now
ntheltArt #
I’ve been getting into photography lately. I’ve wanted a dedicated camera for a long time, but I usually err on the side of not buying the things I want and sometimes it takes me 6 years of thinking about something before I pick it up. I love taking photos on my phone, but they always turn out sort of lame. I found out that FOV matters a lot—or rather focal distance, which is the term photographers prefer. I found out that by applying about a 1.3x digital zoom to the photos on my phone, I can get the FOV equivalent of a 35mm focal distance, which looks soooo much better for shots of buildings and environments. I just picked up a used Fujifilm X-T1 online, along with a relatively cheap manual focus prime lens. I’m excited to learn about composition, the exposure triangle, and focus and depth of field.
Building off photography, I’ve been thinking about art lately. What are the ethics of photographing strangers in public? How does a photographer “say something” with their art? No one can know what they’re going to see that day. If they have a message they want to get across, will they force the photos they take to say that? Will they be open to what the world is telling them, and allow their art to say something else? Will they let the audience to make up their own minds? Will they leave room for interpretation?
Tech #
I’ve been popping off with this website. I’ve got a stupidly perfectionist font pipeline with tiny subsets, preloads, and metric-matched fallbacks. Basically, the custom fonts I send are much smaller and faster to load, and if they don’t load quickly on your connection, they’ll be replaced with something that looks very similar until the custom font can load. I also fixed up the color scheme and layout, and have added a bunch of new words too. I wrote some more of the lambda calculus guide and I’ve started getting some more thoughts down about my other devices.
My phone has become a truly minimal, private, and secure place. The battery is lasting quite a long time. I don’t charge it most nights and instead just grab some charge when I think I could use it. Every once in a while I’ll shave off some more apps and services from my phone, and I’ve got it down to zero proprietary apps, and 3 background apps: Signal, Tailscale, and ntfy—my UnifiedPush distributor. It’s hooked into my server to sync photos with Immich, emails with hydroxide, music with Navidrome, tasks/calendar with DAVx5 and Rustical, and discord notification with ntfy.
I’ve also made a bunch of changes to my homelab. I really should finish my post about it. I make mistakes sometimes, and I spend a bunch of time fixing them, but mostly, it’s incredibly fun to set up and use. Having a way to offload computing opens up so many ways to get custom with your devices. I didn’t want discord on my phone, so I set up a system to forward messages to my phone, like a pager or something.