Two photos for today; first is the door into the lake, that really caught my eye when I was out for a walk. It’s not gold, but looked it during this sunset.

The second image is a preview of my latest bit of code, which is an E85 fuel finder for Switzerland:

I had to write this as Google searches only turn up very old information, and even the websites of the fuel suppliers themselves, have broken search ability.

You can find the app here.

Last update for now, is that I am running Linux as my main computer now. I’ll certianly go into this a lot more, but until then, you can enjoy my screensaver:

Until soon.

Dropping a photo in, more for testing purposes than anything else.

It was basically a 2-week trip and was sandwiched between other life events, so it kind of came and went.

In other news, I’ve peeled back even further several aspects of the site. Most notably, is the domain name (the address), which I changed from my personal name to something anonymous. Back when I started the blog, in 2010, I was an active user on Flickr and several other photographic communities online- DP-review, Google’s own social network; Google+, 500px, and probably a few others. They’ve all changed massively, or even died off altogether. Google killed their social network, which was actually kind of cool, but was hard to monetise… Flickr was sold to Yahoo and then Pro accounts left right and centre popped up and I just kind of did my own thing. I went with Squarespace, hosted all my photos on their CMS (content management service) and was a satisfied customer for over 10 years. I’ve another post detailing why I left Squarespace, but I had to laugh as this year Squarespace are running a Super Bowl commercial starring Emma Stone. Imagine how much that costs?! Well, that’s what you can do when you double your prices and get massive investor funding, I guess. You fuck over the people that built your brand, but you don’t care. It’s the process of enshittification, which is well documented online. Because I am not trying to sell you anything, I don’t need Squarespace’s e-commerce bloatware. I left them, and now host for free on Github. The next chapter to this saga, is that Google also hiked up their prices, mainly in the name of our new lovely friend AI. Or rather, the fact that everyone overspent on AI and now needs to scramble to make some money back. I bought my domain through GoDaddy with Google Workspace, which was then sold … to Squarespace! So I was back at Square[space] one. I killed the Workspace requirement as I don’t need a whole separate email account, Google Drive, and AI features. I make nothing from the website, and considering it is 100% human-writtean and human-taken content in the forms of my writing and photographs, I feel it’s acceptable for me to find cheap or cost-effective ways to keep it going. I don’t have any adverts on the site, and I don’t keep cookies of visitors for advertising purposes etc. So, I killed it.

While I was at it, I decided to just kill the domain name. Using firstname.lastname.com was taken and has been for a number of years, with no-one using that domain for a site, which is sad. Adding “photography” as a prefix was nice, but made the url very long, and I want to do more here than just put up travel pics. So, I came up with a new domain name. Inspired by Cyberpunk and Ghost in The Shell as well as my life-in-Japan, I came up with “kuroshi”, which means “black tide” in Japanese. I wanted this to be a piece of the net, which changes so much year on year with everything happening on the web. I do prefer the old days of the web, before everything was commercialised, and before “the public” started writing on Facebook walls and joining this thing called Twitter. My Twitter account predates Elon Musk’s; but he is able to buy it and fuck it up, and I must just watch. Things were indeed better before they were ruined, but there are plenty of great blogs and interesting things going on, on the net. In Cyberpunk 2077 there is this notion of the Black Wall, a firewall to keep the rogue AIs out. Each month I think we’re getting closer to that. Right now, and AI will be crawling through my site and picking out text for its model. That’s fine. But I am me, and this is my kuroshi. It is a tide against the enshittification of the internet, and generally all digital services. It is a statement to listen to physical media again, to disconnect from your smartphone for SEVERAL HOURS, to pick up a standalone camera. To use an old computer, offline. To see technology as something helpful, not essential to our very existence.

