robotmay

I debated doing this recently but ultimately spent a lot of money on an LTO-6 tape drive instead, just due to the cost efficiency over time for larger amounts of data. I justified it to myself as I needed to either expand my NAS or clear stuff off it, and the drive was the same price as buying two new HDDs to expand the NAS thanks to the obscene price inflation at the moment. As I’d likely need to further expand my NAS next year (I’m shooting a lot of photo and video) I think this works out a much more cost effective way of storing this data long term when I likely don’t need to access it much.

Ooh great I'll check it out. I have a couple of them actually, although I couldn't seem to get one working through the complex series of adapters I had, so I'm gonna set up a new machine with an actual FireWire card and reassess it then. I do at least have one that works in VueScan so I can at least provide some feedback (it's a modded 4000 ED that does whole rolls).

About a month ago I think? It didn't have enough options to run the Coolscan 4000 ED I have lying about, at least not reliably, and I don't think it had any batch options (might be wrong about that). I don't really mind going through VueScan first but I'll take a look again soon and see if that area has been improved.

I've played with this lately. I'd pair it with something like VueScan as the scanner setup is a bit lacking still, but overall it is really impressive. The only difficulty I found is coming into the terminology it uses fresh - it's quite different to most other photo software in that regard.

I found out that my dad managed to ram a full enlarger setup into a small bathroom before I was born. I found this out after telling him I'd managed to ram a full enlarger setup into a small bathroom. I may have to rotate on the spot in order to use the different trays and it may basically be a sauna, but I think I'm still having fun?

Urgh yeah I hate scanning as well. I finally got back to printing with an enlarger and told an elderly customer of mine at my camera stall. He just replied with "Ah, so you're finally doing _real_ photography".

I have a really basic approach to photography, I think: if the photography itself is challenging and stimulating, such as birds in flight, then I want the camera to be as capable as possible and just get out of my way. If the photography is "simple", I want the camera to be as insane and complex as humanly possible.

Have you tried a Foveon sensor camera for film scanning? I was wondering about it recently and how it would perform - the easily removable IR filter and different way the sensor works could be really interesting.

Mostly unrelated but fun thing I discovered earlier this year with Apple's vision - if you have text both correctly oriented and upside down in the same image, it likes to interpret the upside down text as a Cyrillic alphabet. I was trying to use it to read the text on camera lenses and it came up with all sorts of bizarre interpretations. If anyone's interested, I got around it by splitting the text at a point and unrolling it into a straight line before running OCR on it.

I came across DCC (Digital Compact Cassettes) this month: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Compact_Cassette. A digital cassette tape format with the players being backwards compatible with standard audio cassettes. Not massively surprising that I didn't remember them from the 90s, as they were about for roughly 4 years and lost to MiniDisc, which itself wasn't particularly successful. So many of the inventions of that era are a fascinating combination of mechanics and electronics.

Got any recommendations for good German ones? The market in the UK has been improving a lot but I do still think a lot of them taste like socks, I'd be interested in trying some more high-quality German options if I can find them over here (Aldi/Lidl probably my best bet).

The French beer scene has improved over the last 10 years but yeah, it's still quite limited in terms of selection. When I was first visiting there really wasn't much at all outside of Belgian beers, though I've since had a few very good beers from Paris and other parts of the north of the country. Usually only finding them in larger markets, though, as you say.

The UK's beer scene is wildly different to the rest of Europe, and not something that we've managed to export very well. Hell, we could even export cask ale (rare outside of the UK) to Paris without it spoiling these days, yet nobody really does. Whether it's due to taste or the awkwardness of casks I don't know, but I do think it would meet with success in Paris if someone did it properly. Not all beer has to be refrigerated and fizzy. We have so many varieties that you just don't get with fizzy keg beer, and much of it notably weaker in alcohol content. Some examples:

Mild at ~2.5% (made from reusing the materials used to make Bitter), Session at ~3.5%, Bitter at ~4%, Best Bitter at ~5% etc. IPAs are the hot thing even over here now but we get notably more variations in those than most places too.

