Knuckledragger

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.)

(!) Look who's back: It's like 2007 all over again.

This sketch aired 30 years ago today.

This is an obscure one. Today I learned that Mario Rosa AKA Dr Mario died, before his 50th birthday. Dr. Mario gained some fame in the Los Angeles drum n bass scene in the late 90s and early 00s, as well as on mp3.com around the same time. I discovered him on that site, during an era when I'd make regular dives into their electronic music section. I actually contacted Dr. M once, asking him about a track that was only released in shitty, 128k mp3 format (a phenomenon regular listeners to my show will remember be talking about often.) He said he'd look for the originals of that track, but he never got back to me. I have one of his IRL friends on my FB friends list because many years ago, I went look for Dr. Mario and found his friend instead. I saw a post from said friend saying Mario had passed. At his best, Dr. Mario made frenetic DNB even by the standards of the genre. He crossed over into full on IDM territory, echoing the sounds of 90s Aphex Twin and Autechre, but with a deceptively deep sense of melody. Two of his best tracks are this one: This one was briefly popular on mp3.com around the year 2000. This one wasn't as well known, but I actually prefer it. It sums up everything that I like about his music. (Not even) 50 is entirely too young for anyone to pass, especially a talent like Mario's.

Adam Yauch died 11 years ago today.

From the sound of things, Topping ate Monopoly and has proceeded to shit out Connect Four.

Gordon was a complex one for me. I grew up during the age of angry punks and metalheads who were reacting against "boomer rock." His style of music was the least hip thing imaginable around the time I got my first Walkman. In spite of that environment, I always liked his songwriting and his incredibly distinctive singing voice. As is often the case, Gordon Lightfoot wasn't actually a boomer (1938, Silent Generation.) I remember hearing "Sundown" on the radio when I was quite young and finding it captivating. It was many years (which are big ones when one is so small) before I had an artist song title I could attach to it. It's apocryphal/not proven, but the lyrics to the song are often described as referring to the woman who indirectly killed John Belushi. That adds a whole additional weight to an already quite dark song. Also I've noticed that younger generations (later Millennials and Zoomers) seem to unironically (as they say) like "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." I remember a few years ago someone posted a graphic illustrating how lake Superior had its own weather systems to reddit and a bunch of users there wrote out the entire lyrics to the song, one comment at a time. That's some lasting impact right there.

Someone on the MV FB group I'm in got their account hacked and posted this obvious scam: So I posted my own version:

Well, I did it. I finally got a digital camera with some Leica glass. No, not like that. I went to the second hand store on MV and saw a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ7. Some of you may remember when Panasonic licensed the Leica name for their point and shoots in the late 00s, to the sound of much snickering from the photography world. This thing is very silly. It has a tiny 10MP sensor, a "25-300mm equivalent" zoom with an F/3.3-F/4.9 max aperture. In a word, yick. A super range zoom is more or less the opposite of what I like (fast, short primes) Also, the exposure controls are lousy. Even my mid 00s PowerShot S60 had manual (push button) controls for shutter and aperture. I actually kind of like 00s digital cameras. I've shot with a bunch. My OG IR 5D is still in service (once I give the sensor a proper cleaning). As I have said before, I now have an active disdain for the pseudo HDR look that current SMRT phone cameras shit out. The somewhat goofy behavior of older digital cameras is vastly preferable to me. With that said, this Lumix isn't the kind of vintage I like. I cannot complain too much because I got the camera for $8. Strictly speaking, the charger and battery were $8. The young fella at the second hand shop who sold it to me (who appeared to be more stoned than I was at his age and, well... 1996 was the best year of my life that I don't remember) couldn't figure out the price of the camera. His solution was to consider the camera, charger, battery and case to be one item use the price tag he had at hand. Oh, the punchline: The TZ7 can address has a maximum SD card size of 32GB. The only SD card I had on hand was a 64GB. I went on a rummage and found a 256 megabyte card that is doubtlessly older than the sentient cloud of pot smoke that sold me the camera. Fortunately, it formatted just fine and the Lumix was happy with it.

This is amusing, but it's to ...spazzy. If they work out smoother transitions between the AI generated iterations, they'll really be on to something. As it stands now the idea is neat but the execution is seriously lacking.

FYI/FWIW: Imgur, the site to which I have uploaded images since 2009, is changing their ToS. All NSFW content as well as images uploaded not uploaded by a user with an account (that is to say, done anonymously) will be deleted after May 15. I've had an Imgur account since September 9, 2010 and in that time I've uploaded over 42,000 images (an alarmingly high percentage of which were posted in this very thread.) I didn't have an Imgur account for the first year or so that I used the site. I suspect any content I uploaded in that time period is on the chopping block. Also, while I don't upload anything I'd consider to be porn, I'm sure there's a bunch of photos I've posted that will not fit in with the site's new ToS. I have no idea how Imgur is going to go about pruning all the content they don't find acceptable. I remember what happened to Tumblr a few years ago and I'm a bit worried about the future of Imgur. With that said... Memes you can hear. This should make you feel old. "Knight to Bork 5." Least delusional RAM driver. me_irl Firefighters washing blood off the sidewalk following the mass shooting in Dadeville, Alabama. Apparently the "beads" USB hub design is not a new one. This a USB 1.1 hub from 20 years ago. There are two cats. Cape Cod, Nantucket and (part of) the Vineyard on April 14 from the ISS. What a bunch of no-good punks.

Okay, things one could not make up for $500, Alex. The beat from that AI MC Trump track I posted yesterday is lifted from this song: "The Great TK" is a female rapper from New York ...who is a double amputee. She has a YouTube channel. I take it back. AI will never be able to replicate the human experience.

Speaking of, Ignoring one's own opinion on AI generated art (or sentient bags of cheeto dust) for a second, this song is a banger. I'm pretty sure it's over for us as a species.