Camera, code, coffee

To paraphrase Sir Mix-A-Lot, I like Hald CLUTs, and I cannot lie. Indeed a handful of Hald CLUT files made with my own fair hands is a staple of my photography workflow. Hald WHAT? you might ask. To oversimplify, it's a preset that any Hald CLUT-capable application (digiKam, RawTherapee, and Darktable, to name a few) can use to apply a specific look to a photo. Here's a much better and more detailed explanation if you want to know more.

• AI Search Engines And The Quest For Ignorance (Marcus Hutchins, EscapingTech)
• ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web (Ted Chiang, The New Yorker)
• AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off (Lars Doucet, Fortress of Doors)

I'm always fashionably late to the party. So forgive me for being the last to get all excited about Restic. Encryption by default, snapshots, deduplication, support for various storage types—Restic checks all the boxes. Not only that, it is also a supremely easy to use backup tool.

While learning how to use Restic, I took notes for future reference. I'm sharing my trivial findings here on the off-chance that someone might find them useful. The notes cover a simple scenario, where Restic backs up data to an external USB storage device.

Google Translate is great, until it's not. The quality of translation is undeniably impressive, and the apps have some genuinely useful features. But even if you choose to ignore the fact that Google lives off our data, there is a matter of Google Translate not working offline—not on a Linux system, anyway. And even if it could do that, there is still a case to be made for using and supporting an open-source alternative free from the shackles of surveillance capitalism.

Enter Argos Translate, an open-source neural machine translation engine that works offline and is available as a Python library, a command-line tool, a web application, and a desktop utility. Install Argos Translate on your machine, add a simple Bash shell script, and you can instantly translate a text selection from any application. Here is how to do this on Ubuntu and Linux Mint.

Initially marketed as a continuous light source for video makers, LED panels have been slowly but steadily finding their way into the photo bags of many still photographers. And it's easy to understand why. Light, versatile, energy-efficient, available in many form factors and price brackets. What's not to like? Being new to the dazzling world of LED panels, I decided to play it safe and go with something small and affordable: Godox Litemons LED6Bi.