Saturday, January 8, 2022

They say as you get older that you want things to stop changing (Do they say that?) and I'm starting to believe them.

Over the past several years, my interest in shooting film has regularly ebbed and flowed. This fluctuation wouldn't be a problem if the frequency and amplitude weren't so high. My brain does this thing where it decides, usually after a successful roll or inspiring blog post, that I'm now going to "shoot only film from now on!" This is immediately followed by the purchase of supporting cameras or other gear.

A short time later, I tire of waiting to finish a roll, even though when I'm in film mode I claim that "waiting is a feature". The digital cameras come out and I start wondering why I bother with the hassle of film, when digital is "better", faster, and cheaper. I should sell off most of the film gear, shutter the darkroom, and just learn how to make decent inkjet prints instead.

And then, I finally finish that roll, process it, scan it, and make a couple of darkroom prints. Wow! This is so cool and fun and I love the images and I love having the negatives neatly organized in binders on my shelves for future generations of scholars and historians. (ha!).

So, what I'm saying is that I enjoy both film and digital. I should learn that about myself. I should build processes around both, as needed, and stop trying to decide which I want to do exclusively and realize that it all depends upon my mood.

Given that the spec sheet of the new Leica M11 has been leaked a week early, I thought I'd check out the Leica forums. I recently sold my M10-R, so of course I'm interested in what's next for Leica. My god, how I hate speculation. The discussions are boring and useless and I'm going to stop reading them. The good news is that, based on the specs, I see no pressing need for owning an M11.

What a great post by Moxie Marlinspike.

Instead of storing the data on-chain, NFTs instead contain a URL that points to the data. What surprised me about the standards was that there’s no hash commitment for the data located at the URL. Looking at many of the NFTs on popular marketplaces being sold for tens, hundreds, or millions of dollars, that URL often just points to some VPS running Apache somewhere. Anyone with access to that machine, anyone who buys that domain name in the future, or anyone who compromises that machine can change the image, title, description, etc for the NFT to whatever they’d like at any time (regardless of whether or not they “own” the token). There’s nothing in the NFT spec that tells you what the image “should” be, or even allows you to confirm whether something is the “correct” image.

I'll happily live out my life in web1, thank you. You kids have fun, though!

The URLs in this site's RSS feed were broken, sorry. Fixed. Building links in Tinderbox is a fancy-but-confusing-to-me process.

I built this site's RSS feed so that it only includes the big daily posts, one per day, but that post is appended to throughout the day. This feels right for most people. It doesn't work if I want to crosspost, though, since the first published version is usually only me saying "Good morning" and that would be it.

I've added a second RSS feed, allposts.xml, which includes each individual post, independent of the containing day's post. I'll use this feed for crossposting. To keep things from becoming too noisy, I've added an attribute, "Crosspost" which defaults to false. Only those posts with $Crosspost==true are included in the feed. Clear as mud?