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These are all taken with the Leica M3 on HP5+ and were processed in HC-110 Dilution B. I’m pretty sure I used the Elmarit-M 90mm f2.8 for the entire roll.

A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide inside the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rambling past. It makes reality come true.

Leica M6, HP5+. HC-110 (dilution B). Scanned on V750 with Silverfast. Processed with Negative Lab Pro

My dad (right) stands in front of bar while in the Navy. (France 1963)

I’m trying to stick with the Adobe suite for processing, editing, and managing photos.

Yeah, I’d definitely get the black-paint version. The only problem is that kit is around $17,000 as pictured. Still, just look at it.

He’s a good one.

As an antidote for my usual spiral of sitting at a giant screen full of a dozen windows, staring, clicking, staring, clicking, etc. I thought I’d try living on my iPad for a while. 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 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.

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

Yesterday I was asked something about a project I’d worked on two years ago. At that time I’d used 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.

Unless I’m doing some crazy non-standard layout, I’m not a fan of using WordPress’ Gutenberg editor. Mostly I just want to type some simple text and add a link or two. 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

I’m almost certainly using Zotero wrong.

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.

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

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 ????)

I’ve owned a lot of cameras and lenses.

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’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.

Keith James, Macfilos:

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.

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™.

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”

I take all my notes in TiddlyWiki now, and publish most of them to rudimentarylathe.wiki.

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

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

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.

I’ve been using the reMarkable 2 tablet for almost three months now. I’m often asked what I think of it. The short answer is this:

Here’s my star rating system for everything: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Loved it! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ It was good ⭐️⭐️⭐️ It was OK ⭐️⭐️ I didn’t like it ⭐️ Hated it

…skip any definitive conclusions, as we know you might change those at any time. ????

TL;DR: I’m sticking with HEY for my email, but there’s a surprise twist: I’m also sticking with Fastmail. Hear me out.

(Updated with notes about the custom domain discount) Other than having a couple of nits to pick, I really like using HEY! for my email.

A New Guild System | THR Blog | Blogs | The Hedgehog Review:

Dante Stella, The Machine Planet:

I got my first Kindle in 2007. I had given up on Amazon letting me do the Most Obvious Thing, which is to use the current book’s cover on the lock screen.

Writers spend way too much time and money seeking out their “grail” pen and paper combo — the tools that will make their work so much “smoother.” It’s a pattern we’ve seen repeated in all creative pursuits.

I haven’t been using film much this year, but once in a while it’s fun to get out and shoot a roll. I took the M6 out yesterday and finally finished the roll of HP5+ that I’d loaded into it a month ago. Here are a few from the roll. Most of these were shot while out walking around the neighborhood.

Everything in my life has become overwrought, overthought, overdone, and needs to be unwound. Today, I’m dealing with this blog at copingmechanism.com. A few weeks ago I decided to go back to using WordPress (again), and dammit I’m going to try sticking with it this time. But, I don’t like any WordPress themes. There are thousands of them, and I can never find one that works for me. Oh, I find a lot of them that make me say, “Ooh, cool!” and install immediately and say, “There, that’s nice!”

It feels like the entire world (or at least my corner of) is consumed by the “how” of note-taking. Tools, workflows, processes, backlinks, and on and on. Obsidian? Roam? Paper? I read it all. It’s fun and interesting and there’s no end of things to distract myself with. A distraction is all it is. None if it really matters, though, and yet we endlessly split hairs and wring our hands and gaze at our navels over irrelevant minutiae. It’s exhausting. I’m not one of those people who wear “I never change my system” as a badge of honor. I can’t seem to stop. I’m too curious for that. FOMO and all.

Dante Stella pokes accurate fun at videos about still photography.

When I started using Roam, I found the way it handled backlinks to be a revelation. Other software does backlinks, but Roam’s implementation made it feel new. Suddenly, backlinks felt necessary.

My first annual subscription to Basecamp’s HEY email service is about to expire, meaning it’s time to decide whether I will be renewing.

Using a single 32-inch monitor with my M1 Mac Mini has caused me to re-think how I manage apps and windows. After a few iterations, I’ve settled on the following layout. This layout includes Finder, iTerm2, Safari, and Emacs. Safari takes up the majority of the center. Finder and iTerm are split equally on the left, and Emacs is on the right, divided into two windows (or “panes” as most other software calls them). All my most-used apps are visible at the same time and I’m not constantly moving windows around.

