Knuckledragger

I have exactly one neighbor. His name is Gary. He's a genuine boomer, turning 70 this year. He is some kind of special needs. In his day, on Marthas Vineyard, there wasn't much in the way of diagnosis so he just kind of got by. He lived with his mother until she passed on my birthday this year at the age of 93(!) Now Gary lives alone, and I live here on MV. Gary does okay, but my (sainted, octogenarian) mother does have some worries about him. He mentioned to her that his electric bill was over $200 this month. She said to me "you have an awful lot of spare LED bulbs, you should see if Gary would let us replace some of his incandescents." She wasn't wrong. For reasons not entirely worth explaining, I have 3-4 boxes of LED bulbs I brought with me to the Vineyard. My father was a hoarder of antique furniture. He built barns to hold it all: In spite of the thousands of records and CDs I own, not to mention the nightclub's worth of lighting gear (and all the stereo equipment) I own, I have always rejected the notion that I am a hoarder. Except for lightbulbs. I have to cop to it. I compulsively bought CFL bulbs when those were a thing, and then moved on to LED bulbs when they arrived. I have done some pretty neat things with them. I restored a bunch of antique lamps: (For colored bulbs, CFLs are better than LED. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.) Even with the lamps above and many more, I have a vast excess of LED bulbs. Today, with Gary's permission I went through his house and wrote down all of the bulbs I thought he could use. Then I went up to my attic where it was 115 goddamn degrees and dragged down a few boxes. I then spent an hour replacing the bulbs in most of Gary's house. I did most of the living area, and discussed with him a few spots I could not get to (the garage and basement.) He seemed pleased. Also I have (slightly) fewer bulbs kicking around now.

Thanks for the info. I should not be surprised that C clamps are basically useless these days. My father was a very (mid) 20th century man, and was highly resistant to change. He got away with it primarily by being the smartest person in the room, and never above using that to his advantage. Upon reflection this is only a small part of his collection, which means there's a bunch more I still need to unearth. I should add he never did any original construction with these, they were use to repair antique furniture.

Serious question for wood workers of HC: How much do good cast iron C-clamps cost these days? Sizes 4" to 12" with a few odd bigger ones. My father had a bunch, which were made in the 1980s. Many are quite deep. I don't have much use for them, but stubborn idiot that I am, I took every last one of them to MV with me. I left behind his bar clamp collection ...for now. I've seen a lot of C-clamps for sale online, many for less than $25. Most of them look like pure sintered Chinesium to me. Where do serious woodworkers go to buy clamps these days?

This song will now get stuck in your head.

Somebody turns 80 today. There's certainly no other earthly reason I'd post this particular album cover. No siree....

I have internets again.

Still on 128kbsp internet for now. https://i.imgur.com/SnNidmm.jpg Also I am a terrible person.

This is more "Burn in Hell" than RIP, but it is noteworthy: NH Nazi Leader Dead Day After Teatotaller Incident in Concord. Now there's a line. There's a zoomer meme that's appropriate here.

I heard that if the Stax Mafia were real, that they use old Krell amps as cement shoes. Good thing for you they don't exist, huh?

I absolutely loathe most modern pickup trucks. me_irl

Fujifim suspends X100V orders likely due to overwhelming demand, component shortage; raises questions about viability of successor. The Fuji X100 series are HUGELY popular with Tik Tokers, which has driven the demand and price of them through the stratosphere. NIB X100Vs are like $2000 on the used market. An X100 series has been on my "maybe buy one" list for many years, but at this point I'm looking at a Canon mirrorless and the 35mm F/2 IS.

YouTube is the one website I encourage to track my every move on it, because it occasionally spits out some suggestions even I had no idea I'd like: I was only ever peripherally aware of Fanny. I had a hippie aunt who liked them when they were contemporary. This cover is interesting. Captain Obvious here, the original is better. I love that it's considered one of the "lesser" Beatles songs. Like most of their works, it has its own Wiki page. Fascinating read.

So I'm on 128kbps internet for the next 10 or so days. It's like a certain 1994 FSOL album up in this piece. With that said, here's a paradoxical sounding Quick Slow:

Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi dies. Bunga bunga no more.

To be fair GRRM has a head start on the whole not writing thing.

Not worthy of its own thread: Drobo is Officially Done as the Company Moves Into Liquidation. For years I used one as my primary backup. See here on my very crowded desk, a decade ago.

