robotmay

Yeah I'm really excited to try this lens - sounds like it'll be optically similar to some film-era 1.4 lenses and they have lots of character. I have a Minolta 50mm f/1.4 I use all the time because it just has a look that I can't get from modern perfect glass.

This is it for me. I don't want phone technology or operating systems anywhere near my cameras - I need them to be reliable and predictable.

The Fp L was great for landscapes because it was so ridiculously tiny for a 61MP camera that you could just chuck it in a waist bag instead of a backpack.

For the lower-resolution versions, they're very popular with video people from my understanding. The Fp was in particular popular with directors for test shots and framing, and they've leaned into that use-case with this new one I believe.

Sigma are far and away my favourite photographic company right now, for a variety of reasons, but top of the list has to be that they're doing something different. What they're doing might not be for you but at least they're not just making another camera the same shape as every DSLR/mirrorless camera going back 25 years.

From a personal perspective, they were the only company that was interested in loaning me gear to review from right at the start of me making YouTube videos. Many other companies continue to refuse to talk with me even when I've found serious bugs.

The frustrating part is that they're currently not releasing full-frame lenses on Nikon's Z mount, likely due to a licensing issue with Nikon. And that's frustrating because for my needs, there's no "pro" level camera on L mount that I can use, and Sony hobble third party lens manufacturers' maximum burst speeds (also I don't like Sony's AF but that's another story). I ended up selling a lot of my L mount gear and consolidating on Nikon for professional work.

But I did buy myself a Sigma Bf. The Fp series is excellent but the Bf is beautiful. It's such a fundamentally weird camera that it reminds me of camera design back in the 60s-90s where companies went absolutely nuts with camera ideas. Is it my most practical camera? Very much not. Is it the camera I use to take pictures of my cat? Absolutely.

I'm always excited to see what Sigma comes out with. Their optics and manufacturing have moved on dramatically since Yamaki-san took over in 2012, and they're constantly bringing out really interesting new optics. I'm very excited to try out that new 50mm f/1.4 CL they announced, personally.

I highly recommend watching videos on the ProcessX YouTube channel that shows their factory and processes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx14Juo4AQo.

This uses a partially-stacked bayer sensor, same as that in the Nikon Z6III and Panasonic S1 II (most likely, or very close to it).

Yeah some people focus too much on the people rocking about with Swarovski spotting scopes. I’ve met teenagers down my local reserve who were spending their school lunch break watching the birds. Bird watching is essentially free, providing that we don’t manage to destroy what little is left of our wildlife in this country and limit it only to reserves. Serviceable binoculars can be had on the cheap too. It’s a very accessible hobby.

I sell vintage cameras in an antiques centre, but only 3 days a week. I’d like to sell online too but I have no ability to put aside stock for that, and similarly I only have access to the stock a few days a week, which makes shipping awkward. Pretty much every item is unique and needs listing separately, which is a pain. This is probably doable on some existing POS but it’s almost certainly much more expensive than just building my own (I think Shopify starts around £40 per month for what I’d need, then still require a lot of customisation). A major aspect of my business is buying stuff in the stall and tracking its eventual sale price, which tends to be a pain on other systems when it’s all one-off unique items.

I also do repairs and so I recently added a job management system into the POS, which has been really useful so far. Next step is to sort out the online store/eBay integration aspect!

I've hit a weird point myself. I'm not overly interested in building software for other people now. What I'm able to do is build all my stupid hobby project ideas for my very specific use cases and not have to worry about making them profitable in order to justify the time spent on them. I just built my own point of sale system because nothing on the market meets my needs, and my needs are extremely niche.

On a tangent: this is a really good website. I understood what you do and how you do it by reading down one page. There's a lot of projects/companies I immediately tune out from because I can't actually figure out what they do amongst all the buzzwords, animations, and excess scrolling in every dimension.

I slopcoded my own forum software in Elixir/Phoenix recently, starting from my memories of phpBB and SMF forums I used to run. I’m using it as a forum for my vintage camera stall as I have a lot of people who enjoy hanging out at the stall, and it turns out they enjoy hanging out on a retro forum too.

I do want to add some stupid forum features I remember from the 2000s. An RPG mod is definitely on my mind.

Ooh that’s fun! I’ll have to add some stats like this to mine too. Anthropic keeping connections alive for 2 hours is wild. I don’t think they fall into my trap as I believe they respect robots.txt, which is at least an improvement on Meta.

I should probably put together some actual stats at some point, but from what I see in the live logs you'd be shocked - some of them will happily sit there for over 5 minutes being drip-fed packets!

Looking at you, Meta.

I do still get some requests going up to 15 minutes which is quite ridiculous, though those don't seem to be super common (maybe they're learning).

