Weather was decidedly "meh" yesterday. Windy too, which made this little weed tilt and sway like it was dancing. But you make do with what you find on a cloudy day in a bourgeois suburban landscape. Not sure I'd send it to Mom, but good enough for the marmot.

The OM-5 with the, also new to me, 12-45mm/f4 I got on a refurb sale. I haven't photographed a brick wall with it yet, so I'm not sure the lens is "perfect."

Fixed a bit of hard-coded date stuff in the RSS export template. Next January things should go much smoother.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 12:37 Saturday, 13 January 2024

Got the OM-5 yesterday and of course the weather is uninspiring. It feels denser than I thought it would, heavier than such a tiny body should be. But lighter than an E-M1!

I'll probably go out in a bit, try to get some exercise and hope something catches my eye. Perhaps some new and exotic fungus or something.

I've been printing and mailing a photo as a greeting card for my Mom every day. The idea is that she gets something in the mail every day. But the U.S. Postal Service seems to have other ideas. She'll go days without a card, then get four or five at once. Kind of defeats the purpose. The ones she likes she tacks on the wall (tapes?) outside her apartment and her neighbors comment on them. In a good way, I suppose.

KEH is going to be in town next week. Maybe I should make an appointment and bring a box of "extra" stuff I have and see if I can reduce the clutter and get a little "walking around money" in the process. That'd be the smart play.

Finished Monarch and For All Mankind last night. Both were, overall, better than I'd expected at launch. If Monarch doesn't return, I think it ended on a satisfactory note, that it was relatively self-contained as a story.

If For All Man Kind returns, I guess we're looking an alternative history of a decade ago. I wonder if the conceit runs out of steam at that point. What's the entertainment value in a subsequent season that offers a vision of the present that is predicated on an alternative past? Beats me, but we'll see. Maybe it's just an "I told you so," moment for everyone who thought we'd have colonized the moon and Mars by now.

Reacher seems needlessly gratuitously violent. That seems to be a thing with some Prime shows, like The Boys.

I've got to get busy and read my 100 pages of The Power Broker too.

Welp... I bought it. The OM-5. Not the "pre-owned" one, a new one. I figured for $150, I might as well have the certainty of getting a new camera. I went back through my email and found the times when I'd bought a "new" camera. Most of the cameras I buy are used, er "pre-owned" or refurbs from Olympus.

I wanted to see what the interval is on these purchases that cause such angst.

PEN F in Mar 2018

E-M1 Mk 2 in Jan 2019

E-M1X in Nov 2020

E-M1 Mk 3 in Jun 2021

OM-1 in Feb 2022 (shipped in Aug 22)

The OM-1 was the most expensive of these, bought at list price on release. The E-M1 Mk 2 was the second most expensive, but it came with the 12-40mm/f2.8 lens. The others were discounted from their launch price, often significantly, in the case of the E-M1X.

Prior to the E-M1 Mk 2, I didn't buy a flagship camera every year. I bought the original E-M5 and E-M1 upon release and then didn't buy another "new" body for five years. I retired in 2013, just before I bought the E-M1. I could live on my navy pension. Though I wasn't "rich," my time was worth more to me than what any employer would pay.

I bought the PEN F because it was going out of production and I wanted a new body, rather than used. It was a flagship camera, the highest-spec PEN body Olympus released.

In 2019 I started drawing Social Security and we moved into a house that was less expensive to own than my condo, so my "discretionary income" increased significantly. The mortgage, taxes, solar and battery loan, HOA fee and CDD (a local development bond repayment) fees are all less than my mortgage and HOA fees were at the condo. Hurray for low interest rates! Can't walk to the beach though. Alas.

But I still have angst about buying these big-ticket, "luxury" items. I bought it yesterday after giving up on wrestling with it, as I suspected I would. Then experienced exactly what I knew I would, this brief, intense period of self-loathing. And now I'm fine with it. Mostly.

It's a ridiculous number of cameras. This list doesn't include a large number of used cameras I have for one reason or another, none of them strictly "rational." It's not a financial problem, it's mostly one of space, shelf and cognitive.

