Downtown, mostly

YOB, Revolution Hall

YOB and burritos

A few quick notes on my “start from a blank page and contribute the first 30 percent” theory of ideating with AI. I don’t do the LinkedIn discourse much, and definitely not on LinkedIn, but I’m sorta fighting a two-front war of subposting someone and also trying to be the change I want to see.

I’ve been using VoiceNotes for a few days. It’s an AI note taker you can use for meetings or as a memory companion. I’ve got it wired into my iPhone’s action button, and running on my desktop machine.

Things I’ve tried with it:

• Dictating problems I’m trying to solve and letting it summarize. Its voice recognition is better than what I get with Gemini Pro at work.
• Dropping quick reminders as a capture inbox.
• Recording vendor demos.
• Developing action plans/next steps on some routine business stuff.

I have mixed feelings about it.

It does a good job capturing dictation. It does a good job extracting todos, tasks, and next actions from a given note.

I imagine, over time, with a corpus larger than the four or five dozen notes I’ve created this week, the “Ask AI” feature, where you can query your collection for insights, would get more useful. As it is, it’s still in that state of any new corpus where there’s not a lot of insight to glean.

That means I’m more interested in what it can do in terms of structured output, and that is just okay. It has a bunch of canned formats it can apply to a given note, but no way to build one (you can do a one-off prompt with a given note, but I don’t think you can save it). And its “todo list” output, oddly, is an ordered list.

My other use case, besides pulling actions out of a note, is getting a rundown of the day’s notes and tasks. It can’t deal with any prompt along those lines: It summarizes the last note you took. If you specify the date you want a summary for, it picks notes from other days. It does have a way to get that summary from a set of notes, but that means opening up a picker and clicking each note you want in the summary. Fussy.

It also has an integration picture: Todoist, Notion, Zapier, webhooks, and Readwise. The Todoist integration (I tried it with a free account) is primitive, and creates more work. Webhooks and Zapier seem promising.

I heard someone recently say that with AI assistants, dudes want Jarvis.

I guess maybe I sort of do want Jarvis, just for what seems like a trivial use case: “Tell me what I told you today at a high level, and then with any specific tasks, etc. I need to capture.” VoiceNotes can do that, but not without some friction. And given the friction, why not just “Hey, Siri, remind me to do this thing I have to do?”

I really wish Apple would get its act together with Apple Intelligence: All the pieces are there, but the glue isn’t. You should be able to just capture voice memos with the native tool all day long and have a variety of outputs via Notes, Reminders, etc. As it is, you’re stuck recording things, then explicitly generating a transcript, then explicitly pasting it into a Note, then asking Apple Intelligence to do stuff it sometimes manages and sometimes mysteriously fails at.

This “empty your mental pockets into a little valet tray at the end of the day” thing is something I’ve wanted for a while. When I was first learning Ruby I wrote a thing called “panopticon” that just traveled things like Pinboard, Evernote, the Safari history sqlite db, NetNewsWire’s read/unread AppleScript API, my starred inbox, etc. and dumped out a report into Evernote that let me see what I’d captured or looked at on a given day. I’d like an assistant that did something like that.

Well, the weather will keep it indoors for a bit but I’ve fully kitted up the X half: Soft shutter button, new Peak Design rope leash, metal lens hood, and grip. It has been a nice palate cleanser: Well, this is what I captured, so I guess that’s the picture I’ve got. Still haven’t tried film mode.

The “Apple locked my account over a sus gift card” guy was made whole, so that’s good.

Also, some guy from Singapore who helped him said, “only buy gift cards from Apple,” which registers with me as “just don’t buy Apple gift cards.”

hey.paris/posts/app…

Love Nuphy. I ordered an Air75v3 as soon as I knew they existed, and broke with tradition by going with the super quiet Blush switches instead of my usual Browns. I think the mechanical keeb people in a past Slack would probably turn their noses up, but this is a nicely built piece of normie kit.

