vr46

Just easy to see on the map, I guess - look for the binoculars!

I was in a chunk of the world where roaming was prohibitive this summer, and Organic Maps took us everywhere, found us incredible viewing spots to photograph from, and basically gave us a real connection to the landscape around us. The UI was slightly confusing, but forgivable, and if I had any money I would give it to them.

Opportunity to give Organic Maps a shout for being brilliant and wonderful.

The Opsix looks very straightforward. I bought the Digitone Keys about three years ago and it's a lot of fun, along with having that sequencer and Elektron Interface. It does not appear to have been a successful product, and I do not think it's really possible to use a full instrument, but I have enjoyed using it as a plaything to learn and understand FM synthesis. No doubt there is some creative wizard like Blue Lab Beats who probably uses this and a Digitakt to make whole albums.

I was hoping to see a giant red line going from France directly into CERN, as Geneva (last I heard) was unable to supply them the power they needed.

Did you run through Buyers Walk right inside the building, or do you mean Grand Ave, the short and often slippery vehicular road that cut the building in half?

Either are cool, although I like the image of you running through the actual market like Rocky Balboa in the meat locker or something

Super sad, have spent a long of time in the area from riding right through the middle of it and parking my motorbike under it, to wolfing Turkish lunches and drinking in the pubs (not on the same day, drink-driving mavens). It is a bit of anomaly in the modern London, hard to get to and surrounded by roads that aren’t really fit for purpose anymore, but it’s these incongruous spots that make things interesting. I remember the butcher on the main Farringdon Road just near the Charterhouse St junction, who was somewhat of a character, scoffing at my suggestion that he would even consider buying meat from Smithfield - literally around the corner - which confused and amused me at the same time.

I note the haughty remarks of other commenters who are neither familiar with the area or the ability to read, and suggest they pay a virtual visit to the spots in question

Android phone circa 2010

Every computer ever, I could have been a lumberjack and had a peaceful life

What a lovely memory, and I think my first mac, a PB 180, was Irish, but if not, the accessories certainly were. And I wonder if the doorstop of a Powermac 8100 still at my childhood home was Irish too.

A different world, though. You couldn't find an Apple Mac most places, and I think I possessed the only Mac laptop in the whole of my university.

I wonder what Apple Ireland do now, apart from make nefarious plans to avoid tax and make orphans cry.

My buddy has a wallpaper on his phone that says, in large letters, "Do I really to be picking up my phone right now?"

Done and done.

Photography has never been a cheap hobby, and there have always been a few manufacturers at the top end of engineering able to reach higher and higher.

Regarding digital, Leica made several false starts - its M8 and M9 were excreble - and it finally understood that you couldn't spend all the money on machining brass to protect the innards made of cheese.

The Q2 is/was/whatever in a league of its own and the closest thing I have yet found to my old G2. The lens is pretty much too good, it resolves everything, and everything is there, always, and you want for nothing. The rest of the camera is a joy to use, I've had it for five years and they have nailed the usability. It is constrained, of course, but as an everyday camera that is a joy to use, it's amazing. Couple that with brand cachet and awareness, and no wonder they're finally doing brilliantly. The new digital strategy also shed some of the duller old-school gatekeepers like the late Erwin Puts with his whining about the "soul of Leica products being eradicated" (see https://photo.imx.nl/blog/files/75caecf5a21140ab6c9b46f825ef...).

And many of the comments about the Q-series talk about rediscovered the joy of photography and shooting. I lent my Q2 to a friend for an extended play and they were in love with in and what it let them do.

Joy-to-use. Wins the oh-I-like-your-camera-competition. Superlative image quality and colour. Luxury brand that reminds you how awesome you are when you look it, which, let's face it, is the only reason you look at a Rolex or Omega on your wrist too.

I took a position at a prominent London university to teach one of their courses and I did it for the love of it, because it was less than two days contracting for an entire term of lecturing and marking. Forget that coming into college to teach was effectively an entire day of my time for a two hour lecture or seminar, I think I was paid by the hour. This practice goes on everywhere and the real losers are the students/customers.

