Colin Devroe: Recent Episodes
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Photographer. Darkroom printer. Blogger. Antiquarian. Reverse Engineer. Art curator. YouTuber, lol. Senior Product Manager at NerdPress.
I’ve written several times about mixed reality experiences over the last 6 or 7 years here on my blog. I recently went back and looked at some of those posts and so I thought I’d sum up my thinking as it stands today, as well as detail what I hope to see from Apple’s headset.
For quick context, VR means that you can only see the virtual world, AR means that you can see some amount of the real world in addition to virtual elements, and MR refers to the broader landscape of experiences that blend any amount of those two.
My main interest has been in seeing a well executed AR experience primarily because I haven’t seen a great VR one yet. Some VR experiences are fun but none of them are very productive.
What do I mean by productive?
Using a Mac on a large screen with a good keyboard and mouse is arguably the most productive set of tools ever devised for the human mind. Information and creation I/O out the wazoo. For the last several decades no one, including Apple, has made a more productive platform. While the iPhone and iPad are very useful platforms that I use every single day, they simply are no where near as productive (yet?) as the desktop computer paradigm. So far my use of any MR experience has felt super unproductive. Doing something as simple as browsing the web in a VR experience has been a slow and clunky experience.
In my personal life experience, here are my most productive platforms in order of how much I can get done while using them:
- A Mac laptop plugged into a large screen with a good keyboard and mouse
- iPad with a keyboard
- iPhone (especially with voice recording, camera’s ability to scan documents, etc.)
- A good notebook and pen
Of course, this list needs a big “it depends on what I’m doing” asterisk. There are some tasks, like scanning in handwritten notes, that the iPhone has jumped way way ahead on over the last few years. Or other tasks, like sketching out ideas for my garden, that pen and paper are simply far better suited for. But overall, for the work that I do the Mac reigns supreme.
For my use, I’d love an augmented experience that enhances my productivity not one that encumbers it. I have no interest in using a platform that makes me less productive simply because it looks cool.
OK, so that is where my thoughts are today on MR.
On the cusp of Apple’s headset, which seems very likely to be previewed at this year’s WWDC, I’m looking forward to where they’ve settled on this. Will it be a platform built for fully immersed fun experiences like Ready Player One? Or, will it be a productive augmented version of what we have now like Minority Report?
It is my hope that within 3 or 4 versions of Apple’s headset - say, by 2026 or so - that using an Apple headset for productive work will be as good or better than using an iPad with a keyboard. If they've somehow figured out how to be more productive than using a Mac then they've shot the stars.
If those are my hopes what are my worries?
Apple hasn’t shown itself to be good at creating a virtual assistant and I think the headset would likely require one. Siri is the worst virtual assistant currently on the market. Last night, I asked Siri “How many inches is 500 millimeters of rain?” and it replied with a link to the web to figure it out on my own. I rephrased my question “How many inches is 500 millimeters?” and it replied accurately. I confused it because I said the word rain? Using Siri today while at the same time using ChatGPT or Bard or the like really shows the gap Apple has to make up.
But perhaps they’ve been working as hard on Siri as they have on the headset and they’ve waited to debut the two together? An all new Siri 2.0 that is available on all devices including Apple’s new headset? Given Siri’s reputation in the market I imagine they will have to touch on how they’ve improved it dramatically for this new device.
Another worry I have is how uncomfortable and draining using most headsets are. Use any MR device on the market for a few hours and you’ll see what I mean. The devices themselves feel like a lunchbox on your face and your eyes, ears, neck, etc. are all knackered when you’re done.
One last note regarding price: I think the first version being $3,000 is totally plausible. Perhaps Apple will have a $3,000 build just for developers that they can then return for Apple credit like they did with the Apple silicon transition. If the device is great and makes me as productive as using an iPad or better than $3,000 sounds good to me. I'm sure the price could come down slightly over time.
I'm very hyped that Apple is entering this market. I genuinely hope they have something special to offer. If the headset isn't meant for me but is more geared towards people that play games or will watch movies on the device that is fine too. But I'll be looking for something that enhances my productivity.
My approach to building Tuff, my static site generator that I began working on last November, was to jump in as quickly as possible by publishing my personal website publicly very early in the development process. Doing so forced me to make rapid improvements and to focus on the most important features.
By spending 5am to 7am most weekday mornings I was able to publish my entire website publicly within 14 days of starting to code and I wrote a short blurb on how Tuff works within 30. Considering that my personal site has a portfolio, podcast, and thousands of blog posts I was surprised by that timeline.
As a quick aside, this 5am to 7am time slot for coding personal projects did not appear on my typical day post from January 2021 because I wasn't doing it then. As I get older I find myself waking earlier and earlier. Rather than blow all of that time on YouTube (I love my YouTube) I decided, just a few weeks after that post, to begin working on personal projects instead. I've done a lot of programming, photography, and side hustle business during these early morning sessions over the last two years and I hope to continue. Waking early and being productive feels like a super power.
Development on Tuff has not stopped. I've been chipping away at improvements to this website, the efficiency of the build process, and adding the capability to build multiple websites. As you can see in the changelog, each release brings a few small improvements but they begin to add up over time.
One feature that I've missed the most since switching to Tuff for my personal website has been search, which I finished a first version of yesterday.
In very early January, just a month or so into development, I added a local command line search command to Tuff to help me find posts in my archive. It works pretty well and I continue to use this to help me find older posts. But I knew I needed to add on site search so that visitors to my site could do some basic searching. I wasn't sure how I was going to go about it statically. Should I build a client side search forcing the visitor of the site to download some large index? Should I use a third party tool? Should I do what many have done and push people to a search engine?
I thought, don't be dogmatic about building static. Most modern content management systems are full of bloat, load too much unnecessary junk on the page, and have far more features than most people need for a personal site. It is why I decided to build Tuff to begin with. But that doesn't mean I have to get all self righteous about server-side code and only publish HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I can sprinkle in some server-side code where it makes sense.
That is why I'm now calling Tuff a Static+ Site Generator. S+SG. Is this a thing? I don't know. Don't forget, in my original building Tuff post I mentioned that I never looked at other static site generators. And I still haven't. I'm oblivious to best practices.
As of today, I use Tuff to build three sites; this site you're reading now, a private local network website that showcases over 100,000 of our family photos by date, and a new static site for The Watercolor Gallery that I hope to finish before the end of the year. In addition to that I'd like to begin working on publishing Stripe Transfer, Stupid, and at least three other websites that I've yet to debut with it.
Tuff is now a tool I plan to use for the rest of my computing life (see also). I love it.
John Gruber on Humane's recent demo at TED:
"So far, it feels like Humane’s entire premise is founded on that same mistake: building a new device intended to replace our phones, without that new device being able to do any of the dozens of things we love to do on our phones that require a display."
As I tooted over the weekend, Humane is starting to smell a lot like Magic Leap. They are building hype with their promotional videos and product demos - that, do seem impressive in some ways - only to raise hundreds of millions of dollars rather than shipping products.
In 2018 I wrote how Magic Leap was actually hurting themselves by building hype they couldn't possibly deliver on.
"While this release is for developers to get their hands on the devices, I believe the hype this company has built around itself has hurt them. No matter what they showed in this first version it would have been disappointing to many."
And that turned out to be true. We all read quotes from various people that saw the Magic Leap technology and they all proclaimed it was world changing stuff. As a result Magic Leap raised billions of dollars. That is billions, with a B. But the actual devices turned out to be lackluster and, in fact, never really shipped to the consumer.
Have you ever seen a Magic Leap device? Will you ever see a Humane device?
See also: Magic Leap of faith.
Over the last few weeks I’ve begun using the recent crop of AI-powered services in my daily work and I’ve found them to be an enormous boost to my productivity and fun to play with. I do not know if these human-like chat services will end up causing great harm to the earth’s population or not — but as of today, I think they can be both useful and entertaining.
I’d like to start off this post by describing what I think AI is. Not because I think there is any confusion on the matter but because I want a definition I can point people to. A service that uses a bunch of learned prompts and responses to use various APIs to present you information in a human readable or audio format are not what I would consider AI. Think Siri. Siri, while it may very well have portions of it that are using AI-data sets, I do not consider AI. Siri feels much more to me like a gargantuan list of IF THEN statements.
IF you ask Siri for anything relating at all to the weather THEN it will pretend to be a human and answer in a human way. “Hey Sir, will it rain today?” “Yes, there is a 70% chance it will rain today.” is a good answer but far from being an intelligent one. If you ask “Hey Siri, what time will the rain start and stop today?” it will almost certainly fall on its face. In fact, Siri falls on its face more often than not.
IF you ask Google's assistant a similar question it does a far better job of trying to deliver you the answer you want. For instance, you can “OK Google” a fairly complex mathematics query and, in my experience, it does a good job. Where Siri is like a very young child trying to respond to adult questions, Google is somewhere in the teenager area. But a teenager that does not know how to use Google, read the first few links, and summarize an answer.
I’ve heard that Alexa is even better than Google but I have almost no experience using Alexa personally.
Siri, Google, and Alexa are not even close to what I would consider AI.
