Withers Without You

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world, this makes it difficult to plan the day.

— E. B. White

How it started, and how it finished

A Brisbane based crew have delivered on their Kickstarter promise to deliver a “camera for the small moments”, the Flashback Camera. It’s a digital film camera, or a film-like digital camera more to the point.

I’m an avid Kickstarter backer, but especially for cool gadgets like this, and it was a pleasure to unpack.

The idea is to take the point-and-shoot disposable film camera vibe to a digital setting, mainly for the purposes of getting off our phones, disposing of cameras a lot less, and making memories.

I don’t have a full review in me, instead, a reflection on having used it for a week: it’s a lot of fun and a beautifully made product.

I have but one issue, probably the same one that everyone who has ever clicked the shutter on their iPhone then instantly been able to share and edit the photo.

In an update today the makers have expanded on the feature I find most annoying. That at the end of the arbitrary digital film roll of 27 photos it takes about 48 hours for the photos to “develop”:

The processing done to develop your photos is currently too intensive to run on a mobile device. Over the last 2 years, we developed our own effects. In particular, our method to generate film grain is complex. Often, “film grain” effects are based on adding random digital noise, but true film grain is fundamentally different. Analog images are composed of grains, not pixels, and our method follows this closely. Our vision for this product has always been to stay true to the analog world, and we’ve worked hard to never compromise on that. If we were satisfied with simple filters, we could run them inside the app, but we continue to believe that our current setup is the most flexible in providing the best possible photos from this camera.

Personally, I think there would be greater customer satisfaction if that 48 hour time period was minimised to the actual required time to process, and ultimately that could be brought on to the device. I think the iPhone CPU has proven itself to be apt at processing photos.

It would be nice if the processed photos had better metadata as well, like orientation of photo, date and time that was correct, that the flash even if enabled accidentally by fat fingers wouldn’t fire in full sun, and ultimately this last one is just me being really nerdy: GPS co-ordinates of photos so the captured memories end up in iCloud Photo Library memories.

Here’s some demo photos take over the weekend in Exmouth and the Gold Coast …

Disappointed this hasn’t come to pass yet

This article on “Afrofuturism” is so interesting, so I’ll lead with the end:

The fate of humanity in the 21st century and beyond hinges on whether African countries can figure out the riddle of industrialization.

I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains. I love her far horizons, I love her jewel-sea, Her beauty and her terror – The wide brown land for me!

– Dorothea Mackellar

Photos from somewhere between Exmouth and Learmonth on the Exmouth Gulf.

When I’m president I’m going to classify printers as terrorists

Digital incompetency truly will be the swan song of the people of the 2020s.

“The information you consume each day is the soil from which your future thoughts are grown.”

– James Clear

I wrote this eight years ago on Facebook. I think it’s more valid today plus I want to preserve it on my blog:

With all of our books, albums, magazines, and letters going digital and stored outside of the physical and easily visible realm, how will our kids discover that album that dad loved, or that magazine that mum kept?

I remember that “already in our house from mum and dad” discovery being a big thing for me.

I love Led Zeppelin and Sheryl Crow because I found the album at home. I loved Nick Earl’s ZigZag Street because it was sitting on a shelf in a room I was renting on the Gold Coast when I first worked for Sea FM. I discovered albums I still love because they were sitting on the music director’s desk and they weren’t on demo enough to give away on air. I love Smith Journal, Monocle, and Relevant Magazine because I found them on shelves, tables, coffee shops, before I ever bought them.

How will our kids discover things?

Will they rely purely on people recommending things?

Recommending culture is hard. I barely ever show other people music I like because a) I don’t want them not liking it to affect my liking it, and b) it’s kind of rude to assume that anyone would like anything.

Passive discovery has been such a strong driving force for hundreds of years, surely that hasn’t been replaced with trending topics, Facebook shares, and retweets?

📨 Mail Client - Mail.app

📮 Mail Server - Fastmail

📝 Notes - Drafts/Obsidian

✅ To-Do - Reminders.app

📷 iPhone Photo Shooting - Camera.app

🟦 Photo Management - Photos.app after a Lightroom CC edit

📆 Calendar - Google Calendar (for business) and iCloud calendar for family, read by Fantastical

📁 Cloud File Storage - Dropbox for work and iCloud for family

📖 RSS - NetNewsWire

🙍🏻‍♂️ Contacts - iCloud and Contacts.app + Obsidian for work

🌐 Browser - Safari

💬 Chat - iMessage plus whatever everyone else makes me use, God bless their souls

🔖 Bookmarks - Raindrop.io

📑 Read It Later - Pocket on Kobo

📜 Word Processing - Remarkable 2 tablet

📈 Spreadsheets - Numbers

📊 Presentations - iA Presenter

🛒 Shopping Lists - Reminders.app

🍴 Meal Planning - my heart

💰 Budgeting and Personal Finance - Xero for business, Up for personal

📰 News - as little as possible, but Apple News plus local news subscriptions

🎵 Music - Apple Music

🎤 Podcasts - Overcast

🔐 Password Management - 1Password

Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist. If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will.

You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.

– Alain de Botton

It’s amazing how close Google is to upsetting the iMessage monopoly and I’m betting they’ll let go of the opportunity.

I’ve just started using Google Chat for a new project and it’s actually not terrible. For someone in the Apple ecosystem, it’s not far from being as good as iMessage.

They need a native Mac app that works like a Mac app, and their iPhone app needs to work in with the share sheet API, but it’s close.

They’re so busy fighting for iMessage to accept RCS/Google that they’ll no doubt miss this opportunity to just put iMessage out of business.

The hardest thing about being a wedding celebrant is figuring out the right balance of smiley faces, exclamation marks, or periods, to end sentences in emails with.

You don’t want to sound too cold, but you don’t want to sound too excited. It’s an art.

You know, it’s super fun and easy to take a pot shot at the Humane AI Pin, but put your hesitations aside and 1) watch the video and tell me it’s not actually kinda cool, and 2) it’s refreshing to see someone have a crazy idea and actually get it to a stage of putting a price on it.

So many big ideas never make it past a concept video. Ideas are easy. Shipping is real hard. If it was available in Aus today I’d probably give it a red hot shot because it’s just fun.

Watch out guys, the police have installed new air drumming detection cameras and if you actually can’t play drums or if you’re out of time with the music it’s a $2000 fine.

Answering the most common question I get asked, “Do you travel for weddings?”