mediageek: Recent Episodes
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I like earbuds. Not in-ear-monitors (IEMs) that go into your ear canal, which are often called “earbuds,” even though they’re not – at least they’re not to me. I’m talking about old fashioned earbuds, like the ones that came with your iPod or MP3 player in 2005. They have wires and just sit in your ear right in front of the canal. If they’re well designed they stay in place pretty well, without fully sealing you off from the outside world.
I like earbuds for watching YouTube or online video on my iPad – which has a headphone jack – where I don’t need the highest fidelity, and don’t need sound isolation. I also like them for monitoring when I’m doing various kinds of media production. Like plugging them into a video camera to be sure sound is coming through, or plugged into a DJ mixer to help me cue. Obviously this isn’t quite right for DJing in a loud club, but I’m not that kind of DJ. I work in radio or studio based mixing, where it should be quiet. I don’t use them for editing, or work that requires more attention to sonic detail. I just need the ability to check that sound is coming through and there’s no major problem.
I prefer earbuds because they don’t hurt my ears. No doubt, good IEMs sound better than most earbuds and are preferable for critical listening. I own a pair of Air Pods Pro that I love for air travel precisely because they have excellent isolation and noise cancellation. I also love them for phone calls, where I only use one so that I’m not isolated. I also think the Air Pods sound pretty great for music. But after wearing them for an hour or so, my ear canals get pretty sore.
On the other hand, earbuds sound just good enough, without fatigue.
But there’s a problem, and that is finding good earbuds.
You see, as IEMs took over, interest in earbuds waned. Even a few years ago I could go to any headphone section in a store and find at least a few decent examples, that window seems now to have closed. I still sometimes find very inexpensive earbuds from audio brands you don’t necessarily associate with headphones – like Maxell or Memorex – but they just don’t sound good. Tinny, or all midrange, with the fidelity of a 50 year-old pocket AM transistor radio.
If you buy an inexpensive radio or MP3 player online, they often come with a free set of earbuds included. But they also sound pretty poor. Fine, perhaps, for tuning in sports talk radio on AM, but otherwise very subpar.
At this point I’ve narrowed it down to just two good models that are still (mostly) available, and not just available as new-old-stock. My absolute preferred model is the brightly colored line of JVC Gumy earbuds. As I guess the name “Gumy” implies, they’re soft and very comfortable. Importantly the sound has no obvious or immediate flaws. Also the soft earbud body combined with a soft flexible cable means that cable friction doesn’t easily get transmitted into the bud. I don’t think I’d use them to master an album, but to my ears the deliver audio that’s close enough to what I think an album or video should sound like.
There are many versions of the JVC Gumy, with many more wireless and in-ear models, but only two that don’t go into the ear canal. Also, I prefer earbuds that don’t have an integrated microphone or volume controls. That’s because I’m mostly not using them with a smartphone – since iPhones lost the headphone jack many generations ago – and the three-striped TRRS plug doesn’t always work correctly with radios and other audio devices designed only for stereo. Simpler is better when it comes to earbuds.
The only issue I have with the JVC Gumy is that sometimes they’re hard to find, or the prices get jacked up. They really shouldn’t cost more than $10. Apparently they are also frequently counterfeited, so caveat emptor.
My second-favorite earbud is the VE Monk Plus. When they first came out a few years ago these made- and designed-in-China buds were available for as low as $5 and were a bit of a sensation on headphone message boards. By and large, they lived up to the hype. They’re pretty neutral and with less bass boost than the JVCs, and are very reminiscent of a late 90s earbud you’d get with a mid-priced Walkman or discman.
That similarity includes having a harder plastic body and less supple cable, meaning that cable friction or movement definitely transmits more into the earbud than with the JVCs. The tradeoff is the sound is definitely more hi-fi, as long as you don’t move around too much.
Today the original VE Monk Plus are more difficult to find. And when I do encounter them, the prices have been pushed to $25 or more, which is harder to justify. There is a pile of knock-offs now, too, and maybe they’re good. But I don’t have the time and energy to buy a bunch and test them out. It’s simply not that important to me.
Having owned many good pairs of Sony Headphones I took a chance on a pair of recent vintage Sony “fashion earbuds” and was sorely disappointed. Slightly better than the cheap radio pack-ins, but far inferior to the JVC Gumy or Monk ‘buds, with a strange midrange response and mid-bass bump, but little low or high end otherwise.
Because I use them a lot, a pair of earbuds is good for about a year or so. Luckily right now I can pick up my preferred JVC Gumy ‘buds for about $10 a pair, which is a few bucks more than it used to be, but within my tolerance. So I’m going to spring for two and hope JVC keeps them in production to 2025.
