Heather Cox Richardson puts her finger on what's happening in Florida without mentioning it once. A state that has been governed solely by one party for more than a generation has now largely empowered one man to rule over it.

There's a powerful appetite for this sort of thing among a large minority of any population. Democracy is messy and difficult. Faithless actors, chiefly motivated by greed, work tirelessly to corrupt the system. People lose faith.

Institutions must be strong to guard against this; but to be strong requires accountability to the electorate.

When parties themselves, whether Republican or Democrat, work to corrupt the system, by gerrymandering, making voting more difficult, undermining faith in the electoral process, accountability to the electorate is eliminated. Institutions weaken or fail.

The faithless, those hungry for power, the greedy achieve control.

For the privileged, it's often irrelevant. The new bosses make sure the privileged are content, at least insofar as their status is concerned.

It's when things go wrong, or reckless decisions are taken with widespread consequences, that the hollowness, incompetence and cruelty of an authoritarian government is exposed, even to the privileged.

There's ultimately a price to be paid for surrendering your responsibility for self-government to a "strong man."

Sooner or later, the bill comes due.

I would write, "and all must pay," but that's not true. There is a class of people that are seldom, perhaps never, truly held accountable, who never pay for their faithlessness, their greed. That would be the rich. Many of their sycophantic toadies, their apparatchiks and fixers, their "lobbyists" and "consultants" are often held accountable.

But the people who wrote the checks seldom are.

Rich man wanna be king.

And a king ain't satisfied 'til he rules everything.

For more than a generation, Florida has been governed by one party.

Today it is ruled by one man.

Who wants to rule America.

Heard back from KEH.COM today. It seems I was a bit more conservative than I thought. They quoted me $1000 for the batch of cameras I offered. Upon review, they're paying me $1049! Cool!

I'd sold a Fujifilm X20 last month for $250, and shipped off those 14 bodies to KEH; but then I bought the OM Systems E-P7 on eBay. That came in at $685, which wasn't horrible. It turns out that it's one of those resellers that splits out lenses and bodies, probably moves a little more quickly with the overseas crowd and brings in a better margin in the process.

PEN-wise, I've now got the PEN-F, the E-PL10, an E-PL7 and a very red, so very red, E-PL6 along with the E-P7. The PEN-F is somewhat iconic, and has held its value. As a shooter, I'm ambivalent. I've carried it on travel quite a bit. It went with me to Ireland, most recently to Boston. I love the jpegs and the evf comes in very handy in bright sun. It's not the most comfortable body in-hand, but I don't think I want to part with it.

The three E-PLs are my most irrational cameras. I have the black E-PL10, and I just love the way it looks with the 2nd generation 14mm/f2.5 Lumix tiny pancake on it. It's quick, light, takes great images, what's not to love? 16MP sensor, okay. Not very customizable. No option for an evf, where I can put a VF4 on either the E-PL7 or the E-PL6.

I have a bunch of accessories I'm going to try to sell to KEH, I may offer the E-PL10 as well. That would bring in a decent price, though the combination of the E-PL7, E-PL6 and the VF4 would likely bring in the same or more. Those external evfs have held their value pretty well and I have one of each. Because of course I do.

I'm fond of the E-PL7 just because I shot with it a lot. Bought it as a refurb and was impressed with the build quality as an entry-level camera. It's got a better sensor stabilization system than the E-PL6.

What I'm trying to do here, and mostly failing, is convince myself to part with all the "light" PENs. Just have the PEN-F and the E-P7 for rangefinder style bodies.

I'll sleep on it.

In the meantime, the E-P7 is nice. It's kind of a mid-grade body between the E-P and E-PL series. Build quality is at the E-PL level, which is very good but not at the same level as the E-P5. Like the higher end PENs, it has two control dials, where the Light series only had one.

The image processor interface is dumbed-down like the E-PL10 or E-M10 Mk4; but it offers a jpeg color/b&W profile customization capability like the PEN-F. It has a 20MP sensor, with a less capable image stabilizer, probably like the E-M10 Mk4, so no high-res capability, sensor-shift or handheld.

It's attractive without being sexy in any way. Serviceable grip. Buttons are tiny. Someone said it's kind of an ideal jpeg shooter's camera, and I think that's about right. Which means me.

I like it and certainly don't regret buying it, but it does seem to lack a certain je ne c'est quoi that has often been present in other Olympus bodies, especially the diminutive ones.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 10:39 Friday, 10 February 2023

Colin Devroe writes about something I've been thinking about recently.

I bought the machine I'm writing this on back in July 2019. It replaced a 2012(!) 13" MBP Retina that I bought on release and I think max'ed out at the time, i7 processor, 1TB SSD and 8GB of RAM. It served me well for about seven years. It was connected to a 27" Thunderbolt display for most of that time.

