Camera, code, coffee

And by "let's talk" I mean I'll do the ranting, and you decide whether you want to stick around.

I already have a perfect neck strap. I got it for free when I bought a Nikon FE in Ginza, Tokyo. I think it was in 2013. The strap served me well with a variety of film cameras, and now I'm using it with my Nikon D800. Despite its age, the strap looks like new. While it's the most unremarkable neck strap, it's also everything a good neck strap should be. There is no branding whatsoever to attract attention. It's made of a single piece of webbing, so there is no stitching that can fail. The strap is soft, and its loops are made of strong plastic. This means that 1) I can wrap the strap around the camera or lens, 2) do so without worrying about scratches, and 3) I can loop the strap around my wrist, so it can act as a wrist strap. There is an anti-slip strip on the inside of the strap. In short, it's an affordable, simple, reliable, and functional strap.

• All those naked Greeks… (Sarah Murray, Aeon)
• AI Is a Lot of Work (Josh Dzieza, The Verge)
• The unsolved mystery of Europe's oldest language (Tim Brinkhof, Big Think)

In which we eat trapizzini, take photos of Cinquecentos, enjoy the quaint charm of Orvieto, gawk at a skull with ears in Naples, and eat more trapizzini.

• The rise of the 'no-wash' movement (Matilda Welin, BBC)
• How some people get away with doing nothing at work ( Emily Stewart, Vox)
• Travel in the Time of Climate Crisis (Rachel Nuwer, Audubon Magazine)

So the engineers became proud parents. Their chicks grew up fast and pooped a lot. And while we were in Dublin, they left the nest. End of story — or so we thought.

Last Friday and Saturday, there was a flurry of activity: it turned out that we'd got a new team of engineers, and they were attempting to build a nest from scratch at the other end of the awning. I say attempting, because Sunday morning, we woke up to this: the entire nest fell down right into a pot on our terrace. 🙄