September photos are up!

Wanted to drop a note here sharing that my photo picks from September, 2024 are now up over on the RistrettoShots site.

As usual, getting to go back through the photos I’ve taken was a good opportunity to remind myself how nice a past month it’s really been, and how blessed Anné and I are. Lots to be grateful for.

Until next time. Cheers!

August photos are up!

I’m getting around to this a little later than some months, but today I finished selecting and uploading my favorite photos from August 2024 on the RistrettoShots site. You can check them out here.

Spending more and more of my free time cycling around Providence meant that I haven’t been dedicating as much time to my photography. I did still bring my camera with me to things and take some shots I’m happy with, which are what you’ll see on the photo-site above. It feels weird to cut back on taking photos at all, but not entirely bad to have another hobby that’s worth enjoying. As a side-effect, I did start experimenting more with using my iPhone for photographs again. It’s been nice to see a few examples of that practice paying off, where even without my biggest, most capable camera I was still able to take some images I’m happy with.

My preferred iPhone camera app Halide also updated this month with a new mode called “Process Zero” - one that’s dedicated to stripping-back the majority of the iPhone’s built-in image processing. I’ve been hoping for something like this for awhile, since even the iPhone’s default RAW files from Apple have processing baked-in that I find hard to work with.

The images from Process Zero are a lot more natural, even if in the process (heh) they do expose some of the iPhone’s inherent small camera weaknesses. Yes, things can get a bit grainy or blown out, but there’s also not as much smoothing or high-dynamic-range to try and wrangle back into a normal-looking photograph afterward. It feels like predictably exposing a camera sensor with light, rather than a hyper-processed pocket computer image compilation.

The fine folks behind Halide even ported Process Zero all the way back to the iPhone X, which meant I was able to dig out mine from where it’s been collecting dust and take it out with me as a cycling camera. I find the iPhone X’s 28mm and 52mm equivalent lenses far preferable to my newer 13 Mini’s 26mm and 13mm ones (“already too wide” and “even darn wider”), even if the resulting images aren’t quite as impressively sharp or have as much natural dynamic range as shots from the 13 Mini.

It does feel funny to be back shooting phone photos again after having spent so much time researching, learning, and practicing “proper” photography the last few years. I haven’t had this much fun taking photos with a smartphone since high school. Big, big thanks to the team at Lux for the part their excellent tools have played in that.

I’ll finish this post off with a few of my favorite Process Zero images. Cheers!

I got a bike:

Life seems to be inherently busy, and despite much general effort, it continues to pass on by. For me, my brain dreams up neat projects to start on, hobbies to explore, in-depth articles to write.

Too often I’m left only dreaming, but not without having things worth doing or sharing about. I don’t want these bits of life to skirt by without my getting the chance to write about them, to crystalize a bit of how I’m feeling and thinking right now. And so, I recently got a bike. A folding bike.

I’ve been meaning to own one since sometime during high school - ever since I saw the old Minimally Minimal blog’s post (RIP) about the MINI folding bike. I did truthfully forget about it for a few years, but the idea of owning one bubbled back up more often after having moved to Providence last year. I wanted to be able to get around even when Anné is using our car for her work commute. I was curious about reaching new areas of the city I’d not yet trekked to on foot. Also, bicycles can’t help but sort of ooze a century-proven, utilitarian cool. Little neat folding bikes? Come on - they’re even cooler!

So here’s mine. It’s an Origami Crane 8 originally made by Origami Bicycle Company in Virginia sometime around 2016 or 2017. The older-style “Origami” decal is what gives away its vintage, and I quite like the font they chose. I purchased it used from someone off Facebook marketplace a little outside Boston, and for what I thought would be a good deal ($100). I didn’t really know much about bikes a month ago, and I don’t know much more about bikes now, but I do know now that I didn’t know enough then to know a good bike deal from a bad one. Whoops.

Several flat tubes, worn-out tires now replaced, some new bits and bobs attached to the handlebars — I have to hope it’s now in complete enough shape where I won’t need to spend any more on it this season. I definitely could’ve ordered a certified-refurbished Zizzo bike for the same total I’ve amassed on this one (Zizzo’s bikes seem quite nice, but having a full URL plastered across their side does seem a crying shame). Oh well - deal or no deal, the Origami is mine.

Since getting back on the bike, I’ve taken quite a few early morning rides to get in exercise before work, walked it through the grocery store for fresh produce at least as many times, and even used it once or twice for my photography and meeting up with friends from church. These are all things I’d looked forward to doing before starting to cycle again, and it does feel good to have already pedaled my way to many of them.