I'd be curious to know from anyone in Germany if they have equivalents to these sorts of categories, as what we get from Germany over here tends to all be about the same strength.

Due to ADHD meds I do now have to drink less, and the best non-alcoholic beer I've found so far is Guinness 0%. I'm not a massive Guinness drinker, it's alright but there are other stouts I prefer, but the 0% version is surprisingly close to "real" Guinness and has none of those sock-y flavours that most non-alcoholic beer has.

Yeah this has been the hard part for me with both transitioning into a photography business and trying to run a YouTube channel, albeit a different variation on the issue compared to the art world. Both (most) people and algorithms want you to fit neatly into a specific little box, like "high contrast black & white street photographer"; that's the dream for them. They can't deal with or understand somebody who then also takes colour photos of birds, for example. YouTube in particular hates this and has no idea how to show your video to people if it breaks from the niche it thinks your previous work fits into. Many creators find that they get pigeon-holed into the one thing that brings them success and burn out when their attempts to break out of it are met with confusion.

It's much, much harder to build a brand that is you, rather than what people want you to be, but if you can build a brand that is the whole of your personality then you can make a success of anything you publish as people are following you for you, not just your work. As someone with a complete lack of focus this is likely the only way I can make it work for me, but it's still very much a work in progress.

Mallard (and the rest of the A4 class, though that blue is my favourite livery on any of them) will always be the best for me, but I do love steam locomotives. It's utterly beautiful whilst also being extremely good at its role, and that's the definition of design I believe in.

So much of modern design, particularly vehicles, is missing _something_. Maybe it's the lack of hand-rolled panels and everything being slightly too perfect, or maybe we've just lost a bit of that pizazz over the past 100 years.

Honestly I'll take pretty much anything over Matrix. I've tried to get it set up but it just feels unfocused. Too many server variations; none of which are at parity with the complex default stack, and too many clients; none of which I particularly liked. To me Matrix is kinda like Wayland in that early design decisions have made it awkward for how people want to use it in the modern day (in Wayland's example, the absolute shitshow of getting push-to-talk to work in apps running within it).

I'll have to try out Armada to see how it compares, as I'm always suspicious of the claims of decentralised software as they often end up having some unique downsides.

How odd! I did some research into why people have been finding it looks odd and it appears to be tied to Mac doing something called font dilation to slightly fatten up thin fonts when displayed as light text on dark backgrounds, whereas Linux/Windows don't tend to have such a feature enabled by default. Shows how long it's been since I made any attempt at good typography, I've never heard of this before!

I've bumped the brightness of the text on Linux/Windows to hopefully make it a bit easier to read/overpower the anti-aliasing thinning it out. I'll have to go fish out an old ThinkPad to test it properly as I ditched most of my machines outside of my Mac when I quit programming full time (I don't really like any OS but Mac is still the easiest for photo/video I find).

I've never liked configuring nginx I must admit, but I would be curious to see how it would handle this sorta workload. If anyone's experienced in configuring it or running it with lots of slow streamed responses I'd be curious to know your thoughts.

Are you on Linux perchance? I've had a couple of people mention this in the last day. On Mac the font is pretty close to white, but I was sent a screenshot of it in Firefox on Linux and it looked rubbish, and notably greyer for some reason.

Just as an apology in advance for people reading the article on Linux: er, sorry. I've had a few people point out that Firefox on Linux renders the font particularly shitly (it somehow seems to get both the aliasing and colour wrong, wat). I'll fix it soon, but in the meantime using reader mode might save your eyes.

Yep I find Elixir very enjoyable with agents at the moment, I've been developing a lot in it. It helps that I already liked the language and the platform, and now I just have the ability to build out my ideas faster.

I think they're good at it for a variety of reasons, but it likely helps having a smaller and newer community than many languages, meaning less out of date guff clogging up the LLM sources.

