Pretty Good Hat

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 10:40:53 -0700

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.

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 06:11:52 -0700

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.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 16:33:12 -0700

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.

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 06:51:17 -0700

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.

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 07:49:08 -0700

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

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 10:05:58 -0700

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.

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 17:58:39 -0700

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.

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 17:32:52 -0700

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.

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 15:14:14 -0700

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.

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 08:38:43 -0700

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.

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 15:21:59 -0700

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.

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 15:02:39 -0700

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.

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 08:29:47 -0700

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.

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 10:33:35 -0700

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.

Sun, 24 May 2026 14:45:43 -0700

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)!