I’m not an iPad person, even though I’ve used one since the day they were released. I just don’t understand how anyone thinks they can be anywhere near as productive on an iPad as on a “real” computer. Stockholm Syndrome or something, I always figured, but smarter people than I are doing it, so who’m I to judge?

I’m drawn to the idea of being forced to do only thing at a time. iOS does that. I’d probably do more than one thing at once if I could, but “multi-tasking” on iOS remains an unusable mystery, so I’m better off leaving it alone. Anyway, you get the idea.

Basically, I’d like a break from tinkering with my system(s) on macOS (hi Emacs!), so I’m going to spend some time living on this 12.9″ (aka “Thirteen-inch”?) iPad with Magic Keyboard.

Challenges:

I’ll be forced to use the baby version of Lightroom. How will I handle exports, sharing, resizing, etc? And I hate that I don’t have control over where files go and what they’re named, but here we are.

Where does one take notes if there’s no Emacs and Org mode? Notes app? Drafts? Craft? Ulysses? Do I really want to venture into that rabbit hole again?

How do I get things from one place to another without easy access to multiple clipboards and my Mac’s desktop? How do I save things for later without Zotero? How do I do nearly anything without Alfred?

And so on.

But, iOS is calmer than macOS, and right now I need a little calm.

UPDATE July 5, 2021: The iPad is a wonderful peripheral

I purchased the Leica Q2 Monochrom (new) from Camera West in February 2021. It’s in like new condition and has fewer than 600 shutter actuations. Price is $5,100 net to me. That’s a savings of $1,000 off the price of a new one.

I adore my Leica Q2 Monochrom, so why am I selling it?

The Q2M is for sale because I miss the M10-P and can’t have both. I bough the Q because sometimes I just want autofocus, close-focus, macro, and the convenience of an EVF. I found that the SL2-S ticks all those boxes, so the Q2M is really just an extravagant extra. As wonderful as it is, I don’t need it. My loss is your gain.

The camera comes with original box, strap, battery, charger, cap, etc. If you want to know more about it, email me.

Update Jan 2022: I bought another Q2M.

Riccardo Mori has a few comments on the beta of Safari 15 showed up. Here’s one:

In other words, what a browser needs is horizontal breathing room, instead we have Apple doing things backwards, sacrificing horizontal space to give us what, 28 more vertical pixels?

I can’t begin to describe how deeply I dislike the new tab handling in Safari 15.

Curio to help manage the project. I opened the Curio project and within thirty seconds of just looking at the workspace I had a handle on the project and easily found an answer to the questions I’d been asked.

Whenever I revisit something that I’d created in TheBrain or a mind map or Curio or Tinderbox, I find the spatial layout of the information to be instantly useful.

And yet I use Org mode in Emacs for nearly everything. You can probably tell that I’m having another one of my moments.

I love plain text. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that I love the idea of plain text. Nearly all the arguments for using plain text are good arguments, but that doesn’t make plain text any more useful for me.

Plain text’s usefulness depends on what it’s for. As an example, a simple log of things that happen throughout the day makes sense as plain text. It’s almost always going to be accessed via search, and text is made for searching. Journaling can be done in plain text, although it’s made better by including images.

The way text is presented can make all the difference. An example is the display of backlinks in Roam and Logseq. Those tools use a nicely-formatted display, including context. Compare it to something like org-roam, which, as powerful as it is, can’t compete visually. It’s hard to parse backlinks in org-roam just by looking at them. And that’s a problem system wide. A wall of text is less useful than a purposefully-arranged and formatted visual display of that same information.

Anyway, I launched Curio and Tinderbox and TheBrain and now I’m in big trouble.

Last year I bought a license for Iceberg which is a lightweight Gutenberg replacement that feels more “normal”. I stopped using it because there was a kind of uncanny valley effect, but after several frustrating days wrestling Gutenberg, I’m trying Iceberg again. Here’s what this post looks like in Iceberg

This post is an excuse to to use it. Sorry for the noise.

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 installed Zotero while tinkering with an Org mode note-taking workflow. Soon after, I installed the "Save to Zotero" Safari extension and started using that instead of my usual "Save to Pinboard" bookmarklet, just for something different. I was surprised to find that this has become my default.

For free, I get smart metadata parsing and tagging along with old-school hierarchical organization. I get full-page offline snapshots and sync. I get PDF annotation and storage. Oh, and I get citation management I can use if I ever want to sound smarter than I am.

It's only been a month or two, but it feels like I have a good start on building a nicely-organized reference library as a byproduct of bookmarking things to read later.

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?

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.

I’d like to tell you that it was love at first write, but that wasn’t the case. The pen looks fine, if a little boring. I didn’t get it for its looks, so I don’t mind. The pen feels very good in hand, too. This is important. It’s not too heavy or unbalanced, either with the cap posted or not.