The post In Praise of the Elusive, Simple Earbud appeared first on mediageek.
I am very honored to have my old radioshow and podcast, also named mediageek, archived at the Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications in the Internet Archive. While listening back to some old episodes, nearly all recorded live from a community radio studio, occasionally makes me cringe, there are also interviews I’m proud of, that I think serve as important records of independent media and communications during the first decade of the 21st century.
Please allow me to select a handful of note:
- Making Podcasting Easier for the Masses and the FCC Busts Free Radio San Diego (July 22, 2005 – DLARC link) features an interview with Evan Henshaw-Plath, who at the time was working on podcast platform Odeo, which turned out to be the precursor to Twitter.
- The Inspiration for US Micropower Radio, and the Mediageek Radioshow — Mbanna Kantako from the Archives (March, 2004 – DLARC link) features a talk given by the unlicensed micropower radio trailblazer, who inspired many of the activists who took to the airwaves in the 1990s as acts of civil disobedience, protesting the fact that the FCC did not license low-power FM. Arguably this contributed to the motivation for the FCC to create the modern LPFM service in 2000.
- Brattleboro Community Radio – From Unlicensed to LPFM (June 8, 2007 – DLARC link) documents an example of one station that started unlicensed, to serve a public service gap in the community of Brattleboro, and then transitioned to a fully licensed LPFM once the opportunity was opened.
- San Francisco Liberation Radio (May, 2004 – DLARC link) – In fact, I often talked with microbroadcasters operating with out a license, in part because the FCC’s original LPFM order was curtailed by Congress, keeping low-power stations out of most major metroplexes until 2013. This is just one example.
I have another 21 months of shows in my own archives that haven’t been available online consistently for two decades. That’s because they’re from the pre-podcast era, with many episodes hosted on now-defunct Real Audio or other streaming servers. I was less consistent with posting them online, because I didn’t get a podcast feed up and running until 2004. Which, I must claim, was still very early, given that the first one went online less than a half-year prior, July 9, 2003.
Mediageek’s inclusion in the DLARC happened largely by happenstance. Curator Kay Savetz reached out to us at Radio Survivor, asking for permission to archive our podcast and radio show, which has been going since 2015. In turn, we asked Kay to be a guest on our show. As we were wrapping up that recording, mediageek came up, and they asked if I’d be interested in having it archived, too.
Next, I’m making plans to backfill those 2003 – 2003 archives on my radio show website, so that they’ll be available on its RSS feed, and easily ingested to the DLARC, if they’re still interested.
By, the way, if you have any interest in radio history at all, you owe it to yourself to dig into DLARC, which hosts periodicals, newsletters, manuals, as well as podcasts and audio, and other ephemera, all related to amateur radio and communications. Kay takes a pretty broad view of the subject, which makes for some fascinating reading and listening.
The post Mediageek Radioshow and Podcast now at the Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications in the Internet Archive appeared first on mediageek.
I’ve been monitoring this apparent digicam revival, and have noted that the true connoisseurs have a particular affection for the CCD sensors these cameras contained from their invention in the late 90s through the first decade of the new century when the CMOS sensor took over. Wanting to re-check this out, I thought it might be fun to take a CCD digicam for a spin.
Rather than searching through thrift store bins and the bottom barrel of eBay, I remembered that I still had my circa 2007 Olympus Stylus 830. I’d actually tried to sell it at a camera buying event some six years ago, but there were no takers, and I thought it too nice to donate. I recall relatively pleasant experiences using it, and appreciating its 5x zoom lens packed into a really tiny body about the size of a deck of cards. So I dug it out and charged it up.
I have to say I find the CCD fetish to be curious. In particular, one of the big benefits touted by the digicam enthusiasts is that the images it produces are more film-like than those from today’s digital cameras. Yet, my memories of the 2000s, when I got my first digicam, are all about the film vs. digital debates, and the many claims of how inferior digital was to film, especially digital point-and-shoots. Complaints were that their pictures looked “too digital.”
With the supply of working film cameras dwindling, and the price of them increasing, along with the cost of film, I totally get why photographers are looking for a film-like experience at a much lower cost. I just didn’t quite think it would be the lowly, but serviceable, CCD sensor.
Battery charged, and obsolete xD memory card installed, I took the Stylus 830 for a photowalk. Immediately, I was reminded why I gladly replaced it about three years later. It pretty much has just one mode – program automatic – and the autofocus is on the slow side. The 5x zoom lens is nice enough, but not particularly sharp. A too-high percentage of my outdoor shots were out-of-focus or poorly exposed. It was not particularly fun to use.
