This seems like as good a reason as any to grab a new GF1. Any Micro 4/3rds camera would do, but the GF1 is the one I want. Mike Johnston keeps making it worse. Photo from The Online Photographer.

There is a terrific scene from Adaptation in which John Laroche describes his obsession with tropical fish – and how that obsession simply and abruptly ended. Then one day I say, “fuck fish.” I renounce fish. I vow never to set foot in that ocean again. That’s how much fuck fish. The closest thing I have to an obsession these days is shooting with film. I love film cameras.

Maciej Ceglowski wrote a much linked to piece on How to not get your blog hacked, suggesting that the best way to avoid having your WordPress (or whatever) site hacked is to run it statically… You can use a program like wget or curl to generate a flat HTML version of your website from this local version, and then upload these files to your public server to share them with the world

Photo by View from 5'2″ on Flickr I enjoy speculating about cameras and the future as much as the next guy. The trouble begins when the next guy doesn’t approach it as speculation or opinion, but rather as fact. Starting something with “While I’ve not used either camera…” should only be followed by “…but I think I might prefer camera A because…” and not “…but clearly camera B is superior.”

Not really a fair comparison, but you get the idea. OM-1n Viewfinder And now… Panasonic DMC-GF1 Viewfinder First image courtesy www.mir.com.my. Second via dpreview.com

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness. — Thoreau You have too much stuff, and it may not bother you. I also have too much stuff, and it’s been bugging me for a long time. Yesterday I decided to do something about it. I’m calling it The Great Purge.

As someone who practically lives in Tinderbox, I love to see Mr. Bernstein write things like “I took an hour to improve the little arrows that represent pull-down menus in the key attributes table.” Tinderbox is so good at what it does that I ignore some of the minor interface things that might normally bother me. It’s nice to hear that at least one of those things might be going away soon.

The need to pay attention to everything can be overwhelming. I don’t want to miss anything and I want to try everything. These needs are unsustainable financially and productivity killers. I keep promising to hop (and stay) on the minimalist bandwagon and yet I keep buying things – all sorts of things – most of which I don’t really need. The idea then is to counter all this nonsense buying with a combination of getting rid of stuff and taking whole segments of things off my list.

My Das Keyboard Professional arrived today and I’m typing on it right now. I didn’t need a new keyboard. I was perfectly content with the Apple Aluminum keyboards I use at home and office. But you know how it goes, someone on the Interwebs starts talking about a cool new Das Keyboard and how much they like the old clicky sounding keys and so on. Next thing you know, WANT! At $130, it’s not cheap, but my hands are on or near a keyboard for 8+ hours every day – why would I go cheap?

Apparently, I’ve not been paying attention to the progress being made in robotics.

When you think of SLR cameras what’s the first manufacturer that pops into your head? That’s right, it’s Nikon or Canon. It’s been that way for a long time. Today, though, we’re talking about one of the minor players – Olympus. If you spend any time listening to people who still use film cameras, you’ll hear the Olympus OM system mentioned frequently. It seems to have an almost cult-like following. Of course anything with a cult-like following piques my interest, so I started looking more closely at the old OM cameras.

Original photo by osiris555, chosen at random from the Flickr HDR pool I spend a lot of time looking at photographs, mostly on Flickr. There are a few contacts that I follow and I also enjoy browsing the Interestingness area. What I’ve noticed though is that many of the “interesting” photos (according to Flickr), aren’t. That is unless you enjoy photos that have been Photoshopped to within an inch of their lives.