It’s a vacuum filler, which is apparently unusual but I’m not sure why, as it’s super easy to fill. It holds a lot of ink, too. This does make it more difficult to switch inks, but I don’t switch often so this isn’t a problem.

So what’s not to love, then? Well, I didn’t love how it wrote. I bought the pen to write with and not look at, so this was a problem. It felt somewhat scratchy and skipped more often than I’m used to. At first I thought of it simply as “feedback” but it was worse than just feedback. It felt dry. I’m left-handed, so any scratchiness in a pen is amplified. This was disappointing.

I thought maybe I had received a bum copy, but I’m loathe to ship things back and wait so I’d try a few things before giving up.

First, I ran it with wetter ink. I typically use one of the quick-drying Nooder inks like Bernanke Blue, but thought something wetter might fare better. I ordered Pilot iroshizuku kon-pecki ink and it was an immediate improvement. Also, what a great ink!

Then, I spent some time writing in a Midori notebook. Maybe I got an off copy of the Leuchtturm notebook I have been using, but writing in the Midori made a huge improvement.

So the problem wasn’t with the pen, necessarily. It was just a combination of the fine nib, dry ink, mediocre paper, and being left-handed.

Things were much better, but I still wasn’t thrilled with how it wrote. I wondered if maybe the nib was simply too fine. Japanese pen makers’ idea of “fine” is different than that of the German pen makers. Here’s a comparison between the fine nib on the Pilot and that on the Pelikan M400.

I had to find out, so I ordered another Custom 823, but with a medium nib. After a day with the new pen, I’ve concluded that it’s perfect. The combination of better paper, wetter ink, and broader nib is wonderful. This is my new favorite crew.

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.

I brought the Q2 Monochrom with me to the party. Shot about 20 images. This is the only one I kept.

My feelings about remote work are evolving, and I’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.

The above tweet demonstrates the kind of thing I see from people who’ve never had an employee who wanted 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’s that for adult pants? But seriously, I don’t have a good answer. I don’t think the answer is automatically, “just give every employee the choice.”

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 “adult pants” phrase. Managers, even good ones, sometimes struggle making difficult decisions (which I assume he means by “putting on adult pants”). So? Who doesn’t?

I’ve been managing a handful of people for 25 years. In most cases, I’m entirely OK with them working remotely. Basically, I’m a fan of remote work, and prefer it for all the reasons made by its proponents.

However, I don’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’t even know it.)

So at least maybe don’t assume that every example of “I’d like you in the office” is a case of a bad manager just wanting to watch over the shoulder of a “body in a seat.” It could be that, but it also might not be.

Nuance, is all I’m saying.

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?

Or how nice it was having aperture-priority auto-exposure on the Leica M7?

Or the Mamiya 6 with its giant square negatives in an easy-to-shoot package?

I’ve been thinking about this lately while pondering all of the money I have tied up in various cameras and how infrequently I use some of them. My head tells me to sell everything I’m not using often, but my heart won’t let me. I always, always regret selling camera gear, so I think I’ll hang onto all of it for now. At least until circumstances dictate that I cannot.

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.

Lightroom’s ecosystem is hard to beat. It works with nearly everything. I can sync with the mobile Lightroom CC library. It works with every plugin one could possibly want (most notably, Jeffrey Friedl’s and Negative Lab Pro.) There’s no end to the presets and styles available. If I want to do something with a photo, Lightroom is more likely to be able to handle it.

Lightroom’s cataloging is more capable than Capture One’s. Or at least it feels easier to use. I’d prefer not having to rely on a specific vendor’s tool for managing my lifetime of photos, but it’s better than only having them scattered in folders. Believe me, I’ve tried it that way numerous times. It’s liberating, but only for a moment, then it quickly becomes frustrating.

And of course I don’t like having to pay a monthly subscription to Adobe. That said, for $20 a month I get Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, Lightroom CC on all my devices, and 1TB of cloud storage. It’s a pretty good deal.

While I’m still looking for excuses to go back to Capture One, I am, reluctantly, back in Lightroom Classic for the majority of my photo management. For now.

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).

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.

I love my wiki, but I’ve always been a blogger, and the wiki isn’t a blog no matter how much I treat it like one. Rather than letting it just sit here and idle while I figure out what’s wrong with me, I may experiment with different types of posts and a higher frequency. Maybe I’ll summarize the daily wiki content as a way to clean it up and make it available via RSS, since the wiki doesn’t have a feed. Or maybe I’ll just post links with tiny blurbs about them, like the good old days. Or maybe I’ll post a random photo from my archives every day.

Or, maybe I’ll let it languish, but I hope that doesn’t happen.

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.