Some favorite photos taken whilst bike:

A fun surprise is that I actually really like the feeling of simply biking along. I’m not on some new age e-bike, I’m not setting Strava PRs up and down the city. Just the simple things — pedaling along, steering around dips and juts in the pavement, feeling the wind rush by and hearing the click of the freewheel — all are simple joys I’ve been savoring. I’m enjoying getting better at really mashing the pedals down when there’s an incline, and I’m slowly starting to allow myself to descend Providence’s bigger hills; the bike’s loved but still-hanging-in-there brakes squealing all the way down.

About the only thing I haven’t done much of yet is explore new areas of the city via bike. This is, in part, because I’ve not been getting out to take photographs all that much lately (unfortunate, but honest). It’s also because riding along new, busy throughways in areas of the city where I don’t know a quiet side-street to duck down for reprieve is scary. Despite wanting a bike for close to a decade, I very nearly didn’t get one at all for fear of having to tackle cycling on city streets.

Now that I’ve been doing so? It’s not been nearly as bad as anticipated. Finds like Ken Kifer’s bike pages were a big help. An old-school, extensively-written recounting of one’s many years learning safe cycling habits on the road. What a resource that’s mercifully left up on the web. I first rode with mixed traffic about a month ago now, and while I’m still not braving the busiest streets (I have the luxury of taking the slower and quieter side-roads much of the time), I’m feeling much less anxious. Heading to wholly-new areas on the bike is only a matter of time now.

So that’s something from my life lately. It’s been fun (and scary, and expensive, and ultimately fulfilling) to experience. I’m glad I can share about it here.

Oh, and I also got a cycling cap. I had no idea these existed, but I like how they fit on my head. :)

Cheers, ~ Mike

I don’t know James Rolfe, but maybe I can better know myself

Yesterday, a YouTube video made me feel something. Being candid, I watch entirely too much YouTube: photography and technology review videos, research on new hobbies, and long essays on various bits of history and pop culture that really only vaguely land inside my realm of interest. Seldom do these many consumed videos provoke an emotional response.

Dan Olson’s “I Don’t Know James Rolfe” truly touched me. After finishing watching it (more than once now), it seems like Dan began this video as an examination of what’s happened to the YouTuber and filmmaker James Rolfe and his Angry Video Game Nerd/Cinemassacre channel over the years, but as the piece formed Dan was able to notice and tease apart deeper observations than he anticipated. A view into James’ career and creative ambitions begins to form, but over the video’s runtime it becomes clear Dan is also reflecting on and searching his own feelings about creativity and filmmaking, not just James’.

A few things stood out to me from the video:

1. It might be easy to describe James as stuck in his creative endeavors. Per his own autobiography, he still thinks back to and compares his modern YouTube videos to partially-finished childhood backyard movies or college projects, despite having made so much “professional progress” since then as the creator and longtime star/showrunner of the Angry Video Game Nerd.

2. A subset of AVGN fans are clearly upset with James’ output as his channel has progressed, but the more Dan reads from James’ autobiography, the blurrier our view of how James feels about his own career becomes. Is he resentful toward AVGN “needing” to stay the same on account of fan expectations? Does he wish he could’ve moved on and done more creatively? Is he just grateful to have a job that provides for his family and involves filmmaking, even if it’s on YouTube?

3. Throughout the video, Dan is drawn to a stupefying aspect of James’ current filmmaking: the cramped “AVGN Basement” set, complete with its jerry-rigged light stands, scrap wood tripod heads, et al. From our viewpoint at the end of Dan’s reflections, this is one of the main “hooks” that pulls him in deeper and provides the clearest potential window into James’ outlook or situation. One where he might be frustrated; short on time, energy, funds, and space.

   Dan describes these befuddling decisions in James’ set as clear hacks to solve specific problems, but also as potential inefficiencies or distractions. Small and solvable enough problems in isolation, but taken all together could feel intertwined and big in a way that adds up to a sort of creative technical debt. The kind that might eventually drag down on someone’s ambition and leave them feeling mired, pulled down by many small things in life.

The whole video felt relatable to me, but especially the points where Dan focused on the visibly built up, habitually inefficient cruft that might weigh down someone’s life. This deeply struck me with personal parallels. Creative ambitions I’ve harbored all these years to apply myself as a blogger, a photographer, a streamer, maybe a youtuber or filmmaker myself. Remnants of these lie scattered in my brain, but also in the technical ephemera around the office where I was watching Dan’s reflection.

These leftover bits and bobs are reminders of years spent thinking if I could just solve this or just overcome that, then I’d surely be in a good spot to unlock the creative potential I might be harboring up inside my brain. Hell, just earlier the same day I was goofing around with a digital camera I’ve had since I was 15 years old, attempting to see if maybe it could still serve some creative purpose. For some reason I’m typing this text on a slightly broken laptop of similar age, despite having numerous newer computers I could be working from.