This iMac isn't max'ed out in specs, but nearly. I got the i9 processor and the Radeon Pro Vega 48 with 8GB of RAM. It came with 32GB of RAM, but I've since added 32GB more, and it's got a 1TB SSD.

At the time I bought it, I figured I'd keep this one for at least 8 years.

Now I'm not so sure. I think it'll work just fine for another five years, probably longer. But I don't know how long Apple's going to keep developing software updates, specifically security updates, for it. I think that's my biggest legitimate concern.

Emotionally, irrationally, there's the whole Apple Silicon issue. Being something of a techie, albeit less so now than in my younger days, I follow the industry. The rhapsodic reception of the M1 chip and its derivatives definitely took a lot of the luster off my 8-core i9.

In June 2020 I bought a 13" MPB to have a current laptop, a refurbished quad-core i5 with 8GB of RAM. I bought that one because it came with 4 Thunderbolt ports. A few months later, the M1 13" MBP came out and the Mac world lost its mind.

Mitzi was still running a non-Retina 13" MBP and using it as her daily driver. She offered to buy my refurb, so I could buy a new M1 machine and keep up with all the cool kids.

And so, life was good again.

Then the M2 machines came out and Mitzi went to San Diego for two weeks. I live in a place in Florida that's basically 30 minutes from anywhere you'd actually want to go (Nocatee), so I listen to podcasts when I'm in the car by myself. Which meant I was listening to the Accidental Tech Podcast and The Talk Show right when they were discussing the new M2 macs, specifically the M2Pro Mac mini.

Well, to make a long story short, I then spent some time on Apple's web site, pricing out an M2 Pro mini and a Studio display. Ouch! And the Apple trade-in on the 2019 iMac is now almost pennies on the dollar. Dimes anyway. Double-ouch!

So then I tried to find some performance tests to see where my 2019 i9 iMac might be, just to see if an M2 Pro mini would be life-altering. Turns out, the iMac is fine. It's way over-spec'ed for anything I do, and the screen is still about the best you can get without spending thousands more. I'd be paying a lot of money for performance improvements that I'd not really experience in my daily use.

The one app that bugs me is OM System's OM Workspace. It's pokey to the point of being unusable. I don't know why. They've made an Apple Silicon version and I haven't tried it yet on my MBP, maybe that'll be a better experience. For now, I've abandoned using OM Workspace as my main editor. I'm playing with RAW Power now from Gentlemen Coders, one of the guys responsible for Aperture. I'll also play with Acorn and Pixelmator Pro eventually, but for now I'm trying spend enough time in RAW Power to get comfortable with it. But I'm getting out of Photos other than as kind of a library tool. But that's another story.

Colin also writes about another thing that resonated with me, and that's the pace of system change. For a long time, Apple was struggling just to survive and differentiate itself from the Wintel market. We welcomed the new features that offered more capabilities or greater ease of use than Windows. But now it seems like we're chasing "new" features just for the sake of buzz, while many of the formerly new features underperform or get flakey.

One of the podcasts I listened to was The Automators and they were discussing keyboard launchers, like Alfred or Spotlight and some new app called Ray Cast. I use LaunchBar. Well, I didn't recognize what they were describing with Spotlight, because I'd never seen it do the things they were describing. About the same time, Gary with MacMost dot com posted a video on rebuilding the Spotlight index, and my Spotlight didn't look like his at all either!

So I checked Spotlight on my M1 MBP, and it looked like the one on my iMac. Since they're configured nearly identically, it may be some conflict with something I have installed. But what that is, I don't know. Looking into it some more, others have been complaining about similar issues.

Maybe I'm just getting old, but I would rather see Apple fix, refine and improve the performance of the existing features in the OS and Apple apps, than keep rolling out new features like Stage Manager that demo well, but don't really seem to improve the user experience.

I recall how George R. R. Martin still uses WordStar on some antiquated piece of computing hardware because, well, that's how he writes!

Again, maybe it's because I'm getting old, but I'm beginning to think it might be cool one day to be in my 70s, still blogging on an ancient intel iMac. That's less than six years away!

Just needed to post a pic to make sure I remembered how to do it!

It seems giving my E-M10 Mk4 to my son has prompted a broader examination of how I wish to "take pictures" on my morning walk.

For a long time, I was content with the M10 Mk4 and the 14-150mm/f3.5-5.6 because it was a lightweight setup, and I could do pretty much anything with it. It's a close-focusing lens at 150mm, so I could get nice closeups of flowers, lizards or insects. 14mm is equivalent to 28mm full-frame, so I could get some landscapes if I wanted. And 150mm (300mm equivalent) isn't bad for birds, and with 20MP I could crop quite a bit for the little pics I shared.

