Using Aphera has made me enthusiastic to shoot raw photos for the first time in quite a while. It’s lightweight and makes it easy to get looks that I really like, without the heaviness of Lightroom’s interface or the deep analysis paralysis of the this-or-that among the dozens and dozens of filmy presets I had stashed away over nearly twenty years of using LR. The Aphera blog has a nice writeup in response to the common question “Is Aphera a Lightroom Replacement?”

I’ve landed on a couple of go-to straight out of camera jpg settings that I quite like on my X100VI, but adding raw back into my workflow has given me some great flexibility that I’m having fun with.

Iris continues to move me with its “On this Day” feature. Now that my multiple decades of different catalogs are accessible in one place, I have this photo roll of personal history that changes every day. I find myself struck by the passage of time, recalling moments that I haven’t thought of for twenty years or more — and plenty of more recent memories, too. Every day I’m surprised and sometimes have to outright catch my breath. It’s quite a thing.

I got out for a paddleboard session early one morning this week. The water was perfectly calm and the air was hazy from wildfires, but had improved some from the day before.

I really like this piece by Graham Smith at Jank: “Tinkering with games is as good as playing them”. Having spent so many hours working on my own Destiny 2-related data and stats tools, there is something very resonant in the notion that the computer is not just the vehicle for playing the game, but for doing things about the game:

I’m defining tinkering broadly here as anything that involves reaching beneath your computer’s glossy façade. The machine, which may be in front of you right now, is pretending that it is a tool of simple productivity, an obelisk of user-friendly efficiency. It is not. Your computer is 8000 rats in a burlap sack. To tinker is to reach inside the bag, remove a rat, and make friends with it.

If you’ve ever spent several weeks trying to build the perfect collection of Skyrim mods only to then not follow through with playing the game, you might be a tinkerer, too. Perhaps you’ve spent several hours curating your Steam Wishlist, sorting your library into categories, and selecting the perfect bootup video for your Steam Deck, and now you still spend more time browsing your game collection than actually playing it. Don’t feel bad! You, too, are a tinkerer.

My tinker-to-play ratio is pretty high, and tinkering has been one of the ways for me to learn a bunch of my current skills quite deeply. I think affinity for the tinkering is also one reason I’m just not attracted to the AI-enabled shortcuts to the product. I don’t want to simply have made a thing; I want to work through the making of the thing.

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.