The E-M1 Mk 3 becomes somewhat redundant, given that the OM-5 replicates its feature set, albeit in a smaller body. I may sell it, maybe not. The OM-5 will become my daily walk camera. I'll be giving up the bird recognition feature of the OM-1, but I was doing okay with the E-M10 Mk 4 which lacked it as well.

The E-M1X is the home of the 100-400mm zoom, my largest lens. While its sensor isn't as up to spec as the OM-1, it's "good enough," and it's easier to handle that big lens on that big body, I don't have a grip for the OM-1 and I'm not inclined to get one.

I'm aware of my privilege and good fortune, and some of my discomfort is due to that awareness. I enjoy photography, and it seems I have some addiction to "gear." I'd like to believe I probably won't buy another "new" camera for many years, but recent history suggests that may be wishful thinking.

If the doom-sayers are correct, OMDS may have only one or two more cameras left in its future anyway. But I'll be in the micro-four thirds system for the rest of my life, no matter what. Or until even that becomes too heavy, which will likely spell the end of my practice.

Looking forward to playing with my new toy.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:56 Friday, 12 January 2024

Forgot to update the RSS template for 2024. Fixed.

What I ought to do today is make the year an attribute and let it roll over automatically.

We'll see how motivated I get.

(GAS is an acronym for "gear acquisition syndrome.")

Spent a lot of last night tossing and turning thinking about buying a camera. Ugh. Looking at getting a used OM-5. Not inexpensive, it'd be over $900. I figure if I wait long enough this feeling will pass, but I've almost pulled the trigger twice now.

The attraction for me is that it's essentially an E-M1 Mk3, which I also own, in a slightly smaller, much lighter body. I took the OM-1 and the E-P7 with me to Charleston, but only shot with the E-P7 because it hangs off my wrist comfortably. I took the RRS bottom plate off the OM-1 to make it a little lighter, but with the 12-40mm/f2.8 it still requires a strap. An OM-5 would give me kind of the "best of both worlds." A lightweight body with an electronic viewfinder for carrying around when I'm "out and about." (Which, frankly, isn't that often. Alas.)

I can afford it, but it's like anything else, there are probably a lot more useful things I could do with $900. Like a heat-pump, ventless dryer.

Right now I'm figuring I'll wait until February and see how I feel.

But as they say, "The struggle is real."

And the little neon light show going on in my head has ended. For now.

I have an appointment for a neurology consult on Monday to look into why my toes seem numb. They're not completely numb, but they feel funny and it mostly feels like "numb." Kinda like when I was a kid in New York and it was 20° below zero out and we were outside playing. "I can't feel my toes." Mostly. Not as bad as all that.

Might be something, might not. Might just be decades of walking barefoot on hard surfaces in Florida, running a fair amount and several years of taekwondo. Blood sugar is fine.

But I noticed something else the other day that seems to be happening with increasing frequency. I get these shimmering lines in my visual field. I cover one eye and then the other, and they're present in both eyes, so it doesn't seem to be an eye thing.

Consulting Dr. Google, it seems they might be something called "ocular migraines," and they might be something as well. I don't have a headache, but there's one going on right now and it's also annoying. They pass after a while, but I don't know what prompts them or what they might mean.

I don't know if this neurologist is going to want to talk about ocular migraines on Monday, or toes only; but I have a couple of follow-up appointments with my regular doctor next week as well, so maybe I'll get another consult scheduled.

Otherwise, I'm in ridiculously good health for being as old and as fat as I am.

Against my better instincts, I bought an Apple Watch Series 9 (before the decision, subsequently overturned, that briefly caused Apple to stop selling it). I had one niggling issue with it, the weather complication refused to display any weather data.

Life being what it is, I cursed Apple and ignored it after wasting a fair amount of time trying to get it to work.

Well, yesterday morning, my Apple Watch 9 refused to wake up! Well, stay awake anyway. I'd hold the crown in and enter my pass code, it'd appear to be awake and alert and seconds later, it'd go back to "sleep."

