Lmno

I’ve been using SmugMug for a while, and really like how well it has worked for my pix subdomain, but it has always come with a little feeling of “what am I even doing on SmugMug to begin with?” It’s meant for people who want to sell their photography, and everything about its customer comms reminds you of that. In the process of getting imgup to broaden its horizons and work with flickr, I remembered that I actually like flickr (which is owned and operated by SmugMug now). It’s just more oriented around “you want to put photos up online,” without any emphasis on being a “pro,” and without Glass’s … whatever it is about Glass’s vibe. ...

Yeesh. So, re: imgup. It is pretty much “done” to me as a tool. Meaning, it does exactly what I want it to do, plus a few things I didn’t start out with. There’s maybe one more tweak (“just give me the URL”) I can go add in five minutes when I get around to it. But today I was thinking “oh, it’d be cool if it had a history,” and “oh, it’d be cool if it could show thumbnails in kitty.” ...

For whatever reason I have an allergic reaction to the phrase “distraction-free,” but as I’ve waffled back and forth between org-mode and Markdown as the starting point for prose I’ve also thought about how my model writing app on macOS is probably iA Writer, because it’s just so easy on the eyes. I kinda buy the limited choice it offers, too. That might be why it edges out Ulysses. ...

Does anyone else remember Mixel? It was a collaborative collage app that arrived early in the iPad era, was amazing for a little while, then pivoted into online postcards or something, then slipped under the waves. You started with a blank canvas and a collection of images that sort of acted like stickers you could plop on the canvas and manipulate into a collage. The collection was socially driven, so for periods something would find its way into collective consciousness, spawning a bunch of riffs on a theme. ...

… but I do miss that it exerted tremendous pressure to figure out whatever it took to do things I cared about, and that sustained me. So for a long while there, almost every night, it was just “grab a camera and go somewhere.” I guess I’m thinking about it because when we were walking on Foster Road last night I noticed that three places that had kept their outdoor areas all the way through now have taken them down in the space of a week. ...

flickr’s API is way more comprehensible than SmugMug’s, so adding flickr support went down much more quickly. Just get an API key/secret (links in the README) and step through onboard to auth your copy of imgup. Otherwise, it’s the exact same interface and UI. You just have to add a --backend argument to use flickr when you run it: imgup -b flickr -t "The Title" -c "The Caption" -f md img_123.jpg ...

I’ve been using imgup as a cli tool for a few days and it has worked pretty well. A few things bothered me about it: The OAuth situation was janky and not very portable. You had to have a .env file with very little help in the way of configuring it. Onboarding via oauth was non-existent. Configuring a target album involved fiddling around in the API or knowing exactly where to hover your mouse on the website. So I spent some time just cleaving the CLI out of the core project and working on cleaning some of that up. ...

We decided to walk down to Foster Rd. for dinner at Bruno’s tonight, and walked past Bar Carlo. I still haven’t adjusted to the new red paint job, but it’s pretty striking.

Late in the season last year I started getting into black mist filters on my cameras. They’re just glass with little black flecks that end up creating a really nice halation effect with night-time lighting; and they soften digital images a tiny bit, in a way that pairs well with the right preset if you like a kinda vintage look. I forgot I had one along on my trip to the Mutoid Man show and that was a mild bummer: The light was so low that the X100VI’s perfectly serviceable 3200 ISO had more of an uphill battle. On the other end of the spectrum, during bright daylight, they turn the highlights into a glowing mess. ...

I packageized lmno-export, which just lets you work on your lmno blog in org-mode then export it to clean Markdown. Mainly I wanted “real” org-capture instead of my hacky alternative, and I like being able to reuse my org-mode notes as-is instead of extracting and converting them. Write your blog in a monolithic org-mode file (set in Customize). Export it with lmno-org-export-blog . It opens the target file (set in Customize). If you’re a Mac person, drag the proxy icon into the lmno.lol uploader. Here’s the org-capture template, which reuses the source file variable: ...