Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2022
Jen Powers and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s Sicut cervus:
I remember hearing this for the first time during a music history lesson at a vocational school I attended when I was 16 and it completely, sweetly crushed me. I’m pretty sure the teacher and me were the only two deeply affected by it—thanks, Mr. McCargish
One of the best things I’ve done recently is make and use a Twitter list that I call “Pleasant Twitter” (and no you may not see who’s on it). In it are book nerds, musicians, friends, NASA employees, etc. Absent are journalists, people who quote-tweet dumb things to dunk on them, and anyone trying to get everyone else riled up about this or that. I can’t look at that Twitter anymore, at least for now.
Monday, Aug. 29, 2022
Added to the to-read list: Anxious People by Fredrik Backman. Via Sara.
Deep down, in memories that we might prefer to suppress even from ourselves, a lot of us know that the difference between us and that man on the bridge is smaller than we might wish.
I’ll never wean myself off of seeing a photo and wondering what its origins are (film/digital, camera/phone), but Glass gets me closer to letting go of that than any other screen-based medium.
Talya Adams: My Leica M3. This is a delightful testimonial. I’m sold! (But I was already.)
BSAG recommends Work Clean by Dan Charnas:
The basic argument Dan Charnas makes is that kitchens are extremely high pressure, busy environments, in which a series of processes have to occur in a specific order and in a timely way in order to get a delicious plate of food in front of a customer. Therefore, there might be things people working in other fields could learn from professional kitchens which would help others faced by a daily deluge of things to get done.
Fixed hover behavior on Flickr embeds
I’m using a tweaked version of Blot’s “Blog” template, and the defaults were great, except for embedded Flickr photos. Since they’re actually hyperlinks to the source photos on Flickr, they were affected by the a:hover CSS selector, which made them briefly flash when I would mouse over them, me being an unrepentant pixel-peeper. I fixed it by changing that selector to:
a:hover:not([data-flickr-embed=”true”]) {
opacity: 0.75
}And now here we are!
Sunday, Aug. 28, 2022
The Obsessive Pleasures of Mechanical-Keyboard Tinkerers | The New Yorker, via Joan.
…because I often eat at my desk, I have issues with what’s known in the hobby as “board chow”—bits of food that disappear into the spaces between the keys—so that if I turn my keyboard upside down and shake it I can sometimes almost re-create an entire everything bagel.
Also from that article, behold:
Brand New Model F Keyboards by Model F Labs
The First Modern Model F Mechanical Keyboard
Bringing back the classic buckling spring keyboard, built to last for decades but out of production since the 1980s, for a short production run ending soon!
Still messing with Capture One and Fujifilm X100T photos. I’m making it up as I go, but it is fun. Shamelessly cropped way in on this one:
Dang, I haven’t used a regular blog in so long that I forgot how much fun it is.
Saturday, Aug. 27, 2022
We’re gonna (re)watch The Thin Man soon. I didn’t realize how ahead of their time the Nick and Nora Charles characters were!
Is there anyone who made full transition from dslr/mirrorless to Leica Q system? Wanna share experience, unexpected, some positive remarks? Would help me make the decision. : r/Leica Via Alex. Why do you do this to us?
I picked up a Q2M and started taking photographs without opening an instruction manual. I felt like the prodigal son returning home.
The new Julia Jacklin track is an earworm:
Friday, Aug. 26, 2022
You know who doesn’t do “quiet quitting”? The two electricians we had in our house a week ago who knocked out four jobs in a row as quickly and cleanly as they could. They broke for lunch and that was the only time they weren’t working.
Ezra Klein re-ran this interview with C. Thi Nguyen, author of Games: Agency as Art and it’s like pulling your head out of The Matrix to see the metrics, scores, and games designed into so many systems around us. The reason it’s so rare to find nuanced discussion on Twitter is that it’s designed out of it. I don’t know if this episode is what prompted me to step away from looking at Twitter so much, but it helped. It’s probably why I started this blog at all: just to have a place 1) to spout off, 2) that has regular HTML pages and hyperlinks (unlike my dear wiki), and 3) that has no mechanism for instant feedback or ways for me to tell who saw any of it.
I keep thinking about how much better off the world would be if we all had our own standalone blogs and didn’t have like-driven social media platforms. The answer is “a lot”. We would be a lot better off.
Mac Power Users #654: Data Storage in 2022 reminded me that plain spinning hard drives are a good, cheap, spacious alternative to SSDs when you need a backup-only drive.