I later switched to using color negative film, and only used Kodachrome occasionally. I don’t remember why. Probably because “normal” film was cheaper and prints were 2 for 1 or something.

Kodak stopped making Kodachrome in 2009 and Dwayne’s Photo, the only place that still processed it, accepted their last roll at the end of 2010. I wanted to get at a few rolls in before it was too late.

I sent them my final roll for processing near the end of 2010, just under the wire. Here’s the final frame.

I miss that film.

I avoid any apps that involve “streaks” because breaking a streak makes me feel bad about myself. Although sometimes I break them on purpose because YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME!

I’ve spent much of the morning deleting stuff. It’s possible I’ve been too aggressive, but it feels great. One of these days maybe I’ll have the guts to delete all of it.

There is no “productivity system” in the world that will make me less lazy.

I don’t know which camera to use. I don’t know which computer to use. I don’t know which fountain pen to use. I don’t know which writing app to use. I don’t know which blog to use. And so on. Yes, yes, I’m very lucky and privileged to have this problem. Still, it’s a problem I have. One to which the answer is probably, “All of them”. Which breeds a different set of problems, but I can’t complain.

It’s too late to be pessimistic

–Yann Arthus-Bertrand (and others)

Using LLMs and agents to do stuff for me is amazing and exhilarating, but it’s not fun and it feels dirty.

The Next Big Thing in photography is landing February 26, 2026.

Hey Flickr, I love ya, but unless whatever you’re planning actually is going to be the Next Big Thing in photography you’re shooting yourselves in the foot with all the breathless hype.

Wouldn’t it be funny if I just punted and moved my blog to Pika?

I am constitutionally unable to decide anything and then stick with that decision. For example, I moved my blog to baty.blog because Pure Blog is so cool. Then yesterday I went back to Hugo because I missed editing posts in Emacs. Now today I’m using the Tinderbox version of my daily blog because I want it static, not Kirby-generated. Sheesh. I’ve typed this paragraph in 3 places.

Continued reading “Manifesto for World Revolution”. It’s wildly unrealistic but still gets one fired up.

• STATUS: Driving people around to appointments. Thinking about operating systems.
• TODO: I intend to do nothing on my list, today. Harumph!
• READING: Still working through “Dungeon Crawler Carl”

Am I back? Not sure yet, but I think I’m a static-blog kind of fella. Pure Blog is awesome, and Kev’s done a great job with it. I like it a lot. And yet, there’s this nagging feeling about it running “out there” and needing PHP, etc. Pure Blog is super simple to host, but not as simple or portable as a static site. A CMS with a nice, simple UI is pretty great, but I’ve spent years honing my combination of Hugo and Emacs. Blogging is a “solved” problem, right? :) Anyway, I’m going to try this again for a minute. I’ve migrated the “regular” posts from there to here. I don’t think I’ll bother with the journal entries.t

The reef tank is a struggle. I’m always fighting some unwanted critter or algae or chemicals or something. I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble. I do like watching the coral wave around in the current. The urchin is super cool, too.

Doctorow, Six Years of Pluralistic

Purity culture is such an obvious trap, an artifact of the neoliberal ideology that insists that the solution to all our problems is to shop very carefully, thus reducing all politics to personal consumption choices

Ouch, but kinda.

When living on macOS, I moved between Lightroom, Lightroom Classic, Capture One, and Bridge/Photoshop for editing and managing photos. That was bad enough, but now I’ve thrown Linux into the mix and all hell has broken loose.

None of my usual tooling is available for Linux, so I dove into Darktable, which seems to be the top contender for dealing with RAW files. (RawTheraPee doesn’t attract me for some reason). Darktable is the oddest thing. It’s super powerful and flexible, but the UI and workflow are inscrutable. I could learn to live with it if I had to.

So I have added digiKam and Darktable to the set of options. Not to mention a whole new OS. That’s not confusing at all. 🙄

I typically keep the current month’s photos on a local SSD. I’ve done that for January and February. Sometimes this was done on the Linux box, sometimes on the Mac. You see where this leads.

I have lost raw files. I have photos with multiple associated .xmp files because everything seems to name them differently. I have edits done in several apps. I’ve lost edits. Where do I edit metadata? What is the canonical location of my photos? Why does the rating sometimes come along and sometimes doesn’t? What should I sync? What goes on the NAS and what stays local? I’ve even lost an entire sleeve of negatives. How’s that even possible? It feels related.

My photography hobby is the main thing keeping me from moving full-time to Linux. It would be so nice to live on one OS, using one set of apps. I just don’t know if I can commit to Darktable.

Anyway, I have work to do. This is unsustainable.

I love seeing new approaches to things, so I bought Terry Godier’s new RSS app, Current, which is designed in a way meant to avoid the sense of obligation around unread articles. Current does some clever semi-algorithmic manipulation of feeds based on frequency, importance, type, etc. It’s quite clever and it looks nice. I have a few early thoughts about it.

Using Current, though, I still find myself scrolling through my feeds and hitting “Mark as Read” on everything I see but don’t want to read, same as I do in other readers.

Thing is, I like the unread count in RSS readers like NetNewsWire. These aren’t obligations, they’re opportunities. I’m sad when the count gets to zero. Unread articles are just that. Things on my list that I haven’t gotten to yet. There’s no rush, and if I haven’t read all of them, so be it. Sometimes, if I get “behind”, I just glance at the latest articles and if nothing grabs me, I “Mark all as read” and move on. I might feel a slight twinge of FOMO, but it’s fine. It’s possible that Current just isn’t for me.

Maybe I just need to give it a few more days, to see if I actually prefer the “flow” Current promises. It seems like a thoughtful, well-designed app that is trying to improve the experience of keeping up with our feeds. I’m all for that.

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