purisubzi

Category: Tech

  • Churn

    The sort of grey, monotone day in Bangalore where the default state of being is to wonder where the year has gone and reflect on a variety of things. I’ve been thinking of the past month or so though. It has a been a time of change, both expected and unexpected.

    Personal

    A lot of my energies went into personal and family matters. I won’t get into all the details, but as a family, we’ve been dealing with multiple deaths within a short span of time, a major health scare and seeking closure on a number of financial deadlocks. For reasons unbeknownst to me, I was thrust into the middle of many of these — to sort, convince, cajole and comfort others. Normally, I wouldn’t mind, but there was a giant, urgent gorilla occupying space in my head and heart needing equal or more attention at the same time.

    Work

    That giant gorilla was work. I work in an industry that is closely coupled with how people spend money, and as everyone knows, prices have risen and spending has slowed in the past few months. That meant some teams at work needed to be restructured with a shift in focus on the things we do. The inevitable followed, as we had to ask about a dozen people to leave. Such conversations are never easy, and I have had my fair share of them in the past, but this time it felt different, and personal. Over the past year, the team had built a great product, but more importantly learned to deliver on time consistently, quietly and without any drama. It all felt very much like everyone was giving a shit and the needle was moving.

    So it was a shock for everyone to process. I am still somewhat in shock, despite having a couple of weeks go by. Will I get better? In time of course, but I don’t think that feeling of unfairness of it all will ever go away.

    Presence

    The third thing that’s been on my mind has been my online presence. I haven’t been a heavy Twitter user for a while now, but despite that I am not immune to the all the drama surrounding it. That place occupies a special place in my heart. It bought me friends, jobs, love, and immense learning. I won’t abandon the place, until it does really go away. But these events did force me to think about my online presence.

    I have this blog of course. I have had it some form of the other since the mid-2000s, switching platforms and hosts many times. The current incarnation in WordPress was primarily driven by my need to make it easier to share my words and pictures (which I think I have succeeded because I am one of those rare people who likes the new editor.) A second reason was also to slowly attach a store to sell prints of my work. That endeavour has gone nowhere mostly because of laziness and covid disrupting businesses of people I wanted to work with.

    I intend to write more here, and keep tinkering with the format because WordPress now makes it really easy and intuitive to do so.

    I have a presence on Micro.blog and Mastodon. The later I just setup, mostly to protect my user handle at the primary server. I’ve been on Micro.blog for a few years now and I really like it. It is an ocean of calm whenever I visit, and if the infrastructure that powers it is in the mood! And lately, it has been very moody. I get that the team behind the service is small and they are very deliberate about doing things a certain way, but as a user, it really does put a dampener on things when sharing takes ages, timelines don’t load etc… I don’t intend to quit it either, but perhaps may not visit and share as often.

    Tools

    The fourth and perhaps the least consequential and most navel gazy of all is use of software tools and services. Like a true nerd, I think about this a lot more than I should. If anything, these past few weeks have been worse!

    I thought long and hard about my Setapp subscription and in the end, decided to follow through and not renew. The only app I that I was using regularly was Ulysses and PDF Squeezer. I used Noteplan too for while, which would have justified the subscription, but I switched to taking work and meeting notes on my iPad using Goodnotes because it allowed me to be present a lot more.

    I also decided not to upgrade my Capture One 21 licence to the latest. Capture One is my preferred tool for processing photos, but the new features aren’t that useful to me. The existing version still runs fantastically well on my M1 MacBook Air. I did add Darkroom to my toolset because I find it far more useful and much more intuitive to use on the iPad than Capture One.

    I still have some more ways to go before I optimise my current toolset and the costs associated with it, but it has been a decent start.

  • Lines

    For someone who really likes strong lines (leading, intersecting, away) in his photographs, I’ve somehow never taken to architectural photography. More than a decade or so ago, I was a production assistant to a very famous architectural photographer from Bombay, and using skills learned on that job, I managed to score a couple of small gigs in the field. Beyond that, I never developed the thinking and framing muscles for such kind of photography.

    iPhone 13 Pro, 77 mm, f2.8, 1/149 sec. Processed in Darkroom

    All that seems to have changed in the past few months. The primary catalyst seems to have been my recently acquired iPhone 13 Pro and its 77mm ‘telephoto’ lens. Now, most architectural photographers would simply dismiss such a focal length for taking pictures of buildings as a joke, but I really, really like the medium compression such a lens engenders. It is not the sharpest lens either, but there is a certain kind of look it has, especially when shot using RAW.

