Wild guy disassembling $1000 camera. Yikes. And he doesn’t even like it!
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Today I learned that when you change how you do your backups, it is really a good idea to double check that they work properly in a catastrophic event. My NAS box died a few months ago and I switched to backing up on an external HDD. I changed the paths and just looked to see if data was being written, but did not check for problems… 5 months of RAWs, edits, and printing tweaks just disappeared. OOPS! 
Some good news though, dt 5.4 is now in my distro’s repositories. So I get to use aGX and look at .xmp files made with it now!
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A heads-up: old XMPs from before December (the development builds) won’t work completely, the AgX parameters will be reset to defaults.
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Thanks for the reminder!!
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Not sure if you can’t get a Leica for the total amount of money and time he spent, either. Are they that crazy expensive? I mean, sure, learning experience, great fun, but from a utilitarian viewpoint, does this project “make sense”?
(He said, after having hand built two keyboard and working on the design for a third one)
He did open source the models, though, that’s cool.
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When he mentions the empty space inside the body, my first thought was about how Panasonic could have made a smaller body easily. But then he talks about the thermals, and I am no longer so sure.
In any case, it is an impressive project, even if it did not work out in every detail. This gives me hope that Esquisse can pull it off.
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The way that camera is used, often for video and handheld or in a rig, I think going smaller could also be counter productive weight distribution wise. For me it’s much easier to stabilize a larger camera than a smaller one, given that the weigh the same
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Cool list, I’m going to try to find somewhere to stream those.
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On all those cheap Chinese lenses (and more significant things):
"The weak yuan isn’t the only way Chinese officials engineer trade surpluses. Industrial policy also plays a role. You see, while China no longer engages in old-style Communist central planning, the Chinese government still plays a large role in directing where resources, especially capital, go. In particular, it channels cheap credit into favored industries — which tend to be export industries or industries that compete with imports. Again,Chinese government policy encourages large trade surpluses.
There’s much more that can be said on these topics, but for current purposes the essential point is this: by foregoing policies to boost domestic consumption, China is relying on huge surpluses to compensate for underconsumption, and its exchange rate and industrial policies are designed to enable those surpluses."
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From yesterday’s ISO profile creation – just if anyone’s curious what ISO 50 does to an image (SOOC JPEGs are shown) compared to native 100
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The term “enshittification” has become widespread over the past year or two, but it isn’t exactly new. I recall a couple of friends back in the late 60s / early 70s who often described things as “shittified”. It could have to do with politics or working on a car, but if things were wrong, they called them “shittified”. 
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Really like this short NPR photo story and profile of a Filipino photographer who took pictures of people doing their laundry or waiting for it dry in the open air in Cambodia. Photos can sometimes really help to isolate an otherwise unnoticed element of ordinary life and bring out the everyday stories of regular people.
And here’s two of my own from the archive.
Edit: The second is a conscious though underpowered effort to replicate Michael Wolf:
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The ISP replaced (“upgraded”) my modem today, the technician (a guy in his 20s) asked me to check that everything is working. I opened my laptop and started speedtest-cli. As we watched the numbers crawl by, he asked if I was some kind of hacker. As much as I find it incredible, he claimed that he had never seen a command line before.
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I hope you at least confirmed that yes, you just hacked into the mainframe of his employer and gave him a hefty raise. (did you wear a hoodie with the hood up by any chance? Black gloves maybe?)
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I am not at all surprised, no. These guys get sent out to replace modems and maybe put in a cable, and that’s sometimes about the extent of their knowledge. The days were this kind of profession attracted a very narrow set of people, are long behind us. 
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Same thing happened to me. The tech (a young lady) said it was fixed so I opened a terminal and tried nslookup, ping, etc. (it wasn’t fixed)
“…what are those codes you’re typing?”
On one hand I was slightly amazed but on the other I felt sorry for her. Having to go onto customers’ networks with clearly no real understanding, even at a fundamental level (and I’m no network engineer)… Must be fun.
At least I know for a fact it was “fun” when I was in that type of situation at work, regardless of context. My employer had no qualms about “assuming” we knew things, with zero training on them and putting us into the wrong place.
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Me neither, I am just a Linux user. I know the very, very basics of diagnosing a connection issue (do I have route to a host I know by IP address, can I ping it, check the name server, etc).
Is this different on Windows? Is there a “wizard” for this, or do people ask Clippy?
Windows has ipconfig and so on, you can dive into things as far as I know (haven’t touched Windows in ages, could very well be that you’re forced to watch ads first or the terminal has been replaced by a copilot prompt).
As for @lphilpot 's “must be fun” comment: it can be fun, depending on the willingness of the tech to learn stuff.