out of the Maps app. Allow people to submit their own photos to locations. Slowly remove Yelp altogether.

Wednesday, 2 November 2022

I have to admit, I’m surprised that just a few tens of thousands of new users can make Mastodon underperform. It isn’t exactly a new codebase and much of the work is spread out across many instances. I wonder what the biggest bottleneck is currently.

Wednesday, 2 November 2022

Skittish is closing down

Monday, 31 October 2022

Matthias Ott on publishing

Monday, 31 October 2022

Fall texture dreams - a new set of images I made while in a dreamlike state recovering from COVID-19.

Monday, 31 October 2022

Back in April I wrote a wishlist for Twitter. Six months later it still holds up.

Monday, 31 October 2022