I discuss this topic with people more and more; how many things seem to be getting worse. And this isn’t just me getting older and thinking that things were better when I was a child (they were), or even just pre-Covid (they also were), but this is something different, linked to surveillance states, populist politics, little-to-no reasonable discourse, the sortening of tempers, the lack of civility and common manners, the increased selfishness, and the overall lack of excitement for the future. Perhaps China and India are the only nations with significant populations that are indeed looking forward to the future? I have no idea. I just observe Japan dwindling each year since 1990, being in stangnant economy and relying on the ever-weakening yen to support influxes of tourists. I see a Europe that has been navel-gazing since 2000, with the UK thinking that the US would return the favour unevquivocally for support in the Gulf War(s), 9/11’s WMD Iraq excursion, and Afghanistan 2.0. Instead, the UK left the EU, due to press showboating African migrants and reugees from the fallout of helping the US fuck the middle east. Germany has its head up its arse since WWII, worried about bad press and appearing to patriotic, they have given the country over to immigrants and now Deutsche Bahn employees are being beaten to death on trains by people without tickets. The less said about France, the better, and I can highlight the Land of the Free(TM) taking control of Venezuela to secure some juicy mineral deposits, distract from Epstein’s network of filth, oh, and turn on NATO co-members to take control of Greenland because it’ll be great to have some golf courses up there, and China and Russia might want it for a Cuban Missile Crisis sequel. There have often been wars and times of unrest, throughout most of humanity, I’m sure. Pax Eterna of Britannica and the British Empire is often hailed as 100 years of peace, and they did that without biometric ID and age-verification online to protect the children, because the parents have all but shirked all responsibility onto the state to raise their kids.

I will continue to post photos, write about things that interest me, talk about basically 1995-2010 as something of a golden-era. I am writing this post on a netbook from 2010. Then iPads took over and phones became massive, and now there’s hardly any small tech. This netbook struggles with the modern web, because loading Reddit or The Guardian requires at least 500MB RAM and then there’s all the GPU or CPU resource needed to feed you ads.

Which can bring me on to something of a project focussed on e-waste, or at least that’s one way in which I am justifying my rampant eBay purchasing. I’m writing this post in terminal (so, like a code editor), on a Sony netbook from 2011. Specifically a Sony Vaio P with an Intel Atom processor and 2GB RAM. The SSD inside is only 64GB and is slower than today’s devices. I have Windows 7 Ultimate installed, which works surprisingly well. One issue is the high resolution of the screen and DPI scaling - fonts are tiny! I have installed Linux onto this device, specifically AntiX 32bit. It’s a very fast OS and the device is extremely usable. The main issue is that even though it has wifi (with a nice hardware toggle switch so I can be truly offline and save battery), the internet of 2026, as I mentioned before, is a RAM hog. So, even loading up google.com today takes a decent amount of time, let alone a typical website. I have my phone for web browsing, and the web is and always has been better for vertical content - and this is a very, very wide screen. Perfect for watching a video, which it can do nicely, if you use Windows. The battery lasts for about 3 hours and is the standard and original battery that came wth the device. It’s also neon-green, so that’s kind of cool. The nice thing is, for writing, I don’t need more than this. The keyboard is great for its size and I can touch type comfortably. I would like to pick up another one, perhaps in white or black, with the Z560 CPU and 128 or 256 GB of SSD space. They all came with 2GB RAM I believe, but the larger drive works faster and I could maybe do a bit more with it. Oh yes, it has an SD card reader and Memory Stick Duo reader at the front, a little track-point nub mouse like Thinkpads, as well as an optical mouse to the right of the screen. This is to be used with one’s thumb when holding the device almost like a tablet - the left and right click buttons are on the other side for the left thumb. This also works surprisingly well.

I appreciate that it makes little-to-no-sense posting at the end of February with photos taken at the beginning of summer

The net is vast and infinite.

My last post was written in November and somewhat erroneously published on New Year’s Day (thanks to a computer switch and a GitHub sync mishap), but no harm done. It still holds up, and it makes for a fitting, if unplanned, start to the year.

