I’m an enthusiast amateur photographer with nice DSLR and a few mirrorless cameras. And I shoot a lot on automatic. It’s fine. Semiauto and manual is usually only needed if you have specific ideas about exposure.

Also you can fix soooo many mistakes in the post. When people tell me their cellphone photos look naff, I tell them to just try levels / curves / white balance tools, and those are in every photo editor. Will help a lot.

I post photos online, and despite the fact that the platforms (Tumblr, and I think Pixelfed too?) scrub exif data, I do it manually anyway.

Pro tip:

exiftool -overwrite_original -All= file.jpg

For me OneDrive “memories” are from my wallpaper folder or Xbox screenshots.

Google “memories” are food diary photos (on days when my food budget is spent, Google loves to show me photos of the massive pizzas I ate years ago, because it knows) or random sunsets. (Except for that photo collage with cheery music from my grandma’s funeral. Why did it have to do that specifically. Just asking.)

Fun thing, I don’t want to get YouTube Premium because YouTube has a huge bunch of bugs and glitches and crap UI design and since they’re the only service in the niche there’s been no indication they’ll ever fix their shit.

I didn’t care about YouTube Music, so losing ads on stock YouTube apps was literally the only reason I was even considering getting Premium.

But if it doesn’t even do the one job…?

Yup, doesn’t surprise me.

I also have a NAS box that’s out of support. Turned off all of the nifty services and firewalled the shit out of it so it won’t be visible outside the LAN even by accident. Will replace it with a FreeBSD box as soon as I get a new hard drive.

I don’t think I’ve had a single USB-C cable/connector/socket fail yet. Which can’t be said of Micro-USB.

But other than that, meh.

A solid game in its current state. Probably one of the best games of the decade for me, just not in top 5. Has that “once you start playing, suddenly it’s 3 hours later” factor. Extremely atmospheric world design. Lots of great writing too.

Now, it does have the annoying thing that it sometimes keeps reminding me of games that did some aspect better. For example: Vehicle physics feel completely hokey. (“Man, I wish I was playing Saints Row 3/4”) Can’t really go exploring everywhere, would have loved to explore more rooftops and such. (“Man, I’ve got to get back to Mirror’s Edge”) Not exactly a prime stealth game in accordance with the laws of the art form. (“Man, Deus Ex was the shit, got to play it”)

I mean, every other device with a clock that I have use NTP.

All of the cameras I have do have wifi/bluetooth, but at least as far my Nikon cameras go, last time I tried it using the app reliably on my phone was a bit of a hassle. Ricoh pocket camera was said to have an app but everyone complained how terrible it was so I didn’t even bother to try it. Setting the time manually is just easier for all of the cameras.

The only camera that I have that had a reliable and easy app-based time sync was my GoPro. But then GoPro replaced their old app with this current nonsense. It just straight up doesn’t pair my camera to my phone any more and pushes a subscription thing and I heard them talk about EOLing the camera (“excuse me, how the f do you ‘EOL’ a camera”, asks this Nikon girl with a lens from the 1980s). So I had to figure out how to set the clock manually.

Luckily the only devices I have that need to be manually set to correct time are my cameras. And I set the time on them fairly frequently anyway because the clocks drift by half a minute every few months.

When things go wrong in Windows at an app or third party software, stuff is often fixable. At worst you might need to reinstall the damn thing. But if the OS itself starts doing weird stuff, things often go to the headache territory really fast. Get a weird error, log says some OS component is going boom, no idea how to fix it, official instructions are along the lines of “Well if DISM and SFC are not going to fix it, looks like you need to reinstall the entire damn OS.” Which usually wouldn’t be a cause for anxiety, but blergh, muh preschus licence key, hope I won’t screw that up.

Meanwhile, I ran one Debian install for over 20 years once. Stuff is usually very fixable indeed. There are good logs. It’s rarely a complete mystery why some program is doing what it doing. At absolute worst you might need to look at the source code, which is actually rare.

I have a sports watch and the corresponding fitness app. I can confirm. “Sitting on one’s ass at the restaurant” is not a fitness activity. HOWEVER. Some of my activities (e.g. walks) do terminate near fast food jonts. …I dread what that kind of data analysis would yield on a major political figure.

Well cron is “really easy” as long as your requirements are really easy too.

Run a task at specific hour or minute or weekday or whatever? Easy peasy.

Run a task at complex intervals? What the fuck is this syntax. How do I get it right even. Guess I’ll come back next week and see if it ran correctly.

Actually have to look at the calendar to schedule this stuff? Oh lawd here come the hacks, they’re so wide, they’re coming

Run a task at, say, granularity of seconds? Of course it’s not supported, who would ever need that, if you really need that just do an evil janky shellscript hack

Well, systemd developers made one of the classic blunders a software developer can do: make a program that has to deal with time and dates. Every time I have to deal with timestamps I’m like “oh shit, here we go again”.

Anyway, as I understood it the reason this is in systemd is because they wanted to replace cron, and it’s fine by me because cron has it’s own brain-hurt. (The cron syntax is something that always makes me squint real hard for a while.)

Good thing about having a 80s/90s station in the region is that they have to dramatically rebrand before they can branch out to more recent decades.

But it would have been great for a Shakespearian minor joke character bit.

GUARD: “See, milord, how in this year’s almanack the booba hath been veil’d, compared to last year’s edition.”

KING: “Greatly?”

GUARD: “Yes, greatly indeed! Two inches of cloth more!”

KING: “Thou art a nutter and I ought to throw thee in the madhouse.”

GUARD: “But you wouldn’t dare, sire? Tales of your treachery and oppression already circle widely.”

KING: “Thou shouldst consider thee lucky that we have to get the Hell onward with our plot.”

Nah. …Well, don’t get me wrong, the rich absolutely should be taxed, sure, but that’s a different debate.

We don’t have a nationally mandated minimum wage in Finland. Because the unions set their own minimum wages (which they adjust frequently to market conditions) and the unions also have actual legitimate power.

Maybe they should try this stuff in America too. It’s fucking awesome.

Some of the things that helped me:

• Regularity. I also have ADHD so actually getting me to catalog daily/weekly things that I need to do was hard enough. But now that I have like 5 todo lists things are looking up.
• Cataloging things. I love photography and writing down interesting ideas. Someone looking through my photo collection might wonder why I take photos of random shit. Simple reason: Something managed to brighten my day and I just had to put it in on the record. I feel happier when I know that those moments won’t ever disappear if I can at all manage it. Similarly, if I have cool ideas that made me happy for some reason, I write them down.
• Crap social media is the worst. Be on the social media to fearlessly shout your cool ideas to the void if you have to. Don’t be there to passively and silently afraid to speak up and stick around with people you barely know and watch them slowly turn nazi yes-men. (Yes. It has happened. Before Elon bought Twitter. Can’t even imagine how shit things are nowdays over there.)

We old people were raised well, dammit! We had wired earphones! Then Apple cocked up and tried to make expensive wireless earphones fashionable. And look where that lead us. That’s right, kids not knowing what earphones even are. Fuck you technobros, you can’t do anything right.

(Posted from my HMD Global Nokia 5.4, which does have a headphone jack, thank you very much) (Sorry if abrasive, mildly drunk)

Most recent time I was awestruck by a thunderstorm in a game? Forza Horizon 5. One of the early missions involved heading out in the jungle during a massive thunderstorm and it was just legendary. Visuals, audio, everything.

Kinect 2.0 is the one for Xbox One, right? That one has a proprietary plug and needs an adapter of some kind for PC. Finding one now needs some effort. Would have been neat if it supported the Xbox 360 Kinect because it has a standard USB connector.