Pumpkin Pile, taken with Olympus Stylus 830I seem to remember my previous two digital cameras – a 2003 Olympus Stylus 300 and a 2005 Olympus Stylus 800 – were more fun, and responsive, even if they had smaller zooms (3x) and one had many fewer megapixels (3). The only reason I don’t have them today is that they both stopped working and I could not get them repaired.
Hoping to jazz things up even a little I searched through the menus to see if there were any creative picture modes. There are plenty of scene modes meant to set the camera to take better pictures at night, through glass or at sunset, but what I was really looking for was something like a black-and-white, sepia or other more dramatic mode. There is none. I’m particularly surprised there isn’t even a black-and-white mode, since that seems otherwise to have been nearly mandatory on even the cheapest digicams.
To me, fun is the reason to use an old forgotten digicam, and my old Stylus 830 completely failed in that regard.
The pictures, they’re fine I guess. Straight out of the camera they’re not particularly vibrant – though I was shooting on a pretty overcast day. There’s aggressive noise reduction that smears details in anything but the brightest light, and the lens is pretty mediocre, too. I guess maybe those flaws add up to pictures looking more film-like if your definition is “much more imperfect.”
Taken with Olympus Stylus 830My poor re-experience of this camera does not mean I’m dismissing the digicam revival. As I wrote before, I’m all for people resuscitating old technology and enjoying it anew. Moreover, I really do enjoy my 2006 era Kodak V570 digicam that I bought three years ago, calling it a “digital Lomo” because I don’t believe the digicam revival had quite kicked off yet.
I’m not sure I wholly buy into the CCD sensor fetish. Perhaps it’s about the noise that creeps into most pictures shot at 400 ISO or above. Indeed, noise resistance is a reason why CMOS sensors gradually took over in the last decade, and film rated at ISO 400 or above is definitely grainy and that can look similar to digital noise when underexposed.
I certainly won’t recommend anyone run out to buy an Olympus Stylus 830 for a fun experience shooting a 2000s CCD digicam. If you stumble on one for a cheap price or you find one for free, then go for it. But I’m pretty sure there are better specimens worth your time and money.
My best advice is to keep your eyes open and take what comes your way, especially cheaply. I hate to see these trends of rediscovering inexpensive, once discarded technology turn into object fetishism. There have to be millions of forgotten digicams out there, so don’t let a TikToker or YouTuber convince you that there’s one special model or lineup you absolutely have to get. Keep trying cheap or free ones until you encounter the one that’s fun for you.
The post Is the Best Digicam the One that’s in Your Junk Drawer? A Reassessment of the Olympus Stylus 830 appeared first on mediageek.
In the late 1990s, when I was in grad school at a major Midwestern state university, my assistantship was working in the Language Learning Lab, supervising the video facilities – delivering VCRs on carts and maintaining an aging and lightly-used production studio. There was also an audio lab that was managed by a full-time professional, operating a listening lab and a lesson-by-voicemail system.
I was also a very active volunteer with the local community radio station – not part of the curriculum, but a fact that will become relevant shortly.
The Tape-Driven Language LabIf you took a college language course before the 21st century you may remember listening labs. There would be rows of what look like library carrels, only each had a cassette deck installed, connected to a sturdy set of headphones with a built-in mic. Students would check out tapes with their language lessons, bring them back to a tape station, where they would listen and repeat, often recording themselves for their beleaguered TAs to review.
The voicemail system was more esoteric. In a back room stood a bank of what looked like industrial answering machines. Only, these didn’t take messages, just playing them. Each day the lab workers loaded the machines with fresh language lesson tapes that students would call in to hear.
The unifying thing about this operation is that it went through lots of cassette tapes. And by lots, I’m talking hundreds a year. The standard normal bias tape was made by 3M with a very plain, business-like black J-card, labelled “Professional Cassette.” They were packed in boxes of ten, and arrived by the case. Not to be confused with the flashy TDK or Maxell chrome tapes you might use for taping your friend’s CD, they were sturdy and utilitarian. Every semester – perhaps more frequently – they would be taken out of service, bulk erased, and re-used.
Box of 3M AVX 60 Professional Audio Cassettes3M AVX30 Professional Audio CassetteI distinctly remember this one day. I don’t remember why, but I had to go to the audio production lab which housed a small voiceover booth, a bank of tape duplicators and a massive library of reel-to-reel and cassette tapes. Underneath one of the heavy steel tables supporting the duplicator I spied large cardboard boxes filled with cassettes still inside their Norelco cases, but without J-cards. I took one out and saw that its label had been taken off. I asked the woman who ran the lab what they were for.
