In case you were wondering - which you almost certainly weren’t, but I’m going to satisfy your non-existent curiosity anyway - I’m currently off the grid. Not off the net, to be sure; that would make work rather difficult. But I’m avoiding all news and social media during the current fortnight, due to the inclement militarised sponsorship event currently taking place.

Visitors to this site using Retina-equipped MacBook Pros should note that it looks equally bad on lower resolution displays. Serves you right, you flash bastards.

PS. Get a haircut, ya hippy.

It’s not that hard to understand. It shouldn’t be this hard to convert a phonecam image to monochrome and then introduce some subtle toning to selective parts of it. But I’ve yet to see a photo app for Android or, to a lesser extent, iOS that gets it right and offers any real control over the process.

This is a quick rundown of some of the personalised news apps on Android and my thoughts on each. In general, I add categories or feeds for Top Stories, Art and general culture stuff, Film, Photography, Technology and/or Gadgets, UK or anything more local (yeah, like any of these sites offer a working Wales feed yet) and then possibly Web Design, Programming, Linux/UNIX/Sysadmin and Politics. In general, I like my news and sources mainly UK-focused and ideally with a regional or local flavour. I’m not looking for breaking news or a broad picture; I’m after interesting links, reviews and think-pieces on matters of interest to me (including topical issues) that I wouldn’t otherwise see. In the Photography category, I’m not too interested in gear reviews, unless they’re particularly entertaining, HDR and hyper-saturated images trying way too hard to be “punchy”, or basic “how to” articles. And while I don’t want a totally enclosed filter bubble, anything that combines antithetical views to my own with a strongly partisan approach (e.g. Apple fanboyism, rabid neoliberalism, Marxist fantasy) isn’t going to get much attention beyond an exasperated ‘tsk’. And I particularly want to block anything from Mail Online getting through.

So, a few months on, how has my cunning camera plan worked out? I eBay’ed my FE2 (for a pittance), my Bessa L and the 15mm Heliar (for about what I paid for them - rangefinder gear does not lose its value) and bought a very nice secondhand, boxed GF1 from Ffordes. I also purchased a cheap but well-made Nikkor to m4/3 lens adapter from eBay and a new Panasonic 20mm/1.8 lens from Park Cameras. Recently, I added one of the Panasonic 14mm/2.5 lenses that is currently being split off from the discontinued GF3 kits and sold cheap by various eBay sellers.

Methods of installing Puppet are covered in the documentation. This is the stuff that isn’t covered.

Much like Chris Siebenmann, I find I need a new Linux PC for home use. I don’t say this lightly. My current system has been with me since around 1999, has had at least three motherboards and has run approximately every other release of what is now called Fedora since Red Hat Linux 6.2. In the end, that’s what is killing it.

“I think there’s a problem with my car, and it might be the battery or the tyre treads or possibly the car in front. I drive it in your car park so can you check it out please and then, if you can’t find anything wrong, fix it?”

I’ve joined the thundering herd and migrated this blog to Octopress. In my defence, this is the first upgrade I’ve done since setting it up using MovableType 2.x back in 2000. Within about five years of that, the bloggerati were stampeding towards Wordpress, but lately the traffic seems to be going in the other direction as static, “baked-in” blogs become fashionable once more (because you can deploy them on your Macbook like a Troo Dev).

Summary: I built a ZFS NAS using a pair of mirrored 1TB drives to comprise the root pool. Unfortunately, it turns out you really don’t want to combine a large amount of NFS-served data with your root pool unless you have a separate ZFS Intent Log (ZIL), due to the NFS COMMIT performance bottleneck. Note that you can’t add a separate ZIL to a root pool either. Hence, I needed to separate my data from my root pool.