None of the old books on my Kindle mean anything to me. They’re just there. I never see them, I never re-read them. I never use them for anything. Seems like a waste.

I haven’t seen my parents in a long time, so we got together on Easter. Everyone is fully vaccinated (ok, technically I’ve only had my first shot) and it was wonderful being “with” people again.

I uploaded this photo of my daughter to Flickr on July 5, 2004. It was taken shortly after I got my first Leica rangefinder, (an M6 TTL), and I was practicing timing and focus. It’s still a favorite.

I am once again having thoughts about only maintaining One True Blog™.

I’ve had this Minolta Autocord for so long I don’t remember where I got it. Or when, exactly.

A week ago I decided to cancel Doom Emacs and go back to building Emacs from Scratch, and once again I was reminded what a terrible idea that is.

Is this something I can do? Sometimes I want a better environment for writing and posting to my blog. Ghost’s post editor is fine, but not “nice”. For writing with Markdown, iA Writer‘s editor is hard to beat. I thought I’d see if there’s a way to post from iA Writer to Ghost.

Of all the ways I’ve logged books, I’m thinking that plain text remains the best. I’ve been adding books to a text (Markdown) file for while now and it’s not pretty, but it works. And it will always work. I publish a copy at www.baty.net/books books.baty.net

There’s a scene in Lexicon by Max Barry in which Emily is sitting in a waiting room watching a single fish swimming in the upper half of a tank shaped like a large hourglass. The water drips slowly into the bottom half. Emily assumes that the whole mechanism will automatically pivot at some point and then the fish will be swimming in the bottom half. And so on, indefinitely. She figures it’s some sort of art piece. Looking more closely, she realizes that there is no mechanism for allowing the tank to pivot and that someone must just come in and replace the dead fish each day.

I was skeptical about this tablet’s ability to replace paper. I needn’t have been. It’s a terrific paper notebook replacement.

I was supposed to sell the Leica SL once the SL2-S arrived. I almost did it, too. It’s technically still listed for sale in a couple of places, but I’m not ready to get rid of it yet. I mean just look at it.

It only takes a few seconds to write something down in a notebook, and look what it gets you. It gets you an immutable, permanent record of something in a cool, personally unique format. It produces a physical artifact that will last for generations.

I’ve played on and off with twtxt a little and keep the feed out here: http://tilde.club/~jbaty/twtxt.txt. Here’s a snippet of my old twtxt.txt file…

The Pi-hole was great, but NextDNS makes more sense for me.

Trying some new things this week, app-wise.

Should I host my own stuff or not?

I finally did it. I broke this blog apart and archived 20 years of history.

I watched the following video by Ramsey Spencer yesterday and I’ve been fuming about it ever since: What a load of elitist bullshit. I realize he’s just trying to make a name for himself so people “click Like and Subscribe, guys,” but grrrrrr!

My last house had a proper darkroom. It was a little janky, but there was a big sink, room for three enlargers, a wet side, a dry side, etc. When I moved into my new house, I originally planned to turn an extra room in the basement into a shiny new darkroom. That didn’t happen, so I’ve been using the bathroom instead. It works fine.

It’s not that I made a promise or anything, but I had no intention of shooting film in 2021. I put away my scanning rig, stored the chemicals, and placed the cameras on a shelf.

You’re lookin’ at him. I’ve been asking myself, “Who[sic] should I let manage my photos?” as a way to talk myself into letting Lightroom and the Adobe ecosystem take over the nitty gritty of file and library management. In the end, I couldn’t go through with it, so I remain in charge.

I have for many years kept my photos properly named and in a dated folder hierarchy on my hard drive: /2020/12-December 2020/2020-12-02-Alice.dng

I recently bought a used,

When I bought a used Leica SL(601) recently instead of the newer SL2 , it was mostly because I didn’t want to spend $6,000 on a camera that I wasn’t sure I’d love. But it was also partly because I really don’t need a 47-megapixel sensor. Who’s got the time and space to manage 80MB per image photos?

mi·​nu·​tia (noun) – a minute or minor detail—usually used in plural

I fell in love with TiddlyWiki almost exactly 2 years ago. I wrote in it almost daily until late August, 2020, when I moved full-time into a public Roam database.