One little Highlander joke and these tankie shitbirds downvote me into a crater. Dicks.

I just read there’ll be a Pluribus season two and I feel uneasy. And my god, people, saying Carol isn’t curious isn’t a comment on, like, her sleuthing for a cure or whatever. Yes, she’s “curious” in that sense. No, she is not at all curious in another.

I’m going to experiment with VoiceNotes for a month. I wanted to see if I could cobble something similar together with Apple Voice Memos, Notes, and Apple Intelligence, but it doesn’t look like it’s there yet. I hooked it up to my action button today.

voicenotes.com

bricks, plaster, (me, a little)

The 14 along Foster

System change ahead. Oooo! Hope it’s socialism! 🚩

Christmas shopping downtown

the 19

Ending the week at Bruno’s.

As an IT person, FedEx’s “you’re viewing what our customer care team would share with you” message at the top of every delivery status page hits me in the feels.

It’s like when they’re reading Balin’s final words in Moria.

I was 8 & we were driving from Chicago to the Twin Cities when the Volvo’s pump blew. We got to an overpass oasis then a blizzard rolled in. We got into the presents & played Mastermind for hours.

www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/…

Night in Lents

Say what you will about Bluesky, they’re very proactive about swatting down thirst-trap accounts.

Twitter: Moderation? lol

Mastodon: Really who is to judge? Thirsty people need followers, too.

pixelfed: It’s monochrome. I’ll allow it.

Threads: Whatever. It’s a DAU.

I’m not really a SooC fetishist, but leaving the X half’s timestamp turned on made me feel kind of uncomfortable about my reflexive straightening and cropping when I imported the images: It created an obvious cant or shift in the position of the stamp.

I think I’ll leave it on. I’ve gotten so used to having megapixels to spare that any time I take pictures in the city I rush a little to minimize how much time I’ve got the camera to my face, and I just fix composition and straightness in post. Maybe this’ll shame me into rectitude. Back to the basics. Sent to the farm for fresh air and hard work.

I recently chatted with a college age person about photography and social media. He has a friend who is very considered in her Instagram posting and tries to take nice pictures. He mentioned always noticing when her phone goes horizontal because it means she is composing. I think – he didn’t say this but I think I understand the dialect – those are probably considered “aesthetic” pictures in the way “aesthetic” has become an adjective.

My informant, on the other hand, prefers an aesthetic. He sort of wants his pictures to look a little tossed off and messy. Capturing the moment is a higher priority than taking a nice picture, and enjoying the moment is a higher priority than capturing it. Or at least those are the values the picture is meant to convey. If his Instagram was too curated and his photos too considered, it’d be saying the wrong thing about him.

I can’t generalize too much because I probably only read a few dozen X half reviews, but “responds to the idea of spontaneous capture with little regard for the niceties of composition, lighting, and focus” was a definite class of reviewer, in some contrast to the “tourist/walkabout snapshot” people, and in stark contrast to the “staid urban still life” and “arty jank aesthete” people.

In every case, the little orange timestamp sort of pulls the image into a little persona. The oblivious party snapshot shooter, the film-burning tourist clicker, and the Goodwill $2 camera find, battery-held-in-with-electrical tape art crank. There’s a dweebishness to the time stamp – I associate it with a traveling companion who stole salt and sugar packets and secreted them into a ZipLoc “just in case” – but also maybe obliviousness, and also maybe disinterest in that particular detail in a “the best artists are a little slovenly because they’re laser focused on the muse” kind of way.

I think, as I get familiar with it and quit trying to understand how everything works I am going to end up drifting into the jankier end of the spectrum. I really enjoyed Jana Mänz’s Wabi Sabi Photo School few years ago. I put a little toy body cap lens on my X-Pro3 and lived with the fixed focus slow lens limitations. I still like seeing the things that came out of it once I got on a roll with it.

Which sort of raises the question, where does the creative spontaneity lie, anyhow? In a moment of abandoned capture, or the singlemindedness of letting the time stamp get cut off and tilted in pursuit of the thing that should look just so?