ChatGPT, which is the AI-powered chat service I’ve been using the most, is most definitely intelligent. And it is improving rapidly. My guess is that in a few years ChatGPT 3.5 and 4 will feel like Siri does today. Which is a little mind blowing to be honest.
I have a few ways in which I’m describing ChatGPT in conversation with those that do not understand large language models, data corpuses, neural nets, or RLHF. To be clear, I do not understand those things either. But I can at least navigate their broad concepts. I think. Maybe I should ask ChatGPT about that? Anyway, here are the analogies I’m currently using.
- Imagine doing a Google search (or, Duck.com because you’re a sane person) and you read the first 1,000 links in totality. And then you distill what you’ve learned into a single paragraph. In 5 seconds.
- Imagine you could ask someone with 25-years of experience in a given field (programming, music, etc.) a question or to do a task for you and they were able to complete it in a few seconds.
If computers are a bicycle for the mind, AI is an e-bike for the work you do on that computer. (I’m not settled on this metaphor. It’s a WIP.)
I’m using ChatGPT, DALL•E and their ilk for a variety of my daily tasks. It takes a little while to retrain my muscle memory to start at ChatGPT and go from there, rather than starting from scratch, but I’m slowly getting there.
I’d like to describe just one use case from this past week where I used ChatGPT alongside my manual process and the obvious benefits it would have on my work. This isn’t a use case you haven’t heard of as many, many others are doing the same. But I will say it impressed me nonetheless. I used ChatGPT to write some JavaScript and it did remarkably well.
At work we offer our customers something we call company stores. A company store is very much like an e-commerce store - only we have most or all of their inventory in our warehouse and we can deliver it to their locations the next day. Anyway, on many of these stores there is a large rotating banner area on the homepage. We wanted to hide this rotating banner on all other pages. Since the software we use wouldn’t allow us to do this on the server side, we are left with the choice of doing it client side. This means that I was going to write a simple bit of JavaScript to 1) determine whether or not the current page was the homepage, and 2) if it was not the homepage, hide the rotating banner.
This isn’t a difficult piece of code. Anyone with any amount of JavaScript experience could write this code in a few minutes. But that is just it. You can't copy and paste this specific code from a random result from a search engine. You need experience and then you need to write this code. I started this project from scratch and it took me about 15 minutes or so to write code that worked for our purposes. I would call the code OK not great.
I then asked ChatGPT to write the code for me. My prompt was “In Javascript hide a section element that has a data attribute of data-name if the URL is anything other than XXX” (where XXX is the URL of the homepage). The code it returned was better than my code. The way I would describe it is, if I had 2 hours to refine the code that I wrote in 15 minutes, I would have written the same code that ChatGPT wrote the first time in a matter of seconds. I did have to make one very small tweak to the code to run it on production - but it was a tweak there was no way ChatGPT would know to make.
It felt like writing code without using your hands. More often than not, the code I’m about to write is fully realized in my brain and I just need to type out the characters onto my computer. I may make a few mistakes along the way, or need to search for a specific syntax that I had forgotten about, but the rest of the code is menial work to type out. But if I start out with the idea of the code using a detailed prompt to ChatGPT I don’t need to use my hands to write the code. I save a huge amount of time.
This experience and many others (which lead to hours being saved not just minutes) leads me to believe that for many things that I do day-to-day; write, interpolate data, program, etc. I should be using ChatGPT as an accelerator.
My initial optimism for crypto, which has all but completely faded away (the entire industry feels like a squandered opportunity at this point), has me reticent to excitement about AI. And I do not know how to predict the next several years of “improvements” to this technology. But as of today, it certainly feels both useful and fun and I plan on continuing to use it to get work done faster.
Over the weekend I finished Looking At Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art by John Szarkowski. Szarkowski is, as of this moment, my favorite photographic writer and curator.
For the past few days I've been testing out Wavelength - a group messaging app that is currently only available on Apple's platforms. It reminds me a lot of Quill, the former messaging app that was swallowed whole by Twitter just prior to ... you know.
Why use Wavelength? It is tailor made for group messaging. Focusing on starting asynchronous conversations rather than realtime chats. While it is possible to have a one-on-one direct message with someone or to host thousands of people - it is very clearly made for a relatively small group of people to have a private discussion.
John Gruber, adviser to the Wavelength team, provides this analogy:
"Wavelength is designed for the area between those extremes. Think: groups that could fit in a bus, or even an airplane."
Out of the gate Wavelength is platform native, encrypted, thoughtfully designed, has no ads, doesn't collect personal information, and isn't owned by a tech giant.
So far my use of the app has been limited since I do not know very many people that have it yet. To fix that I started a Wavelength chat for darkroom printers (you can join it too by clicking that link). The number of darkroom printers in the world is dwindling and finding one another proves to be a challenge. So this chat is a good way to share tips and stories, ask questions of others with more experience, and to test out Wavelength.
I don't know if my darkroom printers group chat is best served via Wavelength longterm. Personally, I prefer knowledge share like this to happen in public so that others can benefit from it. But it has been a great way to test out this app.
If you find yourself in need of a group messaging app that fits these criteria give Wavelength a shot. And be sure to send them feedback as well, it seems they are paying close attention and making adjustments.
Yesterday I finished reading Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford and Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang. I'd recommend both. Chiang is great. I think I need to read more by him.
Wind, stirs the dust
This is it. The final WIS link list post. This series of posts has spanned 10 years.
I'm happy that I published 99 lists of links and that thousands of people have clicked on them to enjoy the interesting, creative, useful, and fun webpages I stumbled upon over the last decade. I'm saddened, however, that so many of the links I've shared no longer work.
I suppose that is the state of things. Websites that feel permanent are anything but. And while The Internet Archive is a true treasure, it is most definitely incomplete. Most of the websites archived into The Wayback Machine are but shadows of that which they represent.
When I started putting this list, the one hundredth, together I began at #1 and slowly started moving forward through time. I was trying my best to find the most interesting links that are still active. After going through many, many links I found that the vast majority of them were dead, not found, or changed altogether.
Blah.
So rather than share a "best of" list made up of all the previous lists, I've decided to publish a new fresh and final list.
There is nothing overtly special about the following links. They are simply more of the same, amazing, inspiring, and funky things I've found recently while browsing the web. I do hope you enjoyed this series. I'm looking forward to my next series which I'm still working on the format of.
Enjoy!
- Video: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed - An upcoming HBO documentary chronicling the photographic and activist work of Nan Goldin.
- IG Video: Stanley Tucci makes a martini - Somehow I missed this when it originally went viral during the pandemic. He makes a good martini. And I believe this video turned into an awful lot of work for Tucci. Consider me a member of the Tucci gang.
- Simon Collison on Apple Music - I've been really digging into the Apple Music library. I'm coming at it in a variety of ways by using Shazam, finding obscure music blogs, and by following curators like Simon.
- Videos: DIRT by Huckberry - This video series that encourages you to explore locally by Huckberry is very well made. I'm really enjoying it.
- HTML Energy - Handwritten HTML gives these people all the feels.
- Monty Don's tips & advice - I've probably linked to this tons of times. It doesn't matter. It deserves a relink. Each month Monty publishes a blog post with tips for the month.
- How the ring got good - Robin Sloan shows us that even J.R.R. Tolkien needs to iterate a lot on an idea.
- My Girl with a Pearl - When Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring goes out on loan, the museum gets creative with some fan generated content.
- Novella - "thoughtful films for creative people".
- Smartless - A podcast co-hosted by Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Sean Hayes.
- Quanta - An app that allows you to broadcast your vinyl records via Airplay while at the same time showing you album art and lyrics.
Thank you for looking at these links. If you don't already, please consider subscribing to my blog to see what is coming next. And also follow me on Mastodon!
The ease of Ivory on Mastodon has me sharing a lot more than I had been over the last few years. Ivory is on my phone, tablet, and my laptop. It is very easy to write a post, share an image, boost someone else's post, link to a good blog post, etc.
My homegrown static site generator Tuff is super simple to publish with too. It is far easier than WordPress was towards the end of my use with it. However, Ivory on Mastodon is even easier than Tuff. When publishing is frictionless I'm more likely to share.
Because of this ease of publishing, I've been posting far more on Mastodon than here on my blog. At least, more of the shorter titleless posts. And because Mastodon is an open platform, supports RSS, etc. I don't feel as though I'm publishing for someone else's benefit. I don't feel as though I'm lobbing stones into a volcano like I would if I was tweeting.
I've decided to double down on Mastodon. I plan to publish more there, not less. I've added my Mastodon RSS feed to my Micro.blog account. And I plan to structure my posts far more like I would structure my posts here on my blog. I'm treating my Mastodon account not as just another social media account, but as a first class publishing platform for my content.
I'm planning on moving my accounts to my own instance on my own domain. The Mastodon project has gotten a lot of attention over the last several months and that has had some benefits on the underlying code. The recent releases have really improved the application, its storage and process needs, etc. And I can only imagine that will continue. It is my hope that by the time I set up my own instance the project will have gotten a lot of great updates that I'll benefit from.
