Luke's personal (hobby) web-log

Ten years ago this month, I quit my job in order to go to seminary. Here’s what I used to work on:

My job was to figure out how to avoid paying to fix them when they weren’t broken.

So I bought the Canon SX50 HS. I’ve got a lot of pictures on Flickr, so I’ll just embed this one:

It’s a spruce tree in my driveway, and I was standing about 50 feet from the bough you see here.

I put up a lot of examples of the amazing zoom on this beast. I also like the low-light capabilities.

I’m thinking of getting a FA-DC67A Ring Adapter. Obviously I don’t need a telephoto lens, but I might get a polarizing filter. It’s been a long time since I had a camera that could accommodate anything like that.

I’m shopping for a new camera. My trusty Canon Powershot A620 still works, but it is literally falling apart and can’t be trusted as my primary camera any more.

So I’m shopping. I’ve given some serious consideration to the Fujifilm FinePix HS35EXR and Nikon’s COOLPIX P510 and S9500, but what I keep coming back to is Canon’s PowerShot SX50 HS.

I’ve read a lot of reviews: DP Review, of course, and Wirecutter, but several other reviews as well.

One of the best things about shopping for cameras is that you can see what real people are doing with it. Take a look at Flickr’s Canon SX50 HS group.

I’ve always found CSS all but impossible to debug, so I use as little of it as possible. Here’s a tool that can help: csscss.

I’m so out of touch with media formats, I was still using ffmpeg instead of avconv. If you’re a clueless n00b like me, there are tools that just do it for you. One of them is FF Multi Converter.

This is just insanely cool. Watch the video and make a HyperLapse.

For the past several years, I’ve been developing and using (and developing some more) my own digital photography workflow and it kind of stinks. I’m intrigued by the idea of replacing it with something like Darktable. (Kudus: iLoveUbuntu.)

Years ago, I wrote part of what became Smaart. The part I liked best was the audio spectrogram feature. Today, I see there’s Spek, but it appears not to have the feature I was so pleased with myself for putting in Smaart. It makes me wonder if I could actually, for the first time in 2 decades, make a useful contribution to an FOSS project.

And finally, as a treat, watch this interview with Margaret Thatcher that Ann Althouse posted:

I’m sorry to learn of Margaret Thatcher’s death. But these quotes of hers made me smile again. Here are two:

‘I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.’

‘To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukaemia with leeches.’

I always used to enjoy watching Question Time when she was Prime Minister. (It was always fun watching her clobber Neil Kinnock, too.)

Apple has never impressed me with their ability to have two different devices synchronize with each other. But they’ve got plenty of hubris, so they keep trying. Take the app store. (Please!) Here’s what happens when I sync my iPad: it tells me I need to authorize my computer to sync to it, I authorize it, and then it tells me never mind, because the computer is already authorized.

OK. That explains it, then.

The original Affordable Care Act was only 2700 pages. So far, the various executive agencies have published 20,000 more pages of regulation to implement the act. So far. Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell’s office tweeted a picture that illustrates how the ACA is like an iceberg.

The part above water, is the law itself, and the regulations are the part underwater. Only the tip was voted on by our elected representatives in Washington.

Walter Russell Mead talks about liberalism 5.0. Mead is always worth reading, but I’m more interested in the death of liberalism 4.0 than in what follows it. Enjoy every small victory, because it is temporary. Dave Barry once said that no truly stupid idea ever dies: they keep coming back, like horror-movie zombies, to eat the brains of the living. That certainly describes liberalism.

A lawyer dissects the contract governing Bilbo Baggins’ employment in the Hobbit. The analysis is amusing, except it shows how difficult the lawyers have made it for non-lawyers to make agreements with each other. I know that interfering in every aspect of society is necessary to keep lawyers in their hand-made Italian loafers, but I’m tired of the drag on the economy these leeches represent. In a better society, we could name and shame people who rip us off (without fear of being sued for defamation) and then honest people could simply avoid doing business with bad actors.

Human eyes are unique in three ways (at least). This gives us the ability to communicate with each other in ways that no other animal is capable of doing.

And the ever-enjoyable Daniel Hannan argues (convincingly) against the proposition that the Oxford Union ought to occupy Wall Street. Even if you can’t stay for the whole thing, the first two minutes should be unobjectionable to pretty much everyone:

This next item won’t be news if you’ve ever tried to have a conversation with anyone in their twenties, much less someone in the #ows crowd, but we are raising a generation of deluded narcissists:

A new analysis of the American Freshman Survey…reveals that college students are more likely than ever to call themselves gifted and driven to succeed, even though their test scores and time spent studying are decreasing. Psychologist Jean Twenge, the lead author of the analysis, is also the author of a study showing that the tendency toward narcissism in students is up 30 percent in the last thirty-odd years.

The next generation may be narcissists, but they aren’t the first generation to be convinced in the absence of much evidence of their own intellectual awesome-sauce. Consider, for example, everyone in the entire post-War era:

The underlying assumption of brainstorming is that if people are scared of saying the wrong thing, they’ll end up saying nothing at all. The appeal of this idea is obvious: it’s always nice to be saturated in positive feedback. Typically, participants leave a brainstorming session proud of their contribution. The whiteboard has been filled with free associations. Brainstorming seems like an ideal technique, a feel-good way to boost productivity. But there is a problem with brainstorming. It doesn’t work.

Why are Pixar movies so good? According to John Lasseter, the reason is something you can replicate for your own creative work, namely:

Pixar’s in-house theory is: Be wrong as fast as you can. Mistakes are an inevitable part of the creative process, so get right down to it and start making them. Even great ideas are wrecked on the road to fruition and then have to be painstakingly reconstructed. “Every Pixar film was the worst motion picture ever made at one time or another,” Lasseter said. “People don’t believe that, but it’s true. But we don’t give up on the films.”

Watch this talk by the late Aaron Swartz, whom the government hounded until he committed suicide, where he explains how and why he helped stop SOPA. In addition to pointing out some of the problems with today’s copyright environment, and with the way our “two party” system is wholly-owned by the intellectual property industry, he also highlights how these laws keep shrinking the area in which people can exist without violating the law:

In the mid-1990′s I worked for a telecommunications firm that was trying to make a set top box for interactive television. (This was even as the internet was exploding. Read Michael Lewis’ The Next Next Thing to find out what the “B Team” was working on.) One of the things I spent a lot of time on was “software update.” We needed a way to securely update the operating software in the device, and we wanted to do it while connected to our network, because the cost to roll a truck and have a technician do it was prohibitive.

A few years later, I was working for a different company trying to innovate in the electrical power industry. (I know, it was hopeless. But I was young and naive.) Anyway, we had the exact same problem: securely updating the software in a networked device. It’s a problem that’s fraught with difficulties.

As it happens, both of those ventures flamed out, so I never got to be part of solving that problem. But this morning, as I was eating my oatmeal, I saw that someone else seems to be doing it:

Not only solved, but untethered. Yay Apple.

File this under Signs of the (Mayan?) Apocalypse: Rush Featured on NPR. Wow.

I recently saw Rush play a show in Atlanta. The crowd ranged in age from five to the mid-fifties, embracing both lank-haired teenage skateboarders and heart surgeons. And when the band launched into its ode to suburban anomie, “Subdivisions,” everyone got it. If you were a smart kid, you lived that song in your youth, and a little thing like academic tenure won’t make you forget it. And if you weren’t, you lived it too.

Update: D’Oh! My clever title was wrong. Fixed. Happy 21/12, by the way!