At least you're accepting them. Half my FB feed was complaining about them as if they were the worst thing to be foist upon them and I sarcastically posted about how people want the world's problems to be fixed and the environment to be saved, but won't for a microsecond accept any actual solution that might involve them to do some work - cue classic Dilbert moment

MinerU

PDFQuery

PyMuPDF (having more success with older versions, right now)

I spend a lot of time scrolling past the same stories, HN is like Groundhog Day

I’ll have to test this against my local Python pipeline which does all this without an LLM in attendance. There are a ton of existing Python libraries which have been doing this for a long time, so let’s take a look..

A good season, with the front runners doing something really special at times. Conflicted fan of the sprints and so many races due to the pressure to squeeze money from the sport, but enjoying the extra racing.

Oh, I still love it, just not in a rose-tinted goggles way, like I did when I was 18. I did work a few stints at a Japanese company in London and saw the slight clash of corporate cultures up close.

Yeah, I think brown people are less welcome, although I still want to spend a month just wandering around record shops listening to Japanese jazz-funk and slurping noodles

All this has gone a long way to make me feel better about not keeping up my Japanese language skills after university. My youthful deep reverence for Japan and its culture shifted into realpolitik as I learned more and more, and I think another watch of Fear And Trembling is in order…

Yes, feedback loops? What feedback loops!

One of my favourite books and authors, I gave my copy to my photojournalism tutor after I explained how this book helped open up my mind and related directly to the photojournalism concept of “creating order out of chaos”, which has since become applicable to every part of my professional life!

Need to go dig out his other books and get myself another copy of this. And clone this repo.

That seems like an apt metaphor for TW, if the guards were the ones who got you into the mess in the first place, of course

Ah, their fabled rear-view mirror again.

A nicely-presented summary of various tech applications but I’m not sure we need a lighthouse anymore.

At a distance works great, my friend (not deaf, but works in a school) taught her kids BSL (also not deaf) and recounted the story of how she was able to bollock the kids once in public across a hall.

She also had no trouble ordering a drink from her boyfriend (not deaf) who was standing at the bar some way away in a crowded pub.

Sign languages are indeed quite useful.

The article seemed a bit straw man and whining, as well as recycling old ideas, such as letting groups isolate themselves from others, but I confess I was too bored to finish reading.

Reinventing the wheel suggests they're not even paying attention to the past, let along learning from it...

So here's the thing - the law isn't the problem - because you have no idea in advance how each individual piece of media, film, song, whatever, will be treated depending upon your own circumstances. And this actually changes from time to time.

e.g. Bought all eight films in the collection of a well-known series about a wizarding school. Move country. Film number 4 vanishes into thin-air. Just gone. Have to buy film again in current country.

e.g. Bought entire collection of classic British comedy about some senior governmental tomfoolery. Whole collection vanishes on move. Then about three months later reappears. Then a few weeks later disappears. Then reappears again. Then disappears.

So the laws aren't causing this, but they do need to resolve this. Licensing media might be harder than the Good Friday Agreement, but I refuse to accept that it's impossible, and consumers should just suck it up. I don't have any kind of contract with anyone but Apple, so they really should take responsibility.

I keep buying CDs at €1 or £1 each from the local secondhand-kaufhäuser or charity shop, and the house is littered with thousands of CDs and the only break-up clause I would worry about with regard to those is the one with my other half, not with who I bought them from.

It very much is an Apple problem because I purchased my stuff from them and not from anyone else. The buck has to stop there.

Secondly, I already bought the thing, I don’t care that the thing is no longer sold where I happen to be standing. The rights holders already got their money.

If retail suddenly means that one side gets to renegotiate the deal, then yeah, I think we have a problem. Give me the money back.

I’m well aware how licensing content works, I just want post-purchase shenanigans to stop.

Any space on that boat?

Good, I hope they hammer Apple. I moved country and lost around 2/3rd of my TV and Film library, box sets partially complete, films disappeared, TV shows too.

I was attempting to build a small collection of decent stuff and didn't expect that I would have to move country, much less that my library decided to stay behind. So pissed off.

I picked this up a few months ago while wandering around London and it is a delightful book, with a delightful tempo. Perhaps for those of us that lean more towards the Wong Kar-wei’s of the world than the peaks and tropes of airport bestsellers packed with big moments connected by flatlines.