But then I wanted to get closer to the birds, and the landscapes were pretty monotonous on the walk anyway, so I started carrying the 75-300mm zoom. It's often maligned among micro four-thirds users, but there's sample variation and mine happens to be sharp enough to please me. With the M10 Mk 4, it remained a very lightweight setup, about 1.7 lbs, and I shot with it a lot without experiencing any knots between my shoulders, or spine issues.

Since Monday, I'd been carrying the E-M1 Mk3 with the 75-300mm. That combination weighs about 2.4 lbs. Yesterday I noticed some additional creakiness in my spine, but nothing very alarming. It did seem related to carrying the heavier camera, but I wasn't sure.

So today I decided to try something different. I carried the OM-1 with the 40-150mm/f2.8 Pro, with the MC20 2x teleconverter mounted, which gives me the same reach as the 75-300mm, but a slightly brighter aperture at f5.6 versus f6.7, a half-stop faster. That rig comes in at a whopping 3.5 lbs! (Both the OM-1 and the E-M1 Mk3 have RRS bottom plates mounted.)

The biggest lesson I learned is that that's too heavy for a sling. I could do it in a pinch, but it was uncomfortable by the end of the walk, and my spine has been creaking and popping quite a bit since I got back. Most mornings, I bend over and do a modest inversion, holding my elbows and letting them hang below my head. I can usually feel one or two pops from the lower part of my spine. This morning there were about five, all along my spine! I've got a little muscular discomfort along the left side, just below the shoulder blade. The sling rests on my left shoulder. It's not the same knot that would develop when I carried the camera by my right side with the sling over my left shoulder. The weight vector is more nearly vertical, so there's less of that side-force pushing me out of alignment.

The other thing I learned is that I need to adapt the way I shoot with that combination. Most competent photographers would shoot in shutter priority with a long lens mounted, to minimize the possibility of motion blur in the image.

I've been spoiled by the light weight and excellent image stabilization of Olympus cameras. I normally shoot in aperture priority, with ISO fixed at base and relied on ~4 stops of image stabilization to get a sharp image. My 75-300 is modestly sharper stopped down, but it's pretty sharp in the center wide open. I mentioned I seldom shoot birds in flight, where I would shoot in shutter priority. But for birds just perched on a limb, or standing by the pond in good light, aperture priority usually gets me something IBIS could handle easily, even with a slow lens at long focal lengths.

I found the heavier lens is more challenging, for me, to hold steady. I'd already noticed this with the 100-400mm zoom, but it kind of surprised me with the 40-150. Many people prefer a heavier lens for a steady grip. I suppose there's a sweet-spot for everyone. But it seemed like the image was moving around in the viewfinder a bit more than I'm accustomed to.

A hooded merganser landed in the retention pond just as I was leaving it, so I turned around and tried to get a few shots. It's a dark bird, against a dark water surface and I wasn't paying attention to the shutter speed. I was getting speeds around 1/50s, and those shots weren't sharp at all, a lot of visible motion blur. I suppose the camera was doing okay with the body and lens movement, but the bird was probably bobbing around a bit in the water as well.

They weren't all horrible, though most of them were. I'm going to post one on Flickr that cleaned up fairly well in Topaz Sharpen AI, but it's not something I'd brag about.

In any event, I think I'm going to switch to using shutter priority whenever I have a long lens mounted. If the ISO goes up a couple of stops, no big deal.

The bluebird above seems to persuade me that my 40-150 with the MC20 mounted isn't significantly sharper than my 75-300. I'll have to shoot with it some more, to become more accustomed to how it feels in my hands. I might be able to get something more out of it. But for just taking my morning walk, I think the 75-300 punches above its weight as a "kit" lens, and it's a hell of a lot more comfortable to carry.

Where the 40-150 excels is in on the trail in the woods, where the light is much more challenging. And it's a close-focusing lens as well, so it's great for flowers and fungi and bugs too.

Anyway, I'm glad I'm not carrying full-frame bodies and glass!

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 11:17 Thursday, 9 February 2023

Those that are fortunate enough to still have property above the mean high water line will at least have the legal means to defend their "property rights."

The bad news is, everyone who doesn't have property above the mean high water line will have the means to contest those rights.

Everything will be great in the Sunshine State.

What's the notional life-span of a new apartment complex? I figure they'll be lucky to get 25 years out of this one.

The music's louder in Miami.

It's doubtful that even the ultra-rich will find a way to adapt in Miami. And without a middle-class tax base to fund services, it's also doubtful the ultra-rich will want to live there, given their aversion to paying taxes.