I got caught up on the (slightly dated) chatter about the Fujifilm X half and then decided to buy one. After a brief spin around the block, I think it is a keeper. The outrage it has generated is a little entertaining.

I have been buying stuff in the Instax ecosystem for years, including the assorted mechanical cameras, the digital hybrids, and a few of the printers.

On that side of the portfolio, they sort of nod over to the X series now and then, but stay grounded in the target demographic with big, colorful, rounded designs and simple supporting apps. They take a little advantage of the low expectations of their customers by introducing odd limitations with the digital hybrids, e.g. limiting obvious sharing options just to photos you have printed out of the camera (though if you decide to bother, you can always get them off the optional micro SD card, if you knew to install one in the first place).

I have a sweet tooth for toy and novelty cameras. There was a brief period in the early aughts where there were some genuinely fun designs, like one that was shaped like a thumb drive and came on a lanyard. I really loved the camera module on my Handspring Visor. For a brief period I had a shared photo album site set up I called “crapshoot,” and it was devoted to snapshots with bad early digital cameras.

I think because I learned photography as a supplemental skill to my small town reporting, I’ve always had a small inferiority complex about it. I learned how to do a very functional “will hold up well in a bad darkroom and newsprint environment” style. When I rediscovered how much I loved taking pictures, the thing I most loved about it was learning how to get into a particular frame of mind and treat photo outings more like a kind of walking meditation. So I went straight from “this is a task I do that involves a kind of simple craft” to “this relaxes me. I like what I see doing it.”

So I love taking pictures, but shy away from wanting or needing anyone to believe or think anything about what I’m producing. I make things that are to my taste. I like to have a supplement to my memories. Every now and then, when there’s an odd confluence of a story and me being around when it happens, I’m glad to capture it, but I am not really a street photographer in that sense, even if I sort of favor urban settings.

Toy cameras and bad cameras make it easier to always be taking pictures. They don’t attract a ton of attention, they don’t permit some kinds of rigor and control, and they do things/have artifacts that lower expectations – mine and everyone else’s.

Back to the X half, I really like the small subreddit for it, because you can see an array of styles and approaches. The “light leak effect + digital timestamp” people fully lean into the bit, and those are the features that seem most outrageous to the people who hate the X half (and probably hated Instagram filters). One commenter explicitly called out the softness of the images from the small sensor as a mark in its favor.

Reading assorted fora and subreddits, I see a number of people who are considering switching to the X half as their main camera, or comparing it alongside Fujifilm’s lower end ILCs as a simpler, more approachable option. One person sold a bunch of gear, spent some of the proceeds on an X half and just pocketed the remainder.

So there are people who take the camera very seriously despite thorough documentation of its limitations. I can’t get myself there: I want to have a camera that is in the “nice” tier, and that means the specs will probably start at M43, weather sealing, and a lot of control. I’d be very unhappy with an X half as my sole camera.

At the same time, look at the wider context of being a person who likes to take pictures, and the hustle-ification of everything. I’ve sold a few prints to people who’ve asked for them because I use SmugMug to host and it’s dead simple to turn on the cart and do literally nothing to sell a print at cost. I auctioned a few off for MetaFilter a few years ago, too. But when people ask if I want to make the whole thing into a side hustle, I’m a little resistant: When I restarted my writing career in the late ’90s, it took a lot of the joy out of writing for me, and it took a few years after I was done doing it for a living to be able to write without feeling a certain dull resentment.

Where photography is concerned, I just packed up the last of a big lens and body sell-off. A lot of it was gear I acquired because I was curious about a certain style of photography I thought a given lens would benefit, or because a certain body had some feature that would get me this or that thing in the pictures I took.

