I was supposed to sell the Leica SL once the SL2-S arrived. I almost did it, too. It’s technically still listed for sale in a couple of places, but I’m not ready to get rid of it yet. I mean just look at it.

The Leica SL is five years old and still a wonderful camera. If I’m being honest, the brand new SL2-S is better, but not that much better. I’m keeping the original because it’s awesome and it’s worth more to me to have around than the money I could get for it. This calculus could change, of course, but it’s kind of amazing that I have an extra SL available. I don’t see the APO-Summicron-SL 35mm ever coming off the SL2-S, so it’s great that I can keep one of the M primes or the Zoom lens on the SL without having to switch lenses.

Another benefit of keeping the SL is that I can take it places I might not take the newer one. It seems silly to call the SL my “beater” camera but that’s how I’m thinking of it. If I drop or lose or have the SL2-S and Summicron stolen, I’m out a very significant amount of money. With the SL and cheaper lens it would still really hurt, but less. The SL has GPS built in and the SL2-S does not, which is handy for if and when I actually do go places again.

Leica SL with 35mm Summicron-M ASPH

I no longer have a camera to use for scanning film , since I sold all my Fuji gear. I’m thinking about finding a cheap Nikkor macro and adapter and using the SL for the scanning station. Not an ideal use for such a fine camera, but should work well.

And finally, I get a little emotional about cameras. I sold the M10-P and hate myself for it, even though it was necessary at the time. I’m thinking that if I don’t have to sell the SL, why not keep it around for a while?

I have had thoughts about finding a used Leica Monochrom. If I get serious about that I’d need to sell the SL to help fund the M. In the meantime, the SL won’t go to waste.

UPDATE (February 24, 2021): I sold the SL. Could not resist trying a Q2 Monochrom.

February 8, 2021 Leica Misc Photography Reply by email

It only takes a few seconds to write something down in a notebook, and look what it gets you. It gets you an immutable, permanent record of something in a cool, personally unique format. It produces a physical artifact that will last for generations.

For a few years, I recorded each movie I watched and each book I read in a large notebook…just one line for each entry. But, as often happens, I was sucked into doing it digitally instead because convenience or search or whatever. This is a shame because what do I get for having a text file or Roam graph with a bunch of movies listed? I get a boring, digital, ephemeral text file that doesn’t really exist anywhere as a thing.

I really want to have that thing. But I kind of also want a searchable, sharable record at the same time. So, I did some math.

Let’s say that it takes 2 whole minutes to go get the notebook, record a book or movie in it, and put the notebook back on the shelf. And let’s estimate that I read two books each month and watch 4 movies each week. That’s what, 18 entries per month. Assuming I enter each one as it happens, that’s 36 minutes per month. In reality, I probably enter everything all at once each week rather than one thing at a time. This knocks it down to maybe 10 or 15 minutes per month.

I think I can find an extra 15 minutes per month for such a lovely permanent record. And if I can find another 15 minutes I can record everything digitally as well, for when I want something to search.

February 2, 2021 Notetaking Reply by email

It was fun setting up a Pi-hole on my home network. I learned some stuff, found an excuse to play with another Raspberry Pi, and got network-wide ad blocking as a bonus. The whole thing cost next to nothing and played to my nerdy tendencies.

The problem with my nerdy tendencies is that they come and go. For months the Pi-hole just sat silently in the corner and did its thing. Sometimes the best computers are the ones you forget are there. But then something goes wrong, or I want to upgrade, or some other event requires me to get in there and do something. After so long since not doing anything with the Pi-hole, I forgot how to do anything with it. I try to take good notes, but always miss something and end up flailing about online frustrated and looking for help.

Enter NextDNS, “The new firewall for the modern Internet.” A couple of clicks and it was configured before I knew it. I installed the app on my Mac(s) and iPhone and everything just worked with almost no effort on my part. I don’t remember the last time something that I expected to be complicated turned out to be so simple.

I now have the functional equivalent of a Pi-hole but with none of the “joy” of managing a Pi-hole. I have better things to do with my time, so this is great for me.

NextDNS is free for up to 300,000 queries/month. I knew I would blow past that so I signed up for a very reasonable $19.99/year.

I’ve had no issues after the first couple of weeks, and blocking seems to be at least on par with what I was getting with the Pi-hole. So far, I love this service.

January 30, 2021 Software Reply by email

I’ve played on and off with twtxt a little and keep the feed out here: http://tilde.club/~jbaty/twtxt.txt. Here’s a snippet of my old twtxt.txt file…

2017-10-15T08:45:06-04:00   Hello, this is a test from twtxt
2017-10-15T08:54:53-04:00   Testing the post_tweet_hook to see that it copies the file to my server
2017-10-15T16:24:10-04:00   Fun with text tools today https://www.baty.net/2017/some-text-based-things-today/
2017-10-16T07:17:40-04:00   Good morning, several people!