The people who will be trapped are the poor who can't afford to leave, and the newly-poor who counted on the value of a house in Miami to be the major portion of their net worth who will find their houses worth nothing when the game of musical chairs stops.

The wise will get while the gettin's good, and the music hasn't stopped.

And most of them will want to remain in Florida.

The National Weather Service thinks it's 49°F, but it's 44° here. Sun's up, so it should warm up quickly. The heat actually came on this morning.

Mitzi gets home today after a little more than two weeks away helping to look after her granddaughter. It'll be nice to have her back again.

My office is perhaps just a little less of a catastrophe. I opened the other file drawer the other day and had to deal with its contents. I have a couple of those expandable folio organizers on the way. The file drawers didn't actually contain files. Just piles of paper mostly. Some in folders, some in binders, some in plastic bags. That should all be sorted soon.

KEH.COM wrote to say they have my stuff and they'll let me know what they think it's worth soon.

I got rid of another camera on Sunday. My son collects miniatures and mentioned he'd like something better than an iPhone to photograph them in close-up. I said I'd wished he'd mentioned something sooner, or I'd have given him the E-M5 Mk.2. I suppose I could have asked as well. Anyway, I still had 5 OM-D bodies, which is probably too many. So I bundled up the E-M10 Mk 4, the 12-50mm electronic zoom, with a dedicated "macro" feature (close-focusing setting), a couple of primes and an old Joby GorillaPod, the DSLR one, along with a bag. Gave him a circular polarizing filter that only fits the 12-50, in case he gets any glare from the miniatures.

So the shelves are a little less crowded.

I had a shoebox that functioned as something like a junk drawer on the top of the bookcase. I got rid of most of its contents, and now it contains all the myriad USB cables that tend to accumulate, sorted into ziplock bags. It also contains an assortment of wall-warts that go to various radios that normally operate on batteries. Ideally, I'd like to get rid of that too. But that's going to wait for another round of purging.

Since I don't have the E-M10 anymore, I put the 75-300mm zoom on the E-M1 Mk3 and took that for a walk yesterday. It's heavier than the E-M10 by a lot, it also has a Really Right Stuff bottom plate mounted, which I suppose I could remove, but I like the way the camera feels with it on.

I've found that if I put the camera behind my back, resting on the top of my hips, I can do the full 2.5 miles without developing a knot between my shoulder blades. (I use a sling, not a neck strap.) It's little bit more of a reach to bring the camera to hand, but I was never very quick on the draw anyway.

If I was going to be out hiking for a couple of hours or more, I'd use the Cotton Carrier G3; but for 45 minutes to an hour, it seems I can handle the Mk3 with a plastic zoom. It'll be nice because the E-M1 has more features than the E-M10, and I can set up some custom modes. There have been occasions when I'd have liked to try to capture a bird in flight; but it would have been a bit fumbly and time-consuming to configure the E-M10 and the bird would be gone. I can assign a custom mode to a button on the E-M1 and be ready with just a press. I haven't taken advantage of custom modes very much in the past. Mostly just configuring the camera depending on what I'm hoping to shoot at the time.

No walk this morning, though. As soon as I post this, I've got to get ready to go to the dentist.

And with that, I'd better sign off.

I did remember to try again, bumping up the ISO. This one is at 400, and the shutter speed is 1/640s, probably because I also dialed in -1ev exposure compensation. It looks so bright in the viewfinder, even spot-metered. I could have kept it at about -.33ev and been fine.

Exported a TIFF from the RAW (.ORF) in OM Workspace because when I crop a jpeg so closely and then sharpen, I'm picking up some of the jpeg artifacts. Edited it in Photos only. I brightened the TIFF, added a little contrast and definition and some sharpening. Dialed back the highlights to keep the crater rims from looking so bright, but that's pretty close to how they looked in the original. Exported that as 1,000 pixel jpeg and voila.

Larger version at Flickr.

It's Groundhog Day, and I did a thread on Twitter that I was thinking about yesterday. I was trying to figure out how to do it here so it would show up there as a thread. I don't think it can be done.

Anyway, my office is still a catastrophe and there are other things I probably ought to be doing, but I feel compelled to do this. The thought of my own mortality has been with me more and more of late. I don't know why. It doesn't bother me, but it does kind of offer some direction. Maybe that's a good thing.

A little background first. I went through some stuff back in the day, more than twenty years ago now. Much of it was unpleasant, but some of it was amazing, transcendental and, ultimately, transformational. It wasn't easy, and I didn't do it alone and some people suffered along with me. But I'm glad it happened.

So now the disclaimers. First, I'm an authority on nothing, I make all this shit up. You're encouraged to do your own thinking, it's the only thinking that matters.