One side benefit of publishing to Mastodon rather than my blog is the ease that others have of sharing my content. Engagement on Mastodon is rather high. Look at Cabel Sasser's findings. Some of my posts have gotten a fair number of boosts. This one had over 400 boosts. I have several with more than 100. If you've read my blog for any length of time you know I don't collect nor care about statistics -- but these numbers do tell a story. The microblogosphere is alive and well. People can publish their thoughts and be heard. They aren't being hidden behind some algorithm that is optimized for ad revenue.
It is a very exciting time and I'm happy to be part of it.
As for my blog here. I still plan on publishing blog posts, entries into my portfolio of crazy projects and more podcast episodes. I may even build a way to bring some of the content I publish on Mastodon back onto this site in some way. The future looks fun!
Side note: I hope that Tapbots or Iconfactory end up building an all-in-one app that plugs into the fediverse but also lets you publish content on your own domain either via Micro.blog, WordPress, or some other platform that has ActivityPub built in. Or, perhaps any platform that has ActivityPub. The pieces all certainly seem to be there. And at least Iconfactory seems to be toying with the idea. How cool!
Tuff, my static site builder, can build a simple directory for me to view my entire photo library. It creates views for each year and month and also checks various backups - both local and cloud - to make sure the files are properly backed up. It warns me if a file isn't backed up.
The entire process takes 3.328 seconds and I have 153,000+ photos and videos in four locations.
Thank you modern computer.
Perhaps you’ve had this experience… you walk into a place of business and see the computer and software they use to do their scheduling, billing, and ordering and you notice they are decades old. But, have you seen how productive they are? More often than not they are so fast that the computer has a hard time keeping up with their inputs.
This idea keeps rolling around in my head that I could purposely construct a similar situation for myself on my personal computer.
Could my next Mac be the last Mac I ever need to buy? And can I run the same software on it for decades allowing me to become even more productive than I am today? What would I gain? What would I lose?
On average I buy a new Mac every 5 years or so. Each time I’ve upgraded to a new Mac I keep the old Mac around for at least an additional 5 years. The laptop my wife currently uses for Zoom is a Mac from 2012 and we see no reason to replace it anytime soon.
Macs last. And the technology inside is so capable these days - especially the M series chips - that I’m beginning to wonder if I will ever need to upgrade after I purchase my next Mac. And that sort of excites me.
I currently use a 2019 16” MacBook Pro. It has an 8-core 2.4 GHz i9 Intel processor with 64GB of DDR4 RAM and an 8GB Radeon Pro 5500M graphics chip. It also has a terabyte of flash storage. In 2019 this Mac cost $4,200. I am very happy with this computer. For my day-to-day work I have more than enough resources. There is very little reason to upgrade this computer for many, many years to come.
Though, having the M-series all day battery life, rather than the dismal 2 hours I get now, is a huge temptation.
Battery life aside, though, I could conceivably use this computer until 2024 (which would be my average) or even 2029 which would be my stretch goal.
So, let’s say I keep my average streak going and I buy a new Mac in 2024 or 2025. That would mean I’ll likely end up with an M3 or M4 series chip from Apple. I like the idea of that because those chips will be multiple iterations in on their already well regarded chipset. And some of the M1 series chips will be nearly 5 years old at that time so we will see if they have similar longevity to the Intel chips. If I were able to hold out until 2029 the benefits would be even greater. If I plan to spend a similar amount of money on my next Mac, is there a possibility I can plan on keeping it for the rest of my life?
Why would I want to do that? I’m only 42 and I plan on trying to live at least 4 more decades. Could I possibly have a Mac that would run for 40 years?
Let’s talk about the current trajectory of software.
I’m a little worried about software these days. The best software ever written may already be in our past. Modern day app frameworks that are full of bloat, the overwhelming demand for cloud-first apps that barely work without an internet connection, and the ability to create truly great user interfaces seems to be dying — all of these factors add up to an uncertain future in software from my point of view.
The rapid march of software progress can be an exhausting thing as you get older. What if I was to just stop updating my software? As it stands today, I really love my Mac. macOS Catalina (I haven't updated to Ventura yet) is pretty good — arguably not the best it has ever been, but certainly very good — and many of the apps I use day to day allow me to be very productive. I feel superhuman on my Mac with the current software it is running. And the programming languages I use; PHP, JavaScript, a bit of AppleScript or Swift, work amazingly well on my Mac.
To illustrate this point, in just about a month of early weekday mornings I wrote my own static site generator in PHP from scratch to build this site you’re reading now. It works remarkably well. It builds tens of thousands of files in just seconds. And my code isn’t very good. How much more productive do I need to get?
I could lose this superpower. Software will change. macOS is likely to become more restrictive. Programming languages will be deprecated. The keyboard and mouse may be replaced with gestures, voice, and eye movements. Which is all well and good for the next generation of users. In order to stay productive in my work and hobbies (photography, software development, and blogging) I think having a platform that stays in relative stasis over the next 4 decades could be an incredible asset.
I also think about large data sets like my photo library. Each time Apple releases an update of macOS I feel a pit in my stomach that they may change something that will completely blow away years of my cataloging work. They’ve done it before and I’d be naive to think it couldn’t happen again. Which is why I’ve developed my own workflow. I want my photo library to work until I die. And I don’t want to spend another minute redoing it.
The prospect of possibly having a computing platform that stays relatively the same for the rest of my life and prioritizes good usability, speed, reliability, and saving data locally to disk is very exciting. And it may just be that the only way I can ensure that I will have that is by stopping time and refusing to keep up with the latest technology.
--
It appears I'm not alone. While I've been thinking about this topic over the last several weeks, I've noticed others expressing similar sentiments in a variety of ways. I've only made note of a few of them. Such as Ev Williams wants to keep his small phone, Paul Stamatiou would like an old Powerbook to write on, Dan Rubin and Joe Van Cleave use typewriters every day, Jeremy Keith has expressed opinions about frontend web development getting out of hand. None of these people are saying exactly what I'm saying. But all of them are sort of part of the same milieu - people that have been around in computing for a long time sort of wishing for how we used to do things. In 5 or 10 more years perhaps we will long for how we did things today.
Simon Reynolds, in December, marking the 20th anniversary of Blissblog:
I honestly can't see that anyone has invented a better format than the blog, at least for what I want to do.
Simon's entire post is dripping with flattering remarks about how enjoyable and rewarding blogging is.
Those of us in the 20+ year blogging club obviously love it - why else would we continue to do it? It isn't because it is the best way to reach the most people. Simon writes:
Blogging is effectively narrowcast, but it retains an aura of broadcast, the tantalizing possibility of reaching more than the pre-converted, the already tuned-in. (In that sense, not unlike the terrestrial broadcast pirate radio station).
I love the idea of a blog being like a pirate radio station. Consider my flag flying proudly! Arrr!
The entire post is a must-read for bloggers.
/via Michael Donaldson on Mastodon.
I'm refactoring Tuff - my static site builder - to support multiple websites so I've been posting more on Mastodon than here the last week or so. That should change now as Tuff is able build 3 very different websites. Lots more to do but I see the light.
Recently finished reading Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ Copious detail. Fast read if not for the length. Author a bit gushy.
I'm continuing to whittle away at my to do list for Tuff - my static site builder. Every few days I'm able to check off a task. Lots of small improvements add up over time.
I'm putting the finishing touches on a presentation of my portrait The Engineer that I'll be recording for my YouTube channel.
I'm hoping to record better audio without spending too much money. Each presentation I make I want to improve.
There have been several waves of activity on Mastodon since I signed up in 2017. Those waves have increased in frequency and intensity. Admittedly, while I did put in some effort early on, I wasn’t really part of that first wave. I rode in on a much later wave in mid-2022 and haven’t looked back since.
Waves, as waves do, flow in and ebb. Each time I witnessed a wave of new users on Mastodon it was almost immediately followed by those same users floating back out to sea.
The most recent wave has proven to be different. People are sticking around on the beach. Setting down their blankets, getting their umbrellas firmly planted in the sand, and… OK I’ve pushed this metaphor far enough.
The point is that the latest surge to Mastodon seems to have people sticking around and using the service. Apps are being built. Connections are being made. Thousands of instances are being spun up. And tons of platforms are working hard to join the fediverse via ActivityPub.
So, if you and I are not building an app, running a large Mastodon instance, or working on the Mastodon code, how can we help Mastodon and the larger fediverse? Here are a few humble suggestions and things that I am already doing or plan to do in the near future.
- Consider donating regularly to the Mastodon instance you use, the Mastodon project, and pay for the apps that you use. Doing so will ensure all of these projects have the resources they need to continue improving the service, keeping the instances reliable, and improving the apps.
- Really move to Mastodon. If you are sitting on the fence by publishing to Twitter and simply lurking on Mastodon, give some consideration to moving the bulk if not all of your publishing to Mastodon. (Please read the note at the end of this post)
- Ask friends to try Mastodon. If you see a friend that may not know about Mastodon, take the time to let them know how it works, why you like it, etc.
- Help organizations to move. If you manage social media accounts for your own projects, for your business, for the company you work for, etc. take the time to set up Mastodon accounts for them and move the bulk of their publishing to Mastodon as well. Perhaps even give consideration to creating an instance for the organization.
