@nerys   I was joking about the VHS.   I can’t see it ever coming back into fashion, for several reasons:   Compared with DVD’s, or other electronic storage, it’s much lower quality, much bulkier, VHS players are mechanically  highly complicated, the tape wears with each playing, jumping to a specific place on a track requires the whole tape t…[Read more]

@nerys That happy circumstance happened to me just once. Decades ago I had a turntable and a couple of dozen LP’s. When cassette tapes came along, they were so much more handy (even though of doubtful sound quality) that I never listened to records any more. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of my LPs in their artistic sleeves. Then CD’s…[Read more]

@dentarthurdent @winston @nerys @janetteb @mudlark @thane16

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year all. Best wishes for the year ahead.

@thane16 Lovely to hear from you.

@nerys and @dentarthurdent I share your distrust of cloud storage. I have multiple hard drives, one backup I carry with me, one is in a sideboard. I once had two backup hard-drives in my laptop bag which was stolen. Have also lost hard drives so I no longer…[Read more]

@mudlark    @nerys  @thane16  @dentarthurdent  @ps1l0v3y0u       and everyone else, just took a moment to say hello and Happy Who Year! We are still a few hours to midnight here and then the old year passes and a brand spankin’ new one begins. So exciting and full of possibilities.

Does anyone make new years resolutions? I have the usual ones lik…[Read more]

@nerys      f/2.8   Wow.   That’s pretty nice.    The TZ80 is f/3.3 to 6.4.    I’m – almost – tempted to consider and FZ, but the same argument applies as did to my Konica (though obviously less cogently) – I can’t take photos if my camera isn’t on me, and the TZ is small and light enough to just carry as a matter of habit.   TZ has a Leica lens…[Read more]

@nerys Your FZ’s are a step above mine, in lens size certainly. I did love the light-gathering capability of my Konica film cameras with great big hunks of glass, but when I went digital I wanted something more portable. I also wanted a wide angle – 35mm or even 28mm, it was surprising how difficult that was to find in those early compact…[Read more]

@nerys    As you say, extra shots in digital cost virtually nothing.   Great, compared with 50c-a-shot film, but it can be a problem.   I don’t weed out nearly as many as I should.   Ones that are out of focus or accidental shots of my feet are obvious candidates for deletion.   Deciding which of several similar okay shots is the best is just to…[Read more]

@dentarthurdent that is impressive and requires dedication. My filing system is more akin to @Nerys. I store all my images in folders roughly dated. No details attached. I have photos of places which I have forgotten the name of. Recently I made up a slide show for our eldest as a 30th gift. (it was started as an 18th gift so has taken a fair…[Read more]

@nerys Sorry if it looks like I’m bragging. But its just so nice to be able to go and swim every day (and this year Summer seems to have arrived early, at least up this end of the country). What I also love about summer are the long evenings, it doesn’t get dark until 10pm or so (of course anyone in the mid-latitudes can say the same). It always…[Read more]

@janetteb @nerys @whohar

Merry Christmas / New Year / solstice.

I’ve been absent [minded] for a while, time always sneaks past when I’m not looking. Been swimming every day, here (water’s warm!) And also indexing all my digital photos, of which I have literally tens of thousands, I tend to binge on shots. A luxury I could never afford with film,…[Read more]

@janetteb @nerys

Yes! Here’s to everyone having an enjoyable festive period, however you choose to celebrate it.

@nerys. We have or had the video of Curse of Fatal Death. I am going to be bringing it to our Cult TV podcast next year. I really enjoyed it and it is interesting to watch now post Moffat because there are so many of his ideas in there. At the end of our original recording there was an interview with Moffat and he was asked if he would work on Dr…[Read more]

@winston   @nerys    I think a lot of the anti-society attitude stems from the myth of the hardy pioneering individual who did everything for himself and was beholden to no man.   So that, reinforced by the successful American Revolution (which was really a rebellion), morphed into the ‘all government is a threat to my freedom’ frame of mind. …[Read more]

@nerys    Covid did bring out the beast of us and the worst of us.  There have always been racists ,bigots and haters of all shapes and sizes here in Canada and around the world but the rest of us told them they were dispicable and held them accountable. When the big orange menace emerged from the muck he took a big stick and lifted up the rock th…[Read more]

@nerys @dentarthurdent

In the age of ‘rage-bait’, malicious blatantly revanchist/irredentist sites and posts, of funded social media stooges, of bots and fake foreign avatars of known personalities, can we really claim the new information order down to ‘matters of opinion’ or reactions to apparent ‘mistakes’ made in obviously exceptional…[Read more]

@nerys   Unfortunately  Covid was a breeding ground for  anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists  and  bloody-minded obstinate people of all types who thought their individual rights trumped everyone else’s.   In fact, thought that they weren’t properly exercising their rights unless they trampled on somebody else.   The sort of mentality that thin…[Read more]

@nerys    Has Donald Trump sued the CBC for a billion dollars yet?

We know why he hates the BBC.

Given that Trump is the most loathsome excrescence ever to crawl on the face of the earth, with all the appeal of a Dot-and-Bubble slug  [five paragraphs of vitriol omitted], and lies brazenly and continually, any news organisation that reports his…[Read more]

@nerys I know the slugs ignored Lindy because they were working through in alphabetical order.
(As an aside, had the AI read the ‘Hitchiker’s Guide’ quintet, wherein Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, being immortal and bored, set out to insult every living thing in the Universe *in alphabetical order*?)

But, why do it that way. And why ‘build’…[Read more]

@nerys @dentarthurdent @janetteb

This was the high water mark of S1. Only the finale (of the series) was a real problem, because those 2 eps dragged, and begged so many questions. That is, intelligent guesses can be made about to the arc but most people aren’t that interested. This means the show (or rather RTD and Gatwa) become a target to peop…[Read more]