Second, some of this may sound glib or facile, or it may feel like it's minimizing the pain you or others may feel. That's not intended. I acknowledge the pain, and I'm sorry you're feeling it. I think I'm safe in saying, in the case most of you, as it was with me, it will pass. Won't mean the end of pain, but feelings pass. I should have included that in the Twitter thread.

Herewith, the lessons:

The inner voice is an unreliable narrator. It's a habituated recording that mostly plays on a loop. But it's there all the time, and you would be wise not to trust it.

Introspection is a useful habit to cultivate. Consider it interrogating the inner narrator. Likewise, meditation can lower the volume.

All forms of personal transformation involve loss. That means you will grieve. You will suffer. You will experience the five stages of grief, and they will in large measure parallel the hero's journey described by Joseph Campbell.

I know the five stages of grief are out of favor with many, and they've been misused and misunderstood by some, but in my experience they're a pretty accurate description of how we process loss. Campbell is likewise a problematic figure to some, but I think the hero's journey narrative holds up quite well and can provide a valuable context and framework for understanding one's life.

We all want to be the hero's of our own narratives, do we not?

You see this in pop culture a lot. Examples: Groundhog Day, The Matrix, Joe Vs the Volcano, Cast Away, The Legend of Bagger Vance, the list goes on.

Each is a meditation on death. Chuck Noland didn't survive on that island, if you think he did you missed the point.

I was thinking about Cast Away this morning on my walk, and I had a surprising epiphany, I didn't think there were any left in that movie for me. It'll come up later.

If you find the inner voice telling you "It'll get better when...", it's a lie.

"It" isn't the problem. You are.

There's a typo in the tweet, corrected here. We insert our ego in all the wrong places, and ignore it in all the places where we should be paying attention to it. "It" doesn't get better when I get more shelves for all these cameras. It gets better when I stop feeling like have to have them.

The only power we have is the power to choose. That's the only power anyone has. Our character, the meaning of our lives, is an emergent property of the consequences of our choices.

I did a bunch of posts about the nature of power on the old Groundhog Day blog. Suffice to say, this is really the only one you need to understand.

This next one is the epiphany I had this morning on my walk.

When Chuck Noland said, "I had power over nothing," it wasn't a declaration of despair. It was an exaltation of liberation.

Pay attention.

The "pay attention" part was directed at myself. How did I miss that?! It's huge! Huge!

"Dear God, whose name I do not know, thank you for my life. I forgot... how big!" (That's from Joe Vs. The Volcano. They're basically the same movie.)

All we have are moments to live. Where you choose to allow your consciousness to exist is up to you. The past and the future don't exist. You make your choices in the moment.

Remember that.

No matter where you go, there you are.

Be here now.

You can't own what doesn't belong to you. You can't fix other people. Which leads to perhaps one of the biggest lessons.

Love isn't owning other people. We each own our own shit. Compassion is probably harder anyway. Work on that.

We are not here to "change the world."

The world is here and you are in it to learn to change yourself.

If you're in the world, and you're seeing cops killing black men in the streets and your inner voice is telling you, "They should have complied."

Well, kind of explains why we're in the mess we're in, I think.

As an aside, if the inner voice is telling to become part of a system to "change it from within," it's lying.

Beware, my lobbyist friends.

This is just kind of a converse of the preceding lesson, together with the unreliability of the inner voice. None of us, I think, ever truly escapes all the influences of the systems we're a part of. But we can try to be aware of them, and use that awareness to inform better choices.

Your mileage may vary.

Faith and fear. Love is faith in action, the first derivative of faith for the calculus types. Courage is love in action, the second derivative of faith.

Balance the equations.

The two aspects consciousness presents to the universe. Yin and Yang. Yes and no. Faith and fear. Haraclitus' binding opposites.

Okay, that's probably enough. Nobody can teach you this, you have to learn it on your own. You have to take the step. You must enter the woods. The wasteland is an unpleasant place, but it reveals much.

It's probably not enough, but it's a good start. Anyway, I'd hate to die without passing those along.

We're all in this together, and none of us gets out of here alive.

But I'll close with this:

And here goes...

"May the Lord bless you and keep you:

Happy Groundhog Day.

I'm not much of a religious person. Mitzi and I were in Ireland and we stopped by the church where Yeats is buried. We went into the church and the Priestly Benediction was on a wall or something. I'd heard it, of course, but not often and certainly not the decades since I'd stopped going to church. Mitzi said that it was a Jewish prayer. The priest came out and we had a nice chat and Mitzi recited it in Hebrew.

For some reason, it spoke to me. Still does. When I was so angry about my congressman, John Rutherford, lying to me and his other constituents a few years ago, I closed a blog post with it as kind of an appeal for myself.