- If you have a blog, consider linking to Mastodon posts as cited sources. Perhaps even going out of your way to work a link to a Mastodon post in your future posts. This will create more links to Mastodon content as well as expose your readers to the resource.
One last suggestion, and it is a big one. Set up an instance. If you have the needs that having an instance would accomodate and you can afford it, consider creating an instance. Who needs an instance? If you work at an organization that will need multiple accounts, you have multiple commercial projects that each have their own account, or you just love to tinker and own your portion of the web, consider creating an instance. Be sure to plan to invest enough to keep it around for many years to come. Creating an instance will help in a variety of ways.
By creating more instances we spread out the load on the existing instances. Yes, I realize it doesn’t fully remove the load since all instances need to interact each other. But, we all can’t be and don’t want to be on the same few instances. We don’t want any instances that get ridiculously large. Some of them are already too large, in my opinion. We don't want to simply recreate Twitter. Having an instance can also help to provide better feedback and data to the main Mastodon project on how instances work, how efficient they are, and how easy they are to set up.
There are so many organizations that I hope spin up their own instances; news outlets, NASA, federal, state, and local government organizations, libraries, etc. The Internet Archive's Mastodon instance is such a great example to show people and organizations how it could work.
Just a side note: Twitter doesn't have to lose for the fediverse to win. In reality, if Twitter ever decided to add ActivityPub and join the fediverse it would be good for everyone involved. My main reason for recommending using Mastodon over Twitter is the amount of control you then get over your own content and audience. On Twitter, you have very little to no control over that, on Mastodon you have nearly total control. It is simply a better option that may end up with more reach than Twitter in the coming years.
--
In 2017 I wrote a similar post How to support Mastodon. There are a few more notes there as well.
We had a possible fireball explosion tens of thousands of feet above us in Pennsylvania. Shook our house pretty good at 10:49am Eastern.
Now I'm looking for how to properly document it with NASA.
I figured this worthy of jotting down on the weblog.
This antique store was... different
This is the penultimate WIS link list. The final list, number 100, shall reprise all previous link lists and come sometime in February. I'm looking forward to crafting a new link list reborn in a new style and with other themes. Doing anything 100 times isn't easy so I'm proud of this little series of blog posts I've made.
Onto the links!
- Life inside seawater - Photographer Angel Fitor captures some amazing living things in seawater.
- Video: Apollo 11 Animation - C-bass Productions on YouTube created a rather stunning animation timed perfectly to audio from the Apollo 11 moon landing. Riveting stuff.
- Closed on Sunday - Lofi jams from Star Wars.
- Sony Walkman - Sony is still designing and making what look like great products.
- Lightning maps - The amount of lightning happening globally at any given time is impressive.
- Sea surface temperature maps - There is so much data at our fingertips any time we need it. Fascinating.
- The sounds of atoms - Researchers are turning the Periodic Table into sounds.
- Soderberg's media diet - He consumes more media in a single day than I do in a month.
- Video: 133 Days on the Sun - Stunning timelapse of half a year or so of the Sun. A violent place.
- Alphaputt - Incredibly designed miniature golf game played on the letters of the alphabet.
- Shottr - A great free screenshot app.
- Me on Mastodon - Shameless plug here but I'm sharing a lot on Mastodon these days. If you are there and we haven't connected there please follow!
Zero inside knowledge here; but my guess is an Apple Event in February announcing Apple VR dev kits that cost $3,000 that come with a headset + Mac mini. With the device shipping at least 6-9 months later for less than that.
A very dead bird, October 2010, Plymouth, Mass. iPhone 4
Last night I revisited Simon Collison's post from early December 2022 Farewell, Twitter. I had read it shortly after he published it and while I agreed with what he wrote, it didn't hit me as hard as it did last night.
Simon claims that "others have articulated the situation better", however, last night I realized how well he managed to capture my own thinking on "the Twitter situation".
I'll be quoting several portions of his post below, but I urge you to go over to his website and read the entire thing and then come back here to read my bits.
Simon calls what is happening at Twitter "unnecessary chaos and destruction". Exactly. Ironically, I think if I wrote down on paper what I would have done to correct the business side of Twitter I would have deployed many of the same strategies that Elon Musk did. I would have reduced staff, shrunk footprint, revisited every policy and contract, etc. I would have tried to make Twitter as lean as possible as quickly as I could.
On the face of it, that is what Musk did. Except he did it in the polar opposite way of how I would hope I would have done so. I would hope that I would have been able to right the ship without throwing the passengers (both employees and users) overboard directly into the mouth's of hungry sharks.
I deleted the Twitter app and removed all bookmarks and shortcuts. I no longer go there for trends or live reactions (a real test when, for example, I want to check the vibe around this bonkers World Cup, itself a problematic yet addictive drug). No, I’m out.
During my recent break at the end of the year I had deleted the Twitter app as well as all other social apps. I like to do that when I'm on vacation, traveling, etc. It really helps me to be present. Of course, I've since reinstalled the apps and I check them fairly regularly. I've only posted on Twitter a handful of times since October of last year, but I like to use Twitter to get NBA scores, see what is happening during a news event, etc. I'm going to try to find alternative ways to get this information or simply do without it. As of today, like Simon, I've deleted the Twitter app from my phone.
I may occasionally exploit Twitter’s reach with a promo tweet, like each time I release music or cast my net wide in the search for new work. But otherwise, I’ll be absent.
I so appreciate Simon's honesty here. I've seen many people write scathing remarks about Twitter about how we should all jump over to Mastodon or our blogs, only to see them still active on Twitter. I believe the dopamine hit from posting to Twitter's large audience is addictive and very difficult to put down. And for some people, like Simon, they consider their Twitter audience vital to their work.
Fortunately, I do not care about my audience size. I never have. My blog here has always been my primary way to promote what I'm working on. And it has served me extremely well. I have a relatively small audience but I'm very thankful that small audience has a rather large reach.
His last paragraph is a bullet aimed straight at the vital organs. No doubt cathartic. Similar to Craig Hockenberry's recent diatribe - sometimes you just need to let it out!
Other tidbits and notes related to this topic:
- A short Twitter wish list - I wrote this post in April of 2022 describing what I would do on the product side of things at Twitter. I wish I had written a post about what I would have done on the business side of things.
- I believe I stated somewhere publicly that I thought Elon Musk's idea to make an X app that has similar features to China's WeChat - chat, payments, video, etc. - was a good idea. I thought Twitter was so stagnant over the last few years that a bold vision like that would help breathe life back into the platform. I still think an app like that could exist, but I no longer think Twitter would be the right foundation for it. It is clear that millions of people enjoy simple microblogging just the way that it is.
- Twitter isn't going anywhere - In 2019 I argued that no matter how terribly Twitter is run, it would survive. And somehow I still believe that. Although it is looking like Elon is going to have to sell everything he owns in order to keep it running for the next few years.
Oh man am I happy! People that hadn't written on their blog in a long time are blogging again. Websites that hadn't been updated in many years, some over a decade, are being spruced up and published to again. And popular news outlets are publishing articles about blogging.
Of course, those of us that have kept our focus on blogging know that blogging never died. The activity of publishing just moved around from platform to platform. In some cases behind a wall like on Facebook and Instagram, in others, into data silos where the content couldn't flow out onto the open web like Twitter.
Perhaps you're reading this and you totally ignored blogging over the last few decades or you're a young person just starting to venture into the blogging world. I won't cover the entire history of blogging but let me sum up what happened in just one paragraph.
The weblog exploded onto the scene in the early 2000s. Many websites were being frequently updated prior to that, but the blog format really jumped into the mainstream during that time. There were millions of active blogs. Then, social networks sprang up to help make publishing on the web easier or more approachable. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram - all of these began to see enormous growth in popularity and the amount of content that is published on them. Today, hundreds of millions of posts (which, are not unlike blog posts) are published on these three platforms daily. So, in a way, blogging is more popular than ever. The thing that changed was where people published.
And, that was a shame for a variety of reasons.
Having your own personal website is still not as easy as signing up to Instagram. And the fear of publishing to a blog paralyzes some people. However, the advantages to having your own website are myriad. You own it. The content that is on it can be visible to everyone on the web. The fate of your blog isn't tied to the fate of a public or venture backed company. Etc.
I think the resurgence we are seeing has been caused by many variables. Two primary drivers over the last few months has been the upheaval caused by unhinged billionaires and privacy invasive business models. But I think there are other factors at play too.
One possibility is that the same people that desired a much more simple publishing tool in the early 2000s are now older, wiser, more patient and desire more control, ownership, and features. When I started publishing on the web I was 15 years old. I'm 42 now. I've changed a lot over that time period. So, some of the recent surge may be that people are willing to put in the time to have a home on the web they can be proud of and that scratches their particular itches.
Then there are those that already had blogs that laid dormant for a few years. They found their audiences on Twitter and so they saw far more engagement there. And, for those willing to admit it, they became addicted to the feedback loop of having large followings on social media platforms. When they publish to their blog it sort of feels like throwing a ball into a black hole. But publishing onto social media, when you have tens of thousands of followers, feels like playing table tennis. Even with that addiction to engagement, they desire to own their audience rather than build one for a tech giant. And so they reach for their blogs hoping to bring that audience from social media onto their own platform.