She said they’d been blanked and taken out of service. Eyeballing the boxes, in the back of my head I estimated there had to be at least 1000. I asked her what would happen to them.
To my surprise, she said she had no plans. They’d clearly been stacking up there for some years. Ones that actually broke or failed would be tossed in the dumpster, but she couldn’t bring herself to throw away ones that were still functional. So, there they sat.
I wonder if my eyes didn’t pop out of my head, as I pondered the fate of so many dozens of cassettes. You see, this was the era just before CD-Rs and MP3s were widely used. Minidiscs were on the scene, but still relatively expensive and nice. So if you wanted to take music on the go, or record sounds yourself, you mostly used cassettes (Digital Audio Tape – DAT – was only for moneyed pros).
Cassettes and Community RadioBack at the community radio station, the studio cassette decks were in constant use. Many DJs would record airchecks of their own shows, either to check their sound, or, more often, to use them as mixtapes. Some would use the production studio to record albums, or make more typical mixtapes sourced from the station’s library, without any voicebreaks.
I, and some of my radio-art inclined fellow DJs, also used cassettes to bring all manner of found sounds into our shows, pre-recorded interviews, sound collages or other sound fragments. This meant one’s cassette budget could easily eat into your beer and ramen budget.
Returning to the audio lab, I asked the manager if I might be able to have any of the used tapes. Without hesitation she told me to take as many as I wanted, she’d be glad to have the space.
Trying not to visibly salivate, I tried to size up how many I could take without seeming too greedy, also taking into consideration I’d need to carry them home on my bike. Picking up about four boxes of ten, she asked if I didn’t want more. I suggested I could come back later for additional tapes, and she told me I was welcome anytime.
And that was how I became the cassette tape king of community radio for a few years. Not that anyone actually recognized my royalty, nor did I ask for fealty. With only so much room in my one-bedroom apartment I could reasonably hoard just so many for myself. So I took the rest to the station and put them into box marked “free.” The first several dozen disappeared in less than a week.
When I came back to replenish the station’s cache, one of my fellow cassette-abusing pals saw me dropping them off, and inquired if he might get his own supply. Knowing I’d barely skimmed the surface of the desposit, I just gave him that day’s drop-off, and steadily kept him in tapes for quite some time.
3M AVX 30 Professional Cassette – courtesy Tapedeck.orgWithin just a few months, a DJ popping a plain, black 3M tape into one of the station’s decks was a common sight. Sure, these were not the most hi-fi or high-end stock, and the repeated use in a language lab probably stripped off some oxide. But they worked, and were more than good enough, especially for the boombox or car stereo where most probably ended up.
The 21st Century DeclineWhen the 21st century arrived the demand for surplus tapes dropped off, though I don’t remember getting even close to the bottom of that well. I actually took over the audio lab alongside the video operation, as part of a new full-time position with the mission of bringing language learning materials into the internet age. Over the next few years we digitized the master tapes and put them online so students could listen from their personal computers (smartphones and tablets were still a few years away). By 2003 we’d retired the cassette listening lab and voicemail system, over the mild protests of some very senior faculty and a few students stuck in their ways.
The used cassette stash then grew back almost to its original late 90s size. I still pulled from it now and then for various projects, but nothing like the glory days. In the mid-2000s the room was split in half, with the other side turned into a server room. I don’t remember clearly what happened to the tape repository, but I suspect a good portion of it finally got tossed unceremoniously into a dumpster by laborers needing to clear the space. By that time they definitely would have been viewed as unnecessary waste.
My personal cassette collection is greatly reduced since the turn of the century. Several moves required that I pare things down successively in the intervening two decades. However, I did digitize a lot of the unique and irreplaceable stuff, a lot of it recorded on those plain black 3M tapes. Playing these always brought back memories.
I still did my best to keep these aging cassettes out of the landfill. In my last big purge, about six years ago, I put tapes out for a garage sale priced at 25 cents each or 10 for a dollar. Several people took bags full that I never bothered to count, usually charging them barely more than a buck for the lot. I’d rather see them get used and enjoyed than squeeze out a few more pennies.
At the end of the sale I was still left with several dozen tapes, which included a decent percentage of the old language lab specimens. In a call back to my community radio days, I dumped them into a cardboard box labeled “free,” and put it on the corner. Not an hour later I saw a couple of teenagers piling through them, eagerly stashing handfulls into a backpack. By nightfall the box was empty.
