A neat feature of almost every modern digital camera is that every single photo you take includes detailed metadata, including all of the photo’s settings including shutter speed, aperture, sensitivity, and focal length. The focal length, or simply the “zoomness” of your photo is of particular interest. All of the other settings are very easy to change by adjusting a dial (or using some annoying menus), but this one can only really be adjusted in a large way by changing lenses.

Taking photos is fun and easy. Just kidding, it’s a fractal of complexity, FOMO, and slowly realizing how little you actually know. However, one nice thing is that using some simple Unix/Linux tools, it’s remarkably easy to mass produce good looking JPEG images from your raw photos, without having to actually learn Lightroom. After a few days of fiddling with the settings, I’ve come up with this bash script to process my images:

This is my phone. It’s a 2016 iPhone SE, and for the past seven years, it has been my main computing device and the centre of my digital life. It’s outlived four laptops, three pairs of headphones, survived through dozens of trips away from home over three continents, a couple drops, and one close call with a broken umbrella in the fierce Ontario summer rain. It’s had two battery replacements, some lint picked out of the sleep button, and a few scratches on the screen from keys and grit.

I’ve realized recently that I have to very carefully create boundaries around my hobbies to protect them. I like to take pictures. Sometimes of my cats, other times of neat things I see while traveling or exploring, and always to document things that I find interesting in the physical world. The encroachment of legitimacy It starts with a cheap sewing machine before spiraling into boxes of fabric, rare and vintage patterns, accessories and notions.

While there are plenty of IOT security cameras that promise privacy, none of them really do. Eufy recently got busted for secretly accessing peoples' feeds, Unifi got breached, and literally every off-shore IOT device is slurping as much metadata (and regular data) off your devices as they possibly can. It’s not hard to understand a need for secure and private home security devices. Despite its age and legacy, ZoneMinder is still by far the most capable and complete solution for this.