From The Verge:

Starting on February 26, 2025, Amazon is removing a feature from its website allowing you to download purchased books to a computer and then copy them manually to a Kindle over USB. It’s a feature that many Kindle users are probably unaware of, given books are more easily sent to devices over Wi-Fi. Still, it’s beneficial for backing up purchases or converting them to other formats compatible with non-Kindle e-readers.

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In the midst of the constitutional chaos over federal spending is the disbanding of the presidential committee on the arts and the humanities. From Art Newspaper:

[Trump] dissolved the committee in an executive order reversing Joe Biden’s own executive order reviving it. [The PCH] endeavours to boost support for the arts, humanities and museum and library services at the federal level.

Not that it really matters, but the PCAH was establishedy by President Reagan in 1982. As an artist or creative, it’s easy to be disheartened in times like this. But that is exactly the point. Creating a sense of hopelessness and futility is a key objective of the “strategic confusion”.

This morning, while drinking my coffee, I put on Jack Van Cleaf’s new song (featuring Zach Bryan), “Rattlesnake”—I hadn’t heard it before and it’s a beautiful song. One line especially stuck with me: “Drunk on freedom, stuck on choice.”

The previous night I watched Wim Wenders’ contemplative film, Perfect Days; it invites you into the life of Hirayama, a Japanese toilet cleaner. Hirayama lives a life of extreme routine. His structured, predictable days at first seem limited. Yet, within these self-imposed constraints, he finds a profound sense of peace and freedom even. He is, in a word, happy, or at least content. He is anything but drunk on choice.

My friend Joël recently shared the Empire podcast with me (which I was unfamiliar with) and an episode in particular: Empire of Plants: From Kew Gardens to Botany Bay. Anita Anand and William Dalrymple in conversation with Sathnam Sanghera discuss the history of botanic gardens and their role in colonialism.

As background, in 2016 Joël took my family and I to the Kew Gardens on a trip we had made to the UK. We had a lovely day there. It was near Christmas time and we brought my then 4-year old daughter to explore. During the winter holidays, Kew Gardens put together a spectacular light show that adds a touch of magic to a place already rich to the senses: giant palms housed in Victorian glass, oversized lily pads floating on ponds, flowers spilling from manicured beds, and centuries old trees of so many varieties including black walnut, coastal redwood, mountain gum, and more. I have vivid memories of my daughter running playfully through the mature gardens, and watching into the sunset as the holiday lights put on a magical show. The Kew Gardens are a testament to human curiosity in the natural world and commitment to continued study of it’s beauty and diversity.

I was cleaning up some repos in GitHub and came across an old gist I created back in 2012.

Honestly, I’d completely forgotten about it! Back then, Sublime Text was my IDE of choice, but I had recently started using Vim motions. I wasn’t quite ready to embrace MacVim or the terminal as my full-time coding environment, though.

When Apple released macOS X Lion, they introduced an iOS-like context menu that appeared when you pressed and held a key. As a designer, I understood this was another step in bringing macOS and iOS closer together in terms of user experience. But it was painful if you were a designer clumsily making his way through Vim like me. After digging around online, I figured out how to disable this context menu for Sublime Text and documented it in a Gist for posterity. Honestly, I didn’t think about it again.

Anil Dash in his post The Web Renaissance takes off

And I should never have underestimated the passion and resilience of the people who create the good internet, those who never stopped making things just for the love of the medium.

This captures so perfectly this unexplainable draw I’ve felt recently to resurrect a personal site. It’s not for traffic, eyeballs, money. Truthfully, I deeply regret not having made a personal site a ongoing committment. But here we are.

I love Vim. And while I’m a fan of its infinite customizability, I’m not a fan of having to remember every syntax and config parameter.

I ran into a simple problem today: when using Telescope to find a file, I kept seeing repeated filenames in my tree (e.g., in this Hugo site, numerous files are duplicated between /content and /docs). This made it tough to know which file to choose. I wanted Telescope to show me the full pathname in order to help disambiguate the files. Easy enough, I assumed, but I don’t know Telescope and NeoVim’s syntax well enough to implement this without resorting to Google and clicking through some links. But then I remembered that Gemini now lets you upload code folders and I thought, why not just upload my entire NeoVim config and ask Gemini?

One of the unique advantages of using Capture One is its concept of Sessions, which doesn’t exist in alternatives like Adobe Lightroom. In my workflow I use both: Sessions for individual shoots, and Catalogs as a way to aggregate sessions and photos.

What I particularly like about Sessions is they are directly tied to the filesystem. Each Session gets its own dedicated directory for all the images, adjustments, and metadata. For me this keeps things organized and integrates well with how I already manage my photos and back up system to my NAS. I still use catalogs but the majority of my photoshoots start as Sessions, and then I use catalogs to aggregate across them.

It’s been a bit of a slow start to the year photographically. That’s not a bad thing as a big part is due to our recent trip to the Florida Keys where we got to do a bunch of diving. Besides spending as much time as possible underwater, I also had a goal of making my first short dive video. I’m pretty happy with the results, but I’m equally eager to get some photos made this year.

I made a diving video! Link to heading

Feel free to head on over to YouTube if you’d prefer. But as a bit of backstory:

This winter holiday, my family and I had the chance to dive the Florida Keys for the first time. We have some friends who’ve made a tradition of visiting the Keys around Christmas, and they’d been encouraging us to join them. With my wife being a PADI Scuba Instructor, me a PADI Divemaster, and our 12-year-old daughter recently certified as a Junior Open Water Diver, an excuse to go to Florida (my first time) seemed great! We’re used to spending our winters skiing in Oregon, so trading snow for some tropical weather and warm water was a welcome change of pace.

BookTok, r/suggestmeabook, Tiermaker… Everywhere you look online, people are ranking their yearly reads. I’m going old-school and just listing mine here. I read about 26 books in total this year, although some were larger commitments than others (ahem Brandon Sanderson). I read quite a bit more fiction than non-fiction and have no regrets. I’d like to get to a point where I process each book more thoroughly as I go. However, it’s also nice to look at the year in full, so here we go. This year I discovered some new favorite authors and genres, and found that themes of found family, resilience, and the power of nature resonated strongly with me.

The Orton Effect is an extremely popular (some might say overused) technique that imbues images with a soft, ethereal glow and touch of blur to add a painterly quality to photographs. Used with restraint and on the right images, it is a wonderful effect for good reason.

This effect was initially accomplished in the darkroom, pioneered by photographer Michael Orton in the 1980s. The technique involves a multi-exposure film process: one image shot in focus and correctly exposed, another slightly out-of-focus and overexposed. These slides are then physically “sandwiched” during printing, creating the signature blend of sharp and soft details with a luminous glow.