Some of them will succeed. Some of them will crawl back to social media once the dust settles over the protest du jour.
Whether or not blogging is alive or dead is not a new topic of discussion. It is a topic that reoccurs every few years. I've written about it dozens of times. But the current push seems slightly different. I believe we will see many more people blogging again or, at the very least, publishing on a platform that compliments the web rather than chafe at it.
Ten years ago, I wrote:
A set of protocols or standards will need to come along to help connect all publishing platforms together. The incredibly useful features we find inside of networks like Twitter will need to find their way out onto the world wide web. This means bringing actions like following or subscribing, mentioning, citing, link previewing, etc. to the independent web and have them be completely separate from any single service.
The IndieWeb set the standards for some of the tools and protocols we now see finding footing. ActivityPub has been a boon for modern day platforms, like Mastodon, to give people the best of both worlds -- you can have your ease of publishing and be web friendly too. I hope we see a lot more platforms built from the priciples of the IndieWeb so that people don't need to think about federation, microformats, syndication feeds, webmentions, etc. People do not care about these things. Developers need to.
I'm so very happy that blogging is getting a shot in the arm.
Here are a few links worth looking at:
- The Year of the Personal Website - Matthias Ott
- Bring back personal blogging - Monique Judge for The Verge
- Personalsit.es - By Andy Bell, a showcase of personal websites
- Ooh.directory - By Phil Gyford, a directory of blogs
After a 3 week break from blogging and social media (more like 2 weeks completely, 1 week just reading and replying), I'm ready to jump back in. I have lots of plans for 2023 for my website and personal projects.
I spent January 1 in the darkroom making prints from a 35mm roll of Tri-X that I finished over the last few months.
Last day of work done. Just deleted all social apps from my phone. Going to put my nose in a book, some food, and some bourbon. 👋
Just about a month ago, for some unknown and undoubtedly a sleep deprived reason, I began building my own static site generator (SSG).
And I did it entirely wrong. This is that story.
A sensible person would have first looked at the available static site generators and tried them first. I didn't. In fact, I have only a limited amount of experience with a few SSGs. That same sensible person should have made a comprehensive feature matrix to figure out what these products offered and, perhaps, pick out the features I would need. I didn't do that either.
Instead, I wanted to see how I would solve the problem rather than looking at prior art. By doing so, perhaps I would come up with some different (and, maybe, better?) ways of doing some of the things that SSGs do. Now that I'm about a month into development I'm ready to share what I've accomplished so far. Spoiler: I don't think I came up with anything new or better. But I have had fun.
I named my SSG Tuff, the type of rock formed from volcanic ash. My mind is like a volcano spewing nonsense and Tuff is what puts it all together.
Here is how Tuff works today.
The directory structure so far:
- _lib - For external code libraries.
- dist - For the output that is the website itself
- website
- website/assets (multiple directories for images, css)
- website/content - for markdown files
- website/content/blog - blog posts (directories by YYYY/MM)
- website/content/pages - pages e.g. about
- website/content/podcast - podcast episodes
- website/content/portfolio - portfolio entries
- website/content/blog.md
- website/content/home.md
- website/content/podcast.md
- website/content/portfolio.md
- website/feeds - templates for syndication feeds
- website/layouts - HTML template files
My main objective with Tuff was to avoid a complicated technology stack and keep dependencies to a minimum. As it stands, there is but 1 code dependency and that is Parsedown. I wasn't about to rebuild a Markdown parser in PHP. Parsedown is extensible with add-ons but I don't currently use any.
Other dependencies related to the stack are that you need to be able to run PHP. I'm currently using PHP 8.1 on my Mac to run Tuff locally.
There is no magic to how Tuff works. I've set up various commands that will chew through the markdown files and spew the content out combined with the HTML in the layouts folder. Each section of the site is able to be built on its own.
For example, to build the entire website I run tuff build all from the command line. This deletes the previous build of the site and rebuilds it from scratch. Now that my website has reached a point of some sort of solid footing, I shouldn't need to rebuild the entire site very often. Most of the pages on the site do not change often so there is no need to rebuild them. However, whenever I make a change to one of the core layout files (like, say, the footer) I need to. Rebuilding the entire website, with over 15,000 files, takes less than 10 seconds. This has nothing to do with my skills as an efficient programmer and more to do with the awesome raw power under our fingertips with computers.
Other commands I have include tuff build recent which only builds the most recent posts, tuff build portfolio which rebuilds the portfolio. Of course, other commands include building the podcast pages, the other pages like the about page, etc. And, I have a command to move assets (images, CSS files) around.
I plan to make Tuff's build routine even more efficient over time. I do not agonize over every millisecond of build time, but I like the idea of touching just the files that are necessary. By doing so it will keep things like file created dates and modified times more accurate.
The built website is able to be viewed on my local computer and network so that I can test the site on other devices. For this I'm using Docker, though on a Mac I obviously don't need to do that. I just to like Docker Compose. I'm using a dead simple Apache container and that's it.
Once I've verified that my updated content has been built correctly, it is time to deploy the changes to the public site.
To deploy Tuff uses rsync. This has proven to be extremely fast. I can first request a "dry run" deploy which lists the files that will be updated during a real live deploy. I sometimes do this if I'm curious how many files will be impacted. But most often I just shoot from the hip. The deploy routine can be broken apart into smaller chunks to just deploy things like assets. I plan to break this part even more to conincide with Tuff's other build commands. This way I can deploy just a single page, just a single blog post, etc.
Backing up my website's content has never been easier. In fact, I currently have 4 copies of my website's content that are fairly up-to-date. Tuff's built-in backup command will take the local copy and push it out to OneDrive and local hard drives. This too I would like to improve to daisy chain commands together so that I don't need to run this manually. I'd also like to set up a Shortcut on macOS to either alert me when a backup is out of date or run the routine when it is.
Tuff's current featureset includes, but is not limited to:
- Home page
- Pages like about or projects
- Blog index, and pagination, posts, titleless posts
- Blog post tag indexes, examples photography, wis
- Blog date indexes, example January 2018
- Portfolio index and entries
- Podcast index and entries
- Mastodon favorites (gathers Mastodon faves at build time)
- RSS feed
- Social media redirects, example cdevroe.com/yt redirects to YouTube
- Featured images for portfolio and podcast post types, including image counts
- And text files. Each page or post has a corresponding text file. Here is the one for this post. Append .text to most URLs and you'll find the content. I stole this idea from Daring Fireball.
Of course, there is still much to do. I'd like to make it easier to share a photo from my phone to my website. Right now there are a number of steps to do so. Most of those steps can be eliminated with a few Shortcuts automations. I'd also like to bring back the comments that had been left on my site over the decades. I have a lot of server maintenance to do to pair down the services that run there that I no longer need (such as mySQL). I'm also going to take that opportunity to upgrade a bunch of the software there. And of course, just improvements overall.
My website has never been faster or used less compute cycles to deliver a page. I'm super happy with how things are today and I'm looking forward to continuing to whittle away at making more improvements to Tuff. And I may end up using it to rebuild all of my other websites including The Watercolor Gallery.
My website has supported dark mode based on the user's system preferences. But now, those among you that prefer to toggle it on a per-website basis can do so.
There are options for On, System, or Off. I keep my preference at System but choose whichever option works best for you!
I'll be improving the UI of the toggle widget at some point.
Thanks to Sara Soueidan for spurring me to add this option.
I've just added a new watercolor sketch of a landscape in China to my portfolio. My grandmother photographed the scene in 1987.
Rewrote most of my static site generator over the last few days. Cut the build time in half at the same time as doubling the number of files it deals with. The latest update adds monthly blog post indexes.
The sleeping Atlantic
I have decided that #100 in this series of link lists will be the last "What I saw somewhat recently". Today's list is #98. I'll try to get #99 out sometime in January and #100 will be a look back through all of the previous links.
- M.C. Escher - Journey to Infinity - An excellent documentary on the artist, narrated by Stephen Fry.
- Roy Tang's website - I just think Roy's website is super cool.
- Raw data from airplanes - Charlie Gerard shows us how to use a radio antenna to pull down raw data from airplanes overhead.
- ooh.directory - If you're a blogger you've likely already seen this. A collection of blogs. Mine isn't listed yet. Fun to click around.
- Ban Ban Ton Ton - "A music website / blog run out of rural Japan".
- WHCC - Reportedly makes good quality photo prints.
- China's Van Goghs - Hundreds of oil painters churning out souveiner masterpieces.
- Gabriel Rivera - A nice profile of Gabriel by Ilford.
I'm trying to decide which text editor I want to write my blog posts in.
Left to right: Sublime Text, MacDown, VS Code
I don't understand the push towards self-driving cars? Do you really think a robot can merge onto a highway while eating a bowl of breakfast cereal and putting on eyeliner? I don’t think so!
Over many years of watching YouTube videos something has become clear to me; quite often, the fewer views a video has the more information I seem to glean from it.
