I have 825 books in my LibraryThing. I started using the site in 2005 just after it launched. I’ve been tagging the books in my catalog for years but just got around to putting them into Collections. Philosophy & Religion for example.
I’ve posted on this before it bears repeating. Barb’s visiting an old friend (Jeff Pylant) who took the selfie on the left in which his finger features prominently. Using the Repair Tool in Pixelmator (not Pixelmator Pro) it took less than 30 seconds to fix the image. Not a pro photographer fix but good enough.
We “took” photos differently when our cameras had a roll of film that could take 24 shots. And it would be days — later just 24 hours — before we got our prints back. That’s when we learned if we got the light right and everybody was ‘in’ the photograph. We didn’t snap photos back then. We positioned everyone. Said dumb shit to try to get them to smile. We worked at making the photograph. A little bit.
Today we one-hand the phone and fire off a burst of half dozen images and if they’re not very good they’ll scroll into oblivion in a few hours. We have no investment in such images. We have so many they’re like a wheelbarrow full of Reichsmarks in 1949. Or a pair of Imelda Marcos’ shoes.
The image would seem to be the obvious answer but I wonder if sharing isn’t an equally important component. Yes, you can take a photo and enjoy it without ever showing it to someone but that rarely happens. When photos were expensive and rare, we hung them on walls for all to see. As we accumulated more, we sat next to each other with an album in our lap, slowly turning pages. Or on the floor with a shoe box filled with “pictures.” I never cared much for carousels filled with 35mm slides. Trapped in a dark room, clicking through hundreds of photos of Old Faithful.
But now photos are cheap and easy. Like that girl in high school. We take thousands and dump them in the sky or cram them onto our phones drop them into a Facebook stream where they live for a few seconds then die. Marie Kondo asks, “Does this photo spark joy in your heart?” If not, give it away. I’ve done that with a life-time of prints. Feels good, like giving a dog you can’t care for to someone who lives on a farm.
There’s no way to share 10,000 photos.
Shawn Quinn has been playing pinball for a long time. He knows a lot about the games and the history behind them. He blogs at SKQ Record Quest (“A site about one man’s quests for record video game high scores, pinball tournament championships, fame, and stardom”)
“Microsoft Word is a tyrant of the imagination, a petty, unimaginative, inconsistent dictator that is ill-suited to any creative writer’s use. Worse: it is a near-monopolist, dominating the word processing field. Its pervasive near-monopoly status has brainwashed software developers to such an extent that few can imagine a word processing tool that exists as anything other than as a shallow imitation of the Redmond Behemoth. But what exactly is wrong with it?”
David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Ruby on Rails, Founder & CTO at Basecamp) is leaving Medium for… a WordPress blog.
“Writing for us is not a business, in any direct sense of the word. We write because we have something to say, not to make money off page views, advertisements, or subscriptions.”
“Beyond that, though, we’ve grown ever more aware of the problems with centralizing the internet. Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization.”
“With the new take, we’re also trying to bring more of a classic SvN style back to the site. Not just big, marque pieces, but lots of smaller observations, quotes, links, and other posts as well. In fact, the intention is to lessen our dependency on Twitter too, and simply turn Signal v Noise into the independent home for all our thoughts and ideas – big or small.”
I’ve been seeing articles (posts?) on Medium for six or seven years but never paid much attention. Here’s the Wikipedia page.
A gutsy offering from the Cool & Vintage guys. Photos of some of their restorations got me started down the Land Rover path.
I’ve never paid much attention (or used) the Health app on my iPhone. Apple says it “consolidates health data from iPhone, Apple Watch, and third-party apps” to do all kinds of stuff. It has a “Health Records” section that I never did anything with until a couple of days ago when I learned I could sync my records (University of Missouri Health Care) to the Apple Health app.
I have about ten years of records stored in the MU Health system and can get to them via browser or iPhone app. But it took a little digging and I rarely had the need.
Within minutes all of my data was pulled into the phone app and I mean everything. More than 600 records (I’ve been pretty healthy). Immunizations, lab results, medications… the works. And much easier to navigate than the website and app I’d been using. So now I have all of my health records right there on my phone. Additional info.