Today, with an apparent cassette comeback in full swing (BTW, I totally called that more than a decade ago), veteran collectors and new aficionados alike are hunting for tapes, as prices for even used ones keep going up on eBay. Makes me kind of wish I still had the old 3M stash, though I also wonder if they might be too low-rent even for the newbies. I fantasize that maybe the last of the old language lab pile was rescued by a dumpster diver, taking on the mantle of the next cassette tape scion.
The post How I Became the Cassette King of Community Radio appeared first on mediageek.
This is a follow-up to my first post, wherein I detailed the increasing friction and my growing complaints with Evernote, after about a decade of use.
When I left off, I confessed switching to Microsoft OneNote, in part due to being free without restriction (except storage) and its integration with Microsoft 365 (née Office) for even more storage and interoperability. Also, after reading countless reviews and comparisons with Evernote, the consensus seemed to be that they’re pretty equivalent in terms of overall functionality, though each with its own workflow differences.
Migrating from Evernote to OneNote: When Is a Notebook Not a Notebook?Upon starting a OneNote test drive, my first task was to migrate my Evernote archive. Turns out, that was less straightforward than I’d have liked. In fact, there is no import capability built into either the MacOS or web apps. However, I did find a Microsoft OneNote Importer app that will still run under Monterey. It appears to be a preview or beta app. While it does work, it’s a touch wonky. The primary issue is that it’s supposed to be able to connect directly to your local Evernote notebooks, but in practice I couldn’t make that function. Instead, I exported notebooks from Evernote and successfully uploaded those files. This can take a while if you have a lot of notebooks, and big ones might fail or time out. So it was a process that was eventually successful after a few days.
Here’s where a big organizational difference between Evernote and OneNote became all too apparent. “Notebook” means something different in each. I learned this the hard way because OneNote only lets you work in one notebook at a time, with notebooks divided into sections, pages and subpages. Switching between notebooks takes more steps than it does in Evernote. Instead of having all your notebooks in front of you, OneNote only gives you quick access to recents, and opening others is more like opening a file directly from your OneDrive. On the other hand, Evernote always has all your notebooks available to you, but they’re not as cleanly broken up into sections.
In my view there’s no right or wrong between these two schemas. At the same time, to make it easier to navigate all my imported notes, I had to move the contents from most of my imported Evernote notebooks into one main notebook. Again, depending on how big the notebook was this could take a little while – but it never failed.
In the end, I’ve come around to the OneNote approach to Notebooks. For instance, I like to keep work-related notes quite separate from my personal notes. Having the work notebook just one step less accessible while I’m working in my personal notebook actually helps to keep these worlds more separate.
Web ClipperThe Evernote web clipper was critical to how I work. I used Evernote like a scrapbook, filing away things like interesting articles, instructions and, especially, recipes. For work it means I can easily review the last few week’s worth of articles in the podcast industry to find ideas for blog or social media posts, or quickly locate a research report from earlier in the year. The Evernote clipper mostly never let me down, but that’s less useful if the platform itself is failing you. So, OneNote’s web clipper would be a vital test.
The verdict is a split judgement. OneNote’s Chrome plug-in clipper is a pretty close facsimile of Evernote’s, letting you clip a full page, article or section. The section functionality, however, is poorer. In Evernote you highlight everything you want to clip, then start the plug-in to capture your selection. It doesn’t work that way in OneNote. Instead you start the plug-in, and then click “Region,” which gives you a selection box like in Photoshop. More annoying, you can only select what’s currently on the screen – you can’t scroll down to capture more. This wasn’t a frequent function I used with Evernote, but I still miss it.
As a Mac user it’s unfortunate that there is no OneNote plug-in for Safari. You can use the share function in the browser and select OneNote, but it’s variable how the content shows up in the note. Often it’s as a PDF rather than having all the text and graphics right in the note itself. The Chrome experience is preferable.
There’s also a Firefox add-on clipper that functions identically to the Chrome one.
Finding What I’m Looking ForThe real test, of course, is if I can find what I’m looking for. This was a place where Evernote was becoming very frustrating. I’m pleased that OneNote has passed this test, for me. More often than I was experiencing with Evernote as of late, I’m finding things quickly, without a spinning wheel or multiple versions of mis-synched notes.
As I noted at the outset, I’m not Microsoft fanboy, and OneNote was nowhere near the top candidate when I first started searching for an Evernote replacement. Switching platforms is almost never straightforward, and I’m not certain any other replacement would have been smoother. Yet, as I adjust to OneNote’s quirks and begin enjoying it’s features more – for instance, the styling and markup is definitely easier and more powerful to use than Evernote’s – it’s turned out to be a good choice for me.