A 3-hour presentation on fine art photography from many years ago? 55 views? <3
A poorly lit, hard to hear, video of some guy in his basement darkroom? 7 views? <3
By opening Slack, Teams, and Discord on your computer at the same time you’re running all of the JavaScript ever written since the time of the Egyptian pyramids.
This weekend Eliza and I tried some experiments in the darkroom with paper negatives that failed completely. It is good to be humbled from time-to-time.
Making backups of my site's content is easier than ever. Just like my photo library I now have 4 complete back ups that will seldom be very far out of date.
Developed two rolls of Tri-X last night. One I have no idea where it came from - and it looks like the camera had a light leak (selective memory?). But the other looks terrific. I can't wait to spend some time in the darkroom.
For the past several years I've been POSSE-ing. In Indieweb terms that means to publish content on my own site and syndicate it to other platforms. I've decided I'm going to discontinue using automation in favor of manually writing posts for each of the platforms I want to post to.
I'm doing this for 3 primary reasons.
- POSSE-ing to other platforms is a messy business. And I'm persnickety.
- Most communities on these platforms would prefer you do not cross post.
- I believe I can better engage if I do this manually.
Thanks to Micro.blog, syndicating my posts from my blog to Micro.blog, Mastodon, and Tumblr has been very easy. Micro.blog also supports syndicating to Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn, and Flickr. Of any service I've tested, Micro.blog is by far the most thoughtful and well considered way to POSSE.
However, it isn't perfect. Many of my notes have multiple links in them. Like this one. Micro.blog supports multiple inline links but syndicating to Mastodon does not. So I lose a link! I do not know if this is a limitation of Mastodon's API or of Micro.blog's implementation -- but regardless, I cannot lose a link!
That is but one of likely a few dozen idiosyncratic niggles that I have with how POSSE-ing works and that is just for one platform. I'd like to syndicate to more platforms and each of those have their own look, feel, and community driven norms. As just one more example, hashtags. Micro.blog does not support hashtags whereas on Mastodon and Twitter they are first class citizens. By POSSE-ing via this method I lose out on all of that. And #believeinfilm is becoming a community I interact with often.
Please know that I'm not picking on Micro.blog. I don't think it is possible to build and maintain a syndication service that works exactly how I would prefer it to work. I've tried several different solutions over the last nearly 10 years to get this right. None of them will satisfy my neurosis. If it wasn't for Micro.blog I would have given up trying long ago.
As the great Twitter exodus of 2022 was happening, and some people were flocking to Mastodon, the community there made it clear that they do not appreciate cross posting. Specifically, they discouraged people from setting up a Twitter to Mastodon cross posting service - but I believe they discourage cross posting all the same. And the more I think about it the more I get it. As I've written in the past, my mental model for each of these platforms are bars or cafes. If I ran down the street shouting into bars and cafes, people would think me weird. Perhaps I'm stretching the analogy too far but I understand why people would prefer direct engagement on the platform.
Photographers are all too aware of the need to tailor content for each use. Let's say I took a photo of a cat. If a magazine editor wanted to use the image for the cover or for an article within, that photo would have to be manipulated to their specifications for each of those uses. If I share a photo on my blog, Flickr, or Instagram - I create a different file for each of those because they require different specifications. It is why you see so many bounding boxes on photographer's Instagrams. They want to crop the photo to their liking not based on Instagram's constraints.
This leads me to believe that I should do the same for my text. I've been inspired by how Sara Soueidan constructs her posts for Twitter and Mastodon. Each post seems thoughtfully composed for each platform she publishes to. I would prefer to model after that.
This isn't to say that one couldn't spend time to get POSSE working mostly right. Or, that I couldn't build my own solution that might adjust my main quibbles with how Micro.blog syndicates content. Jeremy Keith is a great example of this. His posts are thoughtfully shared to each platform even if they are done so by a robot of his creation. He recently added Mastodon. I'm simply unwilling to take on the task of building and maintaining a robot to post to each platform based on their own particular set of requirements.
For the time being, I'll be syndicating to Micro.blog via Manton's very well built robot RSS feed eater, but for all other platforms I'll be taking the time to share each post that I consider worthy of the time.
Spent some time this morning making adjustments to dates in RSS feeds. I think they should be accurate now. Sorry to all subscribers for the odd RSS behaviour the last few days.
Zhenyi Tan, who I linked to back in April about his app History Book (which I still use), is on a bit of a tear. Just take a look at Tan's website post archive and count the number of times you see the word "Launch".
His most recent projects; a Time Machine inspired UI ontop of the Wayback Machine, an expense tracker, a music player, and several clever Safari Extensions - have all been released in just the last few months.
His prolificacy reminds me of _DavidSmith.
Added a changelog to keep track of updates to this site, Tuff, and my overall workflow.
I'm going into year 3 of learning film photography and darkroom printing. One thing is abundantly clear, both of these disciplines are wholly separate. If you find yourself good at one and struggle with the other, do not feel bad. Both require skill. Both can be raised to the level of art. It is OK to focus on one of them.
What is Apple's policy for updating things like rsync on macOS? The preinstalled version is very old.
Learning more about rsync this morning so that I can develop a few rolls of 35mm film this evening. As one does.
iCloud+ email sometimes misclassifies replies as junk mail. I would think that my having emailed the person first would be enough for Apple to know the email isn't Junk?
If you're subscribed to my RSS feed (first, thank you!) you might notice the feed will refresh. That is because as of this morning my personal website is no longer running on WordPress. Eeek!
I'm getting dangerously close to switching away from WordPress and onto Tuff - my personal static site generator. Like any well tended garden, I'll need to pick weeds and cast seed, but the important bits are done.
I'm writing this, my first post (actually, it is the second or third) written using my new static site rendering thingy I call Tuff.
Twenty plus odd years ago I copy and pasted my way to having my first blog. I was writing HTML by hand then and just copying the bits and pieces that I needed to create a new post on a page. This new setup that I'm duct taping together sort of feels like that -- in the very best way possible.
Tuff reads in a bunch of Markdown files to make this website. This post you're reading right now is written in Markdown. You can see its source right here. Like John Gruber, the author of Markdown, does for Daring Fireball - I've decided to share the source of the files at URLs you can see.
I have a lot of work left to do. But the scaffolding for the work ahead is sturdy. I'm looking forward to banging away at it.
Spent about 90-minutes in the darkroom making this print. It is an 11x14 print from a 6x6 neg taken in 2020 at Keuka lake in New York State.
Yesterday I took a stranger’s portrait. It was quick, likely poor lighting, and may not turn out at all. But I’m super happy that I worked up the courage to ask.
On vacation days I spend a lot of time on my iPad rather than my Mac. Which limits me on what I share - particularly photographic work. I need to create a better workflow for publishing from iPad.
My favorite ways to view photographs, in order: books, iPad (someone’s website, or in Flickr app), YouTube on TV.
Jeremy Keith's post about Twitter from two days ago caused me look up the first time I mentioned Twitter here on my blog. It turns out is was exactly one day after Jeremy did on his blog - 16 years ago yesterday. I have been subscribed to Jeremy's blog this entire time so I likely have him to blame for my Twitter, umm, issues.
WSL is no longer in preview mode. I wrote about WSL for a few years. It is an amazing addition to Windows and the team should be very proud for how good it is.
Enjoying a martini and Leon Bridge's Tiny Desk concert
There aren't enough links in the world to describe the amount of information I've been ingesting lately. The Twitter takeover, the FTX fraud, the hacking of FTX, and the crypto winter. All while maintaining my steady diet of whacky ephemera and art inspiration topped with a dose of Mastodon and the indieweb. Phew.
- PO-80 - Teenage Engineering made a vinyl record cutter in collaboration with Yuri Suzuki.
- Ezra Klein interviews Patrick Collison - (Wayback link cuz paywalls) An interesting interview with the Stripe CEO, also available as a podcast episode.
- Daily Routines - Readymag, which is pretty cool, asked 5 designers to describe their daily routines. Sort of a visual representation of the typical day series of posts we all did last year.
- Get Blogging! - Ben Werdmuller's call to, well, blog. I linked to it already but it bears a repeat link.
- whitespace - Molly White's newsletter. She's been busy this year, oof.
- Me, on Mastodon - I somehow feel like now is a good time to remind you that I'm on Mastodon. I don't know why though.
- Mac Miller doc - This documentary about Mac Miller is a good background. I didn't know anything at all about Mac until recently.
- Marc Rebillet's cameras - I only recently came across this series on Youtube and, subsequently Rebillet's fever dream of an account. Wowza.
Brent Sticher, who writes a lot about my favorite programming language PHP (don't @ me), writes about the history of his personal blog and Twitter account and how he now owns his audience.
The entire post is worth a quick read.
I wanted to back him on on this bit:
I've managed to build a following of 15k people on Twitter. That's small for many people but it's larger than what I imagined a couple of years ago. And while I have 15k followers (that's maybe 1k of real people actually seeing my tweets), if Twitter shuts down tomorrow, those people are gone. To me that would mean all the time and effort I put into my Twitter audience will simply be… gone.
