I’m almost certainly using Zotero wrong. Instead of for citations and research, I’m using Zotero as a bookmarking tool and read-later service, and it’s working really well. Is no one else doing this? I’ve used many tools meant for saving links for later, from del.icio.us to Pinboard to Instapaper to Pocket to Raindrop. All of them are fine. Some focus on social bookmarking, some on archiving, some are meant as “read later” services. And all of them are prettier than Zotero. And yet… ...

I bought my first Olympus Stylus Epic in 2004 and fell in love. I’ve owned one ever since. That original copy was replaced in 2012 for $10, in the box, from a guy on Craigslist. Those days are gone. These little fellas have grown quite a following and fetch upwards of $300 on eBay. I’m not going to be paying that much once this one dies. Mine has been collecting dust in a drawer for a year or two, which is a shame, so took it out today and loaded it with a roll of HP5+. No sense trying to preserve it, right? ...

It’s been a while since I bought a new fountain pen. This is about the Pilot Custom 823. Literally every review I’ve read says the same things: “It’s not a looker, but what a great writer!” I can only resist that kind of consensus for so long, so I bought one. I have the “smoke” color with a fine nib. I ordered it from JetPens for $270. I’d say this puts it well into significant purchase territory, so I was very excited when it arrived. I’ve been journaling quite a lot recently and was looking forward to spending time with what reviewers call one of the best every day writers. ...

The more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered; and the easier repaired when disordered Thomas Paine I would be wise to keep this in mind.

It’s good being able to celebrate again. I brought the Q2 Monochrom with me to the party. Shot about 20 images. This is the only one I kept.

I see office vs remote is very much on the menu (thanks media for using your platform to ruin our day ????) <p> The key should be *choice* </p> <p> Some people prefer to work at home<br />Some people prefer to work at an office </p> <p> It's up to managers to put on their adult pants and facilitate both. </p> <p> &mdash; Andy Bell (@piccalilli_) <a href="https://twitter.com/piccalilli_/status/1402971819431370753?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 10, 2021</a> </p> <p> My feelings about remote work are evolving, and I&#8217;m working through them, but social media makes it difficult because social media almost forces us to pick a side and run hard with it. Nuance is left at the curb, along with rational discussions. </p> <p> The above tweet demonstrates the kind of thing I see from people who&#8217;ve never had an employee who <em>wanted</em> to work remotely, but was incapable of being productive that way. That is a situation that exists. What should be done? My first reaction is termination. Problem solved!. How&#8217;s that for adult pants? But seriously, I don&#8217;t have a good answer. I don&#8217;t think the answer is automatically, &#8220;just give every employee the choice.&#8221; </p> <p> I could have chosen any number of tweets along these lines as example, but Bell is someone I enjoy following and this tweet in particular triggered me with the &#8220;adult pants&#8221; phrase. Managers, even good ones, sometimes struggle making difficult decisions (which I assume he means by &#8220;putting on adult pants&#8221;). So? Who doesn&#8217;t? </p> <p> I&#8217;ve been managing a handful of people for 25 years. In most cases, I&#8217;m entirely OK with them working remotely. Basically, I&#8217;m a fan of remote work, and prefer it for all the reasons made by its proponents. </p> <p> However, I don&#8217;t agree that remote work is automatically the best option for every person and for every company. Maybe you work for one of those companies. You might even be one of those people for whom remote work is counterproductive (and you probably don&#8217;t even know it.) </p> <p> So at least maybe don&#8217;t assume that every example of &#8220;I&#8217;d like you in the office&#8221; is a case of a bad manager just wanting to watch over the shoulder of a &#8220;body in a seat.&#8221; It <em>could</em> be that, but it also might not be. </p> <p> Nuance, is all I&#8217;m saying. </p> <p> <!--kg-card-end: html--> </p>

I’ve owned a lot of cameras and lenses. More than average, I’d say. I’ve of course sold more than I currently own. With few exceptions, I regret selling any of them. Remember how the Nikon F6 printed exposure data between frames? Self-portrait with horse head. Nikon F6. Or how nice it was having aperture-priority auto-exposure on the Leica M7? Lobster Buoys. Mount Desert, Maine. ...

I felt guilty that the wonderful Leica APO-Summicron-L 75mm was sitting unused for a while, so I went into the backyard with Alice and snapped a few. ...

Riccardo Mori: But this review was underwhelming and, as I commented on Twitter, with unusual fanboyish tones I’ve never really detected in his past product reviews. I notice that when someone agrees with a review, it’s “thoughtful and detailed.” When one disagrees, however, it’s “a brief from Apple’s marketing department”.