Anyway, we're all in this together and none of us is getting out of here alive. I wish you good luck in your journey.

Happy Groundhog Day.

Woke up about 0130 and couldn't fall back to sleep so I figured I'd try to photograph the Falcon 9 launch. I did, but focus was off and it wasn't a very good shot. While I was waiting for the launch at 0258, I did some shots of the moon with the OM-1 and the 100-400mm zoom.

I took some in hand-held high resolution, some with the 2x digital teleconverter and the last batch with the MC2 teleconverter mounted on the camera.

This is probably the best of the bunch, with the MC2, and I'm fairly pleased with it handheld.

I had difficulty getting the HHHR shots. I eventually ended up with three, and after cropping, they weren't as good as this.

The ones with the 2x digital teleconverter were surprisingly good, better than I'm used to on any of the E-M1s, though they're never really bad. They were nearly as good as this, but just visibly softer.

This is the best one, with the MC2, heavily cropped. I took a lot of frames with the teleconverter on it, and this was the only one that didn't exhibit some motion blur. This is at 1/125s at 800mm (effective focal length 1600mm). This shutter speed is roughly four stops slower than you would use at that focal length without image stabilization. Technique matters and I haven't been practicing much lately. I did lean against a pillar on the house but it didn't seem to help much. Looked steady in the viewfinder, but that's not a real indication.

I could have bumped the ISO to 400 and perhaps had more success with no real noise penalty. I'll make a mental note of that (He said, confidently.) and do that next time.

Until then here's a Groundhog Day moon.

(Larger version at Flickr.)

Testing making a post from micro.blog the Mac app. #XZ-1 jpgs SOOC. #CCD.

Unrelated to my efforts at eliminating non-value-added stuff in my little sea cabin here, has been a reconsideration of my photographic workflow. (A word that arouses an irrational feeling of hostility in me, but one for which I can't seem to find a suitable synonym.)

My previous practice was to simply import all new images into Photos and then do everything from there. I'm not an expert at post-processing, I can live without layers for the most part. I had long hoped Photos would eventually incorporate Aperture's brushed-in adjustments, but it seems that's never going to happen.

Until fairly recently, you could use Topaz DeNoise AI from Photos by means of the External Editors extension, an App Store Photos extension seemingly rendered obsolete when Photos acquired the ability to use external editor extensions natively. But Topaz never made their apps register with Photos, so you couldn't select it from the Photos extension manager. External Editors, the app, still allowed you to do so.

Topaz Sharpen AI still works from External Editors, though I don't know if I'm running the latest version. For a while, I could keep DeNoise AI running by using an older version, but even that seems broken now.

Then there's some anxiety about iCloud, which is where my library lives. Not that my images are so precious that if anything were to happen to them it would be some incalculable loss to humanity, it would certainly be an inconvenience to me.

So I've been casting about for some revised process where importing to iCloud is the last step, and all the originals and their edits still exist in local storage.

OM Digital Systems has their own image editor, OM Workspace, inherited from Olympus. It has a number of unique features that offer some advantages when working with images from Olympus cameras. I hadn't taken advantage of those because of my one-and-done Photos approach; but that has changed.

Storage wasn't really an issue with Photos, since I have 2TB in iCloud, and the library lives there. Now I have to park images someplace until I work on them and they can add up pretty quickly.

I hadn't been in the habit of deleting images from the cards because Photos was very prompt in identifying the new, unimported images when I popped a card in. Given my new anxiety about iCloud, I decided to use Image Capture and import all the images I had on every card in every camera into external storage.

I have a 1TB Samsung T5 SSD hanging off the iMac that still had over 200GB free. Mainly it held a consolidated Aperture library converted to Photos that was kind of a backup, though it's hopelessly out of date in that regard. Anyway, I filled up the remaining free space on the T5 pretty quickly.

Not a problem, I bought a 1TB T7 recently for scanning my dad's old photos. Plenty of space still on that. But it wasn't connected to the iMac, I mainly used it with the 13" M1 MBP. So, now to figure out where to plug this guy in...

The 2019 iMac has two USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports. One of those is used by a CalDigit Thunderbolt Dock, a purchase I think I regret making two years ago. It's pretty unreliable, periodically just going offline somehow, or failing to register when an SD card is plugged in.

I mainly got it to put some USB ports and an SD card slot in front or me where I can see them, rather than hidden behind the iMac. It generally works, but I wouldn't buy it again. It's flakey and annoying.

I'd made a mental connection between high speed and USB-C/Thunderbolt ports. The only USB-C port on the dock is in the front, and I don't want even the tiny T7 hanging off the front of my computer. I thought I needed a new dock with more USB-C ports in the back.