It’s a fun, simple idea; just a text file as social media feed. I’m already spread pretty thin online so it’s only been an occasional toy, but of course someone (James Mills, aka @prologic) is trying to make using the format easier and more approachable by wrapping it in a web UI. Here’s his description from the about page

Technically twtxt.net is a twtxt client in the form of a web application. You are viewing an instance of this software at twtxt.net. twtxt.net allows you to make small posts in a simple easy way without privacy concerns, advertising, tracking or the fear of censorship. Think of twtxt as somewhat like Twitter™ but unlike Twitter™ twtxt and twtxt.net are designed to be decentralised.

James was kind enough to give me my own “Pod” at baty.twt.social and I’ve been tinkering with it for a few days.

I haven’t spent much time with twtxt.net yet, but it’s been fun writing short posts knowing that the underlying format is open, portable, and easy to deal with. There’s no telling where any of this will go or whether it has any chance of putting a dent in the other established networks, but I’m rooting for it.

A couple things I’d like to see. First, the web UI appears heavily mobile-weighted and I’d like to see a more concise layout for desktop. Second, there seem to be a lot of “mentions” in my feed whose purpose is unclear to me, e.g. FOLLOW: @twtxt from @jack using twtxt/0.1.0@988f2a7.

I expect that discoverability, cross-server mentions, and conversations will continue to be improved, making the whole thing an increasingly-viable alternative to, say, Twitter. It’s awesome that people are working on this stuff.

January 30, 2021 Social Reply by email

simple [ sim-puhl ], adj. Having few parts or features; not complicated or elaborate.

I talk a big game about keeping things simple, but I rarely follow my own advice.

Before restarting my computer, I usually quit all open apps. This morning I noticed how many that was. I didn’t count them, but it was a metric shit-ton of apps. And there was a lot of feature overlap.

So today I made a few changes to the lineup, spurred on by a desire to reduce the number of apps I need open and to consolidate where things are kept. You know, I wanted to keep it simple. 😆

Here’s what changed.

• OmniFocus for tasks. I had tasks everywhere (Curio, Emacs, paper notebooks, Things, Reminders, Roam, etc.) That all happened organically, but is unsustainable and crazy-making. At first I thought I’d move it all into Things again, but when there’s lots going on, OmniFocus is the appropriate answer, so I took the opportunity to start with an empty database and migrated everything I’m supposed to do from the other places into OmniFocus.
• TheBrain for projects. I’ve been trying to keep work stuff out of my Roam database, and had been using a combination of Org mode and Curio and DEVONthink. I’ve bailed on both Org mode and Curio and put it all into TheBrain. TheBrain version 12 does a great job with notes and backlinks and of course links everything to everything. Giving it a go for project and people management.
• Day One for journaling and daybook. I’d been journaling in Org mode and Day One and sometimes Roam. No more. If I want to write about either the large swaths of my day or the minutiae, it goes in Day One. I keep a few separate journals in Day One. The big ones are Journal for photos and general journaling and Daybook for the minutiae about the day.
• Roam is for topic journals. I’ve been limiting my use of Roam to mostly things I want to learn about or take notes on. Quotes, links, ideas, etc. Roam is good at that.
• Nova for writing and editing. For manipulating text, there’s nothing like BBEdit, but what I do with text most often is write and edit Markdown files. For this, I’m using Nova, from Panic. It’s just nicer for that sort of work.

I’m writing it down because it’s fun seeing how things evolve. It remains to be seen if I need to write a new post next week about this.

January 25, 2021 Apps Workflow Reply by email

Having my own instances of things is cool. Websites, apps, databases, all mine and completely under my control. Except I’m beginning to wonder whether I want that control.

I’m down to 2 instances at DigitalOcean. The first is my “static” server which runs the Caddy web server. I keep all of my static sites and files there. Until yesterday, this site was there, too. The other server runs Ghost, the engine for my CopingMechanism blog.

Over the weekend I made a bunch of changes to this blog, and in the process moved hosting back to Netlify. I’ve gone back and forth on this at least a half-dozen times. It’s such a relief to simply do a git push and have Netlify grab the repo, build the site, and pour it into their CDN. I don’t have to worry about a thing. And yet, before long I always miss worrying about the things.

Having a folder of HTML files served up with a simple web server is so comforting. Hosting is a breeze on cheap hardware. I have access, direct access, to everything about the site. I have server logs that can analyze traffic and look for 404s and such. I can put my arms around it. This is also comforting.

And what about other apps and services? I still have a free tier of Cloudron on an EC2 instance running a photo gallery. Cloudron makes me want to host my own stuff. It’s so easy. But a while ago I’d decided against having to manage a bunch of separate self-hosted apps, so I’m supposed to be phasing that out.

