Durga Chew-Bose: Both versions of me, since living alone, have settled into a one woman show that I star in and attend, that I produce and buy a ticket, but sometimes fail to show up to, because as it happens, living alone has only further indulged the woman — me — who cancels a plan to stay in and excitedly ad-lib doing nothing at all. I’ve lived alone for quite a few years now.

I upgraded my iMac to the latest macOS Sierra beta. I thought everything was working fine until I tried to publish a short blog post about the experience. My Hugo and/or Go installation was broken so I could not build my site. This meant I couldn’t publish to my blog. Ironic, no? Rather than waiting for things to be fixed, I decided to find a way around the problem. Enter Netlify.

Benedict Evans: So, you break up your assumptions about the models that you have to follow. You don’t have to save the photos - they can disappear. You’re not paying to process a roll of 28 exposures anymore. You can capture all the time, not just the moment you press the ‘shutter’ button (which, for example, gives us Apple’s live photos). The video doesn’t have to be linear - you don’t have to record just the right bits as though you were splicing a mix tape or recording from live radio.

This is me when trying to decide where to post something on social media.

John Naughton: Facebook is what we used to call a “walled garden” and now call a silo: a controlled space in which people are allowed to do things that will amuse them while enabling Facebook to monetise their data trails. One network to rule them all. If you wanted a vision of the opposite of the open web, then Facebook is it. I’m as critical of Facebook as anyone, but I tire of this trope.

Cloudinary is pretty impressive. I’ve only used it in small doses recently but so far it’s been a very nice image hosting/manipulation/delivery service. The free tier has been plenty for me. I really like the “fetch” option which pulls images from a remote URL and then transforms and caches them automatically. That way I can leave the “master” images on my own server while utilizing Cloudinary for delivery.

Mike Caulfield: No, my problem with Slack is that it is all hose and no bucket. You can search through conversations and find meaningful facts, but for us, at least, conversation is so easy that it can (and does) erode the impulse to do more end-to-end treatments of things. Community knowledge accretes but never quite pools. “Community knowledge accretes but never quite pools”. This is exactly the problem I’ve been grappling with.

NYT: But the release of the album last weekend, through an exclusive deal with Apple, has also roiled the industry, bringing to the surface long-simmering tensions that record companies have with streaming music services, and sometimes even with their own artists. Streaming music is darn handy, but I prefer owning physical copies of albums that are important to me. I’d rather not rely upon the whims of a “service” in order to listen to my music.

I spent today learning how to create a static website with Middleman. Middleman is a static site generator using all the shortcuts and tools in modern web development. I’m a fan of static websites and excited to see that static site generators are proliferating like mad lately. I’ve created static sites using Movable Type, Emacs (org mode), Hugo, Jekyll, and completely hand-coded HTML files. I wanted to try something new, and decided upon Middleman.

I took a few days off and headed to Traverse City. I didn’t spend time deciding which camera to bring, I just grabbed the Nikon F3 and 28mm lens along with a dozen rolls of Tri-X and Portra 400. It felt good. I was ready. I shot a total of 20 frames using the roll that was already in the camera. It didn’t help that the weather wasn’t great and we spent a lot of time just driving around sight-seeing from the car.

Nikon F3 I love this Nikon F3. Sometimes I get a new camera and the shine wears off quickly (like the Mamiya6 for example). The F3 I still like. I like how it feels in hand, I like how it looks, and I really like how it performs. I’ve never felt as confident with any camera as I do with the F3. Even the Leicas don’t inspire the same confidence.

As has been pointed out everywhere, July 2016 was the warmest month we’ve seen, ever. As a sane person, I understand that climate change is real and remains a pressing issue. A warm month and we're all like, 'Neener neener' It’s always nice to see evidence of the things we believe, but can we stop gloating already? First, saying “hottest month” rather than “warmest month” seems a little excessive.