Andy Matuschak nails it in a series of entries on his site. A couple of good examples: The most effective readers and thinkers I know don’t take notes when reading | People who write extensively about note-writing rarely have a serious context of use: In fact, the negation almost seems true: most note-taking fanatics seem to actually be quite ineffective thinkers. and… Many bloggers and “life-hackers” have made a full-time job of suggesting how you should organize your journal, or how you should most effectively “Write about what you read.

Kelly and Jess (2009). Hasselblad 501C/M Acros 100" Kelly and Jess (2009). Hasselblad 501C/M Acros 100 I ran into the above photo from 2010 and it jumped right out at me. I am a huge fan of the way the Zeiss lenses on the Hasselblad render, but this one had a little extra something. I dug out the original negative and of course it was Acros 100. I didn’t realize I was missing Acros after they stopped making it but now I wish I had more of it.

Editors. I try them all, so now I’m trying Nova, from the artists at Panic. The idea of a freshly-built, all-native macOS text/code editor is exciting. I think people overreact to the oddities of Electron apps, but a fast, lean, “real” Mac app is still refreshing. I have only used Nova for about an hour, including to write this post, but my first impression is that it’s fast, clean, pretty, and a pleasant, more Mac-like alternative to VS Code.

Today, I deleted the Adobe apps from my devices. This was not due to some sort of protest or reaction to policy or subscriptions fatigue or anything like that. I did it because I needed to make a decision about how I manage and process my photos. I wrote just a week ago about how I’m going to be using only Lightroom because I couldn’t deal with the combination of Lightroom and Lightroom Classic.

In January, 2018 I wrote this: Yet, I continue to learn, discover, laugh, share, and interact with interesting and generally wonderful people on Twitter every day. At that time, I decided to continue using Twitter, but I’d significantly pruned back my feed. Disabling retweets, unfollowing negative people, unfollowing brands, all made Twitter more useful than not. However, I’m not so sure I can continue spending time on Twitter.

I’ve finally taken my film negatives out of the moving boxes and given them proper space on shelves in my office. I don’t know why I bother, since I almost never actually look at them. Maybe I’m just comforted knowing they’re right there. I wish I would have been more consistent in how I’ve filed them over the years. I’ve used hanging folders, individual sleeves, and several different types of binders Currently I’m using binder sleeves with integrated contact sheet holders in archival binders, but things got a bit messy there for a while.

Baty.net has been a Hugo-managed static site for a few years now. I’ve been using Netlify for hosting this latest iteration, but I thought I’d give Vercel (formerly Zeit) a try. Getting things running with Vercel was simple and worked very well. The site was at least as fast or faster as it was on Netlify. This was encouraging. One downside of these services is that it takes a little time to build and deploy sites.

I don’t like having so many subscriptions, but I’m losing interest in maintaining servers and apps, so I’m now using the Commento- hosted version instead of the self-hosted version for comments. I’ve looked at other options but I don’t love any of them, so I’m sticking with Commento for now. My new theme supports it out of the box, so all it took was for me to pay for a subscription and now Commento is managing comments for me for the next year.

The new Lightroom is too simple, and Capture One Pro is too disconnected from everything, so I want to use Lightroom Classic, which kind of falls in the middle. I love Capture One Pro, but I thought I’d try using Lightroom Classic and set up catalog sync so that the “keepers” end up synced to Lightroom Desktop (or is it “CC” or just “Lightroom” I can never remember?). Anyway, this was supposed to allow me the power of “real” Lightroom (aka Lightroom Classic) along with the convenience of sync-everywhere and editing on mobile.

Too often I miss making a good photo by just a little

I use org-journal for keeping my personal journal. My first entry was made on December 20, 2016 and I’ve made nearly 600 entries since then1. Most months usually do consist of a couple dozen entries, and it’s important to me that I preserve them. One reason for using a text-based format like Org mode is that it’s portable, flexible, easy to back up, and likely to last a while. Still, I don’t trust anything digital to last forever, so I print my entries each month.

I know it’s probably wrong. The whole point of 4x5 film is making giant enlargements. That’s not what I do. I make contact prints from 4x5 negatives onto 5x7 paper. There’s no cropping, and they are sometimes a little crooked, but I love them.