I bought myself a Fujifilm X-E4 just before Christmas. I asked the nice people in the Fuji shop in Covent Garden for their smallest, lightest, cheapest, easiest-to-use camera with a 50mm-equivalent lens. They conferred for a moment and then suggested the X-E4 with the 35mm lens, which is 50mm-equivalent for the APS-C sensor. I tried it, and it felt and looked right, so I gave them all my money. Since then, I've been getting used to it, learning about the features, and how to set it up simply to take the kind of pictures I take. As I get familiar with it, I will no doubt use more of the features.
The X-E4 twice the price in real terms of the Olympus OM10 that was my first proper camera back in *cough* *splutter*. It takes fabulous pictures. There's none of the wonky geometry at the edges of the frame like earlier APS-C cameras used to have. The amount of detail in the pictures is way over anything a standard film camera could provide. As for colour, it's Fujifilm. It's what any piece of tech should be: good enough so I can't blame it instead of me for poor results.
So I'm having to get my eye back in, and most importantly, having to learn to see big pictures rather than to pick out some details and zoom in with a telephoto. I've done that. It feels great for a while. I saw a YT photographer doing it a while ago, and realised I didn't want to do that anymore. It's a phase one goes through. Cropping is fine, zooming is for sports photographers.
The first dozen or so outings are probably not going to produce good photos, except by luck. It takes time. It's partly about learning to use a camera again, and partly about learning to see a scene, and then to take a photograph of it. Here's the first real outing.
Management gurus love to quote the mavericks on the need to think differently, go against the consensus, dodge the groupthink and otherwise swim against the mainstream. It takes bravery and moral courage to resist
The people who don't are, they imply, suffering from some kind of moral fault. They are unable to resist peer pressure. They have a fear of freedom. They are too willing to go-along-to-get-along. They just aren't smart enough. They are dreadful conformists.
Insults are not explanations, even if they do make the reader feel superior.
For one thing, follow the crowd at chow time
is a very effective rule-of-thumb. If it wasn't, the human race would not have survived. Nor would starlings or any of the herd animals.
For another thing, there is no correlation between dodging groupthink, and intelligence or occupation. A lot of the most cliched material I read about our customers and markets at work was produced by clever young people with good degrees from Russell Group universities. Consultancies pay good money to young people who are smart and energetic but don't make connections across different subjects or problems and who can focus.
What proportion of the population follow the crowd at chow time? This has always been a puzzle, but recently we had what I think is the definitive answer.
According to a study in 2020, 93% of the UK population (who expressed a preference) wanted or approved of the March 2020 lockdown(*). Call them the Convergents.
Not because they were brainwashed, lead on, hoodwinked, mislead, lied to, deceived, tricked or bamboozled into their opinion. Neither were they lazy, scared, conformist, or virtue-signalling. You're not allowed to be rude about or make excuses for 93% of the population. Half of the under-35's who approved had a degree. A quarter of everyone had a degree. All those people made that judgement in the belief it was well-informed and well-judged.
So what about the 7% who were right? The Divergents. They weren't smarter. They may not have even been as well-informed as some of the people (including most medical professionals) who got the answer wrong.
What they did have is a sixth sense for something not-being-quite-right about a situation, proposal, argument or bunch of alleged facts. Not all the time about everything, but often enough for it to be a common feature of their lives.
It's the pupil who senses that the teacher's explanation has crucial missing bits, and finding their own explanation. It's the instinct we all have in varying degrees about when someone is being insincere and when they aren't. It's a knowledge of red flags in other people's behaviour, or in press releases, or the statements of experts. It's knowing that people only appeal to `expert consensus' when the facts aren't on their side. It's having a mass of usually unsystematic background knowledge about one's society and economy, and about how different industries and markets work. It's having a sense of which anecdotes are data, and which are just anecdotes. It's knowing when absence of evidence is evidence of absence. It's being dissatisfied with the usual way of doing something and wanting to make it quicker, simpler, more accurate. It's wanting to fill in the missing pieces of knowledge, or questioning the received opinions based on flimsy research. It can have a hundred sources.
Faced with a boat with a small leak, the Convergents would treat leaks as a feature, take the boat and appoint a couple of people to bail out. The Divergents would point out that leaks are a bug, and look for a way to fix the leak.