I’ve never loved editing photos in Adobe’s Lightroom (Classic). It does the job fine, and it has all the tools one might need, but it’s no fun. I prefer editing with Capture One Pro. As much as I enjoy the editing process in Capture One, it otherwise feels like working on an island. C1 has no way to sync photos, the plugin/extension options are very limited, and while it works with other editors, it doesn’t do it as seamlessly as Lightroom. And so on. ...

Keith James, Macfilos: Perhaps because life in the third decade of the twenty-first century, for those of us in technologically developed countries, seems to involve almost total submersion in an ocean of digital devices, I suspect I am not the only one who enjoys occasionally being cast away on an island of mechanical wonder, where devices involve moving parts more than moving electrons. Mmmm, mechanical memories.

I spent the weekend helping a friend assemble and place a lift for his speedboat. It was a job for four people, but we only had two. This meant some extra planning and heavy lifting. Eventually, we succeeded. It was a fun challenge.

Cory Doctorow The availability of a deep, digital, searchable, published and public archive of my thoughts turns habits that would otherwise be time-wasters — or even harmful — into something valuable. What a great piece by Doctorow. It inspired my previous post and made me want to write here more (in addition to pouring stuff into the wiki).

Things have been stagnating around here. I haven’t felt like doing any capital-B Blogging. Rather, I’ve been pouring stuff into rudimentarylathe.wiki. It’s just easier to have the daily notes tiddler open and type as I go. No need to come up with titles or worry about whether I have enough words put together to justify a new post. Writing blog posts is a Whole Thing™. This blog started out as a place for me to share photos and their supporting processes and gear. Later, I combined it with my other blog(s) in an effort to consolidate my “presence”. Instead of writing more, which is what I expected to happen, I write almost never. ...

But just because we always come back to the barn with “results” doesn’t mean we got anything. When we get nothing, we have to have the discipline to know we got nothing, and not try to force it to be “something” Mike Johnston So much of the photography I see on the internet is made of snapshots that don’t work. Most of the stuff I post fails in the same way. One thing I’m doing to improve my self-evaluation is to immediately delete photos that don’t show me something first thing. This is riskly, but I’m betting that 99% of the time I’m right. This way I don’t spend hours trying to make something from nothing. ...

I take all my notes in TiddlyWiki now, and publish most of them to rudimentarylathe.wiki. For the past few years, I’ve published my wiki using TiddlyWiki. I write daily, publicly sharable notes there. Private stuff goes elsewhere…or did, until yesterday. It’s the “elsewhere” part that drove me nuts. I have a private Roam database in which I would track things I don’t want to share. Or maybe I should write it in Org mode. Or Obsidian, or Craft, or or or. The difficult part for me has been that I want to take a note about, say, a new camera purchase. There are two components to it, the information about the camera itself, and information about the purchase. The former is public, the latter is private. This means I create one note in TiddlyWiki and one in, let’s say, Roam. There are dozens of examples like this, and it’s crazy-making. I thought I could manage this using links or copy/paste but it sucks trying to do that. I could also make everything public or private. Neither of these are feasible. ...

I wonder what I would choose to do with my time if I didn’t share every detail of my life? Let’s find out.

Software-wise, this incredibly powerful iPad is as capable as a 2014 iPad Air 2 (the oldest iPad model that can run iPadOS 14). There is still, in my opinion, a substantial software design gap preventing iPads from being as flexible as they are powerful. Software-wise, iPadOS still lacks flow. Don’t wave Shortcuts in my face as a way of objecting. Shortcuts are a crutch. A good one, no doubt, but a crutch nonetheless. Software automation can do great things for an operating system, but if an operating system comes to depend on it to become usable, then maybe you have to rethink a thing or two. ...

It’s 2021; structured data and ~transclusion~ are still the sidewalk around the quad, while screenshots are the diagonal desire path, worn to bare dirt https://twitter.com/robinsloan/status/1388325221514432514 It’s embarrassing how true this is. His tweet was part of a short thread about Multiverse, which is something else entirely, and it’s adorable.

I’m exhausted. I think it’s because I haven’t been working in more than a month and my brain has had too much free time to “figure stuff out.” (Yes, I know how it sounds to complain about exhaustion while not having a job!) As an experiment, I’m going to live the month of May in “Easy Mode”. This means I’m going to solve problems with quick, obvious, easy solutions. I’m going to use the easy-to-use tools. And I’m going to make various processes as easy as possible. ...