Camera, code, coffee

• Prepare for the Textpocalypse (Matthew Kirschenbaum, The Atlantic)
• The Untold Story Of Andrew Tate, The Internet’s Most Notorious Influencer (Tom Warren and Ikran Dahir, BuzzFeed)
• On the Trail of the Fentanyl King (Benoît Morenne, Wired)

Used with the Obok DeDRM plugin, Calibre can easily strip DRM from ebooks bought from the Kobo store. The combo works fine, but it has two downsides: you need to have access to the machine running Calibre, and you must connect your Kobo reader to the machine. While these are not deal-breakers, Kobodl provides a more elegant solution for downloading Kobo ebooks and liberating them from the DRM shackles.

Of all the photography-related paraphernalia I bought in recent times, Musou black KIWAMI fabric proved to be the most useful one. Musou what? Well, ever since I learned about vantablack, I've been mildly obsessed with the idea of absolute black. The only problem with vantablack is that you can't have it. But there is a commercially available product similar to vantablack called Musou Black developed and sold in Japan. I tracked down an EU distributor and splurged for an A4 sheet.

• Why Are AI-Generated Hands So Messed Up? (Pranav Dixit, BuzzFeed)
• How Denmark’s Welfare State Became a Surveillance Nightmare (Gabriel Geiger, Wired)
• The Timeless Draw of Decorating Cookies (Joan Bailey, Smithsonian Magazine)
• Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT (Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull, The New York Times)

Hald CLUT files offer a quick and easy way to apply effects to photos, and there are plenty of desktop applications that can handle the task. But if you want to use your favorite Hald CLUT files on an Android device, you'll quickly discover that there are not that many apps (if any at all) that allow you to do that. No problem: instead of relying on a third-party proprietary app, you can roll out your own solution using Termux.