Am I being thrifty, jerry-rigging together a suite of still usable tools and thought patterns for creativity? Or am I hanging onto bits of old gear and long dead ambitions? Would de-cluttering my environment, goals, and the things allowed into my mental state make space for putting my energy into something truly meaningful?

I’m glad to be thinking on it. Because I certainly don’t know James Rolfe’s thoughts on creativity in his life, but maybe I still have a chance at figuring out my own.

~Mike

We’re now on Blot!

Following two years of “self hosting” using Hugo and GitHub Pages, I was finally able to move this site to an easier hosting option over this weekend; Blot.im.

I’d been looking for a new option to host RistrettoRambles for awhile now (at least the past year, maybe longer). Many a late-night website brainstorming session ended with me giving up; frustrated by the limitations of whatever new hosting service I’d been demoing that evening. Not this time.

To summarize, Blot isn’t 100% perfect down to every last pixel and detail of my hypothetical “dream site”, but it seems made and maintained by someone with similar enough website requirements and goals to myself that it’s an easy match for what I’m looking to do.

I didn’t expect to port my entire existing site over a weekend, much less to also design & launch my long-planned photo site (I’ll have more to say on that soon), but it really was easy. For those curious, what follows are a few of the details that make Blot an especially great fit for me.

File-based workflow, no bloated web CMS:

One of the things I loved about running a Hugo site was that tweaking the site’s design and writing new posts was as simple as editing text files stored on my local machine before pushing them to Github for publishing, with no bloated web UI to triage through each time.

Blot somehow makes this even simpler; the entire site is auto-built for me out of a folder in my Dropbox account. Put a new “.md” markdown file there, and it’s immediately published. Tweak an existing text file, save it, and the site’s been updated by the next refresh of the page. I’m sure some folks would want more control than this (and there is an option to interface with Blot via Git), but I couldn’t be happier.

This simplicity and compatibility meant that I could share the new photo site with my friend Ethan via text, tweak the site’s layout based on our conversations directly from my phone, then refresh the page to see it had already been updated. There’s surely other ways to achieve a similar workflow (and times where you’d want more fine-grained, desktop access for editing instead), but that this just worked so darn well with minimal effort on my part was excellent.

Images that zoom, simple layout tools right from Markdown:

Try as I might, I never did figure out how to port-in the right bits of javascript to spice up my Hugo site’s image handling. Pictures were always one set size, smack in the middle of the page, no exceptions.

This was already bit of a bummer for blog posts with images, but made the idea of building a photo site with a similar feel to my existing Hugo blog (something that I’d wanted to do for awhile now) all but impossible.

Welp, over on Blot there’s an option to zoom images to fill the screen when clicked built into each Blot site’s configuration. Done deal. Then I saw that Blot supported simple re-sizing and page layout adjustments straight from Markdown text using the “Layout Tags” feature — I may have audibly squealed. Seriously, check this out. It’s so cool!

There are admittedly still some examples of page spacing I’d like to easily tweak, or even more ways to display images built-in I’d wish for, but Blot is much closer overall to my ideal set of compromises than what I’d cobbled together on Hugo. Oh, and compared to other hosting options like Ghost and Squarespace it’s cheap, too. :)

A big “Thank you!” to David — the person who created Blot and has already kept it running for 10 years now. I’m feeling excited by what it allows for and how it aligns with so much of what I’m looking to make online.

Here’s to new writing, photos, and more. Cheers!

Today was a big day in tech

Today felt like a pretty big day in tech news. I won’t actually go into any detail here, for I feel ill-equipped and under-read to provide meaningful commentary. Only time will tell how influential the day’s headlines actually shape up to be, but today felt like a big one.

I spent more time scrolling through the flotsam of the news than I normally would (scrolling that could surely be more trouble than it’s worth), and despite the mess, I was left feeling like I wanted to contribute more to the area of online-tech again. A “long time ago” in high school there were a few years where I dutifully made many, many shoddily-written blog posts, and I remember how incredibly energized that made me feel at the time.

In the intermediary years I’ve still been insisting to myself that I want to pick that up again (hopefully sans the shoddily-written part), to the point that there are a baker’s dozen of partially-written pieces sitting in my computer’s text files. Pieces that I’d have been proud to see through to completion… but haven’t.

Something about today’s tech shifts and the accompanying discourse caused a stir in me about that. So I’m sitting down and writing a tiny blurb of that feeling so that it’s here, and so that I wrote about it, and so I published it.

Like today’s news, we’ll see if having done so shapes up to be anything of consequence. Cheers!