Almost all daily activity is by clever, ingenious, hard-working people who apply what they were taught in school and in their professional courses, to keeping the ramshackle Behemoth of the economy rolling. Changing the way they do things is not in their job description: they are there to work what already exists. If any change is needed, it will be imported or imposed from outside. This applies to research in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering. It applies in the arts as well, especially when the world is having one of its recurrent moral panics.
Convergents live by if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Divergents point out that just because it ain't broke, don't mean that it's what you need, and figure out what we need.
Innovation, change, insight, originality happen in the fringes. Sometimes it becomes mainstream, other times it doesn't. Too much `disruption' and a society or an economy stops working well enough to be worth keeping. Too little and it is eroded by outside forces. Divergents need Convergents to keep it all running: Convergents need Divergents to stop it all decaying.
(*) I can't find out if that was on the basis that the lockdown would be for three weeks. Please leave me with the illusion that most people would have objected to an indefinite lockdown!
It's been nearly two years since I over-thought how I do backups. Technology changes, prices change, and use cases change: reviews are appropriate.
The cause was finding that one of my external hard drives (EHD) would disconnect and then re-connect from the laptop at random. Diskfix couldn't find any faults on the drive, so I have to blame the USB ports. Everyone thinks that the worst that can happen is dropping an EHD onto a hard surface. Also bad is having the EHD fall while still attached to the computer and so putting stress on the computer's USB port. Those things aren't welded to the card.
The only way to avoid plugging and unplugging an EHD is to use a NAS (either dedicated or a headless Raspberry Pi with EHD's plugged into it), or to use another computer with a more reliable USB port. Either way, we're still using EHDs of some quality or other.
Network-attached storage is the first thing one tends to think about. The original use-case for this was a) it was nerdier than using external drives, b) it was not a lot more expensive per MB than external drives, c) people used to download video files from e.g. iTunes before watching them. The nerds have now migrated to using Raspberry Pi's with EHDs attached, which are computers, not NAS. The cost of EHDs has dropped considerably, while the cost of NAS-related hardware and software has gone up. Finally, what is "downloading movies"? Because streaming.
I don't do daily backups. You should, because you are creating GBs of media every day. Or making irreplaceable music in your DAW, with a bank of plug-ins that cumulates to mucho dinero. If I get to that stage, I too will get a NAS and set up automated differential backup jobs. Because I'd be a pro, and that's what pros do. Most of what I do is writing, and I'm old enough to remember when a writer's nightmare was leaving his work-in-progress on the train. Our idea of backup was carbon paper.
Everything I write is in iCloud, which will do for the short-term, as long as I NEVER delete files. iCloud is really for making a file accessible from a number of devices and keeping them in sync: delete a file by mistake on your laptop, and it will vanish from iCloud.
My ripped music is currently on an external LaCie HDD. I made that decision because I only ever used it as a source to load tracks on my iPhone. Then it was switched off. I do have albums on it that I downloaded from Amazon expressly for train music, and sometimes I want to listen to that. I have the LaCie plugged into a ASUS netbook from 2010 or so. Music does not need high-spec as video does. So I would switch the Asus on, count to twenty and then fire up Music Streamer on my iPad to feed it to my amp through the USB port. Then I would have to remember to switch the Asus off before going to bed. Yes, I know, and I've set the Asus up to hibernate(*) at 22:00 and wake up again at 09:00. Its hard drive spins down even on mains power, but I'm not sure the LaCie does. External drive spin-down seems to be hit-and-miss on Win 7, and there's no provision in the LaCie driver. I looked. So that drive could be on for thirteen hours a day, and I think that disc is spinning all the time. It's warm enough. Not what we want.
So I should use an SSD for the music. No moving parts. No activity, less heat generation. I can buy an internal 1TB SSD drive for about £90 and an enclosure for about £10, which is cheaper than the non-sale price of a 1TB SSD on Amazon. For the added speed, reliability and lifetime, that feels worth it.
(When you get the SSD, you will need to initialise and format it with the Windows disk management facility. Format it as EXFAT as b****y Apple have only just added NTFS-reading with iOS 15. If you don't, you will get strange "access forbidden" errors, which will point you in the direction of permissions, and it has nothing to do with permissions.)
Then I can go back to using cheap HDDs from reputable brands (only because I assume they have better quality control in their Chinese factories than the Chinese brands do), and accept that after 3 - 5 years they will need replacing. A 1TB Seagate HDD is currently £38.
I am going to make sure that each of my laptops can communicate with EHDs connected to any other of my laptops. That way, if a laptop USB port goes squiffy, I can backup over Wi-Fi to another machine.
