The other day, while bored, I shuffled around the house and burned through a roll of film, just for something to do. I took photos of random stuff that I use or see every day. The photos were boring af but, for some reason, because they're film I think they're kind of cool.

But are they? No, they're not. Film photography is fun, and the paraphernalia is awesome, but a boring photo is still a boring photo. Here's an egregious example. HP5 from the Nikon F100 on the left. Nikon Zf with an HP5 film recipe on the right.

I didn't spend time trying to get them to match. I just wanted to demonstrate how I sometimes trick myself into thinking film photos are somehow better, simply by virtue of them being film.

Honestly, I always prefer the photos on film, but that doesn't make them good.

The moral of the story here is that I should try making better photos, regardless of the medium.

You are all a bunch of sick freaks.:

The worst part is how you enable each other. "Hey guys, just finished my basic home automation setup", and then you post a system diagram that looks like the blueprint for a nuclear reactor. Fourteen Docker containers just to manage a suite of 'internet of things connected shitware.

I enjoyed this :).

Heh, Dave noticed that I bought a new camera and now he's thinking about new cameras.

A friend of mine told me once that whenever I mentioned wanting something three times, he knew that I'd end up buying it. It's true. I've been circling the Zf for months. Another friend recently bought a Z8 and nice lenses (that I could borrow), and the FM2n has been growing on my. Nikon has been on my mind, and the only one I find interesting is the Zf.

My GAS usually flares up when I'm feeling bored or frustrated with photography. It happens a lot. This time it started with wanting to replace the SL2 with an M10-P. The M10-P still sells for around $5,000, so I was looking for something interesting, but less expensive. The Nikon fit the bill.

I hope Dave finds his version of it.

In a desperate attempt to spark some enthusiasm for photography, I bought a Nikon Zf. I know, this is not the best approach, but it's what I did so here we are. I'm jotting down a few quick thoughts and first impressions. (This isn't a review. Just notes to myself about the camera).

The Zf^[1] is meant to replace my Leica SL2. The SL2 is a terrific camera, but it's so big and heavy that I never take it anywhere. With the Zf being smaller and lighter, I figured it would make more sense as an "everyday carry" camera.

Except the Zf isn't really that small or light. It's about 200g lighter than the SL2. Put another way, it's a roll of nickels lighter. Or a Ricoh GRIII 😄. That may seem like a lot, but it isn't a night-and-day difference. Here are the two cameras, side-by-side.

As you can see, it's definitely smaller, but "smaller than huge" is still not small.

The Nikon is mostly metal, with cool brass knobs. I love real dials, which is why I chose this camera.

Except with the Zf the dials can lie. After a dozen YouTube videos and the Nikon manual, I can't for the life of me understand how Auto-ISO works. What I do know is some of the time, the number set on the ISO dial isn't the ISO the camera is going to use. As far as I can tell, sometimes it means Maximum ISO and sometimes it means Minimum ISO and sometimes it means the actual ISO. I kind of hate that. The easy solution is to leave it on "C" and just use the control dials like any other digital camera. But why buy the Zf, then? People who claim to understand Nikon's system say that it's better. I'm not yet one of those people. Plus, having both a PASM switch and manual dials is just weird.

The Zf looks great, especially from the front. There's a direct line between it and the early-80s FM2n. Here they are next to each other.

Nikon released only two lenses designed to match the Zf. I bought the 40mm f/2.0. Here it is on the camera:

See how nice it looks? Notice anything else? I do. I notice that it doesn't have an aperture ring. This might be the dumbest design choice they could have made. I mean, the plastic lens already feels like it came out of a Cracker Jack box, but the fact that it looks the part, but doesn't act the part is very disappointing.

Let's see, what else don't I like. The battery door feels cheap and flimsy. People rave about the metal construction and build quality of the Zf, but pick up the Leica and you'll quickly realize that they're not even in the same category, build-wise. The Nikon feels fine, but I've held Leicas, so comparisons are inevitable. The Nikon loses by a mile.

Whining aside, I'm starting to like the Zf. It focuses so fast! Even in low light. Noise has been a non-issue so far at higher ISOs. It beats the pants off the Leica in focusing and low-light performance.

I've been down with a cold since I got it, but I can't wait to try it with my toddler grandson, who never sits still.

The files look nice so far. 24MP is more than enough for me.

I can't wait to try some manual focus lenses on it. With the right adapter, it will provide focus confirmation and subject detection even with manual lenses. That's pretty cool.

Two days after getting the Zf, I thought I'd be returning it, but after just two more days, I'm now thinking I'll give it a bit longer to see if the things that bugged me on day one will turn out to be non-issues. I want to like the camera!

