I have really made more of an effort lately to get out and take more photos. Not easy in the winter when you get off work at 4:30 and it’s dark by 5, but that’s what weekends and off-days are for…
These first two are on pushed (800 speed) HP5+ at the park by my house.
This one was during the Chester Christmas Parade. I miscalculated the develop time on that roll and thought I had totally cooked the negatives, but I was able to rescue a couple of them after scanning.
The only “old” photo scan in this batch. I’ve been simplifying my editing process and wanted to try it on this older image. I really like it.
Finally a few pinhole images. The first two are behind my house. The last one is of one of our cats. Pinhole long-exposure plus curious cat makes for some pretty ghostly images…
This is a (long overdue) update to my Favorite YouTube Channels post from 2019. There are some repeats and some new ones…
They’re in alphabetical order, not in order of preference, so make sure you read all the way to the bottom of the list because some of my absolute favorites are way down the alphabet…
Acorn to Arabella: The boat is “done” and sailing but still worth watching as they adventure around New England and the East Coast. Definitely worth a watch from the start to see the journey from tree to ship.
Blondihacks: Quinn makes stuff in her home machine shop. Very informative and, in my opinion, entertaining. Generally alternates between project videos and How-To videos. She’s currently working on making a working model steam locomotive.
BPS.space: Joe is building rockets. All kinds of rockets. And he explains the process really well.
CROKER vs Rover: This fella from New Zealand is restoring a vintage Land Rover and a relatively newer Discovery. And he’s pretty damn funny, too. His channel with older vids is Geoffrey Croker.
Get Hands Dirty: Excellent channel for practical woodworking. She has redone her entire apartment with custom cabinetry projects that just look amazing…
Inheritance Machining: This guy designs and builds stuff in the awesome machine shop he inherited from his Grandfather.
Laura Kampf: She makes really cool one-off projects and she’s currently renovating a 120-year old house in Germany.
Pask Makes: Australian guy makes amazing projects, lots with scrap material laying around his shop.
Sampson Boat Co.: Another wooden boat channel. The Tally Ho is technically finished and sailing but it’s defintely still worth watching. His goal is to get her to the Fastnet race in 2027. Also worth a watch from the beginning to see her complete restoration.
Ship Happens UK: Husband and wife in the UK restoring a World War II patrol boat. They’ve done a ton of work so far and there is a ton left to do…
The Duracell Project: The restoration of the racing boat Duracell built by Mike Plant. It’ll be a while before this one is done so plenty of time to get caught up and watch the build.
This Old Tony: One of my absolute favorite machining channels. He doesn’t post super often but his videos are all great.
Usagi Electric: Probably my absolute favorite YouTube channel. To say he restores old computers is an understatement. He’s currently working on a Bendix G15 and she’s getting close to running. He’s also building his own vacuum tube computer. LOVE this channel.
Xyla Foxlin: Rockets, electronic projects, woodworking, a corset made out of carbon fiber. Xyla does it all. Great channel.
I have messed around with different Linux distributions before but never run Linux as a daily driver machine until now. Here are the what, how, and (of course) the why…
I bought the Corsair 4000D case, the motherboard, the cpu and an 80 Plus Gold 1000 watt power supply. Then I ran out of money for the planned memory, storage, and video card because going to Los Angeles is not cheap.
So the project was put on hold. I had half of a pc sitting in my office waiting to either be finished or sold. Then a couple of things happened.
First, I modified my backup system. Instead of an old, rack-mount pc in my office rack running 24 hours a day pulling data off of my network drive just to sync with Backblaze, I discovered I could switch to Backblaze’s B2 service and sync my data directly to backblaze from my Synology NAS1. This simplified the whole workflow of backups immensely and saved the electricity and complexity of running a Windows machine constantly just for backups.
Then the upcoming Kerbal Space Program 2 was killed, and I realized I didn’t really want to spend the time or money for a good Flight Simulator setup.