Conclusion: No One-Size Fits AllWould I recommend OneNote, either on its own or as an Evernote replacement? The answers is a very definitive, “it depends.” If you’re in the Mac and iOS ecosystem, the basic Apple Notes app might do the trick. It lacks much in the way of organization and markup features, but it syncs across devices and starts up and is ready for note taking almost immediately.
If you’re less Apple-centric or need more than basic notes, it’s worth pointing out that OneNote offers more functionality for free than Evernote. In particular, there’s no limitation on the number of devices that can sync your notes – Evernote limits you to just two unless you have a paid account. OneNote does have a storage limit on free accounts, but adding a few hundred gigs is cheaper than even Evernote’s cheapest plan.
If you’re a Microsoft 365 (Office) and/or OneDrive user, then OneNote may make a lot more sense, since your OneDrive space is integrated with OneNote. And here’s the thing: you can buy a full year of personal Microsoft 365 for less than a year subscription to Evernote – along with 2 TB of storage, you also get Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Excel, in particular, has become the app which doesn’t have an easy alternative. So the total math makes a lot of sense for me.
Of course, there are other alternatives like Notion and Zoho Notebook. I didn’t have the time nor patience to really test them out. So if someone says that either of these is superior to OneNote, I have no reason to doubt it.
Ultimately, a note-taking and keeping platform is a tool, and it either works for you or not. It takes a lot of pressure and friction to force me to change tools. Some people enjoy trying out new things, trying to optimize or discover the best possible app. I don’t. I find it painful.
That’s a frustration I’ve often had with project management – those who are really into it are often on the hunt for the next best platform, dragging teams from Basecamp to Airtable to Clickup to Monday.com, as they try to optimize little things that most other users find less important than having a stable platform. All that said, there’s nothing wrong with being peripatetic with your notes platform if it’s only affecting you. Me? I’m only going to try out another notes platform if I’m forced to.
In my awkward embrace of Microsoft, after years of avoidance, I’m making OneNote work for me. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it (I hope).
The post I May Have Found What I’m Looking For (Note Taking with Less Friction) appeared first on mediageek.
I saw this coming.
Recently the New York Times reported that, “The Hottest Gen Z Gadget Is a 20-Year-Old Digital Camera.” One 18 year-old, “documented prom night with an Olympus FE–230, a 7.1-megapixel, silver digital camera made in 2007 and previously owned by his mother.” A 22 year-old, “returned to her mother’s digital camera, a Canon PowerShot SX230 HS made in 2011,” posting on Instagram, “grainy, overexposed photos of herself wearing denim miniskirts and carrying tiny luxury handbags.”
Friends, this is just Digital Lomography.
Let’s flash back to a little before the turn of the century, slightly before the era these young folks’ cameras hail from. Photography, as a hobby, was arguably on the wane. Those who took photos socially generally used a point-and-shoot 35mm or APS camera, or just picked up a disposable camera at the drug store. More serious photogs used an SLR. Most of these, especially the SLRs and point-and-shoots, took consistent, focused and well exposed pictures with almost no effort.
However, some folks also thought these effortlessly consistent photos were boring. In 1992 a small band of enterprising Austrian youth encountered a Soviet-era point-and-shoot that turned out to be much more unpredictable, and therefore interesting, than the typical Canon, Nikon, Minolta or Pentax. Still being manufactured in St. Petersburg, they optioned the rights to sell the Lomo LC-A in the West, and founded the Lomography Society.
Being the early days of the internet – without Instagram or even Flickr – it took a little longer for word to spread. But by the year 2000 these quirky film cameras had inspired scores of photographers, especially young Gen Xers, to embrace them and take up film photography. Not only was this an act in defiance of highly refined Nikon 35mm SLRs, but also in defiance of the new technology of the digital camera. “Don’t think, just shoot,” became the mantra, preferring candid, chaotic shots over the posed and perfected. Lomography capitalized by issuing additional models of cheapish, intentionally imperfect, plastic film cameras.
The trend was not exclusive to coastal hipsters, either. None other than ELLEGirl magazine featured Lomography cameras in at least three different product guide features from 2002 – spotlighting the clear plastic Lomo Action Sampler and blinged out shiny gold Lomo Pop 9 – and 2005, naming the Lomo Fisheye to its list of “the coolest stuff under the sun.” For a different demographic, the Oct. 2008 edition of Men’s Health Best Life dedicated a whole page to five different Lomography models, under the headline, “Perfectly Imperfect.”