I joined Flickr in 2004 and have been posting photos there, on and off, ever since. For years, Flickr was the place to share photos and discuss photography. Then Yahoo neglected and thus helped ruin it. And of course Instagram eventually finished the job.

To make this simple self-portrait, I didn’t spend an hour setting up the Wista, loading sheets of film, processing with half-expired C-41 chemistry, crossing my fingers, drying, scanning, spotting, inverting, storing, and on and on. Instead, I set a digital camera on a tripod and triggered the shutter with my iPhone. The whole thing from idea to upload took less than 10 minutes.

When I first saw the Leica SL, I was amazed by its brutalist audacity. Coming from the M series, this was not what I pictured when thinking “Leica”.

Film photography is a lot of work. Not so much the actual shooting part, that’s work no matter what the medium, but lately I find the rest of the process (developing, scanning, storing) to be more trouble than it’s worth. Thing is, I enjoy spending time in the darkroom, processing film. It’s meditative; the perfect hobby for an introvert. I have various wonderful old cameras, which are often reason enough to shoot film. But is it worth the trouble?

I’ve prided myself on my ability to shoot a Leica M3 or Hasselblad 500C/M with no meter, no auto-focus, and no auto-exposure. Who needs it? Real photographers certainly don’t! Plus, being fully mechanical means that the cameras require no batteries and should be repairable forever. It’s a badge of honor. Except, and maybe I’m getting lazy in my old age, I’ve grown to like letting the camera do at least some of the work. In fact, I prefer it. They’ve gotten pretty good at it and if I’m honest they do things better than me most of the time.

Here are my remaining 35mm SLR film cameras. Clockwise from front-left, they are. Canon AE-1 Program. An AE-Program was my first real camera. I received one from my parents as a graduation gift. Today, though, it’s my least favorite. It just doesn’t feel good to use.

Gutenberg is powerful and useful for enabling those of us who don’t feel like working too hard to create decent-looking, complex, media-rich layouts. But, most of my posts are just an image with a paragraph or three of text. I don’t need a fancy, complex, block-based editor for creating those.

I have lots of film stored in my fridge. Some of it is very old. I’m determined to shoot it rather than throw it out, so I ran a roll of Ektar 25 through my Nikon F100.

I threw a singe strobe off to one side. It’s a little hot. It’s no picnic learning how to light things while using large format film cameras. The feedback loop is slooooow. Shot with: Wista 45DX | Rodenstock Sironar-N 150mm | Ilford HP5+ 400 @ 320

I hate scanning film negatives. Especially color film negatives.

Where should I keep my notes, TheBrain or Roam? I decided earlier this year to use Roam, and was confident in that decision until TheBrain version 12 added backlinks.

GQ told me that Now Is a Great Time to Go Back to an Old iPod and I believed them, so I bought one.

Sometimes I get bored with the way I’m running things around here and look to mix things up a bit. It’s happened again. This time, it meant bringing back the Coping Mechanism blog. You’re soaking in it.

This tweet by Mike Lee Williams started something:

I discovered Roam in December, 2019 and thought, “Wow! This is exactly the thing I’ve been looking for” even though it was buggy, less than pretty, and still too new to count on. And yet, the more I dug in, the more I liked it. I remember telling people that “this thing pays dividends on your notes!” I’d finally found the ultimate tool for my Personal Knowledge Management System. (I don’t call it a “Zettelkasten” for two reasons. First, the way I use Roam isn’t really as a Zettelkasten. Second, I can’t help but think that Zettelkasten is kind of a show-off word so it puts me off.)

As you probably know, I struggle with where to keep my notes. For a few months now it’s been a battle between Org-roam and Roam. Org-roam has been in the lead, mostly due to Roam being unstable and (soon to be) expensive. Also, my infatuation with Org mode is on again.

Org-roam continues to impress. I use org-roam’s “Daily Notes” feature every day as a frictionless place to put notes that may or may not need to be moved or otherwise dealt with later. It’s the Org-roam version of a similar feature in Roam.

It’s been a challenging week for me using Roam. For the past several days my Roam database simply wouldn’t load. I’d see the spinning Astrolabe forever. Deleting the site data in my browser and restarting would help for a time, but then it would happen again.

I just learned that Org-roam supports aliases. This means that I can reference pages in my Org-roam database in more than one way. 

A quick rundown the chaos in my head around Roam and Emacs and how it has affected my day so far.