Camera, code, coffee

An idle mind is an incubator for dumb ideas. My latest hack proves just that. If you happen to wield a seriously heavy piece of machinery like a Nikon D800, it's tempting to leave the photo bag with everything in it behind and head out with just a camera on a strap and a few essentials like a spare battery, an extra storage card, and other bits.

You can tuck loose items into pockets, or pack them in a pouch. That's what I did anyway, until one day I thought that it would actually be pretty nifty to have a box with all the essentials in it that I can somehow attach to the camera itself. It sounded like a dumb enough DIY project for a lazy weekend, so I went to work.

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.

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.

I use my Android device for a lot of things: from booking train tickets and checking weather forecasts, to... Well, pretty much everything else. But for some reason, I've never seriously considered it to be useful as a camera tool. While I was tinkering with Termux, it occurred to me that it can transform an Android device into a camera companion that can perform both photo backup and processing duties.