I thought maybe it couldn't detect my wrist. We were heading to the Outlet Mall to spend gift cards, so I grabbed my Apple Watch Series 6, which I use for sleep tracking. I figured when I got home I'd spend some time with Apple Support in chat. Well, the Series 6 did the same thing! Relieved that the Series 9 likely wasn't defective, we headed off to the store.

Toward the end of our errand, I went to the car while Mitzi was shopping. Figured I'd spend some time with the phone and try to figure out what was going on.

Turns out, it was the iPhone. It was "stuck" in sleep focus mode. I had to turn off focus mode entirely, I couldn't get it to switch to "work" (basically, "do not disturb" with exceptions for certain people).

Re-booted the phone and it seems to be fine now. But it was pretty annoying for a company whose products were once praised because they "just worked."

I later updated to the latest WatchOS and the weather complication is also now working properly.

Fast forward to this morning, and the damn iMac didn't automatically shift out of dark mode after sunrise! I didn't notice right away until I went to a web site and the menu bar turned bright red and all of Safari's menu items disappeared. The menubar icons for apps that have them were still present, but the text was gone. Closed the tab, but problem remained.

Switched to Finder and the menubar cleared, but then I noticed I was still in dark mode. Went to Settings and confirmed it was in Automatic, then just selected, what? Light mode? Normal mode, I guess.

Anyway, resolved my question about what I wanted to blog about. Grumpy old man stuff. I used to be an Apple "fanboi," but now they're just another over-sized, over-valued corporation that pretends to care about stuff, but mostly only cares about making money.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:03 Thursday, 11 January 2024

I should know better than to visit the forums at dpReview. It's a "gear" forum and people talk about cameras and lenses and sing their praises or curse their faults.

Someone recently bought an E-P3 and was asking about the results they were seeing, specifically with regard to "noise."

This person has the camera. Their first impression wasn't a great one. They wanted to know if they had a defective camera. Rather than investigate that, have a conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of the E-P3, there were people immediately telling her that the camera was rubbish, and they should return it and instead by a camera with a later sensor.

I normally ignore that sort of thing, but I guess I was weak that day, because I engaged.

To make a long story short, (130+ replies, though I'm only 3 of them.). She's decided her camera isn't defective and is likely to continue to work with it.

But in the process, I was doing some research on that generation of 12MP Panasonic LiveMOS sensor. I was looking at my own images, Flickr and watching YouTube videos.

And I decided I needed a mirrorless camera with that sensor. The E-620 that I don't need has that sensor. But, you know, it's not mirrorless. And I have way more lenses for micro-four thirds than I do four thirds.

So, inevitably, I went to the auction site and I have an Olympus E-PM1 on its way from Japan. The E-PM1 was my first mirrorless (interchangeable lens) camera. I'd had an E-520 and an E-30 four thirds DSLRs before that, but micro four thirds was the new hotness, and I wanted a low-cost introduction. I waited until the E-PM1 came out, foregoing the E-PL1 and E-PL2 in the interim. Although I didn't care for the sound of the shutter, I loved the images it made. (Ephemeral, ghostly bits though they are.)

I don't know what it is about me and cameras, or "stuff" in general (radios, calculators), but here I go again. I'm not too worked up about it. I know I'll enjoy it.

Also, 72°F outside. Oy.

Mike Johnston asks, "Is there any reason a film photographer would shoot color today?"

I touched on this just about a month ago in, A Phone Is Not A Camera.

I know this makes me sound like an old fart, and that's fine because I am an old fart. Kids are shooting film now, I think, not because it's "cool," but because you get to experience making something.

In other words it's more "authentic," as photography, than "digital imaging." While there are likely boomers who are shooting film nowadays out of nostalgia or whatever, for the most part it seems to me to be young people, Millennials and younger, who are drawn to shooting film.

My nephew is a working photographer, touring with musicians and shooting gigs. For that, he mostly shoots digital. But he shoots film to be more expressive. It's a different process, and it requires a different mindset.

My daughter is shooting film as a side hustle. She recently bought a medium format camera. I think it's the same thing with her.

