Weekend reading: "LOL" edition

On getting old

When you're 21


  • Start drinking with your uni mates at 8 p.m.
  • Run out of vodka by 3 a.m.
  • Realize you haven't had a proper meal in the entire day. Walk to a 24/7 greasy spoon on the other side of town to get a hot meal (with occasional cockroaches in it) at 4 a.m.
  • Back in the dorm room by 5 a.m. Smoke and talk about literature, politics, philosophy, and whatnot till 7 a.m.
  • Realize you have lectures at 9am.
  • Sleep for an hour and attend lectures the rest of the day.

When you're 54


  • Wake up and celebrate the fact that you slept well and didn't have to get up during the night to pee.

SD card case I didn't know I had

When switching lenses on my camera the other day, I looked at the lens and the camera caps and thought to myself, Hm, I wonder if I can use them as an improvised SD card case? And you know what? I actually can.

Turned out, two SD cards fit neatly into the rear lens cap. And with the camera cap screwed firmly on top of it, I have a small and sturdy card case I can carry in a pocket. I use caps for Nikon F mount, but I'm reasonably sure that other caps should work too.

A content creator YouTuber could probably turn a simple hack like this into a 30-min video. But I write words, so I stop here, because there is not much else to add.

Topaz Gigapixel AI vs RawTherapee upscale

A while ago, I bought Topaz Gigapixel AI, because my feverish fantasies led me to believe that it would allow me to turn heavily cropped photos into multi-megapixel masterpieces. I mean, it says AI on the tin, which is basically a shorthand for magic and miracle, right? Well, the tool does a decent job of upscaling photos. But you know what? It turned out that RawTherapee is no slouch in this area either. The only difference is that the latter doesn't rely on multi-gigabyte models, and the application is free in every sense of the word.

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Weekend reading: "Freeing ourselves" edition