I spent the weekend with my old iPhone SE and I’ve decided I like it better than the iPhone X. The iPhone X is a beautiful device. Smooth, sleek, powerful, and the screen is just gorgeous. The iPhone SE, by comparison, is tiny, slow, and practically blurry. However, the iPhone SE is also easier to carry, easier to hold, and easier to use. Face ID is clever and it works pretty well, but sometimes having to either pick up or lean over the phone to read notifications is less than ideal.

Paul Ford, Bloomberg: I know that when you think of a Superfund site, you think of bad things, like piles of dead wildlife or stretches of fenced-off, chemical-infused land or hospital wings filled with poisoned families. No one thinks about all the great chemicals that get produced, or the amazing consumer products we all enjoy. Nobody sets out to destroy the environment; they just want to make synthetic fibers or produce industrial chemicals.

Less Precious Things In recent months I’ve noticed a trend away from using precious things. By “precious” I mean “Affectedly dainty or overrefined.” I first noticed this after I bought an inexpensive ThinkPad for playing with Linux. I now bring the ThinkPad to meetings and when traveling instead of the expensive MacBook Pro. I can toss the ThinkPad around without worrying about damaging it. I don’t worry as much about it being stolen.

When Kodak discontinued T-MAX P3200 film back in 2012, I had never shot any so didn’t really miss it. They recently brought it back so I thought I’d give it a try. KODAK PROFESSIONAL T-MAX P3200 Black & White Negative Film is a multi-speed continuous-tone panchromatic black-and-white negative film that combines high to ultra-high film speeds with finer grain than that of other fast black-and-white films Here’s a link to the T-MAX P3200 Data Sheet (pdf)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) have always baffled me, but I have been determined to untagle them. To this end, I’ve been migrating my static sites into S3 and using Cloudfront distributions as CDN. This gave me some real problems to solve, which makes learning more fun. The final candidate for migration was this here blog (baty.net) and if you’re reading this, it worked. Here’s a rough sketch of the steps I took…

I wish I could just delete my Facebook account and be done with it, but I can’t. Or at least I’ve been unable to convince myself that everything would be fine if I didn’t have a Facebook account. Deleting the account entirely would prevent me from seeing things that I really want to see. As disappointing as it is, Facebook is where my family communicates and no sane person would suggest I try getting them all to move elsewhere.

Alexis C. Madrigal (The Atlantic) So I began to take note each time I experienced a little hit of outrage or condescension or envy during a Twitter session. What I found was that nearly every time I felt one of these negative emotions, it was triggered by a retweet. I’ve been noting my reactions to tweets and found the same thing - that retweets are the single most toxic component of my current Twitter feed.

Tim Wu (NYT): An unwelcome consequence of living in a world where everything is “easy” is that the only skill that matters is the ability to multitask. At the extreme, we don’t actually do anything; we only arrange what will be done, which is a flimsy basis for a life. And Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey.

My recent experiment with Linux has me rethinking my password management strategy. I’ve been using 1Password to manage passwords on my Mac and iPhone. 1Password is a great way for most people with Macs to manage passwords. Since I recently started using Linux alongside my Macs, I need better cross-platform support. I could use something similar to 1Password that also runs on Linux such as KeePassX. Or, I could run 1Password for Windows under Wine.

Photo: Petapixel.com I keep trying to move my photo processing and library workflow out of Lightroom, and I keep failing. This post is just me thinking it through (again). First, why would I want to do that? Good question. It’s popular to hate on Adobe, and some of this is justified, but sometimes it feels like bandwagoning. For me, the urge to move away from Lightroom is mostly due to Subscription Fatigue.

Funny, honest, and sometimes hard to watch. I loved Lady Bird.

Josie (2017) It’s breaking my heart, but I decided I needed to find a new home for Josie. I adopted Josie last spring from the Humane Society in Grand Rapids. I knew the minute we met that I wanted to bring her home, so I did. And I fell in love. She is sweet, funny, playful, and affectionate. She doesn’t chew things she’s not supposed to. She doesn’t bark.