In the intervening years film cameras have revived in popularity, with the interest spreading to all manner of vintage point-and-shoots, generally prized for their compactness, simplicity and, sometimes, quirkiness. For a time, price and accessibility was also a factor. If you couldn’t or didn’t want to spend $200 on a new Lomo LC-A, you might pick up an old Canon Sureshot at the thrift store or on eBay for just a few bucks. In the same way that the parents of today’s 18 year-old has a Nikon Coolpix tucked away in a junk drawer, a 2005 twenty-something’s folks probably had an Olympus Stylus (strictly 35mm) in a closet. Embracing forgotten and neglected film cameras has been both a pose against digital perfection, and an economic convenience.
Film Today: Still Fun, but Not As CheapNow, nearly 25 years into the film trend, the cache of cameras is starting to run low. The most desirable models, often touted by celebrities and Instagram influencers, can run well north of the price of a new iPhone. There are still plenty of less sought-after units to be found, but these plastic consumer items were never designed for longevity. With many approaching forty or more years old, finding a reliably functioning camera becomes a challenge. Or at least difficult to obtain for a thrift store price.
This parallels the revival of vinyl, which has, in turn, driven up prices. Pressing plants can barely keep up with demand for new records, while the supply of used ones is inherently limited, especially for more sought-after titles. This situation seems to be sparking renewed interest in CDs, which cost about half of an LP for new albums, and may be only a dollar or two for back catalog. It’s all a little ironic for those of us who bought vinyl in the 90s because it was cheaper than compact discs. But I digress…
Digicams: Film’s Cheaper Little SiblingIt should come as no surprise that the point-and-shoot digital camera is ready to step into its film brethren’s shoes. The dominance of the smartphone camera pushed this technology out of the spotlight, and out of most manufacturer’s lineups. Yet, the landscape and bargain bins are littered with ones bought during the 2000s heyday, when every family had at least one to document all the life events now ably recorded by iPhones and Google Pixels.
A 2007 Canon PowerShot arguably may be more technically competent than its 35mm Sureshot forebearer, but its color palette, light sensitivity and dynamic range pale in comparison to even a five year-old iPhone. And, yet, it has a certain aesthetic that is identifiable, in the same way of that Lomo LC-A in 1994 or Olympus Stylus in 2010. Nostalgia is no doubt, a factor, as is imperfection and unpredictability… and fashion (or trend).
In Praise of the Digicam RevivalThe fact that this new digicam trend was predictable, and follows a familiar pattern, does not mean it is frivolous or risible; or at least no more so than the earlier film photo trends. When I say I saw it coming, I’m making no claim to special knowledge or clairvoyance. I only read the clear signs, seeing the dwindling supply of functioning film point-and-shoots, while encountering a ton of once desirable digicams that exhibit far more quirks and imperfections than what we’ve become accustomed to, today. The most notable fact is that the digicams sell for small fractions of their original price, or can be obtained for near-free from friends or relatives cleaning out their junk drawers.
I think it’s fantastic that young people are snapping up these once-cutting-edge pieces of consumer electronics. It’s fun to mess around and take hundreds of wacky photos in the hope that maybe a few turn out to be special. Plus, it’s way cheaper than taking hundreds of 35mm photos today – the price of film continues to rise, and the number of places to develop film have greatly declined in the last decade. Moreover, I like anything that keeps these neglected cameras out of landfills.
¡Viva el Digital Lomo!
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This is my first post of 2023 and also my contribution to #bringbackblogging, wherein I’ve pledged to post at least three times in January. (Goodness, I remember posting three time a day, some two decades ago). The effort is largely a response to a infantile billionaire’s acquisition of Twitter, and the overall effects of dominant social media platforms consolidated in the hands of a few plutocrats.
Evernote Should Be Renamed Ever-NOT, amirite?But the real point is to share my journey in migrating away from Evernote after about a decade of use. You see, I was, until last year, a relatively satisfied user of Evernote. I’m not a power user, and my demands really aren’t demanding. I just want an app where I can take quick notes, and especially grab web content, and have it easily searchable and synchronized across all my devices. Evernote pretty much met the bill well enough for a long time, such that I was willing to pay the annual subscription to have notes synch on more than two devices, as well as get more prioritized OCR of PDFs and images I upload.
However, somewhere in 2020 into 2021 the platform just got slow and buggy. No matter what mobile device I used, an Android phone, an iPad or an iPhone, the app was slow to start up, and often unreliable in syncing. I don’t expect perfection in apps or software, but I always understood one of Evernote’s key selling points to be that it was a quick and easy way to take a quick note. I’m actually pretty patient, so I can wait even a minute every so often – just not every time. Moreover, increasingly the app just wouldn’t open at all, or would open and immediately crash.