The obvious question, then, is why not just use the now un-needed backup pc for my Linux machine? I could have. And in an earlier incarnation that machine actually did run Linux for a while before I needed it for backups. The main two reasons are: I had already purchased about 90% of what I would need to make the unfinished gaming pc into a desktop Linux pc and I had decided that I wanted to have the Linux pc in my bedroom at a small writing desk I had in there: the rack-mount case wouldn’t work for that. So I repurposed the gaming pc into an overkill Linux desktop for writing.
But why not just use the Macbook? First, that has become a sort of household computer. If my wife or kid need more than their Chromebooks to do something they use the Macbook. So it needs to be out and accessible to them and I like to do my writing in the bedroom at my writing desk.
Plus there is the fact that I just enjoy tinkering and messing with my pc. It’s more fun to run Linux and be able to mess around with stuff. And to not have to run Windows is just a blessing. Honestly, a modern Linux machine feels much more like the 386/486 MS-DOS machines that I grew up learning on but with a really nice desktop environment, too.
I don’t have a video card in the machine right now. Everything I run (including the few games) run absolutely fine on the built-in video from the i7 cpu. I have a card I could put in that I got a few years ago to run in a previous incarnation of what was the backup pc, but I don’t think I need it for what I do and the pc as it is runs almost completely silent, so why add power consumption and extra fans? The 32 GB of ram is probably twice what I’d ever actually need but Newegg had a set of two 16 GB sticks for a really good price, so I got them. Finally, the 1.5 TB disk space is split between a 500 GB M.2 drive with the system and (currently) everything else on it, and a 1 TBSSD that’s in there just in case. I think I’ll backup the entire M.2 to the SSD with automatic backups but I haven’t set that up yet. The M.2 is also backed up to the NAS, and hence to Backblaze B2.
The Distro
My previous Linux experience was with Ubuntu and LinuxMint. They’re totally fine but didn’t work for me in this instance. First, the Ubuntu desktop environment is just too limiting for me. I mean no disrespect but it feels like baby Linux sometimes. I needed something more sophisticated. I initially installed LinuxMint Cinnamon and immediately ran into problems. The display drivers wouldn’t load on boot. The system wouldn’t recognize the motherboard’s built-in wifi. It really felt like the system just couldn’t recognize the relatively new hardware I was running. I briefly considered installing Arch Linux but was quickly dissuaded.
I settled on Fedora 40 Workstation. Initially I installed Fedora Silverblue and found it so frustrating to change things I changed to F40 Workstation almost immediately. And I’m pretty happy with it. There are some UI things that are… different, but I can customize the system to a certain extent. The main thing is that it also worked perfectly with my hardware right out of the box.
So Fedora 40 it is:
Using the PC
This is my desktop. I try to keep Workspace 1 relatively clean, with just a Firefox window if I’m actively using it, or Steam if I’m playing a game.
Workspace 2 is for work. I have Sublime Text or LibreOffice Write up full screen to get writing done with less distraction.
Workspace 3 is for system monitoring. It’s totally unnecessary but I like to be able to see how everything is running at a glance. It’s split between the System Monitor and a terminal window running btop.
You can see the system isn’t exactly being stressed…
One thing you might notice is the top bar has some extensions working to give quick access to my Apps, Places (Fedora for Folders), and more importantly for me quick launch my favorite apps: Firefox, Sublime Text, LibreOffice Write, Text Editor, Mahjongg, Steam, the Terminal.
Firefox is obvious. As is Sublime Text - where I do 99% of my writing for this site. I will be using LibreOffice for other, non-internet writing. And the Text Editor is just handy for making quick notes or quick edits to files. Mahjongg and Steam are for when I need a break. And Terminal is for system tasks, or for using SSH to access and update my VPN/Ad Blocker2. I can also write/edit files in the Terminal via nano or vim if I’m feeling particularly masochistic.