The follower : real people ratio he points out isn't wrong. While my personal Twitter account only has a few hundred followers (long story short, I signed up to Twitter in November 2006 gained about 4,000 followers or so and deleted my account in 2016) my other account for The Watercolor Gallery @h2ocolor has nearly 7,500. The Watercolor Gallery's Twitter account sees fairly high engagement and the numbers still pale in comparison to how many followers it has.
Back in 2010 when I started The Watercolor Gallery on Tumblr (it now runs on WordPress) it shot up in popularity on that platform very quickly. It was linked to by the Tumblr team in one of their "Tumblr Tuesday" posts. Or, maybe more than one? And it quickly gained what I would consider a modest following. I don't remember the numbers, but it may have been higher than what the gallery has on Twitter today. Either way, I noticed something very quickly even back then -- the follower count meant very little. Yes, each time I posted to Tumblr it got a lot of likes, but other than that the audience relationship was very shallow.
Owning your audience via your own website or newsletter forms a much stronger and deeper relationship between you and your reader. And follower counts don't tell the entire story of how popular someone or something is.
The reverse side of the coin is also true. Low follower counts doesn't mean you won't have some reach. In October I had a tweet that sort of went viral and ended up getting 15,000 impression. My buddy Matt Smith recently had one that pulled in over one million.
My Mastodon favorites script got a fair bit of traffic over the last day or so. So today I added a very simple cache (I want to be very nice to Mastodon's servers!), some updated styling, and an indicator to show there are images in the post. More to come!
I don’t know if this collage by Mark Clennon of Mike Tyson is actually a film contact sheet or was a composite made in Photoshop to look like it is…
I don’t care. It is awesome.
I’m committing to no longer asking for boosts. My intent was to bring attention to Mastodon features I thought useful. But it comes across as gross and a ploy to gain reach. Sorry about that y’all.
There is a lot being written about Mastodon lately. And it isn't just being published on Mastodon. Both Time and Wired have published about Mastodon and its creator within the last week.
I wanted to post my current thoughts about the platform to capture the moment. Things are changing rapidly. A lot of things are in flux. A huge number of people and organizations are giving Mastodon - and a slew of other platforms - a try in the wake of Twitter's transition to Elon Musk's ownership. I think this is a good thing overall but I'm unsure if this is a good thing for the Mastodon community of users that has created such a wonderful vibe.
Jeremy Keith:
What I’m really struck by is the vibe.
In a nutshell, I’m loving it! It feels …nice.
I was fully expecting Mastodon to be full of meta-discussions about Mastodon, but in the past few weeks I’ve enjoyed people posting about stone circles, astronomy, and—obviously—cats and dogs.
I've been using Mastodon for a few years and I've found the same thing as Jeremy; there are a lot of really smart people using Mastodon in a variety of fields. And the platform sort of urges people to share more detailed posts than Twitter did. The surge of sign ups has certainly added so many great voices. But a lot of them are bringing to Mastodon what they brought to Twitter - a very unwelcome vibe. At least, unwelcome by me.
Over the last week or two, as millions have signed up to Mastodon, I'm starting to notice a few trends that I really hope go away soon. Two I'm hopeful will go away, one I'm not so sure. They are navel gazing posts, boosts, and vitriol spewed at different factions of people. You know, the types of posts Twitter was known for.
Let's look at each of these.
The navel gazing posts about Mastodon are inevitable. So many new people signing on and veteran users, like me, wanting to let the new people know about certain things. How things work, what they should try, etc. I think that will die down as more people become familiar with Mastodon. Or, as has happened with surges in the past, a huge percentage of people end up leaving because they forgot how angry they are at Musk and they miss their followers on Twitter.
Boosts! Or, reblogs. To help make people aware of new accounts that have been created or great content that exists across the fediverse people have been boosting posts far more than I've ever seen over the last few years. In fact, I'd say the vast majority of my following feed is boosted posts from accounts I do not follow. Many are very welcomed because it exposes me to accounts and content I may have never seen otherwise. But I sure do hope it tapers soon. Fortunately, Mastodon has a mute feature specifically for reblogs. So I can mute an offender without needing to unfollow.
The last class of posts is what really has me worried. As Jeremy pointed out, the vibe of Mastodon has been very cool, chill, friendly, for a long time. For the types of accounts I follow it almost felt like belonging to a maker space. But lately my Explore page on Mastodon has been filled with the exact same types of posts that get engagement on Twitter - those that are filled with politics and hate. People taking shots at other groups of people just to get reblogs and favorites.
So I've gone from checking Explore daily to completely ignoring it.
The Mastodon community, across many instances, have worked hard to curate an experience that is welcoming and fun. I think to maintain that many of us will have to be liberal in our blocks and mutes.
The above series of images were made on a recent trip to Ocean City Maryland and are very likely the reason why my iPhone became what is known as a brick.
Let me back up.
I’ve used my iPhones underwater ever since Apple said they were IP-rated for a reasonable amount of water resistance. I’ve gone swimming in rivers with them, navigated waterfalls with them, swam in pools and oceans, and scouted for fish in frigid streams with them.
Left: Trout in a creek, Right: Me underwater in our pool
Apart from sound issues with the speakers and microphone for about an hour or so after each session - I haven’t had no other known issues using my iPhones underwater.
That is, until I went and played in some ocean waves with my iPhone 12 Pro Max. I’m sure my phone became briefly submerged in the waves but it was never under the water for any length of time. Most of the exposure to the water was splashing. And not even high pressure or high velocity waves.
The problems started about 30 minutes after I got out of the water when the screen began to flicker a little. It was still responding to my touch and - had I known then what I know now - I would have connected it to wifi immediately and forced an iCloud backup to preserve the few photos and videos I took while I was on vacation. A few hours later, or so, after giving the iPhone time to dry the screen kept showing more symptoms of a slow and inevitable failure. The flickering turned to a more rolling effect where the screen would slowly shut off bottom to top. It also seemed that only the green pixels were firing as everything looked like it was in the Matrix.
I did what most anyone with knowledge of these matters would do - I took the phone out of the case, set it upright, and gave it plenty of airflow around it. Perhaps many of you reading this are screaming “put it in rice!”… no, dear reader, never put it in rice. You want airflow. I figured the issue with the screen was that somehow water got into the device and that once it dried everything would be fine.
I now think it had much more to do with the salt than the water. I wish Apple had plainly stated that the iPhone’s water resistance was limited to fresh water… and if they have stated that I simply missed it. Here is what I see.
The official technical specifications from Apple’s website state:
iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max are splash, water, and dust resistant and were tested under controlled laboratory conditions with a rating of IP68 under IEC standard 60529 (maximum depth of 6 meters up to 30 minutes). Splash, water, and dust resistance are not permanent conditions and resistance might decrease as a result of normal wear. Do not attempt to charge a wet iPhone; refer to the user guide for cleaning and drying instructions. Liquid damage not covered under warranty.
According to Wikipedia (and my novice read of it), the iPhone 12 Pro Max should be able to take a very good splash and even be submerged.
There are no notes regarding the water being saline or not and so I simply didn’t think it would matter if I was in the ocean or in my backyard pool.
The iPhone was resting on a table in our hotel room cum condo when, the next morning, we were woken up by my weekday alarm on the iPhone. Even though I’m an early riser and seldom sleep until my alarm goes off, I have a just-in-case alarm set for each weekday at 6:30am. The iPhone was obviously still working at this time - about 18 hours after we got out of the ocean. But the screen was completely unresponsive and wouldn’t turn on. I managed to shut off the alarm by some combination of mashing the physical buttons on the iPhone in a panic not to wake everyone else.
I’ll spare you the details of how I tried to revive the iPhone by plugging it in, washing it with freshwater briefly in the sink, plugging it into my computer when I got home from vacation and trying to restore the iPhone in Finder. And I’ll also spare you the details of talking to Apple Support via the phone while driving on north on I-95 on a Wednesday and subsequently taking it to a Best Buy for further debugging. And I’ll cut right to where I went to Verizon, found out I had insurance (that I had totally forgot about) and was overnighted a replacement iPhone with little fanfare for the low deductible of $229USD.
I think if I had known that I had insurance and how easy it was to get a replacement I would have done it while on vacation and gotten the phone sent right to me. The process with Verizon was quick and painless (apart from the $229 of course).
Why didn’t I upgrade to the iPhone 14 Pro Max? I may have if there were any in stock at the Verizon store I visited. I will admit I was tempted. But I have to say that the iPhone 12 Pro Max is a very capable device for my needs. Even though I’m a hobbyist photographer and the 48MP sensor is a tempting upgrade, I think the photos from my current phone’s sensor is just fine for what I use it for.
The process of activating a new phone, restoring the device to the latest backup, and getting back in business is easier than ever. There are only a handful of applications that I wish did a slightly better job of storing their data in an iPhone backup. Because we were on hotel wifi, my phone needed to be manually reconnected every 24-hours. So some of the photos and videos that I took after the initial incident, but before the phone became unusable, I lost. If I could go back in time I’d have tried to get onto wifi before I lost access to the phone.
All in all I likely only lost a few dozen photos. Fortunately I had taken a film camera with me and I hope that I have a few memorable photos waiting for me, light saved in state in an expensive Kodak emulsion. Just waiting for me to mix some chemicals and bring them to life.