    iPhone 8 Plus, 56 mm, +0.2 ev, f2.8, 1/120sec. Processed in Darkroom

    A secondary reason is that I’ve been really enjoying developing RAW images using the Darkroom app. My Capture One subscription is up for renewal soon, and I am seriously debating dropping it in favour of Darkroom, which at a quarter of the price is quite a steal. My only hesitation stems from the fact that Apple does not handle my Fuji X-T20’s lossless compressed RAW files and I usually shoot in that mode to save space on SD cards (Darkroom uses the built-in Photos app as its library container and browser).

    iPhone 13 Pro, 77 mm, f2.8, 1/99 sec. Processed in Darkroom

  • Trying Out The WordPress Full Site Editor

    At the outset, let me say this: I love the block editor. I am possibly one of the few people to unequivocally say this. I came back to WordPress after a few years in the static site generator world (Jekyll, Hugo etc.) because the Gutenberg editor in WordPress made it easy for me to layout posts (and pages) exactly the the way I wanted. No more futzing around custom styles on random pages, keeping track of which page had which css and so on.

    I typically start a post in a text editor (these days Ulysses, BBEdit before), flesh out some bits and leave the rest as an outline. I then transfer this over to WordPress and finish the writing and editing. That’s how much I like the block editor.

    So I was extremely eager to try out the new full site editor and themes that come along with it. It seemed like a perfect Sunday afternoon project.

    So, pouring myself a nice beer, I sat down and started playing around with the Twenty Two theme. It was initially very confusing to navigate and figure out where all the knobs and buttons were, but I chalked that down to me not being familiar with the changes. But ten minutes in, I still hadn’t figured out how to make a simple change — have all my posts centred on the page, but keeping the text aligned to the left. To make matters worse, the default post listing template only showed excerpts and not full posts, something I absolutely do not like. I kept flailing and flailing. Finding help on the topic was next to impossible because almost all WordPress topics everywhere on the web is SEO’d to hell.

    After forty-five minutes, I gave up and reverted my theme.

    I really, really want to like the new full site editing features, but at the moment it is a disaster. WordPress have a real challenge on hand to make it easier to work with. I am rooting for them as I believe the feature will help a lot of people design better websites and maintain them without much external help.

  • On The Bridge

    On a cold but stunning December morning, a lone commuter on the Auranga river bridge walks towards Valsad station.

    I love this picture for many reasons, including the absolutely beautiful colours. Up until this time I’d been a film shooter, staying away from digital cameras. This was 2005 and I was convinced that film was better. I’d shot a few times using a borrowed Sony digital camera and the results simply didn’t match up to what I wanted. My friend Samit, who makes fabulous maps and the finest atlas on the Indian Railways, was upgrading from his Canon A95. I’d seen his pictures from this camera and felt that finally this might be a good way to dip my toes in the digital camera world at last.

    And I was not disappointed. The A95 offered great controls and when exposed correctly, delivered fabulous results even in lowish light, something other cameras in its class didn’t. It was my gateway to digital cameras and I’ll be forever grateful.

  • NetNewsWiring

    I adore NetNewsWire. It’s the app that is always open when I am front of my Macs. It is rock solid, never crashes and barely sips resources. I do a majority of my reading and news discovery through it.

    But my NNW feeds tend to be text- and subject-heavy, not really suitable for reading on smaller screens or on the go. Which is why I never really installed the iOS version until a few weeks ago, when I decided to cut down on my Twitter usage even more. I added a few “light” feeds – fast moving, artsy, with lots of pictures. A sort of experiment in recreating the Twitter experience. So far, it’s been a great success.

    But it always kept nagging me that my macOS and iOS NNW didn’t speak to each other through iCloud (Yes, I am aware of sync services, but I can’t afford another subscription). So I was over the moon when Brent Simmons announced that version 6 on the Mac would ship with iCloud syncing and that the iOS version would soon follow.

    My “one true reader to rule them all” setup is coming true.

    In anticipation of all this, I spent time reorganising my feeds today. First, I added all the feeds on the iPhone to the “On My Mac” account on the MacBook. Then split them into three “density” folders – Light, Medium and Heavy. Each corresponding to the weight of the content and how much attention it will require of me to read. Then I created an iCloud account and moved all the folders and feeds there.

    For now, there are duplicate feeds on the phone and laptop, but this will temporary. When I iOS version ships, I’ll just delete local ones and synch the iCloud account.

    When everything is synched eventually, I will still mostly only read feeds in the Light folder, but there’s enough flexibility for me read the longer ones in case mood strikes and I am not anywhere near a laptop. And vice-versa when I want to just read something fun on the laptop.