Category: Micro

Olympus getting out of the camera business

Sad news, but was inevitable really. Years ago, when I was looking at upgrading my Pentax setup, I asked my father, a even more of a camera nerd than me, whether I should go Olympus or Fuji. He said Fuji. I asked him why. His reply: Olympus makes technically impressive cameras, but they lacked the soul of Fuji.

After a few years of using a Fuji, I have to agree.

3 years ago, I got rid of my main Facebook account. Instagram, about 18 months ago. Among Facebook’s troika of apps that have had a hold on my life, only WhatsApp remains and it’s proving the trickiest to get rid off.

Over the last year or so, I have managed to convince family to talk to me either on Telegram, Signal or iMessage. It’s been tough going; I often don’t get to participate or hear of things because I am the outlier and it’s a chore for them to tell me via non-WhatsApp methods. But I am stubborn and insistent enough for this to work.

It’s been harder to negotiate this with friends. Most of them are on Telegram or Signal, but their first choice of contact remains WhatsApp. Things get testy when I don’t respond there because I choose not to. I reply to them on the other apps with the required context, but of course they don’t check these often. Then there are groups formed with an extended set of friends and other folk. These are less important to me and I wouldn’t miss much if I left, but some groups have really good conversations that have led to lots of learning and introspection.

The trickiest bunch to figure out is work related. Not my colleagues, who thankfully have remained steadfastly email first, but the extended, external set of people my job requires me to work with. Most Indians have a poor sense of communication boundaries, so even if you insist that you are to be reached only via email, you will be reached via whatever method is convenient to them. And that is almost always WhatsApp. On many occasions, I chose not to respond to these messages, but all that it did was to cause friction and make work difficult. So I gave up and started responding, with constant reminders to switch elsewhere.

There’s a constant nag in my head that I should go nuclear and delete the account and let those who really want to reach out to me figure it out. But I fear that most people will simply not take that effort and that without those conversations I will be poorer.

I wish there were easier answers to this.

Is Dark Mode Such A Good Idea?:

I’ve decided to stop using dark mode across all of my devices, because research suggests that going to the dark side ain’t all that.

As has been pointed out, there is research that shows the inverse is also true. I am firmly team light, with certain exceptions, because I prefer reading dark text on light background. I find the reverse very jarrring and breaks my flow of reading.

Exceptions: When working on photos, I prefer dark UI because the contrast between image and background is more pronounced and makes me judge the colour and highlights separation better.

I am not a huge fan of brutalist inspired design, most of all in typopgrahy. But these are strange, ragged times and I am increasingly being drawn to the straight, sharp, weirdly flattened and disjointed letterforms. Especially on fonts like Syne and Bagnard.

I have a couple of side projects that are ongoing and I just might switch up their designs to see if these will work.

I keep revisiting this piece on Farnam Street to remind myself on the work required to have an opinion:

The difference between the people who do the work and the people who just reel off memorized opinion is huge. When you do the work, you can answer the next question.

Sometimes, magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.

Teller

Via Dan Cohen:

A reminder that the Digital Public Library of America has thousands of high-quality ebooks in EPUB format to download to e-readers, as well as millions of digitized public domain and other freely available books.

Reading Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet.

Alain de Botton on why we should all value pessimism more:

It’s time to recognize how odd and counterproductive is the optimism on which we have grown up. For the last 200 years, despite occasional shocks, the Western world has been dominated by a belief in progress, based on its extraordinary scientific and entrepreneurial achievements. But from a broader historical perspective, this optimism is an anomaly. Humans have spent the greater part of their existence drawing a curious comfort from expecting the worst. In the West, lessons in pessimism derive from two sources: Roman Stoic philosophy and Christianity. It may be time to remind ourselves of a few of their lessons—not to add to our misery but to alleviate our injured surprise and sorrow.