Once I'm feeling better and have had a chance to get used to everything, I'll report back.

Linus Torvalds (Mastodon):

I'm a card-carrying atheist, I think a woman's right to choose is very important, I think that "well regulated militia" means that guns should be carefully licensed and not just randomly given to any moron with a pulse, and I couldn't care less if you decided to dress up in the "wrong" clothes or decided you'd rather live your life without feeling tied to whatever plumbing you were born with. And dammit, if that all makes me "woke", then I think anybody who uses that word as a pejorative is a f*cking disgrace to the human race.

Linus Torvalds

I've decided to exclude "Journal" posts from the RSS feed. Thing is, I like how it feels to write stuff here knowing that it's not "going anywhere". If something shows up that is particularly brilliant, I'll create a separate post. Since most things are decidedly not particularly brilliant, I'll feel better keeping it to myself (and the handful of loonies people who actually come and visit the website).

If there's an outcry, I'll put things back. Or maybe set up a separate feed just for the journal entries. I dunno.

UPDATE: OK, I did get a couple of emails asking for journal posts in the RSS feed. As a compromise, I've added a feed for just the journal posts: https://baty.net/journal/index.xml. It's a bit less convenient this way, but seems fair.

I wish I'd stop writing about the tools I use to write about the tools I use.

I was so bored today that I grabbed the first camera I saw with a partially used roll (the Nikon F100) and walked around the house snapping anything at all.

I got big into TiddlyWiki around 2018, when I created my Rudimentary Lathe wiki. For a few years there, I put stuff into it daily. I sometimes drift away to something New/Shiny, but I always end up back in TiddlyWiki.

Off the top of my head, here are a few things I like about TiddlyWiki:

• My entire wiki is just a single HTML file. That's it. Open it in any browser and you have the whole thing^[1].
• Tiddlers (aka Notes) can be copied between wikis by simple drag and drop.
• Hosting a read-only version of the wiki is easy as copying the file to a web server somewhere.
• I don't get fancy, but I could. TiddlyWiki is a kind of Quine, giving it nearly Emacs-level customization options.
• Making new notes is so easy. I don't need to worry about files or names or none of that. Hit the button, type, and save.
• Using TiddlyWiki is different than using anything else. I like that about it. Feels like zagging.
• It's like the old web where everything one does with it is visible. It's easy to adopt someone else's clever ideas.

I'm sure there are more, but that's a good start.

There aren't many downsides. The room's elephant is that, since it's just an HTML file, it can be difficult to get things set up so you can save changes easily. I use a WebDAV server. Before that, I used the Timimi plugin.

Every time I visit my wiki, it reveals something interesting from my past. I don't know how or why I would continue to ignore that.

Now that I've solved my Notmuch sync problems, I'm more inclined to move ahead with converting other content into emails and indexing them using Notmuch.

I thought I'd start with my blog posts.

In 2023 I learned how to convert an RSS feed into local emails using rss2email. I've reconfigured that and it's working OK, but I still have a bunch of old blog posts I'd like to add to my notmuch database.

I asked ChatGPT for help creating a script that would take a folder full of Markdown files and convert them to local emails. ChatGPT did a surprisingly good job. A couple small tweaks and I had something working.

The script uses the date: and title: properties from the YAML front matter as the email date and subject.

I ran the script on my Hugo posts/content folder from baty.net. Just look at all this juicy email in Notmuch:

Some of the older posts must've had wonky dates, because the script choked on those and just used today's date instead. I'm not bothering to solve that problem right now.

Much like with the RSS imports, I don't want the imported files to show up in my inbox, so these lines in Notmuch's post-new hook does the trick. One for RSS and one for the converted posts:

notmuch tag +feed -inbox -- '(to:jack+rss@baty.net)'
notmuch tag +mine -inbox -- '(from:jack+blog@baty.net)'

This way they still show as unread, just not in my inbox. Note that none of these are ever actually synced to my Fastmail account. Everything remains local.

I put the scripts on Github, but they're not really meant for general consumption. Besides, who but me wants this, anyway?

jackbaty/markdown2maildir

There's probably 1,000 other ways to approach this, but I had fun, and it's one more step toward having everything stored as emails, indexed with notmuch, and viewed in Emacs.

I hesitate to use org-goto in my Org mode files because I find the UI for it to be confusing. In a recent post, Streamlining Navigation in Org-Mode using an adapted org-goto, James Dyer makes some nifty improvements. The TL;DR is this:

(setq org-goto-interface 'outline-path-completionp)
(setq org-outline-path-complete-in-steps nil)

Now, the target list is a simple completion window showing the entire outline.