The occasional scrivener

Tired of cherry picking among my feeds? Want more Gustaf than you can possibly handle? Do you want to sort the wheat from the chaff yourself?

Then I invite you to subscribe to my FriendFeed. I’ve aggregated all my stuff there, just because I can! Isn’t Web2.0 great?

I’ve reached the end of The Wine-Dark Sea and I’m going to take a break to read some other stuff before finishing off this round of re-reading. According to some posters in the Gunroom the quality falls off a bit near the end of the series, which is to be expected, really. Still, there are a lot of good scenes to look forward to.

Right now I’m reading a bio of Charles De Gaulle, in Swedish.

Update 2008-02-27: The rumours are true! Here’s the site for the modification. Sounds doable if you are handy with a soldering iron and don’t care squat about your camera’s warranty.

Basically you hardwire a lens chip to you camera and turn it on to fool the camera into thinking you have a chipped lens. Before exposure the chip is activated, and the camera meters.

Original post follows:

There are rumours that someone has found a way to get the Nikon D40 to meter with manual lenses. Here’s the dpreview.com post.

If this turns out to be true, and not too expensive, it will definitely be something for me. I’ve recently purchased a Nikkor 24/2.8 AI-s to try out on the D40. I don’t know if metering is such a big deal in the long run, but it’s the one thing that’s keeping me eyeing the D200.

Here’s hoping!

Update 2008-02-25: apparently the hack is both hardware and electronic (source, the daily updates on Ken Rockwell’s site, no permalink). I guess that makes it slightly more complicated than just a firmware hack, that I had naively hoped for.

OK so some weeks have passed and my Tumblr is getting more posts. Mostly of the “post a link/quote/observation” type. The bookmarklet is pretty amazing. If you just select something on a page and use it, it automatically assumes it’s a quote-type post. Pain free posting. Beats the hell out of my earlier method, which was sending an email to my blog, which in its turn was quicker than firing up emacs, deciding on a title etc.

I’m not really sure how I should continue using this in the future. On the one hand, having one centralised location for all my “activity” online is pretty neat. On the other, it gets spammy fast, and I’d like to keep this blog high-signal, low-noise, building on my personal brand.

So expect more quick throwaway entries on Tumblr. Feel free to add the feed to your aggregator.

Oh, and I’ve removed the stuff mentioned earlier. Only original content.

You know I hate it when you stick your hand inside my head
And switch all my priorities around
Why don’t you go pick on someone your own size instead?
Go on without me, I’ll just slow you down

You always say you know me, somehow I don’t think you do
Maybe you should buy another vowel
You’re jumping to conclusions so I can’t keep up with you
Go on without me, I’ll just slow you down

I’ll just hold you up
When I fall behind
I’ll just throw your schedule off
So you get going, if you’re so inclined

You know I hate it when you stick your hand inside my head
And switch all my priorities around
You think you’re pretty tricky, but you’re simply overbred
Go on without me, I’ll just slow you down

— Warren Zevon

I really enjoyed this book. Raban buys a boat and circumnavigates England, Scotland and Wales. The book is written in the early 80s, so the Falklands War, the miners strike and the beginning of the Thatcher era are observed from a position out at sea.

This is a view of an England (for Raban touches mostly in England, and the Isle of Man) in transition, lost in the change between manufacturing and fishing and the new “service economy” and tourism.

It’s a wise, compassionate book, mixing travel writing and memoir. I’ll definitely try to read more by Raban in the future.

Charles Stross recommends this article:

Expecting everyone to dump their standard of living in the shitter in order to save the environment is not a realistic strategy because humans don’t work that way: it’d require the equivalent of a mass religious conversion, and we have a technical term for periods of history that involve mass religious conversions: we call them interesting. (Usually from a remove of several centuries.)

So Microsoft has laid a bid for Yahoo! Here’s James Robertson’s take:

I have a better idea for Microsoft: fire the people that came up with idea of buying Yahoo. The severance packages will cost you a lot less, and the bad ideas they generate in the future will hurt someone else.

Actually quite a slick service, at tumblr.com. I’m gerikson.tumblr.com. No original content, just echoes from jaiku, last.fm, and del.icio.us.

If it wasn’t a hosted service, and hosted by NYC hipsters at that, I’d maybe like it even more.