These kids have grown up digital. Everything associated with a screen being nearly instantaneous, and nearly infinitely mutable. A thing's existence is merely a sequence of ones and zeros that must be interpreted by a machine to make them accessible to a human being. There is nothing intrinsic in the artifact itself.

Film is different. Whatever is captured while the shutter is open is all there's ever going to be. Now, digitize it, and it becomes that ephemeral, ghostly entity that only exists as bits. But the negative actually exists.

A phone is not a camera. Even when "taking" or "making" a photograph with a phone, the machine is doing most of the work, and doing it mostly for its own convenience, which is presumably also the user's convenience. (Notice I didn't say "photographer.")

I think for folks who are shooting color film today, they want to be in touch with an experience, a part of the process. To know that the image that results is wholly a result of their choices, their experience, creative and technical.

Can you do that in digital? Sure. Mostly. The machine is still doing stuff you don't know about. Lens corrections. Chromatic aberration corrections. Sometimes you can turn that stuff off, sometimes it's baked into the RAW images themselves. And you still wind up with... bits. A "virtual" thing.

A phone is not a camera, and bits are not "real." We live an era of "deep fakes," because of the infinite mutability of bits and the power of our machines to manipulate them. Film is real. Yeah, you can do clever things making prints, but you have to fight with reality, not just move a slider, click a check-box.

Kids born when the iPhone was introduced are turning 17 this year. Chances are, for most of them, a phone is their only experience with a camera.

For most of the things we use cameras for, I think digital is a boon. I wouldn't go back to shooting film. But I've had that experience. I think young people today, who've grown up knowing only digital, welcome that tactile experience. That embodied experience. The reality of a physical artifact that exists because of their effort, their choices.

I think if this civilization were to survive that numb-nuts Kurzweil would turn out to be right. Everything would be digital.

We would only exist as ghosts in a machine.

I think shooting film is a rejection of that.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 09:45 Tuesday, 9 January 2024

Mitzi's mom passed away yesterday morning. Not to be all L'Étranger or anything. She was 94 and had been declining in recent months, entering hospice care at her memory care facility a couple of weeks ago.

I was going to call this post, "I'll See Myself Out," but that's a little darker than I feel. Only a little.

I'm at that point in my life where I have no grand ambitions. That foolish effort at running for public office kind of put the nail in that coffin.

Which is fine. Not having "lofty goals" leaves more time for considering the little ones. The art of "chop wood, carry water." Kind of a lofty goal itself, in a sense.

Mostly what I want to achieve in the time I have left shuffling on mortal coils is to do the least harm, and try to be as kind as I can be. Both are challenging.

I'm seeing more and more people writing about the climate crisis and sustainability, which is not unexpected. That will continue to increase as the scope and severity of the unfolding catastrophe become increasingly plain to even the most benighted minds. It's hard to thread the needle on this one.

On the one hand, I'm enamored with the idea of hopepunk. To me, it accepts the reality of the situation, it's not kidding anyone. There's a certain humility underlying it, that we might be wrong and maybe we can land this plane safely after all. Certainly, there's little else that might be considered a better use of our time. We do our best, because our best is what's called for in this situation.

On the other hand, it's hard to know what to think about other people. And still "be kind," I mean.

The folks who support Trump don't think of themselves as "bad people." I think they're horrible people. But how does that help either them or me? I don't know how to change their minds. I'm not even sure their minds can be changed. One day, they'll all be "good Germans" ("good Republicans"), but for now "the left" is worse than anything Trump represents, and they think he's their best hope for saving us all from "the left." It's Nazi Germany all over again, and likely what took place in Hungary and Israel and Britain and Argentina and everywhere else radical right-wing regression has taken hold.

I think that's the best I can do in trying to get inside their minds and understand why they're doing this. They aren't genuinely evil people, but we know that genuine evil doesn't require genuinely evil people. Just folks who are lonely, or scared, or angry. Does kindness fix all of that? When?