Finally
What I’ve got here is a virtually silent desktop pc running a modern, stable os that doesn’t track anything I do. It doesn’t serve me ads or try to do anything user hostile. It just lets me work the way I want to work and gets out of the way. It’s just about as perfect as I can make it.
I have the RS819. It is excellent for home network storage if you have a rack-mount system but unfortunately they don’t make it anymore - though they do still support and update it. The closest they have now are the RS822+ and the RS422+.↩︎
tl;dr - I have a Linode server running Ubuntu Linux that hosts a PiHoleVPN that lets us block ads and trackers on our phones and iPads. It’s pretty great and I’ll do a write-up on it soon…↩︎
We recently took a family trip to Los Angeles - mostly to spend time with Erin’s Uncle Brian and his family.
Of course I also got some photos and did a few cool side quests…
Views of Venice Beach
B and I took a day to do Disneyland
And we toured Dodger Stadium
Vin’s View from the Press Box
The 1988 World Series trophy
We also saw a screening of Hitchcock’s Spellbound at the newly restored Grauman’s Eqyptian - just down the street from the Chinese Theater
The Petersen Automotive Museum
The Model S Plaid that did the Nurburgring in 7 minutes and 35.579 seconds
Steve McQueen’s 1957 Jaguar XKSS
Driven by Ayrton Senna
Also driven by Ayrton Senna
Fernando Alonso and Michael Schumacher
It was a great trip. We went all over LA in the Tesla Model Y I rented. I think I might have found my next car…
But Los Angeles was great. I’ve already started a list of what I want to do next time we go.
Note: We were told repeatedly that we would be able to see the Hollywood sign from literally everywhere. Neither B or I saw it the entire time we were in Los Angeles.
Beatrix got a new digital camera and she let me use it a bit on a walk to the local park. None of these are amazing, and I just threw them in Lightroom and hit auto, but it’s a start…
Got some decent photos one incredibly humid afternoon at Lewis Ginter.
And Bea and I went to Maymont on a miserably hot and humid day and I got a bunch of garbage photos, but this one I was happy with…
My continued struggle with film is starting to get very frustrating. The process is too burdensome for the results I get. I’m seriously considering going back to a digital camera.
Scout passed last year after sixteen long years and somehow we now have three cats.↩︎
This project has been stopped. It never worked well enough to justify the montly cost and maintenance. I may try again at some point in the future, but for now it’s on hold.
Search Sucks
Search sucks. Every search engine has problems. Google is going to sell every keystroke you make to advertisers and fill your results with ads. Microsoft is going to do the same but not as well. I happily used DuckDuckGo for a while but I have a problem with the deal they struck with Microsoft.
I don’t think any of that is worth the results those search engines give. But they’re basically utility companies on the modern internet. You have to search. How else would you find anything?
What You Should Do About It
Most people should honestly do one of two things: either suck it up and use Google or change to DuckDuckGo for more, if not quite complete privacy. Either way you can use them as default search in any modern web browser and you’ll get acceptable results for most queries.
What I Did About It
I happened upon this video. I followed it step by step: setting up a Linode instance, configuring it, setting up docker and SearxNG, etc. Now I have my own private meta-search engine that does not collect my search history or keystrokes. It doesn’t serve ads and doesn’t sell my info. And the best part is that it searches multiple sites (google, duckduckgo, wikipedia, etc.) all at once. It works really well.
Downsides
There are two downsides to this setup. First, I do have to pay for the Linode instance. I got a pretty great free trial but once that’s over this server is $5 a month. It’s not much but most people aren’t going to pay $60/year for private search that they have to maintain themselves - I do have to make sure the server is updated and pay for the domain name.
The other problem is convenience. There is currently no easy way to make my search engine the default in any browser on desktop or mobile. I can’t just type a search in the search bar… If I want to use it I have to go to the actual site and use the search bar.
Finally
I do really like knowing that I’m not going to get ads based on what I search for - nothing is creepier than that. I plan on keeping the site up (and updated) for the foreseeable future.
Feel free to use the site for your searches, too. It is at nfsearch [dot] org1.
