Iris does some really nice things for unifying catalogs, but IMO this key feature is nearly worth the price of admission all by itself.

I know I’m ostentatiously late to this understanding, but boy, Tailscale is pretty cool. I had been tinkering with making Navidrome available via Synology’s reverse proxy, kept failing to get it working, and finally just installed the Tailscale package. I logged in on the Synology, logged in on my phone, and — just like that — can reach my server from the grocery store parking lot on my iPhone. This living in the future is pretty good, sometimes.

Doing some cable accounting in the network cubbyhole, I found that the previous homeowner here had run a cat5 cable with an ethernet plug at one end to a phone socket at the other end — my office! One RJ45 jack later, I have wired network at my desk.

Today at Crucial Tracks: Monster Ballads, by Josh Ritter

I have a live version of this song from Josh’s 2020 Hell Yeah! album that’s so deeply searching and beautiful, with Sam Kassirer performing this delicate piano part that just lifts me up.

Today at Crucial Tracks: Sabotage, by Beastie Boys

What’s your go-to song for getting ready in the morning?

This is more of a gotta go, gotta go now kind of song, but it’s definitely right for some kind of mornings.

I got into a Destiny 2 raid with friends for the first time in a while, last night. We pretty much breezed through Garden of Salvation until the final encounter, which took quite a while of trial and error, as we are all a little rusty with it (some of me rustier than others). It’s great to hang out for a few hours together, and finishing the raid (eventually) was a really nice bonus.

Today at Crucial Tracks: Across the Wire, by Calexico

Share a song that sounds like your favorite weather.

What a provocative prompt. I think one of my favorite weathers is a clear sky in pre-dawn light, a cool morning before a warming day.

Alternative photo apps haven’t really stuck for me, but I am really appreciating a lot of what No Fusion does, so far. The interface feels pretty good, allowing for fairly natural feeling adjustments, and it has a nice set of film-like modes. It also claims to have a unique processing pipeline that improves detail and color. Does it? I don’t know; I’m not making direct comparisons, yet, but I do like what I’m getting from it. It feels deliberate enough and produces good enough output that it scratches a little of the same itch as using a bigger camera like my Fuji.

I’m impressed by Iris, an elegant and clever Mac app that does a bunch of delightful things.

I have an array of photos sources: Two Photos libraries from different eras of Mac and pre-Mac computers; more than a decade of flat file storage that make up my Lightroom libraries; and a big file tree of imported mobile phone photos from prior to when I began syncing everything through iCloud Photos.

Until using Iris, these have been separate catalogs, technically unifiable by dumping absolutely everything into a single Photos library, but I really don’t want to do that. Iris gives me this nimble application layered over all those existing sources, so for the first time I have this entire digital photos history viewable in one place. It’s marvelous and transformative as a way to have access in a unified way to such a span of time and places.

Iris has a lot more to dig into, like entirely on-device machine learning to identify faces and associate them with named people. I can add people details and then Iris will show me things like photos from a person’s birthday over the years. I’m just scratching the surface but I’m really excited by what it can do.

Listening Post is such a great scrobbling solution. I’ve been listening to a lot of radio and am really happy that it works so well to capture that listening and mark favorite new tracks.