One new blogger I discovered lives in a tiny house and has what appears to be a relatively sustainable lifestyle. And he also appreciates the challenge we face. But he also likes "naming and shaming." I happen to think that's fair to do to politicians and billionaires, but random "little people" who post something that might seem oblivious in this time of peril, well, "Don't be a Karen," I guess. (Sorry, Karens. It's the idiom we swim in.)

We can't all extricate ourselves from the culture we grew up in. Some of us probably can. Take a vow of poverty, shed most property and pleasures, atone for the harm we've inflicted. But most of us don't have that degree of will or insight, or fierce commitment. I know I don't.

Which is why I'm still buying plastic disks because I think Christopher Nolan is right, even if it doesn't matter in the mid-term. Not a lot of them, and I do so far more mindfully than in years past. But I still buy them.

I'm looking at mayonnaise recipes. It's nearly impossible to buy mayonnaise in glass jars anymore. All plastic. Mitzi made some mayonnaise a few months back. I didn't like it. At all. So I'm going to take that on and figure out how to make mayonnaise I like, in small enough batches that it'll keep in the fridge until it's used up.

I read that article about the confusion many of us have regarding what the changes are that can have the most impact in reducing the harm our lifestyles inflict on the planet and all the living things we share it with. A bit of low-hanging fruit that had eluded me was shampoo. So I've ordered some shampoo in bar form. Also learned Mitzi's daughter has been using that for years now. Smart girl. I'm going to finish the bottle of dandruff shampoo in the shower first. I should have looked into dandruff shampoos in bar form. But I'll use the ones I have up first. It's not essential anyway.

I'm pleased to say I've never bought "body wash." I'm an Irish Spring sort of guy, though I'm sure the fragrance and coloring pose their own problems.

Every morning I fill up a carafe that connects to a Soda Stream CO2 charger to make the carbonated water in which I'll add some syrup to make my caffeine delivery system of choice. I think I've mentioned before that I try to be mindful while filling the carafe that I have clean drinking water, and many people don't. Even in America.

That practice has evolved into a prayer. Can't say why. Early childhood indoctrination I suppose. But I pray for Gaza, I pray for Ukraine, I pray for my kids. Enough time for a couple of Hail Marys while the bottle's being filled. I think of them and offer my wishes for sanity to return and the hate and harm to cease. Does it do any good? I don't know. Probably not. But if "everything's connected," if "there's more here than meets the eye," than maybe that little moment means something. I don't know.

In any event, the current plan is to use the present inventory of syrups in the pantry and then perhaps stop drinking soda entirely. When we were in Charleston a couple of weeks ago, I didn't have any soda for a couple of days. Didn't seem to offer any particular problems. If I do, I'll have to find another ritual in which to offer up my prayers.

One of my neighbors is reading a book about evangelical Christians and extremism. He keeps texting me that I have to read this book. I finally told him that my existential dread locker was full. That for my own mental health, I have to choose to ignore some things.

It'd be hard to focus on improving my efforts in "chop wood, carry water," if I was suicidally depressed.

We do our best. The rest is not up to us.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:35 Monday, 8 January 2024

This is one of the best looks at Mystery Men that I've watched. (There's one where a guy basically reads the wikipedia entry to a montage of film clips. Or the wikipedia entry is just a transcript. Hard to tell these days. Maybe both were made by "generative AI.")

This movie is absolutely gorgeous in 4K UHD.

I bought the Christopher Nolan Batman series on 4K UHD Blu-ray a couple of weeks ago, and while we were watching Batman Begins, Mitzi asked something about the "other" Batman movies. I decided to get a 4K UHD version of Tim Burton's Batman.

I saw the 1989 Batman in the theater, and I recall the excitement many of us felt about this treatment of Batman. At the time, I had the single volume collection of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight comics. (I was kind of into comic books for a while.) The Burton movie, while campy in many ways, felt like a more "serious" treatment of the character; certainly compared to the old Adam West series.

I hadn't seen Burton's Batman in decades. I think the last time I saw it, it was on VHS so I was interested in seeing it again in a premium format.