Not putting the url in as a link just to keep bots from scraping it and hammering my server…↩︎
We went to the JMU home opener against MTSU this weekend. Had a great time. The MRDs were (obvs) incredible and I got this video of the halftime show. Looking at the video today I really need a gimbal to cut down on the movement from hand-holding my phone.
In my last post I promised some color photos that just needed to be developed and scanned… Well they turned out to be mostly garbage so instead here are some photos of interesting buildings in Old Town Petersburg that I took on a walk one afternoon a few weeks ago.
We’ve had a few nice days recently that I couldn’t waste so I went out for some photos.
My last trip to Maymont Park didn’t produce much. I mainly went to try out some experiments with multiple exposures and although I learned some stuff I didn’t get anything I liked enough to share.
But I’ve also been working with some new editing techniques and I decided to go back and completely re-edit some photos from a few walks I did around town.
I even liked these new edits enough to order some prints of a few of them.
I have a couple of rolls of color film in the queue to get developed so I should have another post coming soon.
It has been far too long since I’ve posted something here. And, I have been feeling the urge to get up and take some photos, plus, I have been testing some new settings and workflow stuff around scanning and editing.
So, here are a few photos that I thought were ok enough to share…
After a softball tournament in North Carolina last Summer we went to a local farmer’s market. Learned a good lesson about how much noise one can get in underexposed areas of a scan…
Erin’s uncle Brian came to visit for a few days. I stupidly didn’t get many photos but this one of Brian cooking for us is a nice reminder of how well we ate for the time he was here.
I feel that I have just about exhausted the photography potential of my local county park, but I was happy with these two images I got on a quick walk over there before the winter sunset one afternoon last week.
Dad and I went on a photo walk through Hollywood Cemetery and then along the Canal Walk. I took the Mamiya 645 and Dad used his Pentax K1000. My shots are all on Kodak Tmax 400.
I was actually pretty happy with the images I got and they only needed minimal editing.
I took the 35mm camera to Maymont today. I wanted to try out Kodak TMax 400 — I haven’t used anything other than Ilford for black and white in a long time — and I just didn’t feel like lugging the Mamiya medium format camera around today.
Also, I’m developing and scanning my own film now (post on that whole process coming soon). I’m not super thrilled with the sharpness of these scans but I have a solution for that coming soon, too. Anyway, here are some photos from this morning at Maymont. These are essentially straight out of the camera. They’re all Kodak TMax shot at box ISO of 400 with a yellow filter.
It is way past time to upgrade my office Mac. As you can see, it’s a Mac mini from late 2012. It is ancient and it can’t even run the latest version of macOS.
My “new” Mac is a MacBook Pro from 2015. It’s pretty long in the tooth, but it’s running well enough for a five year old computer. At least it runs Big Sur.
I had been holding off upgrading but Apple’s announcement at this year’s WWDC that they were going to start transitioning to their own custom processors gave me a good reason to pull the trigger. The thing is, I really wanted to upgrade the office Mac mini to an (as yet unannounced) iMac powered by Apple silicon. We didn’t get that at the latest Apple event. But we did get a new M1 powered MacBook Air…
And I got one!
Updates
So the update plan (part one) is to retire the Mac mini, move the Macbook Pro to the office for use during the work day, and have the Macbook Air out in the living room for everyday use — writing, editing photos, and watching stuff when my tv has been taken over…
Despite a few hiccups with moving things around and seting up the new Macbook it’s worked pretty well so far. The only part that was rough was my backups. The Mac mini ran backups for the other computer and for my network storage. It backed up to an external drive and to Backblaze. Changing all of those automated backups to the Macbook Pro was quite a process. It’s still ongoing, actually…
Replacing the Pro with the M1 Air was much less arduous. Some of my needed apps aren’t updated for M1 yet, but I find Rosetta 2 doing a fine job running non-native apps so there is minimal impact on my workflow.