Yeah I repair old cameras these days. The amount of cameras I've fixed by just poking at random stuff until it unjams is surprisingly high. Even more so the number I've "fixed" by just replacing the batteries.

There's the option of trying something like iocaine (https://iocaine.madhouse-project.org/) behind your current proxy too, which I mentioned in my previous article. It's not quite the same as it doesn't chuck the bots into tarpit requests, which is obviously the most fun bit, but because of that it probably won't kill Traefik like my system did.

Must admit I'd not even looked about. I don't know of any off the top of my head but I'd be very curious if anyone else knows of any. It wouldn't surprise me if there's a number of closed-source ones in use at scale - it seems to be well-suited to it, in my opinion.

It's always a pleasure to read more about his thoughts of his own books. Of his works I still enjoy The Hobbit the most, but there's so much to read into all of it.

Ooh do drop me any odd things you're looking for - I never know what's going to turn up, and I do keep a lookout for anything people ask me about. I have debated trying some sort of online stock listing but I think that might just end in chaos due to the lack of space I have for organised storage and other people moving my stuff around.

That reminds me that I need to do a new update post, whoops. I've had an absolute buttload of Pentax K mount gear the past couple of months, which is quite annoying as I don't have that many customers that shoot it. I'll have to big up the Pentax cameras a bit more haha.

Do swing by if you're ever in town when the market's open! I've always got lots of fun cheap stuff kicking about, and a bin of broken shit if you need parts :D

Haha there's certain camera models that are very prone to that. Some of the Pentacon M42 lenses are worth a look if you want an unholy amount of blades - I have a 135mm f/2.8 sat around that has like 15 blades or something daft.

Coincidentally I think I have a non-working 35GT in my market stall (https://camerasetc.wales), so if you want a project drop me an email as I'll send it to you for the cost of postage. I have too much in my repair backlog and those things are fiddly little bastards at the best of times :D

Ooh yeah I love those weird shapes nearly wide open. I found a lens that had a torx bit shaped aperture the other day, I'll have to fish that out and see what it looks like in an image. Lots of compact cameras have a diamond/square-ish hole, notably the Minox 35 range from what I can recall.

Edit: just saw your update with the photos of the mechanism. Wow that's impressive miniaturisation. The hexagonal shape looks surprisingly good. I wonder what's causing the odd effects in the OP. I have noticed in the past that iPhone cameras produce square specular highlights through tree foliage, so I wonder if it's an extension of that oddity.

This is usually due to the blade shape and quantity I believe. The aperture is most likely to be less circular on the widest apertures after fully open unless you have quite a lot of aperture blades, as the curve to make a rounder aperture is usually applied more towards the tip of the blade, and you're only seeing the base of the blades at wider apertures. That varies a lot by aperture design, however - if you have the more banana-shaped blades where the retaining pin and pivot pin are at opposite ends (like in a Yashica TLR) then I believe they can maintain a more consistent curve along the length. Those also suck massively to reassemble, but that's a different story.

I haven't seen a diagram of how the aperture in this new iPhone is designed yet. There's a lot of different ways to do it, with lots of odd shape possibilities.

Ooh that's fun bokeh, it's like the doughnut bokeh from a mirror lens. Combined with the various computational tweaks made to the images that's a pretty bizarre effect, looks like micro motion blur at a distance and properly weird when zoomed in.

Yep I'm also in favour of legally requiring the default feed on any "social" app to be a chronological feed from people you follow. It's both better for society longer-term and a better experience for the users, just not the shareholders.

Japanese manga is kinda interesting in that regard too - they're noticeably more diminutive than Western publications of the same manga, usually, and often on quite nice quality paper. They're usually paperbacks with dust jackets too, which you don't see too often over here in the UK. I have both Japanese and English copies of a few of the same manga and I do much prefer the feel of the Japanese ones, although as someone who bought them to learn the language (and failed, again) they can sometimes be quite challenging in terms of font size.