Friday, 8th July, 2022
The kids love playing with SnapChat for all the funny faces it does. If there was an app that could do that without any of the social media stuff I’d install it. I’ve not looked but I doubt it exists. Some of them are hilarious though. There was a crying face one which no-one could stop laughing at. You still look like you’re crying whilst laughing so it just perpetuated. 😹
Got some film scans back today from the Kodak ColorPlus I’d used the past couple of weekends. They were reasonable pictures, some weren’t that exciting or of anyone looking or doing anything in particular. Sometimes having a fixed set of exposures means I just want to finish the roll in line with whatever event or thing I’m taking photos of. I suppose I don’t need to, but when it’s ISO 200 it’s not always practical to use it later on when I really need higher ISO. I had quite a few poorly focused shots with the 90mm, I was being lax with focusing whilst using it. It needs considerably more accuracy than the 35mm which you can go “close enough” a lot of the time. The 90mm also flares and so I should get a hood. I can’t remember if mine copy came with a hood, but if it did, it was the collapsible rubber one which looks like shit. There’s two metal ones I can get, the IUFOO cone-ish shaped one, or a more regular Leica metal hood. They’re both quite expensive for what they are. The IUFOO seems the cheapest, although turns out there’s two versions: one that’s all black, and one with a silver ring. The all black one is more expensive. I’ll keep my eye on ebay and see what pops up. I think the other one is usable on more lenses so might be worthwhile getting instead. All this makes me think a 50 mm would be a good compromise for when I’m out and looking for something a little longer. That is a massive research project - picking a 50 mm. Unless I just go all in for the 50 mm Summilux. Saves me a lot of time reading about lenses, just also costs a lot more! I do remember a big review article someone did comparing about 10 50mm M mount lenses. Various Voigtlander, Zeiss, and Leica ones. Maybe I’ll go re-read it. Although that will tell me to get the Voigtlander 50 f/2 ultron or whatever it’s called. As it’ll be 95% the Leica and about 10% the price.
I could get an older 50 mm to match the era of the M2. The f/1.5s often come up. Although they’re not exactly cheap.
A couple of domain names I have are expiring this week. Projects that I dream up whilst on holiday, buy the domain and then never do anything with. One I did do a little on it but never got very far. I’ve renewed them a couple of times but now I’m just letting them go. I should do the project first, then get the domain if it actually turns into something.
I had a moment where I remembered something from my childhood today and stopped to think about it. Things that you never noticed as a child are suddenly really strange when you think back as an adult.
This system is incredible. I’d like to have it but I know it won’t work for me as I never write things down. Not consistently anyway. I try to do it but generally get away without doing it so I don’t do it. I’m also not sure about having a notebook and pen with me the whole time. Seems difficult to manage. Phone on the other hand (or the main hand) is just fine. I’ve thought about carrying the Hobonichi with me to use that but so far have left it on my desk and partially forgotten about it.
I’ve had a few thoughts for blog posts running around in my head but even with the easiness of Tiddlywiki I still don’t write them down. Maybe I should get a cup of tea and start on one now. It doesn’t really matter so just do something. Although I was going to research 50 mm lenses…but probably that can wait…even if it is easier to do than write the post(s).
Think I’m coming up a year on having “this” site. (It’s changed 2-3 times since inception) but the daily posts aspect is still consistent. I keep meaning to bring in the old journal entries into this site for completeness, but it’s still on the todo list. I thought I had a script that could do it but I think it was the other way round - as in static pages to json for tiddlywiki import. I’ve prepared the json input file, just need to get around to processing it and writing out new pages. It’s quite minimal in scope - at least for the first 90%. There might be pictures and certainly links which are in the wrong format. But probably a find and replace in VS Code will be the quickest way to resolve those vs. Messing about with Pandoc or some other conversion tool.
I hope I’m more settled on the design and setup for this site now. I have a nice system on all computers and devices for adding posts with shortcuts for creation and front matter, and I much prefer a static site than anything else. The only slightly nagging thing is that the site is Jekyll and not Hugo. Although the hosting CDN caches builds so is very quick to render new pages because it doesn’t rebuild the rest of the site.
Anyway, all of this is to say I very much enjoy this style of blogging. It’s a pseudo-journal-blog site, and maybe it stops me writing in my own personal journal (as I’ve had enough writing by the time I’m done on here) but equally it means I write something. There’s not much else I want to write down that needs to be private. Maybe my personal grumblings about work or something but that’s usually something I can’t control or do anything about so why bother even thinking about it!