Even more annoyingly, all too often I’d take a note, and find later it never synced up, despite having the app open for quite some time. Or, if I was editing an existing note, I’d find Evernote created a new version rather than an edited one.
The same frustrations carried over to the desktop. On MacOS I found every version to be both a resource hog and a crash-a-holic, on top of taking even longer to start up than the mobile app. Simple searches would cause the whole thing to go down, often taking the most recent note with it. In desperation I tried the web app, hoping that would be quicker, only to find the start-up time to be worse, even lasting several minutes on occasion. Utterly useless for taking a quick note.
In Search of Note Taking LubricantSo more than a year ago I set out on trying to find an Evernote replacement. At first I was hoping to find an open source equivalent. There are many candidates, chief among them is Joplin. I kicked the tires back in 2021, but found the app experience underwhelming. Instead of being server based, it relies on web storage like WebDAV or OneDrive. In theory I’m fine with that, but also found syncing to be inconsistent. I fully accept that it may have improved in the last two years, but my initial experience doesn’t fill me with desire to give it another go.
There are plenty of other note platforms I looked at – too few to mention, and only Zoho Notebook standing out at all in my mind. Honestly, if I was giving up Evernote I kind of also wanted to give up being tied to a single platform, preferring to maybe roll my own server. That’s why Joplin initially was attractive.
Ultimately, I found the choices both under- and over-whelming, and so did nothing until December, 2022.
An Unlikely SolutionThe more I read up on Evernote alternatives, the more I found Microsoft OneNote to be the most recommended. Now, I’ve been a Mac user since 2006, with my non-Mac systems all running some flavor of Linux. In that time I studiously tried to avoid Microsoft Office, especially Word. But corporate life and the need to rely on Excel and PowerPoint – both for functionality and interoperability – softened my stance in the last half-decade.
So, I took a more serious look at OneNote. It’s free (as in beer) to use, so I decided to take the plunge. The only additional cost is for storage beyond the free allotment. I found the OneDrive $2 / month plan for 200 GB to be plenty to accommodate all my Evernote files I moved over. That wasn’t the easiest process, but that’s a story for another day. $2 a month sure beats $80 a year for Evernote – plus, the OneDrive storage isn’t only for OneNote.
Then, as a result of leaving my corporate job, I found myself without access to Microsoft Office (365), but needing the apps for professional reasons. Then I also realized I could get access along with 2 TB of storage for ten dollars less than just Evernote alone. Was this really going to push me over the edge back into the arms of borg from Redmond?
Why yes, it did.
Is the end of the story that I have arrived at note-taking nirvana?
No, it is not. And that is to be covered in my next entry.
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I realize it may be click-baitey to call any camera a “Digital Lomo.” But I’m quite serious and not at all baiting for clicks. (What good would they do me, anyway? There’s no advertising on my site. It generates zero dollars.) For reasons I’ll explain I think the released-in-2006 Kodak V570 meets my criteria for […]
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I wrote the following piece as a Twitter thread a few weeks ago. However, at the time (and as I publish this), my Twitter feed is private, and a kind reader commented that they wished it were public so they could share this thread. I responded that I might turn it into a blog post. […]
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The longstanding photo sharing site Flickr recently was acquired from Yahoo by the much-smaller professional photo site SmugMug. As a 14+ year user of Flickr, I saw this as a good thing, since the service seemed to endure benign neglect under Yahoo’s unsteady stewardship. But, under the pressure of keeping the service economically sustainable SumgMug […]
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A number of years ago I bought a nice Yamaha Aventage Blu-Ray player. I bought this model because it’s a so-called “universal” disc player, able to deal with nearly any format in existence, including high-resolution SACDs and DVD-As. On top of that, reviews gave it very high marks for its audio quality for just playing […]
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Weird dreams last night make for a weird morning eat some yogurt and granola try to shake it off
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Today I bought light bulbs salsa freeze-dried cat food then had a beer and poutine now I’m writing this
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Dictaphone, cassette recorder, microcassette recorder, digital voice recorder, smartphone. That’s it. Hit record, make sound. These are the fundamentals I have to remind myself of every so often, when I get too obsessed with fidelity and having really good microphones and recording with many more bits and samples. Sure, there’s nothing wrong with quality, until […]
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After writing this post about how much I still love my 8-year-old Sony NEX-5, I did actually buy a new camera. Well, not so much a new camera as a newer camera. I bought the last model in Sony’s NEX line, before it was consolidated into its Alpha line of cameras. In the process of […]
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French 1980s electropop cassette. Sublime. At Internet Archive.
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I think Kenneth Goldsmith may have rekindled my love for writing.
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