As someone who grew up on 80s wrestling, I recognized early how important a good heel was to any narrative. Clown ass Hulk Hogan owes a huge amount of his success to wrestlers like the Sheik and Andre the Giant.

While I'm not where near my late 00s output, I have begun to take, edit and post photos at a rate that I have not in over a decade. Just a short walk from my house. The 17-40L is a bit silly at the wide end (TBH just about everything that wide is) but I end up using it that way more often than not. I attribute this to a lack of discipline on my part. Conversely, the 17-40 is actually amazing at 40mm. Infrared version of a scene I posted earlier (points up.) IR is never not a PITA. Out of the camera, this shot looks awful. I spent over an hour futzing with it. First I denoised in Topaz DeNoise AI. Next ran it through Luminar 4 where I made a bunch of changes and applied a lookup table. I've begun to use L4 for the conversion to B&W. It's basically as good as (my totally legit copy of) Photoshop for that task. I also applied a lookup table, which made a fairly subtle difference. Lastly, I dragged the image into PS, removed some dirt spots and fixed the [gosh darn] horizon line. I actually quite like the end result. I've been moving toward "normal" looking IR images (vs freakish alien landscape) for a while now. Other than the odd tone curve, one might not immediately notice this is an IR photo. Downtown Edgartown. Similar, but not quite as involved process as above. Luminar 4 manages to add so much noise to images with its pseudo HDR math (even when I specifically disable most of it) that I have found I need to do both "before" and "after" passes in Topaz. This is a much more obviously IR shot. I do like the strong beam of light from the late afternoon sun. Edgartown docks. Less processing than some of the shots above, but I still did a careful B&W conversion and spent considerable time on the levels. Across the street fro my house. What makes this photo for me is the tiny jet with the contrail between the clouds. I've also been editing some older photos, specifically a bunch from 2008: Two shots of the late Heidi the cat, surveying her kingdom and ...doing cat stuff, I guess. Taken with the very good Canon 85mm F/1.8 I borrowed for a few days. The 85/1.8 is a great lens that forever lives in the looming shadow of the glass Gojira that is its F/1.2 brother. Exiting a bar on Christmas Eve, 2011. PowerShot S95 wide open (F/2) 1/13th handheld, ISO200. I didn't like the photo when I took it, but nearly a dozen years later I think it captures a mood. My driveway after a blizzard, January 2009. Light source is my house + car's headlights. A few weeks earlier that same January. Cold sunset over a Stop & Shop parking lot. Back to the present day. Some odd cloud formations over my back yard. Moment app on an iPhone 13, with minimal futzing in PS afterward. I've got a bunch more to post, but this is going to have to do for now. Flickr has gone "503 Service Unavailable. No server is available to handle this request." half a dozen times while I've tried to make this post.

The Bobby Parable.

I own one of the red ones. I have never successfully taken a photo with it.

I dug out and fired up my 30D for the first time in 6? 7? 8? years today. There were a number of false starts. I had to set the time (it had only lost half an hour, which is amazing) and it didn't like the first three CF cards I fed it. Finally, it stopped complaining and I tried some shots with 50/1.4. Confirming things worked, I immediately reached for my ancient Meyer-Optik Orestor 135mm F/2.8 "bokeh monster." My purpose was to photograph to old old widgets that belonged to my grandfather. I had the benighted notion to post the images to reddit's /r/whatisthisthing, but that subreddit has a slew of poorly defined rules and an aggressive AutoMod bot so they can individually and collectively go F themselves. With that said, I took a whole bunch of artistically questionable shots of two 19th century objects while making egregious and unnecessary use of a shallow depth of field: Old East German glass is a hoot. See more here and more broadly my use of manual focus lenses here.

