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.
TIL that Fuji’s raw studio software has perfectly nice support for saving and editing film simulation recipes. It’s been there all along! I exclusively used Lightroom when I primarily made raw images, so I never thought to explore it.
The software isn’t so much for full raw development, but rather for editing, applying and saving the C1-C7 film preset modes that the camera uses to render JPGs. You can do all that on the camera, and in fact it’s what I’ve done … for years! But using the desktop app is easier and much more effective than trying to edit development settings on the camera. For an all-JPG photographer, it’s super useful to be able to test the effects of different film settings on the big screen, and then store them for use while shooting! On top of that, the studio software can store more preset simulations than the camera can keep at a time, so you can keep a library of favorites that are easy to come back to.
Fuji’s really leaving adoration and acclaim on the table by not making a better mobile app to do all this (like this quite good-looking iOS app)!
My Playdate was always pretty fiddly, registering d-pad presses unreliably, and it made for a poor experience, such that I never really got into gaming on it. This weekend I finally opened it up, realigned the buttons over their contacts on the board, and – with some struggle – got it put back together. What a difference! This thing is so much fun!
Quick question, when people post about their “homelab” they’re just talking about another computer, right? Like this is giving a nice credential to “dicking around on the computer?”
Gotta get a new VM on the homelab so I can tailscale it from the Center where I run a Lab.
The improvements that Qobuz are making with their beta apps is really nice, and this alternative Qobuz theme by Jon Hicks is a great illustration of how much impact a thoughtful design has.
