Jim Willis

First off, here’s this from an interesting read over at The Week:

In brief, payment card companies are piggybacking on public systems and guarantees to gouge the American public, especially with credit cards. They act as middlemen, skimming fees off transactions and using their size to bully businesses into accepting their terms — who then raise prices on all consumers. The associated profits, both for Visa and company and the issuing banks, are effectively a tax on everything Americans pay for.

Also, two other credit card facts I learned this weekend:

• KMart doesn’t accept American Express
• Audible (despite being owned by Amazon), doesn’t accept the Amazon Store Card.

#dogpark

Base camp

MTB at Huber on the edge of summer.

A while back I wrote an iOS shortcut to log how many 32-ounce Nalgenes I drank throughout the day. I stopped using it after a while because drinking 3-4 Nalgenes per day had become a habit for me but I’ve noticed lately that I’ve fallen off drinking as much water so I’m using it again, partly inspired by this Outside Podcast on drinking water.

I have been loving my Fuji XE2s since I bought it off of Amazon a couple of years ago. It takes some of the best photos of any camera I’ve ever owned and is a joy to use in every way (manual dials for ISO, Shutter Speed, aperture. So nice!).

Except it doesn’t fit in my pocket. Which means I hardly ever take it with me.

But when I scroll through iPhone I can always tell the FujiFilm pics from the iPhone photos. It’s night and day.

No matter how good the iPhone camera software and lenses get, the iPhone will never consistently match what comes out of the Fuji series cameras. Sure, in certain situations the iPhone takes great photos but sometimes it’s just meh. The fuji cameras just give me more consistently better shots.

So last year I picked up a FujiFilm X70, hoping it would give me the best of both worlds: the great look of the out-of-camera jpegs from the FujiFilm XE2s with those awesome film simulations and also fit in my pocket.

Well, the X70 fits in my pocket and it sort of gives the film simulations but there’s just something about the lack of the view finder that makes using the X70 lose some of that fuji magic that you get from their other X series cameras. I brought it around with me but never enjoyed holding it and using it the way I do my XE2s.

So I sold it on ebay a couple of weeks ago and am now going to try to bring my XE2s with me more regularly. I took off the super 35mm 1.4 lens that I usually use and put on the pancake 27 2.8 to bring the form factor down a bit. I love that 35mm lens but it makes the camera even bulkier. The 27 makes it about the same exaxt form factor as the X100. If I can demonstrate to myself that I can reliably bring the XE2s around with this lens then maybe for Christmas I’ll see if Santa can bring me the X100. Stay tuned!

One of my favorite Mac RSS readers ever, has a new version in public beta. I’m currently using Reeder on Mac and iOS but am looking forward to reuniting with this old friend!

What’s up Apple? Is writing code not as creative an endeavor as music or design?

I was a PC/Linux user for ages before I purchased my first Mac (the G4 quicksilver tower, I think was my first one). And the only reason I bought that Mac was because of OS X was really just a great UI over BSD. Were it not for the ability to fire up a command prompt and have BASH at my fingertips running along side the native Mac apps, I would probably still be running Linux.

Moreover, having a shell and scripting languages like Python installed on Mac OS by default means that when my kid wanted to learn some Python beyond what he was learning through school, it was easy to show him how to run Python scripts on his MacBook. The ease of firing off scripts felt like Apple, who likes to encourage the “making” side of technology, considered “making” scripts on par with “making” movies or graphics or any of the other creative outputs that a Mac could be used for.

Now Apple has announced (in what seems like a really bad move) they are dropping the scripting runtimes from Mac OS. Meaning, by default there won’t be any Python or Perl or Ruby. I have so many little scripts in my ~/bin directory that rely on these languages (mostly Python).

Yanking these runtimes out of Catalina gives the impression that Apple doesn’t consider making scripts on par with making drum loops in Garage Band. I’d argue they’re both pretty damn creative outputs and Apple is denying its users the creative tools they’ve come to rely on.

I installed these fenders less than 48-hours before departing for an extended bike camping trip along the Erie Canal in upstate NY. The forecast called for rain and boy am I glad I got these installed. Did a great job keeping the rain and mud from spraying all over me, my bike and my gear. I probably over-torqued a few of these bolts out of fear of stuff falling apart mid-ride but everything stayed assembled, nothing came loose and I love these fenders on this bike. [Note, if you want to see my 30-day review of the Midnight Special, head over to my family/special needs travel site, AllTogetherOutThere.]

There were a few things not covered in the instruction manual from Velo Orange that I’ve noted below

Finished Product

Go to the hardware store and buy the bolt/nut/washer combo that you’ll need to go through the hole on your front fork as if you were mounting brakes on the center of the fork. You will not be able to install fenders without this bolt and it is not included with the fenders:

I happened to have the correct length bolt and a suitable lock nut in my box of miscellany.

(more…)