As the zoomers say, that last one hits just right. Serious purists would grouse about "nisen bokeh" but as most photographers eventually figure out, faults can make a lens interesting. I haven't taken too many photos since moving to MV, which is silly as when I lived off-island I took photos like mad when I visited here. I mentioned a while back I bought the Moment and Hipstamatic apps for iOS: Hipstamatic is never not silly, but I actually really like the framing of this image. The faux vintage effects add nothing, TBH. This one actually works pretty well as a photograph, hipster or not. Not hipster at all. The Edgartown docks. IR 5D, 17-40L at the wide end, F/4, 1/60th, ISO50. Straight out of the camera with no edits at all. This happens remarkably never. There are two types of photographers: those who have no idea about metering for infrared and liars. My street. IR 5D, 50mm F/1.4 @ F/8, 1/200, ISO100. I ambled around the neighborhood with the 5D and faster 50mm. The latter is actually a terrible match for the former, for a variety of reasons. The biggest one is that the 50/1.4 has a huge bright spot dead center in infrared that doesn't appear at all in the visible color spectrum. Curiously, my older 1987 50mm F/1.8 doesn't have this problem at all. Of all the photos I took this afternoon, this was a last minute one as I was crossing the road. At the time I remember thinking "well, there was no effort in that one so it will suck." It was the best of the bunch, by a huge margin. South Beach, EDG. Moment app on iPhone 13. I adjusted the EV down a bit. I do not get along with touchscreen controls. Some days I wish I'd sprung for a 13 Pro, but the price difference could get me a Canon 35mm F/2 IS. The gateway to South Beach. Also Moment on the i13. I got the sea horizon reasonably straight but that didn't stop be from loading the image into Photoshop, pixel peeping and getting that MFer as level as I could. I do like the framing on this one. About 5 feet ahead of the previous photo. I adjusted the horizon and fussed over the levels of this shot quite a bit. It looks remarkably non-pseudo-HDR, and I consider that to be a success at this point. Missing from this image: the cold AF breeze coming off the Atlantic. EDG harbor again. Taken right after the IR photo at the top. The late afternoon sun was gorgeous and the iPhone was the best (visible spectrum) camera I had on hand. I did correct the horizon but didn't make many adjustments otherwise. I like it. Throwback Thursday: ("Knuckles, it's Wednesday.") Truly a monstrous edit. I started with a not very good photo I took and had previously edited in 2005 and rand it through Topaz Gigapixel AI, upscaling it 6x. Then I loaded it into Luminar 4, where I made dozens of tweaks and applied a lookup table. Next I used Topaz DeNoise AI to clean the image up and remove some of the posterizing effects brought on by Luminar. Lastly I dragged into Photoshop, used QuickMask to select the sky and denoised and otherwise cleaned it up (it needed a lot of work.) Then I straightened out the horizon and adjusted the levels. This was a project I worked on and off again for a week. Was it worth it? Probably not. I find the end result kind of amusing.

Oof. So I've spent ...entirely too long today working on getting a temporary (or "temporary" if one prefers) setup going. It has been an uphill battle. Long time listeners will remember I made use of a Native Instruments Traktor Audio 6 USB audio interface for years. It served as both the dual stereo outputs for my DJ software as well as the analogue inputs for Mixlr. It died a slow and awkward death. I have been trying to diagnose its issues today. What I've learned so far: The device is called an "Audio 6" because it has 6 stereo pairs: 3 in and 3 out. They are grouped into "Main" "A" and "B. The "Main" pair is completely shot. I have not tested the Main inputs today, but given that they were the point of failure when I stopped using this unit, I suspect they have not magically un-fucked themselves. In addition to that knowledge, I have also figured out that the Main ouputs are just as dead. Both the Main RCA outs and the headphone jack (which is permanently routed to Main out) produce nothing but horrid, headphone destroying static. The good news is that output A and output B appear to be working. This is a plus as I need a good 4channel USB DAC for this "temporary" setup, preferably one with RCA outs. I haven't done a proper test with a DJ mixer yet, but so far the Audio 6 looks promising. Unfortunately, that is the only good news. I still have to find a space in a tiny room to set up my large-ish 19" DJ mixer, laptop and necessary USB audio widgets. I also need at least one USB audio device with a working stereo pair of inputs. In the past I have used an Onkyo MSE-U33HB which dates from the turn of the millennium and was primarily sold outside of the US: Right before I moved, and again recently I confirmed that the output stage of my unit is dead. It's probably something as simple as bad capacitors, but it's beyond my ability to fix them. I need to rest the input stage and see if it's similarly dead. If it isn't, I'm going to once again press the Onkyo into service as my Mixlr Box. If it fails that test, I'm going to have to get creative.

This is a photo of a group of boomers in a record store, taken in 1973. I have no idea what is the album that the woman in the middle is holding. I've asked several people and gotten either "I don't know" or wrong answers (CCR's Mardi Gras, which game out in '72 but didn't look like that.)