Well, the T5 only offers about 400MB/s anyway, and I finally had a little "Aha!" moment before I bought another stupidly expensive Thunderbolt dock. I could use USB-3.1 in a Type A port and get that kind of throughput, and I did have a couple of Type A ports free on the back of the Mac. So I had to dig out a Type A to C cable and move the T5 to that, while the T7 hangs off the Thunderbolt port in the back of the iMac, giving me 800MB/s.

The SD card slot in the front of the CalDigit dock is UHS-II, so everything moves along pretty quickly.

I think I've got my storage issues resolved for the moment. I have BackBlaze online backup, but I need to chat with them about how to go about backing up these drives with hundreds of gigs of data on them, when I have a 1.2TB bandwidth cap from Comcast/Xfinity.

Maybe upload doesn't count?

I've been using OM Workspace, mainly just identifying images I want to keep or share, exporting those and importing them into Photos and then editing them there. I want to figure out an editing process that leaves Photos out of it. Maybe use some combination of Workspace, RAW Power or Affinity Photo 2 and Topaz. We'll see. That's next.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:51 Tuesday, 31 January 2023

I have two blogs I maintain. One, Notes From the Underground, is specifically intended for political content and is decidedly negative and critical in tone.

The marmot and NFTU offer separate RSS feeds. Both feeds are ingested and subsequently posted at my micro.blog, where they also will post to my Mastodon and Twitter accounts.

If critical commentary on, or links about the accelerating growth of fascism in Florida is troubling to you, then I suggest you only subscribe to the marmot. I will only bitch about routine things like the weather or the new and exciting ways an aging body makes life interesting here. Probably bitch about movies and TV shows too.

But the marmot should be relatively free of anger and cynicism. Relatively.

Since NFTU posts to my Twitter and Mastodon accounts, you should probably not follow them. While they're not exclusively for bitching about politics, they are part of the content.

Writing a post bitching about people's bitching posts is just another instance of the fifth fundamental force of the universe: Irony.

Carry on.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:37 Tuesday, 31 January 2023

Not cameras. This time anyway.

No, I've opened the big file drawers of my desk and emptied their contents onto the floor. Ugh!

It's not as easy as it once was to sit on the floor and do things. But it's about the only practical way to accomplish it.

I'm going through old correspondence, cards and letters I've saved for reasons I can't always recall. Stuff my kids would have to go through, or just toss when I die. Figured I should save them the trouble.

The good news is, I found some things I'd forgotten about and that I'm not throwing away. Some wonderful notes from my stepdaughter about me as a father. Letters from a friend who died not long ago. Letters from my parents around the time when my son was born and I was in the Arabian Gulf aboard STEPHEN W GROVES when STARK was hit. A few others.

They won't all return to the drawer anonymously filed. Some of the letters from my late friend I may share with his widow and daughters. The others will be filed with an explanatory note about what they meant to me and why they may wish to read them and decide for themselves what they might mean to them.

In the meantime, my office is a catastrophe.

I have been successful at eliminating a lot of ephemera, and it gives me some satisfaction knowing I've at least relieved them of that responsibility.

With apologies to Robert Frost...

This mess is lonely, dark and deep,

And Piles to go before I sleep.

Fascism has a friendly face and a soft, guitar and piano soundtrack.

The State of Education, in "the free state of Florida."

Local Duval County Public Schools teacher Gregory Sampson explains how the Republican assault on free speech and free thought is different this time. Nobody gets to read a book until the state approves it.

We've entered Fahrenheit 451.

I don't intend for the marmot to just be a link-blog, but I've been a little busy.

As mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I've been acquiring more crap, chiefly Nintendo games for the GameCube, Wii and Wii U. That itch appears to have been scratched for now, but the clutter factor was pegging the needle, so action was required.

I've got another stack of books ready to go to Goodwill. I don't know what they do with books, I mostly bought them on ebay. They're all older titles, most more than 30 years old, dealing with technical things I thought I had time (or interest) to learn about.

But the needle was still pegged, so something besides books had to go. I looked at my camera shelves and thought I should consolidate my cameras from three shelves to one. Well, it turns out that I could only manage two. I may return to this effort soon, but for now two is all I can emotionally manage, because it's certainly not rational.

At first, I was just going to take a big box of cameras to the photography club's next meeting and give them away. But who knows if they would take them, and then there's the issue of answering questions, providing some level of support. Too hard.

So I went on KEH.COM and started entering cameras for a quote. Came back at $1000, which isn't bad for a box of cameras I was going to give away. But it does require packaging them up and finding all the appropriate chargers and so on.

Since these cameras use mostly the same batteries, I went through and checked all the dates of manufacture for the batteries. I kept all the newest batteries for the cameras I still have. Because we're only talking about two types of batteries, most of the chargers were in a box in the garage, so I had to dig that out and all their associated cords.