We watched it the night before last, and I have to say that I don't think the film really needs a 4K UHD treatment. Regular high definition is probably sufficient. While the images were clear, the pallet and contrast were kind of muddy, absent the Joker and his occasional gadgets. It was also interesting to experience the longer scenes, the less frenetic pacing of the cuts and camera changes. And by "interesting," I mean it felt "slow." I watched it more out of curiosity than genuine interest. I also noted that indeed, Michael Keaton couldn't move his head when wearing the cape and cowl. And I'd forgotten how pretty Kim Basinger is.

All that said, I did love Tim Burton's "vision" of Gotham and the practical effects with miniatures.

Right after I'd ordered Batman in 4K, I thought of another super-hero movie that might look great in 4K UHD, Mystery Men.

Now that movie looks amazing (pun intended) in 4K UHD. I was noticing things I'd never noticed before. I only had the DVD version for many years before I bought a digital copy. I can't recall feeling the same sense of wonder watching the streaming version, so I should probably compare the Blu-ray with the streaming version sometime. See if I'm imagining things.

Mystery Men goes in for a lot of the same whimsy in set design that Burton used for Batman, perhaps more so, and I think it's great. I'd love a miniature Herkimer Battle Jitney, even though I don't collect movie miniatures. (My son does.)

I thought it was an interesting coincidence that the villain in Mystery Men, Casanova Frankenstein, intended to destroy Champion City by using a "psycho-frakulator," causing hallucinations in its victims and the citizens to turn against one another, similar to the plot of Batman Begins and the League of Shadows.

Mystery Men has always been funny as hell to me. Tom Waits as a "mad scientist." ("I'm only here for the ladies.") Greg Kinnear as Captain Amazing. The script is very clever, though I gather it was a bit of a mess coming together.

I've always loved Mystery Men, but the 4K UHD Blu-ray version is just a visual delight and really adds to what was already a wonderful experience.

Quick test to make sure everything is, in fact, wired up correctly.

The International Space Station is the brightest track beginning at the bottom left of the frame (north) and tracking to the upper right (east-southeast). There's a very bright track in the left side of the frame with no indication of navigation lights, so I think it's a satellite of some kind. Very bright, don't think I've seen one like that before.

There are several satellites. One brightening at intervals, which suggests it's rotating as it orbits, I think. There may be two small meteors. There are the usual aircraft, though the morning isn't as "busy" as the evening.

(Larger version here.)

I know AKMA reads the marmot, because he reaches out to me from time to time on Mastodon to comment on posts that prompt him to offer something.

And he posts pics of pups dressed as elves.

Also please note the clarification on who does the dressing!

An interesting discussion at the Tinderbox forum on using Tinderbox to corral and tame 30 years' worth of notes.

Like cameras, people are passionate about their favorite apps, and there is always more than one way to skin a cat.

Also like cameras, or airframes as Maverick would tell us, it's the person that's more important than the tool.

Some of us begin to identify with the tools we use and the products we choose. Others using something different isn't a reflection on our worth as individuals. And always chasing after perfection consumes time that might have been used to better effect learning out to get the best out of "good enough."

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 13:22 Thursday, 4 January 2024

Just because I'm making these posts for my future (December) self, I had a little glitch there. I tabbed the This Morning's Hawk post out of the January container, in order to tab it back in and have the prototype fix the html. I could have done that manually, but I figured this was two keystrokes and I was done.

Not so much. It tabbed back in with the "do not export" safety enabled, and I didn't catch it. I exported and looked at the page and the post was missing. Head scratch moment. Looked at the post and the "do not export" tick-mark leapt out at me.

When the script creates the note, it assigns the prototype and seemingly avoids the container's "on add" action, which normally assigns a "p_Post wx" prototype. Image posts use the "p_Photo" prototype. When I slipped it out and back in, the container's "on add" action assigned it the normal post prototype, which is fine in this case, other than the "do not export" bit. The "p_Photo" prototype contains all the html markup and attributes to post a photo. Those were already in place, albeit wrong, pointing to the 2023 Images folder. They don't conflict with any attributes in "p_Post wx", so all the html and note text was still in place and unaltered by shifting it in and out.