I feel immensely relieved about being down to a single “real” body and a few lenses for the kind of photography I continue to do despite all the side quests. I have two other bodies and two lenses: One’s my Fujifilm X-Pro3, which I feel very attached to. I kept my 23mm and 35mm Fujicrons to go with it. I am not sure it’s forever, but I didn’t like the thought of parting with it. The other body is my old X-T2. I don’t shoot with it anymore, but I have a sentimental reason to hold on to it. Some part of me wants to keep a foot partially in that world, and I’m just going with that.

But again, back to the X half, which is also in the collection now: I think I understand why someone would consider it as a main camera, because it’s a low-pressure device. There’s only so much it can do for you, and only so many choices you can make with it outside the act of simply shooting with it. I’ll spoil my first impressions by also saying that people have called it “plasticky” but it has enough heft and solidity that it feels “real.”

First impressions

Taking it out tonight to put a few dozen shots through it before I met Al for dinner, I noticed a few things:

It really is very small. Easily jacket pocketable. Close to “pack of largish playing cards” size. People keep posing it alongside an X100 and it is hard to explain, but when you take a picture of them next to each other, it somehow doesn’t convey how small this thing looks and feels in real life.

It feels very solid. Dense. There’s a sense of weight to it.

People complain about not being able to see the little indicator LED to the left of the viewfinder. I was able to. By default the camera is set to center focus, and I could tell when it had lock when I composed through the viewfinder.

Where autofocus is concerned, since it does center focus out of the box and offers no AF feedback through the OVF (besides the green lock light to the side), you can just sort of treat that as liberating and do the old “focus and recompose” thing with it. I once read an extensive treatise with pixel-peeping proof of why that is bad, and it was early enough in my time with autofocusing digital cameras that I sort of internalized “compose, move the focus point; don’t focus and recompose.”

Once I realized that the half would utterly thwart any focus perfectionism, I just muttered a cheerful “well, fuck it” to myself and got on with focusing and recomposing.

(On reflection, this was a problem I had with the Ricoh GR IIIx. I had a little OVF that went in the hotshoe, but didn’t have center AF set up. It was annoying. And stubbornly dense on my part. Because I had way too many cameras, it was easy to just set the Ricoh aside and not try to work with it. If all my gear disappeared tomorrow and I woke up to a GRIII on the kitchen table, I’d re-order the OVF, set it to center focus, and use that for all my street photography. I’d bother with EVF and focus point setting for, like, portraits or things where nailing focus really matters. Not for “f8 and be there” sorts of deals.

I was a little leery about the fact that it is all touch/slide control. It’s perfectly responsive. Much better than the old XF-10. The screen(s) are readable despite being so small. Enough to compose with and quickly review. You can pinch/spread to zoom in and out of an image.

There’s very little to control. You have a grain setting, an exposure control knob, an aperture ring, a simple Auto ISO function, a few autofocus modes, and face detection. There are no tone or saturation settings. You can manage white balance. You get a bunch of film simulations and a bunch of special effects. I think the color may be goosed a little but I can’t be sure.

I think there’s enough there to make nice jpegs. Not enough to go into a super deep rabbit hole.

I haven’t yet done a “roll” of film in the film mode.

The app pairs with the camera pretty reliably. Downloading pictures from camera to phone is as slow here as it is ever with any app/camera combo, so that’s what a USB-C SD card adapter is for. I did a firmware update with the app when I got it home and it was painless.

Now what?

Well, I have this thing. It was $200 off, which made it pretty hard to ignore. I am not going to return it. I don’t even have a twinge of remorse. I sold off so much gear that this was a small percentage of the proceeds, and it truly is what I wanted the Instax hybrids to do, meeting me on the X series side of the product line while being simple and fun. So, Fujifilm granted me my wish and I’m gonna go with it.

I don’t imagine it to be a travel camera, exactly. That’s the OM-3. But it’s a fine downtown camera, a running errands camera, karaoke night camera, etc. etc. Too small to not just bring along where I might balk with the OM-3. Just toss it in a sling or stuff it in a pocket and know I won’t have to suffer the indignity of taking pictures with my phone. Seems okay.

New office art.