Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
I wrote a thing! Common advice for managing photo libraries is to “Keep everything, because you never know.” I have the opposite philosophy, and finally wrote it all down.
For Medium: The Minimalist Approach to Photo Collections
Paddling near some broke-down pilings at Rodeo, I suddenly realized there was an arrow stuck into one of them, probably shot from shore who-knows-when. I turned around and there was not a soul on shore, so I was fine, but then imagined what would have happened if I’d been there at the right time, and this sucker had gone through me. And that reminded me of the lyrics to Wings’ “Arrow”: “Ooh, baby, you couldn’t have done a worse thing to me / If you’da taken an arrow and run it right through me. Oooh.” And I love that song, so everything was fine.
I’m so excited! The editor of Fuji X Passion magazine invited me to write a travelogue with pictures, covering our time in Portugal. It took a week of evenings to put it together, and they did a ton of work on layout, EXIF data, etc. I think it came out nicely.
Well that was fun! A watercolor painter named Tom Vaughan on Mastodon contacted me a bit ago and asked whether it would be OK if he made a painting from one of my photographs (from Pierce Point Rd in Pt. Reyes with Paul Porter last November). I said yes, and this is what he posted in response today. He said in advance that he was an amateur and to not expect too much, but I think it’s lovely. He took some liberties, adding the tree and converting dusk to daylight, but that’s part of what makes it his own.
This image at Flickr.
Because crutches fully occupy both hands, you can’t carry a damn thing around the house. You never even think about it until suddenly you realize that you:
Which means you’re suddenly heavily dependent on friends and family. Knee-scooters leave your hands free, but only work if your injury allows for bending the knee (mine doesn’t). But it’s amazing how quickly your body and mind adapts and figures out new ways to do old things. Here are a few of the tricks I’ve figured out over the past week:
Coffee cups are out of the question. But if you fill a plastic squirt bottle with hot coffee, you can grip it in your teeth by the nozzle. Then find a plastic coffee cup to hook under one finger, under the crutch handle. Transport both to the next room, then squirt coffee from the bottle to the cup.
Using a backpack indoors is a huge help for transporting laptop, tablet, books and boxes from one place to the next.
For moving plates, plot out a trajectory through the house where two horizontal surfaces are a two-arm length from each other, and “hopscotch” the plate. Your quesadilla can move from one end of the kitchen counter to the other, then from there to the phone table, and from there around the corner to the light desk in the LR and from there to the coffee table. If you’re lucky enough to have a series of flat surfaces in proximity to each other, anyway. Then all you have to do is stop between each “step” and transfer the dish between arms to the next surface until the destination is accomplished. Huge hassle, but do-able.
Towels and clothes and other soft things can be draped around the neck and carried that way if the backpack isn’t handy.
Don’t be afraid to use crutches like giant chopsticks, to lift things a few feet away to you, or to drag something across the floor towards your feet. Way easier than going through the hassle and grunt of the one-legged stand-up.
Also worth learning: How to use crutches asymmetrically to help with “pivots” and turns. If you have an old house with narrow bathroom doors (like we do), learning to crabwalk sideways can be super helpful. Since you’ll need to pee in the middle of the night, get good enough at the crab walk to do this in the dark, half-asleep.
For the inevitable stairs, slow way the hell down. Falling down stairs is approximately the worst thing that could happen right now, and it’s not worth trying to move quickly. You’ve probably got one leg that needs to stay straight, so this will be a one-leg-at-a-time maneuver. Upstairs is much easier than downstairs. When going downstairs, plant both crutches on the next step, toward its outer edge to maximize your support triangle. After transferring weight to the crutches, put the straight leg down first and balance, then quickly hop the good leg down to join it. Lather, rinse, repeat.
One last thing to internalize completely: Do not try and support your body weight from the armpits! The armpit pads are only there to keep the crutches in place – all of your weight must go on the handgrips, or your pits will be sore and unusable by the end of the first day.
I’m feeling a lot more capable after a week on crutches. Wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but things that seemed impossible at first are becoming possible. Hanging in there.
Every day, twice a day, I post one of my photographs to Instagram, Glass, Vero, Flickr, Facebook and Mastodon. The whole process takes about 10 minutes and involves no exporting. A friend asked how this was possible, and I thought it would make more sense to record the workflow as a video rather than trying to explain, so I’ve done that here. Hope someone finds it useful!
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