Now I've got to package them up. The nearest shopping center is anchored by a Publix, but there's a USP Store in the complex. I figured I could get bubble wrap from one of them. (There was a bunch of bubble wrap in the garage, but nowhere near enough.) Well the grocery store didn't carry it, and the UPS Store wanted $10.00 for a role of a few feet of that big-bubble wrap! Yikes! And I wasn't buying styrofoam peanuts (which weren't priced anyway).

So this morning I'm headed over to Walmart because I seem to recall they have a good selection of packing supplies from our move.

This morning's project is to get everything all boxed up and ready to ship. Once KEH gets them, they'll evaluate them and let me know what they'll actually give me. I'm guessing it'll be somewhere around $700. I was conservative in my condition assessment. The high-dollar bodies were my OM-D E-M1 Mk2 and OM-D E-M5 Mk2. They're both in great shape, but who knows? The rest are a large number of PEN cameras.

I have a bunch of lenses I'll offer them as well, but I figured I'd just start with the cameras.

My irrational choices are hanging onto an original E-M5, which is a camera model I'd bought at release and later sold to KEH. A few years later, I felt that I missed it. I liked the images it made, so I bought a used one. (From KEH.) I don't shoot with it much, but I do like it so I couldn't part with it this time.

I loved the E-M1 Mk2, but I have the Mk3 and the E-M1X and the new OM-1, so it was totally redundant. Same with the original E-M1, which I also bought at release. Shot that one so much the rear rubber came off. I bought a replacement from Olympus but never applied it. I'm including it in the package to KEH.

The E-M1X is a one-of-a-kind body and I quite like it. I also like the built-in GPS, compass, manometer and thermometer. It's built like a tank, and I think it kind of represents what might have been Olympus' last no-compromises effort in micro-four thirds.

The OM-1 was probably on the drawing board when JIP acquired Olympus' imaging division and created OM Digital Solutions; and it supposedly is a no-compromises body, and it still bears the Olympus brand, but it's not from Olympus. Again, not strictly rational. I hope OM Digital Solutions succeeds and survives, but I'm not certain it will. And I admired Olympus as an underdog innovator in the camera industry, so I'll kind of treasure the E-M1X as an example of Olympus at its best.

Technically, the E-M1 Mk3 came after the 1X, and included the Starry Sky autofocus feature, not present on the 1X (which was never added as a firmware update to the 1X, alas). But the Mk 3 was designed as a less featured body than the 1X, and doesn't include subject recognition auto-focus. So I think the 1X still represents Olympus designers' peak vision as Olympus. Just my opinion, but I really like the camera.

I fully expect those three bodies will outlast my ability to carry and shoot with them.

Of course I kept the PEN-F and I kept one PEN Light, the E-PL7. I have an E-PL8 that's going to KEH. I bought it new, and it has far fewer shutter activations, I've hardly shot with it. But I really enjoyed the E-PL7 and have taken it on many trips. I like the grip better too. What finally tipped the balance in favor of the 7 over the 8 was the sound of the shutter. I think they should be about the same, but the 7's is just kind of silky smooth while the 8's is more mechanical.

Put a small prime on it, or the 14-42EZ powered zoom, and carry it on my wrist when I'm out and about and not expecting birds. Nice little camera, won't draw much attention. Fun to shoot with.

Of course, now I'm thinking about how I'll spend the money. The E-P7 isn't sold in North America, but is readily obtainable on ebay from Japan. Much or all of the JPEG in-camera customization of the PEN-F is in the P7, and it doesn't seem to suffer from the auto-focus hesitation the PEN-F sometimes exhibits.

If I get rid of a few compact cameras, there should be room on the shelf for another PEN. Probably the last of its kind too.

You know how this story ends.

John P. Weiss with another blog post well worth reading on making meaning.

The Enshittification Lifecycle of Online Platforms. Kottke links and comments. The marmot concurs.

A Palm Beach Post article outlines the criteria for textbook exclusion on the basis of "indoctrination." (Read the piece in Reader View, it's easier.)

As if this sanitized, white-washed version of history isn't indoctrination itself.

Originally posted at Notes From the Underground 07:34 Friday, 27 January 2023

Florida's eponymous power utility announced the surprise retirement of its CEO, Eric Silagy.

This commentary from Florida Times-Union columnist Nate Monroe offers background and context on the announcement.

Much of what Florida Power and Light does to achieve its profit and political goals must, of necessity, take place in the darkness.

After a generation of one-party governance, a pervasive and persistent Republican political monoculture, like a fungus you can't eradicate, Florida is becoming a failed state.