This was the first time I ever had a device go completely belly up. It was definitely a learning experience. I believe my takeaways that I hope I will learn from this hassle is to A) be sure my phone is connected to wifi as often as possible to ensure it is backing up to iCloud often and, B) always keep some sort of insurance on a phone - at least for the first 2 or 3 years of its life.
Imagine owning a domain name. Imagine you syndicate when appropriate to various other communities. Imagine being stress free about whether you should use Twitter, Tumblr, Mastodon, or something else. That is what it is like having your own blog.
Work-in-progress: I've created a page to show my most recent 50 favorites on Mastodon. Mastodon doesn't currently allow a public favorites page, so I built my own. I'll be slowly working on the script, caching, and styling. Feedback welcome as always.
TIL Vivaldi, in addition to building a browser chocked full of features like email, to do lists, contact management, and note taking, also has a blogging service and now a hosted Mastodon instance. Productive team!
Poll, of sorts: How do you balance creation vs consumption? I often wrestle with myself on how much I read or watch compared to how much I write or make or create. My desired ratio is 90/10. Unfortunately it is more like 10/90.
I'm at the age where I totally understand why Mister Rogers changed his sweater and shoes when entering his home.
I have to admit, I’m surprised that just a few tens of thousands of new users can make Mastodon underperform. It isn’t exactly a new codebase and much of the work is spread out across many instances. I wonder what the biggest bottleneck is currently.
I wish Apple would transition away from using photos from Yelp in Maps. First, license the photos in such a way that we no longer need to navigate out of the Maps app. Allow people to submit their own photos to locations. Slowly remove Yelp altogether.
Recorded on February 18, 2022 Join me as I scan some photos and chat about starting things and finishing things. Are you dealing with the same thing? Write a comment!
Recorded January 27, 2021. In this special episode of Photowalking with Colin I cover some recent mistakes I’ve made with film and in the darkroom. It seems we (the collective we) mainly share our victories online. I wanted to be sure to share the losses as well.
Recorded September 30, 2019 Have you already read the manual for a product you own? After you’ve used it for a while, I recommend reading it again.
I think it is better said; Everyone should be able to have a podcast. Links: How I Built It – by Joe Casabona
Date recorded: August 19, 2019 Yesterday while driving (sorry for the audio quality) I recorded a quick audio bit to distill my thoughts on why Automattic acquired Tumblr. Short-version: Automattic sees Tumblr as an entry point for new WordPress.com customers – especially youth. For someone to go from idea to full commerce or publishing success […]
Recorded March 11, 2018. A little over a year ago I went for a short hike in the snow just after returning from a trip to Kentucky and just before starting my job at Jujama. Side note: I record tons of these audio bits that I never get around to publishing. They are awesome to […]
Recorded January 19, 2018 A very short audio bit I recorded on my way out of work last Thursday, the day I interviewed Manton Reece. I’m publishing this bit for no other reason than I need to publish more of these audio bits! Download audio.
A quick audio bit, recorded while driving through my car’s audio system for part of it (sorry), regarding upcoming blog posts and reviews of Android and the Pixel 2 XL. Download audio
I’m not blogging as much. But that’s just because my creative energy is being poured elsewhere. Here’s what I’m up to. Download audio
Tucker Hottes and I are setting up new equipment for a forthcoming podcast from Condron Media. We’re looking for feedback in the comments on how the audio sounds. Thanks in advance for your feedback. Download
I’ve been writing about Microsoft’s moves for the last three years. This week everything has come together and I’ve been writing my first multi-platform application using C# and Visual Studio. In this long rant I go on and on about how Microsoft needs to spread the word about what they are up to. Links for […]
This past weekend Eliza and I attended an orchestral presentation by the NEPA Philharmonic that featured musical scores composed by John Williams – my favorite score composer. Forgive the audio quality, the fact that I forgot to record more than I did, and that at the end I yell “it’s all over” so fast that […]
Recorded October 1, 2017. Eliza and I have extended the Bullet Journal to include a Weekly Index – a two-page spread showing the entire week in one snapshot. It has been working for us for several months. Download.
Recorded October 1, 2017. Slowing down and listening helps you to really soak in your surroundings. See also. And maybe this too. Download.
Recorded on September 22, 2017. I’ve been writing a lot about the Apple Watch Series 3. So, of course, you want to hear me yack about it. Enjoy. Download
Recorded on September 1, 2017 A quick audio bit from the Pacific coast of Mexico. Download Audio File.
Recorded September 10, 2017 Starting with this audio bit I’m making a few changes. I’m ditching the episode numbers. My audio bits are not a podcast, they aren’t really episodes, and keeping track of the numbers is just more work. I will, however, denote in the title that this is an audio post. I’m also […]
Recorded on August 23 2017. A quickly captured audio bit while walking to get a coffee the day after launching Summit’s public beta. Download MP3.
https://cdevroe.com/media/audio/e18.mp3 In late-July I stumbled upon a large mound of sand at a construction site that had several large wasps digging holes. I had never seen a wasp that large in my life. Turn your volume up for the tail end of this audio bit. Links Video: Ground Digger Wasps in Australia. Look a bit narrower […]
In late-July I went for a hike and recorded this audio bit. https://cdevroe.com/media/audio/e17.mp3 Links Photo: The grass I mention Photo: The jake I mention Download MP3
Danny and I sat down on Saturday afternoon to chat about a few things. Below are a few links relevant to our conversation. https://cdevroe.com/media/audio/e16.mp3 Links The Dark Crystal on Netflix trailer Netflix spending $6B on content Amazon spending over $3B Google I/O Keynote Microsoft Build Keynote | Day 2 Download MP3
Phil Condron and I were recently interviewed on tecBRIDGE Radio – a radio show cum podcast about business, entrepreneurship and the knowledge economy in northeastern Pennsylvania. Topics included marketing for small businesses, who should learn to code, and the history of Condron Media. Full disclosure: Condron Media is a reoccurring sponsor of tecBRIDGE Radio as we, […]
Last weekend Danny and I sat down and discussed our current experience with bots, the progress I’ve made on my still forthcoming Windows 10 and Surface Book review and also Twitter’s new Head of Product hire. https://cdevroe.com/media/audio/e15.mp3 Links: MKBHD on YouTube Review of Google Home Download MP3
On Sunday Danny and I discussed learning Windows 10 keyboard shortcuts, a bit about video streaming services and the value they bring, and also a bit about Nintendo. Here are some links from this episode. https://cdevroe.com/media/audio/e14.mp3 Links: Video Windows 10 keyboard shortcuts another Windows 10 keyboard shortcut video Download MP3
Danny and I have a Saturday morning conversation about my purchase of the new Microsoft Surface Book with Performance Base and switching from macOS to Windows 10. https://cdevroe.com/media/audio/e13.mp3 Links: Simplenote OneDrive and iCloud exFAT Surface Book and Surface Studio Thanks to Danny for the early wakeup. I edited this MP3 and published this post on Windows […]
We hit our stride in this bit. Danny and I have a Sunday-evening chat about how Apple could move away from the Mac and survive, RSS feed habits, shopping for clothes (naturally) and Stranger Things. Site Danny references is Woodpile Report. https://cdevroe.com/media/audio/e12.mp3 Download MP3
Danny and I have an early Sunday morning conversation about our browsers of choice (he likes Vivaldi), Microsoft and Apple’s announcements this week and the Tesla roof. https://cdevroe.com/media/audio/e11.mp3 Download MP3
Danny and I have a wandering Saturday afternoon discussion about email services, business travel, some food, and life journaling in the modern age. https://cdevroe.com/media/audio/e10.mp3 Download MP3
Danny and I enjoyed listening to ourselves talk so much that we did it again this week. Our conversation is mainly about blog comments and personal blogging. Riveting stuff. Listen to all of it. https://cdevroe.com/media/audio/e9.mp3 Download MP3
Extra special, and most likely reoccurring, guest Danny Nicolas (@djloche) and I have a conversation about Tesla, Twitter, Blogging and a bunch of other things. https://cdevroe.com/media/audio/e8.mp3 Download MP3
Would I have begun work on Barley 2 in November of last year if I had fully known the amount of work it would be to complete it? Maybe not. But I’m glad I didn’t know and I’m glad I didn’t chicken out. https://cdevroe.com/media/audio/e7.mp3 Download MP3
The iPhone SE is for me and Yeti is changing my life. https://cdevroe.com/media/audio/e6.mp3 Download MP3
I’m upset with myself for not recording more audio. https://cdevroe.com/media/audio/e5.mp3 Download MP3
In early-winter 2014 I recorded some owls in my backyard. Perhaps you’d like to hear them too? https://cdevroe.com/media/audio/e3.mp3 For a much better recording of owls, listen here. Download MP3
On a short drive I talk about an annoying habit that I have. https://cdevroe.com/media/audio/e2.mp3 Download MP3
Something new! :) https://cdevroe.com/media/audio/e1.mp3 Inspired yet again by Manton Reece and his Timetable microcast I’ve decided to start sharing some audio bits here on my site. Today I recorded a few short test bits and ended up listening to this one and thought it a perfect representation of what to expect from me. So, here […]