Impressions of the M1 powered MacBook Air
In terms of pure performance, the M1 MacBook Air is a beast. Take a look at my Geekbench 5 scores:
Machine
CPU Score (single core)
CPU (multicore)
Compute Score
MacBook Pro
827
1822
5130
Gaming PC
1259
7562
61878
iPhone 12
1495
2512
9022
MacBook Air M1
1715
7463
16968
The gaming pc listed above has an Intel Core i7-9700K (3.6 GHz, 4.9 GHz turbo) and a MSI Gaming Radeon RX 5600. That’s why it’s compute score is so much higher than anything else I have.
What’s interesting to me is how much the iPhone 12 outperforms the MacBook Pro and how great the new MacBook Air performs, especially considering it runs totally silent and cool. It runs all of my apps — even the Intel apps running through Rosetta — smoothly and fast. The most intense app I run on any regular basis is Lightroom Classic and it is noticably faster. That will only get better when Adobe releases the M1 version soon.
Honestly, for me the M1 transition is pretty seamless so far. Everything just runs, but faster. The A and M Apple SoC systems are remarkable pieces of engineering.
Upgrade Part Two
The next part of the plan — once the MacBook Air is paid off — is to replace the MacBook Pro in the office. I’m confident there will be an M1- (or M2-) powered iMac with a big 27-inch display that will look great on my office desk. In the mean time I hope to get back into writing and photos using this MacBook Air.
After I read The Haunting of Hill House I knew I needed to read more by Shirley Jackson. I went with the next — and last — book she wrote: We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Jackson wrote it in 1962 and it has touches of the autobiographical, taking place in a small New England town much like the one she and her husband lived in, North Bennington, Vermont, and deals with themes of othership and relationships between those regarded as others by the villagers.
The narrator, Mary Katherine Blackwood — referred to by her nickname, Merricat, throughout the novel — shows us the isolated world of the Blackwood house and it’s inhabitants. Merricat tries her best to protect the house and what’s left of her family with small magic and protective spells. That can only last so long, of course. She also tells us — through the rambling memories of her Uncle Julian — about the tragedy that killed four members of the Blackwood family.
In 2018 a film adaptation of the story came out. I saw the movie before I read the book and was left underwhelmed. After reading Jackson’s story, I rewatched it and I did appreciate it more, but I don’t think it’s a great adaptation overall.
The novel, however, is excellent. It’s a quick read, but also satisfyingly complex and has great characters. I’ll be going back into Shirley Jackson’s earlier work soon.
The Haunting of Hill House is the first Shirley Jackson book I have read. I had heard that she was a good writer but, to be honest, I was surprised at how good it was. The story is about the titular house which has a history and reputation in the neighboring town of being haunted by spirits. To me the most interesting part of the story is the ambiguity about whether the house is actually haunted or if the manifestations are imagined by our protagonist, Eleanor. Another possibility is that the supernatural phenomena could actually be caused by Eleanor’s deteriorating mental condition.
As with many of the better horror stories, interesting characters are more important than a spooky plot in The Haunting of Hill House. The story is character-driven and is all the better for it.
Although quite different from the book the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House borrows heavily from Shirley Jackson’s characters. They reuse character names (Nell, Theodora, Luke, etc.) and the story is more about who these people are and their subjective experiences than precise plot points. It is a wholly different experience from the book, but a satisfying one.
There have been two film adaptations of the book, both titled, The Haunting. The 1963 version is good, but not great. It sticks to the book closely, but it hasn’t aged well. I haven’t seen the version released in 1999 so I can’t comment on how good or bad it is.
I had two feelings when I finished reading The Haunting of Hill House. First was I am going to have to read that again in a little while. I think I would interpret it differently a second time. I also thought that I have to read more of Shirley Jackson’s work. I was impressed by her ability to write so clearly, but with the possibility of different interpretations. I have since read We Have Always Lived in the Castle1 and that is excellent, too. I think I will be happily working my way through her works for some time to come.
