Missed the eclipse, but caught sunrise this morning
We’re heading back to Hawaii in mid-January and it got me thinking about the last time I was there and I created a marriage ceremony across the bay from Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler house.
I’ll never know if Steve witnessed me in my element on Maui, but they’ve never officially said what I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing was about …
Anyway, this is just your regular reminder that I make epic marriage ceremonies from Ipswich to Iceland and everywhere between.
Apple Frames is the ultimate shortcut that most Apple computer users don't know about
Over seven years since Workflow first graced the Apple ecosystem - since then being acquired by Apple and renamed Shortcuts which makes it so easy to Google for information about - it’s still a little-known tool on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
My favourite shortcut - it’s the ultimate shortcut - created by the ultimate Shortcuts guy, Federico Viticci at Macstories, is Apple Frames. The shortcut has just been updated to its third version and is ever more powerful and works even better.
You feed the shortcut one or more screenshots you’ve taken on the device, and it inserts the screenshot into an Apple device frame, so the resultant image carries more context. Examples beneath of some quick single screenshots, and three iPhone screenshots shared together in one image.
We don't have a Trump/Musk/political problem, we have a being human problem
I am continually fascinated whilst reading Letters of Note as to how people not of this time, people who lived 50, 100, or 200 years ago talk about the hardships and tribulations of modern life - in their own context - being hard and negative.
Martha Gellhorn in a letter to Raleigh Trevelyan on boxing day 1967 wrote “Do you think it’s at all sensible to wish anyone a Happy New Year? I think the best one can do nowadays is just to wish that we all survive, year by year.”
Or as the preacher spoke to their church a few hundred years before Christ, recorded in the book of Ecclesiastes, “Meaningless! Meaningless! Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless!” and they continued, “I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”
All of humanity, forevermore, just trying to survive, year by year.
Martha Gellhorn in a letter to Victoria Glendinning on 30th September 1987:
“Anyway, I intend to spend the rest of my life wasting time.”
There are two kinds of people in the world, people who confidently pronounce “pho” and the people who anxiously listen to those people say it because they’re sure they’re not saying it right.
I can’t believe that so much valuable conversation is {you should give me all your money} interspersed with ads and unrelated content {gamble your money away!} these days as if it’s a natural way to read and write {you’re so stupid and fat} lol.
Apple executives discussing iMessage for Android is beautifully shortsighted.
We put these people on pedestals but they’re just lucky enough to be considered winners.
Idea: The most important part of Twitter is the feeling of sending the tweet.
No-one sees your tweets anyway, so what if we made a new Twitter where all your followers and replies were just GPT-3 nodes.
An AI social network where computers affirm you and your thoughts.
I’m wondering whether “stay in your medium lane” is good advice for Elon Musk and Twitter today?
I think about Instagram starting as a still photo medium and how I like it less as it has changed lanes. Facebook started as a “friend-to-friend connection” medium, and I like it less as Adam Mosseri has obsessed over Reels and videos.
Twitter started as, and mostly still is, a text medium.
The human brain likes to catalogue and silo things. Twitter is a textual medium, and all of us on it love that about it.
If Twitter wants to evolve to take on YouTube and Facebook and leave text behind, that will be its death knell. Not headwinds in the marketplace, but the fact that those of us that like to read and write text, want to connect and share in a place that champions reading and writing text.
That’s why Imoved my writing and sharing to Micro.blog when it launched. Micro.blog champions text and text sharing, whilst also encouraging you to own your content/text.
If anything was going to take Twitter’s place today, in my humble opinion, it would be Micro.blog, because it has a business plan, it has a network, by design it’s healthy and good for the soul, but it champions the reading and writing of text.
“Chinese restaurant”
Evan Amrmstrong at Every on How Elon Wins:
“Twitter is a perfect case study of the shifting power dynamics of the ad market and how to make money in this era of the internet.”
Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry. Them good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye.
I met Charles Wooley when I was in line to be his producer on what’s now called the Triple M regional radio network.
Smart guy, good interviewer, wasn’t going to leave Tasmania for a big radio job, so they built out the Hobart studios to accomodate him.
I never took the gig, but I was impressed that someone could love where they live so much to the chagrin of a radio job.
In the Sunday Tasmanian today:
“But here I am, after a lifetime travelling the world and interviewing prime ministers, presidents and dictators, now about to engage as deputy mayor of Sorell in what is so often considered the lowly third tier of Tasmanian government.”
Wondering about Unsplash and why my recent work isn't resonating
I’ve been uploading to Unsplash for almost five years, and people always ask why I would submit my work to a website that gives it away mostly for free?
I consider Unsplash my photography mentor and university. Because ultimately, I believe, that good work resonates with people. Firstly it has to resonate with you, but secondly with someone else. It doesn’t have to be the most popular work in the history of work, but a successful artwork resonates with at least as many people as that created it, in my humble opinion.
I started uploading in early 2018.
So back to Unsplash, I’ve shared 505 photos that have been viewed over 152 million times, and downloaded and used over 800 thousand times, making me one of the “1000 most seen contributors ever” which is lovely.
A problem though is my recent work. Work that is arguably better, shot on better cameras, with better lenses, and better colour grading … because I’ve learned and gotten better with better gear.
Of my most viewed photos “of all time” only two photos from the last year are in my top 70 images. After 70 they start appearing a little, but inside the top 70, number 69 is a boring drone shot, and number 8 was an outlier. Luna had woken up early so the two of us wanted to go watch the sun rise, and we both took our cameras.
Obviously the longer a work has been available, the more views and downloads it can get. Secondly, as Unsplash is online longer, I’m assuming more photographers are uploading more work, so the pool gets larger, and the available views and downloads may lessen.
When or why would I leave Unsplash?
I used to think I’d leave Unsplash when I reached 1 million downloads. But I think the truer statement is that I’d stop giving my work away for free, when it resonated with enough people who wanted to pay for it.
How do I reach that number? How do I find those people? I have no idea. The only thing I know to do today is step one, to create, step two and three and four can’t even happen without step one.
Money is nice, but making work that resonates with people, work that makes you and I feel something. That’s like a little bit nicer.
I’ll leave you with my most popular piece, a photo from a backroad before sunrise in Queenstown, New Zealand, shot on my old original DJI Mavic Pro, with just enough light for it to be a sharp and in focus image.
In the Gold Coast Bulletin today @AnnWasonMoore nails it making the biggest losses/mistakes the Gold Coast has experienced. But I’ll add one more: the Indy 300. It was so much more interesting than Supercars, and Aussie driver Will Powers still dominates!
Put a bag of cookies in the break room and it might sit for days.
Open the bag and leave it out, and within an hour, all the cookies will be gone.
We are happy to take a tiny slice off the thing that’s being shared, but we hesitate to open the bag.
The same is true with all of the initiatives in our culture. Design, movements and ideas are all trapped, waiting to be opened, and then the rest of us will happily pile on.
Open the bag.
By an unknown author, from the Startupy newsletter
I think a lot about the guy whose car I ran into on the first day of owning a car in Mexico. I didnt put the car in park or put the handbrake on, classic idiotic move on the first day of driving on the wrong side of the road in a new car.
Scratched his back bumper, lots of talking, making phone calls to family, googling costs to fix, he comes back ready to finish me financially, and asks for $500 pesos. $39.60 AUD.
“Good day” in Spanish is “Buenos días”, phonetically (in Josh Spanish) “beh-wan-ass dee-ass” and I now understand how Australian English must be hard for people learning English because Baja Mexicans basically say an abbreviated “bun dee”, which I guess is “G’Day”.