But, since the html came from the "p_Photo" prototype and tabbing it back in had the container switch it to a "p_Post wx", it didn't change the html. Because it couldn't.

All I had to do was manually change "2023" to "2024" in the html and all would have been well, a matter of only one keystroke!

Now, a kinder blogger would simply leave the "do not export" safety enabled, and this post will be here in December for me to review to make sure I don't screw this up again, yet not burdening you, gentle reader, with details about Tinderbox that you neither know nor care about.

Since I'm "thinking out loud" here, I think I'll publish this anyway.

And if I haven't absolutely put you off ever even considering Tinderbox, I'll point out that it's on sale in the Winterfest promotion. And if I can muddle my way through using this app, you can too. I've been loving it for 20 years.

Okay, it was the photo prototype, not the template. Easy fix. And it was the Automator application that exports the image from Photos that needed the folder updated.

I should review all my January posts to in December to figure out what to do right next time.

Anyway, the last image is pretty small. Here's a 125% crop screenshot from Photos. The 75-300mm zoom is considered a "kit" (low-end) lens. Does fine for me.

Since I'm usually shooting backlit subjects on my morning walks, I use spot-metering. This doesn't work well for subjects in full sunlight. The exposure is right for the bird, but the sky is way underexposed and it's tough to get the color right. At least, for me it is.

I need to pay more attention to exposure.

Not putting this up on Flickr because I'm not pleased with it. Same bird was on the same tree yesterday, but all the shots I got yesterday had a limb growing out of its head. This morning I tried to pay a bit more attention to composition, but it was a busy background no matter what.

I can erase all those limbs, but that poses its own challenges with the sky. I've found it has to be the last thing I do.

This is sharpened in Topaz SharpenAI and I suppose many people might feel as though it's over-sharpened, and they might be right. I'm just still kind of amazed, so here it is. It's not a great photograph, but I love seeing the hawks and I'm still delighted I can get a shot like this, so I'm sharing that joy.

I hope.

(Wherein I discover I haven't updated the AppleScript that exports the image from Photos to the local Images archive for the site. It still exports and posts correctly, because the export template in Tinderbox is pointing to the old folder as well. I'll have to do some repairs to get everything aligned properly again. Sigh.)

(Ed. Note: "Meta" is a tag for a blog post about blogging. It has nothing to do with Facebook, the antithesis of blogging.)

Bix offers some very worthwhile thoughts about comments in blogs. The marmot doesn't offer comments, but welcomes thoughts and opinions, even if I only read them in others' blogs. Sometimes not even then. I know James is still reading the marmot, because he followed me on Flickr after I blogged about Flickr. It's possible to carry on a discussion in an asynchronous, distributed, decentralized fashion where friction is a feature, not a bug.

Manton points to Matt Mullenwegg's birthday wish, which is hereby granted.

Garret shares his appreciation to Christopher Butler for "being normal." Subscribed. And this is how "discovery" works.

Michael Tsai points to a "mere civilian" regarding discontent with connectors. Also subscribed. Another discovery. (The "hand" emoji is the about page, or colophon.)

AKMA is back in Britain and is apparently dressing his dogs in troll outfits. (Pics or it didn't happen.)

Shelley keeps us up to date on what she's reading, in RSS and on Mastodon.

That's the magic of RSS, folks.

Still some signs of life in the blogosphere. I'm guessing we're at the base level of the ecosystem. Micro-organisms, fungi, unseen but ubiquitous and likely essential to all the "higher" organisms.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:08 Thursday, 4 January 2024

My wife's daughter mentioned something about a community effort to read Robert Caro's The Power Broker over the course of a year. I told her I had a copy, but hadn't started reading it yet. I bought it after I'd watched the documentary Turn Every Page, about Caro and his editor, Robert Gottlieb. I asked her if she wanted me to mail it to her. She asked me if I wanted to read it with her.

That sounded more fun.

So I went looking for the genesis of this idea. She's a working parent with a precocious 19-month-old, so I thought I could figure that part out on my own.