I adopted Free File Sync - to which I have donated - a while ago, and I'm still liking it.
(*) Hibernate, not shutdown. A computer can't wake from shutdown.
Learn how to spray wide and evenly from a spray bottle. Get some strength in your trigger finger.
Power tools. Everyone uses power tools.
Specialised tools. Carpet cleaners use a special long centrifuge.
A workshop with jig-saws and drilling turrets.
Tape, nails, screws, drill bits, nuts and bolts, rawlpugs, in all sizes; glue, solvent, and cleaners; spare tins and plastic bowls; saws, files, and other tools you don't know exist and won't use again.
The car detailers use a special brushes to clean tirewalls, and other special brushes to get round all the chrome and grilles. They have vacuum cleaners with long flexible hoses. They take the front seats out. You and I have no idea what's involved in taking the front seats out.
Trade products, not stuff from the supermarket. Especially Trade Paint.
Sometimes you need the chemicals. You know which chemicals you need, right?
Most of the time spent on a painting and decorating job is not spent painting or decorating. It's spent on prep. Most of the time on any job is spent on prep.
Putting down sheets to protect against dust, stray paint and cut down the clean-up time.
Only plastic sheets protect against paint spills.
Filling up little holes, sanding down little lumps, sanding old paint surfaces.
The more time you put into prep, the less time you put into the activity itself.
Use masking tape. The guy saying you too can paint a straight line has forgotten how long it took him to learn.
Practice. Lots of practice.
Cleaning the outside is easy. It's cleaning the inside that's difficult.
If you clean the dirt off one side, a lot of it just goes through the material to the other.
But the thing I really learned is... some people are able to live with amounts of filth and dirt I find unimaginable. When you see them - in the 'customer reaction' shot - they look like ordinary people. Some of them will bring the same thing back to be cleaned only six months later.
I love the sound of my H120, and of the rest of the system. Even now, I will still look up and think by heck that sounds good. In the same way I would hear the old system and think it's not quite...right, is it?
I stream through a Sonos Connect connected via an optical cable, or an iPad connected via USB.
Since I don't live in a fancy Norwegian house that had Cat 6 cable wired in along with the mains when it was built, and the Hegel doesn't have Wi-Fi (and that was not a deal-breaker) I have a wi-fi extender to connect it to the home network.
In theory I could use AirPlay, but until the last update that never seemed to work. Now it does.
The bit where I choose the Hegel from my Air volume control and the amplifier switches itself to Network and some You Tube commentary comes out of my hi-fi is truly... cute.
But...
But...
But...
The Hegel refuses to play with the other kit on AirPlay. I can group my Sonos One's and the Beam, because they support AirPlay2, but choose the H120 and everything else falls off.
Guys!
You made it work with Spotify Connect.
AirPlay 2 is how Apple offers multi-room hi-fi without having to do all the deals Sonos has done... let me explain that.
Sonos has done deals with a bunch of providers to the effect "You send individual streams to each of the Sonos items our customers have, and we will incorporate your service into our pretty darn fabulous app. Oh, and we sell a LOT of kit." Someone will be kicking back to someone on this deal, but I'm guessing the amounts are fairly small.
Sonos have patented the multi-source, multi-destination, grouping and independent volume control stuff. Google lost a lawsuit badly to that effect in 2021. Apple doesn't have more cash than Croesus because it pays licensing fees to competitors. That's why AirPlay runs through the controlling iDevice and only handles one stream at a time: to avoid the Sonos patents. Apple licenses AirPlay to anyone who asks, so a lot of other hi-fi manufacturers use it to provide multi-room and save themselves the trouble of developing their own. All the streaming service apps offer AirPlay integration. Why pay Sonos when you could be getting paid instead?
I can live without AirPlay, and mostly do. But it would be nice to have the option to do real multi-room streaming to include the Hegel.
My trusty early 2015 Mac Air, has begun doing odd things every three or so weeks. A complete screen glitch in the middle of a YT video felt like an advanced warning. So I ordered an M1 Air.
Then my bank sent me a message saying that it had cancelled the payment instruction because fraud.
I called the number I had for these occasions, and the agent told me that this happened a lot with Apple, John Lewis, Curries and a couple of other retailers. If someone gets your card and orders from those guys, they can do a lot of damage in a short time. They choose those guys because they can resell (on eBay presumably) readily. If they bought an X-E4 from Fuji, it's going to be a while before that shifts. Fair enough, if inconvenient. The bank's agent asked me to make another order so he could make sure this payment went through. Not to worry about the first order, Apple would cancel that when they saw the payment was cancelled.
