Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
Last week I was invited to be a guest on a “tech-adjacent” podcast called Hemispheric Views. We spent an hour in a rolicking conversation about my involvement with BeOS, early days at Ziff-Davis, my love of Flickr and Glass and adventure photography, and other topics. I was super nervous but it turned out to be a blast. The episode dropped today and turned out very well! The hosts are a great group guys – sharp, with a wonderful sense of humor.
Listen here, or subscribe.
Whether we’re aware of it or not, we all benefit enormously from open source software. Most web servers and most browser engines are open source. The operating system that powers most internet servers is open source. Critical components of MacOS and Windows are open source. We the People are really good at making free software for each other.
But one thing open source hasn’t been able to do is to own and operate a platform like Twitter or Facebook or Reddit. It’s too expensive, and involves too many difficult challenges, like content moderation and resilience. The concept of federation addresses that gap in the open source world by saying “Rather than having one massive expensive server “instance” that runs everything, what if we could split a service up into thousands, or hundreds of thousands of small server instances that intercommunicate? This approach to service design is called “federation” and has a bunch of advantages:
Discovered this pretty well-hidden Flickr feature by accident and it’s such a time-saver, thought I’d share.
This is for people who post to Flickr from iOS, using the Share Sheet (i.e. from Lightroom Mobile or Apple Photos, you click the Share icon and select Flickr).
If you are in the habit of posting your images to both Instagram and Flickr, here’s where the time saver comes in: Make your Instagram post first, and copy the set of hashtags you created to the clipboard. Then, when you do your Flickr post, in step #1 above, just paste them from the clipboard (and delete). Voila! Now you don’t have to go through the process of adding tags on two different services.
Side tip: If you share from Lightroom Mobile via the Share Sheet, all of your Lightroom tags become Flickr tags automatically.
Felt like it was finally time to make a photo portfolio website, but didn’t feel comfortable with any of the usual options, so decided to hand-code one in Django, since that’s what I do. In the process, had a wild notion that I could do it all against the Flickr APIs (since all my stuff goes there anyway), and that I could create a portfolio site with no image uploading at all!
Built the site over the past couple of weeks (evenings). It’s low-tech (design-wise) but I’m pretty happy with it. There’s a brief architecture walk-through video on the About page, if curious. Felt good to code for fun rather than work for a change, even if it was relatively straightforward.
The source code is open source and available – pull requests welcome – but it’s for experienced Django developers only (probably not for the general public).
The site is here: https://shacker.net
Still recovering from an amazing week backpacking in the Ventana Wilderness east of Big Sur, and just finished recapping the adventure in a Medium piece, with plenty of photos. A week in the woods is spiritually different from five day hikes!
There’s also a separate Lightroom album with more photos that didn’t make it into the article here. Some of those are slowly trickling into a Flickr album here.
Experience of a lifetime, two years in a row!
I’ve been caught up in a protracted debate with Flickr users recently over the question of whether those stupid “Award Codes” amount to spam. Ended up making a survey and writing a piece for Medium:
I sometimes encourage photographers to consider (or re-consider) using Flickr as their primary photo platform. But it can take a while to find the really good stuff on Flickr, so some people get discouraged. So I’ve been casually maintaining a list of some of my favorite photographers on Flickr, which I encourage you to follow if you’re just getting started.
There are 60 million or so photographers on the platform, so obviously this list barely scratches the surface – these are really just some personal bookmarks I thought others might find useful. If you find an amazing profile there, leave a link in the comments!
I’ll update this list over time / as I bump into more outstanding photographers.
See also: Flickr Is No Ghost Town
Teo Kefalopoulos – Art of Photography
Justin Battermann Lightfoot | Flickr
snaps by Jogi Experience | Flickr
Mateu Terrats Miralles | Flickr
And there’s me – I’m shacker
Found it! A few weeks ago I caught an episode of Bay Curious where they talked about “The Lone Toilet†— a mysterious outhouse hanging out all by its lonesome in the marshes off Sears Point. At the time the episode was recorded, the reason for the toilet’s existence was apparently a mystery to everyone. Who built it? When, and why?
I had a general idea of where it was, but nothing specific. Headed out to explore the marshes along Hwy 37, keeping an eye out, but couldn’t find it. Did find a bunch cool bridges and antennae, and mini-murmurations of Starlings, but had given up on the outhouse. Then, while taking a shot under a bridge, turned back to the car and spotted a structure off in the distance. There it was!
Trudging through, I eventually found a plank someone had left to help visitors cross a deep rivulet, and was able to make my way out here. Seemed to be about 100 years old or so, and surrounded by absolutely nothing else.
Last night, I googled it and found this article, saying the mystery has since been solved – built by an eccentric sailor name of Fresh Air Dick (because he liked to sleep out in the air on his boat), who made his living carving wooden duck decoys. At the time, there was a marsh town called Tubs Island around here, but its remains have long since sunk beneath the mud. The outhouse was built in the 1920s – why it still stands when everything else sunk, I do not know.
Images shot with FujiFilm X-T3. Follow me on Flickr!
It’s been a hell of a year, everyone. The pandemic has affected everyone differently, but no one has been untouched by it. My personal therapy through the Quarantimes has been to explore the wonders of the Bay Area with a camera. 2020 was the year I finally made the switch from iPhone to proper cameras (for real this time). I put much of my spare time into learning about lenses, about the power and flexibility of the RAW format, and finally made the jump from Apple Photos to Lightroom. Also spent some of the time messing with editing apps like Snapseed, Tiny Planet, and RNI Aero. On the weekends, on hikes and bike rides, and on morning/evening dog walks, I explored every nook and cranny of this amazing place. I tried to make it a discipline to post one image to Flickr and Instagram in the morning before work, and another after work. Didn’t always succeed, but tried. Here are shots from Point Pinole, Albany Bulb, Berkeley Hills, Mare Island, Pt. Reyes, Guerneville, Alameda, Crab Cove, Tiburon, Morro Bay, and everywhere I landed. If you’re curious, yes, I’m very careful, always masked, almost always alone or well-distanced (I’m safe). Photography has been my therapy, my go-to, my geek-out, and a re-awakening of a long-dormant creative side. For better and for worse, here are some of the images I shot in the first year of the global pandemic. May all humans be vaccinated before we lose another soul. Can’t wait to see you all again.
I’ve gathered up most of the posted images from the first pandemic year in a Flickr album – a few samples embedded here.
One of the “buried treasures” of living in the SF Bay Area is discovering the strange remnants of WWII that still exist in remnant form. One of those I’ve been visiting lately is the Richmond Shipyards – an area spanning several acres of crumbling concrete piers and docs, old-school Mike Mulligan and the Steamshovel-era cranes, rusty tugboats, and the monolithic Art Deco / brutalist General Warehouse.
In their heyday, more warships were produced in these yards than anywhere else in America – as many as three per day (747 total). And the final stop before each ship set out to see was the General Warehouse – a four-story edifice full of ropes and stoves and beds and compasses and clocks and radar screens and everything else a ship needed to support a crew and carry out its mission.
Today, General Warehouse is still standing proud, though its sign has crumbled and there’s no getting inside (though one photographer did a few years ago). Anyway, a few shots from the yards one night last week. Amazing place.