But what about?… :)

I don’t even remember which app I considered self-hosting when I began writing this post. One minute I’m trying to get rid of everything I have to manage and the next I’m pulling it all back in.

Well this ends with no resolution whatsoever, sorry. I told you I couldn’t decide.

January 19, 2021 Hosting Reply by email

Or maybe it’s about drawing (semi-arbitrary) physical boundaries in digital spaces: I need ways to differentiate between the digital equivalent of talking to someone in the street vs. at a restaurant vs. in my house, and drawing the line between diff apps lends a bit of physicality to those relationships

Nadia Eghbal, 2020–12–09

This is exactly the way I use messaging apps.

January 17, 2021 Social Reply by email

You know what I hate? I hate when I’m reading a nice article or blog post or whatever and the author mentions something that I might be interested in and helpfully links to it. but when I click the link, I find myself staring at an embedded audio player that says “1:39:06” somewhere on it.

Well shit, it’s a podcast. Never mind, I guess.

I mean, I do want to learn about the thing, but to do that I don’t want to wade through two minutes of unnecessary intro music followed by ten minutes of two dudes humble-bragging and laughing at their own jokes, then a Squarespace ad, and then 30 minutes of stuff I’m not interested in. Or 75 minutes. Or 10 minutes. How am I supposed to know where it is without listening to the whole stupid thing?

It’s the same with video content, but at least with video I can often scrub through visually and get close to what I came for. With audio I’m stuck either click-guessing or listening at like 3x and neither of those are good options.

I want anything not intended as entertainment to be published as a blog post. That way, I can easily skim it or search it to find what I came for. I want to be able to copy the useful bits for my own use later.

Many people love podcasts, obviously, and I wouldn’t want to take that away from them. So technically I don’t really want them to go away, but on the other hand, podcasts bury good information in audio, making it hard to find and use.

Until more podcasts contain decent show notes and indexed links, I’d prefer text, thanks.

January 16, 2021 Media Reply by email

My last house had a proper darkroom. It was a little janky, but there was a big sink, room for three enlargers, a wet side, a dry side, etc.

When I moved into my new house, I originally planned to turn an extra room in the basement into a shiny new darkroom. That didn’t happen, so I’ve been using the bathroom instead. It works fine.

Here’s my fancy darkroom.

The basement bathr…ehem…darkroom

The worst part of the whole thing is that tiny faucet. At minimum I should put in a tall one. As it is now, I need to fill a 1qt measuring cup, and then use that to fill containers. It’s a pain. The HomePod is nice because I can just tell it what to play in the dark.

Print washer

I don’t have a fitting for the faucet to run a hose into the washing tray, so I just let the faucet pour into it.

Film and print dryer

I ran some string across the shower to use as a hanger for drying prints and film. Works great.

Enlarging side

Here’s the meat of the operation. This is the bathroom closet, converted into the “dry side”. There’s room for this Leitz Focomat V35 enlarger. The V35 is a fantastic piece of equipment, but only enlarges 35mm film. I’m considering something that can do medium format as well. I have two 4×5 enlargers in storage but there is no way they’d fit. I can, however, make 4×5″ contact prints on 5×7″ paper. I love making those, so that should do.

Paper and supplies

There’s room for all sorts of photo paper and chemicals. I’ve only been making enlargements up to 8×10″ so some of this is no longer needed but I can’t bring myself to get rid of it. I also store my film scanner here.

Anyway, that’s it. That’s my darkroom. I was planning to not shoot any film in 2021 but I don’t think that’ll stick, so I dusted everything off and mixed up a fresh batch of chemicals in preparation for spending more time here.

January 12, 2021 Misc Photography Reply by email

It’s not that I made a promise or anything, but I had no intention of shooting film in 2021. I put away my scanning rig, stored the chemicals, and placed the cameras on a shelf.

I’ve been so excited by the new Leica SL2-S that I figured I’d just spend my time with that camera for a while. You know how I am, though. I picked up the M6 and saw that it was loaded with film and couldn’t help myself. That camera just begs to be used, once you touch it.

Anyway, I made a few mirror self-portraits, annoyed the dog, and documented the state of my desk. The usual mundane stuff one shoots when bored and holding a camera during a pandemic in winter.

I finished the roll of Tri-X, shot at ISO 800, and processed it in HC-110. I love HC-110 because it lasts forever on the shelf, and is easy to mix and use. I’m no longer experimenting with various developers and processes. They all look basically the same to me, and HC-110 is cheap and easy.

It remains to be seen how much film I shoot, but I’ve dusted off the gear and I’m ready for whenever the mood strikes.

January 10, 2021 Film Photography Reply by email