This seems to be it. So, if you're interested in eating an elephant "one bite at a time," 100 pages a month, here's an opportunity to do it as a group effort. A "book club," if you will.

Does anyone else think Bradley Cooper is way overrated? Way overrated.

I just noticed that the sound that nuts make when I begin to chew them sounds a lot like a riff or theme in the Batman Begins movie soundtrack. ("Whooom...whoom...whoom...whoom..." Watched it the other night. On Blu-ray 4K UHD.)

I can unlock my iMac with my password much faster than my Apple Watch can. That is, when that actually works.

We don't actually own any of our digital media products. We have licenses that can be revoked. I'm buying less digital media from Apple services because of the enshittification of the Apple TV experience; and because I don't trust corporations to not revoke the licenses without refunding my money, or to not change the digital content without my consent. ("Han shot first.") For movies and CDs I want to enjoy for at least as long as the medium lasts, I'm buying the physical product. Christopher Nolan is right.

Atoms > bits.

I expect corporations will stop selling physical media within the next few years. Claiming "plastic in the environment" or carbon footprint of manufacturing and shipping and so on. It won't be about the environment or the climate. Expect the timing will have something to do with the degree of broadband penetration in those regions where it is currently deficient, and the amount of revenue that represents.

How hard do you suppose it is to subscribe to a streaming service for one month, binge all the content you care about on that service and then cancel? Wait a year or two for your favorite series to return and repeat. I expect minimum subscription lengths or term-tiered pricing are in our near future too. When Season 2 of House of the Dragon is fully unspooled, I'll subscribe to Max for one month.

I already broke one of my 2024 resolutions. On the upside, one of my other resolutions was to stop procrastinating.

Apple News+ is a magazine rack, it's not a "news" platform. If I want to find out what's going on, I know I won't find it in Apple News+.

We're all going to get really interested in learning to grow our own food soon.

I'd never heard of "pot likker" before. I have it for breakfast with my eggs now. Well, technically, the "greens" part. It's easy to grow greens. I like it a lot more than I thought I would.

We need to re-think shoes, from a sustainability standpoint. My soles wear out far sooner than any other part of the shoe, and they can't be re-soled. Doesn't matter how expensive the shoes are, it seems. Mine wear unevenly, much more so on the right foot than the left.

That is all. Carry out the plan of the day.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:17 Wednesday, 3 January 2024

<img src=“https://nice-marmot.net/Archives/2023/Images/P1020009.JPG" alt=“A couple of shadowy figures. The “walking man” in a crosswalk traffic sign, and my long shadow in front of it.">

A couple of shadowy figures.

When we were in Charleston, I tried to do "street photography," except for people. Got a couple of people, but mostly environmental stuff. But I'm with family and there's a lot of family interaction going on, so I'm unable to really focus on making images. It's kind of "run and gun" so whatever works is mostly just luck.

Anyway, on my morning walk, I can be a little more deliberate. I'm mostly doing it for the exercise, so I have to keep moving. This image struck me so I figured I'd try for it. Not sure I achieved much, but I'm happy with it.

My passions seem to wax and wane, tossed as they are on the stormy seas of my interior experience. Photography seems to be waxing at the moment, while vintage calculators have waned to the point where I'm thinking of selling the whole lot.

One of the fairly "new to me" rewards of photography is Flickr, though I've been on the site for almost 20 years (Since 2004). I'm investing more time in it, and my images seem to be getting before more people. I'm not getting many "faves," so maybe they're not very good; but I like taking photos and I like sharing them.

The advantage of Flickr is that people presumably want to look at photos, so it's not like when my family or friends drop by and I subject them to a slide show on my Apple TV!

I'm spending more time following people and groups and viewing other's images in the Activity feed.

I'm glad Flickr is still around and has endured changes of ownership, and the rise of FB, IG and X. I hope it's around for many years to come.

The Invading Sea, Wes Williamson: Florida cattle ranches critical to preserving environment

Kind of ironic, or perhaps a deal with the devil.

Cattle ranches aren’t especially good for Florida’s natural environment either. Better than development though.

I guess.