FTZ adaptor hates tripods, straps, and harnesses

The FTZ adaptor has a surprising and very frustrating design flaw – it’s impossible to mount it to the camera body when you have almost any kind of mounting plate, strap, or harness (e.g. Cotton Carrier) mount point attached to the camera body.  This is because the FTZ has a big fat foot, as can … Read more

iOS 7 first impressions

I found this post in the ‘Drafts’ folder from 2013 – evidently I started writing, got distracted, and forgot about it. It’s interesting to me even now because the aesthetics of iOS have been stuck in iOS 7 ever since.  I still don’t like the look, the design language, how many things operate – the … Read more

Nikon Z7 second first impressions

Having spent a week or so using the Z7 – though still not as much as I’d like, given the continued need to work for a living – I have some further thoughts, beyond / expanding upon my very first impressions. Autofocus Photo mode Autofocus is a problem. It is very clear that the Z7’s AF … Read more

Lightroom “Classic” doesn’t play well with others

So far the new “Classic” Lightroom looks & feels mostly identical to the prior version(s), which isn’t really a compliment, but could be worse.  There’s no apparent performance improvements, that’s for sure, so as expected Adobe’s promises to suddenly learn how to write efficient & performant software, well… at least their marketing department gave it … Read more

Your system has run out of application memory HUR HUR HUR

I hate this dialog with the fire of a thousand suns. When this appears, it basically means one (or both) of two things: Some application went nuts and chewed through all your memory and/or disk space. macOS got itself into a darkly comical & embarrassing deadlock. Quitting any of the listed applications is rarely the correct … Read more

iOS Family Sharing users cannot mix authentication schemes

Apple supports two styles of two-factor authentication, that they call (and distinguish as) “two-step” vs “two-factor”.  “Two-step” is their older method, though functionally they’re basically equivalent. If you have multiple accounts on a Family Sharing arrangement, and some use “two-factor” while others use “two-step”, you’re in for a bag of hurt. For example, any time you change … Read more

#if DEBUG in Swift

Sigh. The Swift team give an impeccable impression of a group of people who’ve never actually tried to use Swift. An incredibly basic compiler task is to provide code a way to distinguish between debug & release builds, in order that it can behave accordingly (e.g. change the default logging verbosity, change asserts from fatal to … Read more