You can guess what happened. I got one Air delivered and the money taken from my account. I noticed that there was still another payment outstanding. I called the bank. Not to worry, they said, it's just a delay because New Year.
Nope. A couple of days later I got another message from DHL saying they would be delivering my Air. I called Apple (in fact, their outsourced customer handling company) explained the situation, and their agent was totally calm and competent, told me to refuse delivery when the courier arrived, and set a return and credit in motion. All of which went through within a couple of days.
So when the bank cancels your next payment to a retailer, cancel the order as well. Do not assume the retailer will notice.
Anyway.
Everything they say about these M1 Airs is true. It's even smaller than the previous one. The keyboard is terrific, and only Apple make trackpads this good. The screen is just pin-point wow!
The stereo sound system is using some psycho-acoustics that puts voices in the middle of the screen, but then ventriloquises background sound as coming from the left and right walls. Music videos have the music in the middle, though it feels like they are using a `spatial' effect that I last heard on a ghetto-blaster in *cough, splutter*.
After making up an old-school what-I-need-to-transfer-and-install list, I found out about the Migration Assistant. See, that's why we all pay Apple prices. It's not for the kit, it's for the eco-system. It's because they put a tonne of work into developing a program that we would only use twice in the life of the machine, once at the start to import everything from the old machine, and once at the end to export it to the even newer one. Everything came over, and everything works, except for a program called LatextIt!, which is probably searching for some files somewhere they aren't any more.
On the hardware side, I got an Anker multi-adapter for USB-A and card readers, plus additional USB-C ports.
Then I tried ripping some CDs.
My Air told me the USB-A CD drive needed power (the Anker supplies power, the USB-A HDD was running) and I should plug my kit into a USB-C port on the laptop. But. But.
OK. Order a USB-A to C adapter so I can plug the USB-A CD drive into the other USB-C port. Arrives via Amazon Prime in less than 24 hours. Plug in. Yea! Works.
This Air turns into a desktop sprawl if you want to do rip CDs, or read an SD card. The rumours are that the next iteration will have extra slots and an SD card reader, and the Magsafe (which I have not felt the need for so far) port.
I met Tom Torero in the summer of 2019, for a lunch arranged by a mutual acquaintance who wanted me to explain how to do lifetime bachelorhood. I tried, but I probably failed. Tom was aware of the legal hazards of relationships, but he seemed to be repeating the words, rather than believing it. He had a strong presence and a confident manner that made you want to like and trust him. Yes, I knew about the dodgy infield with the French girl. I could imagine him standing in front of a Year 10 history class. Like a lot of PUAs, he believed in love, that there was someone or two with whom one could have a long-term relationship that retained its romance, and that was what he was looking for, and was disappointed that he had not yet found it.
Tom describes how he re-invented himself in his twenties, physically and psychologically. I did something similar in my thirties, hitting the gym and going to AA Meetings. Physical re-invention is work, but it shows results quite quickly, can be enjoyable and becomes a positive part of your life. Except legs day. In my experience, psychological re-invention is a lot harder, and more fragile. I learned new behaviours and mind-sets, I can shrug my shoulders at things that in the past would have had me fuming, but the basic structure of my soul remains unchanged: I only look normal on the surface. Psychological re-inventors look as if they are in spiritual balance, but it's unstable, whereas Normies are stable. Maintaining an unstable balance all day can be tiring. One trick is to stay away from situations where you might be thrown off.
The Newsweek article could have been written about Rollo Tomassi, or Steve Jabba, or Krauser, or Richard Cooper, or a dozen other people. But it wasn't. It was written about the kid with acne and bottle-glasses, because that's who bullies go for. It was a reminder that for all his work on himself, inside, he was still that kid, and the bullies could see it. And he had nothing else, not even a day job to pay the rent and leave enough over to put aside for old age. He was 41. Being broke and unemployed at 41 is scary - ask me how I know. He was driving round Europe in a van, living off heaven only knows what. It looks like freedom and it smells like fun, but it feels like being on the run. Any therapist would have unhesitatingly referred him to someone else.
Nobody knows why people commit suicide: it's not like we can interview them.
It's a damn shame. He was a decent guy who had come a long way by his own hard work. A lot of people are expressing how much his ideas and teaching meant to them. He lives on in their memory, which is where immortality is found.