I think the shortest timeouts I've seen are between 2-5 seconds, but they're surprisingly infrequent and actually that's still a massive inconvenience for them. I did at one point just drop any request I couldn't keep open for more than 5 seconds but it actually caused more server load. I'm essentially inverting the server load by making slow requests more efficient, which is counter to everything I ever learnt about performance for web serving :D

I think the average I see is probably somewhere between 15-30 seconds. I'm guessing many crawlers don't want to go too low because they'll be trying to fetch large files like images, or perhaps they know they'll be slowing servers down and want to ensure they get the response. Most likely, the majority of crawler authors aren't expecting some arsehole to exploit this and they've just left the setting as the default.

I've been posting about this recently but I continue to be bad at either timing my submissions or titling them. I struggle with YouTube thumbnails too so I think it might be me. But anyway:

I experienced the same thing after submitting articles from my small photography website. I did debate using some of the off-the-shelf solutions like Cloudflare, Anubis, or iocaine, but I ended up building my own L7 proxy that utterly fucks the bots up: https://robertmay.photography/journal/bwbach-my-guardian-gob.... I will make it generally available at some point once I get it optimised how I'd like, but currently I'm able to trap about 3000 concurrent crawlers in my tarpit of slow requests on two small Hetzner VMs. And that 3k is really just the limits of the networks hitting my servers right now, I think it'll go significantly higher than that.

I haven't really seen anyone else combat them this way, possibly because many of the standard proxies and servers are set up for fast requests, not serving them as slowly as possible. Deliberately serving page loads for as long as the requester will accept packets turns out to be a really funny way to stop the botnets - when I just rejected the requests they in turn hammered my server even harder. By tanking the request volume with a ridiculous BEAM-based proxy you can reduce their request speed to a crawl and I'm fairly certain a couple of them have blacklisted my server now.

Yeah maybe I've just become used to how much I can use Flash 3.7/3.8 but on the less expensive Ultra plan I basically never exhaust my quota even when working over multiple projects, but this was pretty much immediate. I did ask it to audit a project but still, I do that in Flash regularly and it's not especially costly.

Honestly not even that is enough, I exhausted the limit within 5 minutes of trying to use it. I'll stick to Flash I think.

I have no problem with Gemini Flash 3.8 for coding, though I only use Elixir which is one of the better languages for LLMs. Where does it fall short elsewhere?

Seconded. Anthropic feel the need to limit how abusive you can be to Claude because god, I want to throttle that snotty little shit. Google don't have to do that with Gemini because it just isn't as irritating. It does what I ask and doesn't try to second-guess my requests, or do "the quick fix".

Ooh I’d never heard of those. They look great!

I think a lot of the popular classics are often because they were unique, not necessarily beautiful, and often the most popular tend to be some of the most ubiquitous models that were designed for the everyman, e.g. the 2CV, VW Beetle, VW Camper etc. I suspect they become stylish by association with the periods in which they were popular and the people who owned them, rather than because their own styling is great.

I always thought the Citroen vans of the era were very cool, I'd love to see a modern van design based on the H, for example.

Well the suspension is less of an issue these days due to technical advances. Ground clearance is more of an issue than the suspension travel. This looks more like it's targeted towards city use than the countryside use of the original, especially as it looks to have a notably shorter wheelbase. There's a usecase for small city cars that look cute though.

If they actually deliver something for their target price of around £13k then I'd be very impressed - that would truly be embracing the 2CV heritage in making something attainable for the people.

And agreed, I quite like this design. It doesn't feel as bulky as many modern "retro" cars, like the Mini variants.

But he could spend months adding a feature just for someone to spend 10 minutes running it through an LLM and shoving it up for free on GitHub.

I read this article yesterday and it’s the latest in a long line of really enjoyable real world stories from The Guardian lately. In a world where it seems harder and harder to get people to engage with long-form content rather than just clickbait, it’s nice to see some organisations still publishing good quality articles.

This is my approach now. I'm done with programming professionally, but all those ridiculous ideas for my own use I've had over the years? I've built most of them in the past year. I have no time or patience for doing it by hand any more. I used to love programming but I have other things I want to do now and I'm pretty burnt out on putting effort into my code after doing it for my job for nearly two decades.

Yeah I'm tending to shoot around 1TB of data per wedding I cover now that video is in fashion for it. Thankfully it's exactly the sorta thing tape is suitable for - once I'm done I can just archive a couple of weddings off per tape. It's generally very unlikely I get requests for that data later (once they've ordered prints) so doesn't make much sense keeping it on spinning disks in my NAS.

Oh very interesting! This isn't (currently) too much of a concern for me as I live in Wales, and though it's ridiculously humid here there's not much risk of it hitting those temperatures inside my house the vast majority of the year. I shoot a lot of photographic film as well so I'm used to storing these sorts of media, though I probably won't be shoving the tapes in the fridge beside the film. Currently they sit in my windowless office.

This is fun! Something slightly more broad, capturing golden & blue hour on either side of the day, would be really handy for me as a photographer. The number of times I've just been sat inside whilst an amazing sunset happens outside, and vice-versa where I've gone out to photograph some mountains and the sun goes behind the clouds just as the light starts, are numerous.

The biggest problem I found with weather forecasting is that most people want to know whether it's cloudy/raining overhead. I want to know if it's cloudy and raining somewhere near the horizon :D

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.