I am writing this on a new MacBook Air with the M4 chip. It is exceptionally fast and replaces my M1 Mac mini, which is gradually moving into a more server-like role. The M1 is still a great machine, but its main limitation is obvious: it never leaves the desk. I do also have a 2015 12” MacBook Retina, but by modern standards it is severely underpowered. Even routine tasks like web browsing in 2025 were becoming unpleasant, largely due to ever-increasing RAM demands.

I opted for a Japanese keyboard, which I have not used in quite some time. The layout is much closer to UK than German, so touch typing feels natural, and the added hiragana legends are a nice bonus. The dedicated @ key is also surprisingly useful in everyday work.

With “only” a 512 GB internal SSD (but 24 GB of RAM), I keep a Samsung SSD attached via Thunderbolt to store photos and other large files. It has been a long time since a laptop was my primary machine, so it will be interesting to see how habits change. Battery longevity and always-plugged-in usage used to worry me, but modern power management seems to have largely solved those concerns.

The photographs here are from the tail end of our summer trip to Japan, visiting Iriomote-jima and Ishigaki-jima, the south-westernmost islands of the country, just off Taiwan.

All images were taken with the Sigma 90 mm F2.8 DN. It is compact, well built, and focuses quickly. A 20 / 35 / 90 trio feels like it could be a very satisfying fast-prime setup. That said, a couple of years ago I bought my first full-frame zoom, the 20–70 mm F4. It is easily sharp enough, and in most situations F4 on full frame is perfectly adequate—if it gets dark, ISO is there to be used. What you cannot change is depth of field. F4 gives a clear “large camera” look, but it is not the same as shooting at F2 or even F2.8.

Tomorrow is the 5th, when many of us return to work after the winter break (myself included).

Wishing you all a good start to 2026, good health, and good times.

Flickr launched in 2004, and for about 14 years, it ran on a simple, honest premise. You got a generous amount of free storage, and in return, they might show you an ad. Fair enough. It was a utility, a public square. It worked.

Then, in 2018, SmugMug bought it, and the walls started closing in. The “free” tier was gutted—limited to a paltry 1,000 photos. Just like that, 14 years of digital goodwill evaporated. What was once a vibrant community hub became just another service demanding a subscription. It’s not even close to free anymore.

This isn’t just a rant about Flickr, though. It’s a symptom of a larger disease. The digital landscape I grew up with is gone. Everything, and I mean everything, is being monetised. Every service wants its monthly pound of flesh. We’ve traded ownership for rental, community for content streams, and freedom for algorithmic feeds designed to keep us angry and engaged. As I wrote back in 2018-12-13-subscription-services-are-costing-you-money, this relentless push to subscriptions is a disaster for personal computing and creativity.

The worst part? There are no real competitors left in photo hosting. Where do you go? The giants—Google, Apple—will happily hold your photos, but they aren’t communities; they’re data silos for their own ecosystems. The golden age is over. The internet is no longer a frontier; it’s a collection of walled gardens, each with an entrance fee.

It’s the same reason I eventually moved this website over to GitHub. Is it a pain in the arse to maintain? Absolutely. But at least it’s mine. I’m not beholden to a company* that could triple its prices or change its terms on a whim just because their shareholders demand it. It’s a small act of defiance. A way of carving out a corner of the web that still feels like my own.

In the end, we pays our money and we makes our choice. It just feels like there are fewer and fewer choices to make.

All photos from Castle Lichtenstein near Stuttgart.

*github is an american company and could indeed screw over the community at any moment

When reading reviews, I came across a few criticisms of the focal length itself—that 24mm is now “too normal”, given that it’s roughly the field of view of most smartphone main cameras. That might be true, but even the best phones don’t render like this lens. Of course, it depends on what you’re photographing.

I wanted to start this post with a photo from that lens, and I could have, but the first images I chose were actually from my 35mm F2.8 Zeiss.

Never mind. I’ve argued many times in favour of 35mm, and I still find it to be the perfect focal length. I also like 28mm, though the difference is subtle. 24mm, however, is definitely wider—and 20mm wider still. At 24mm, things aren’t too distorted, and it’s still possible to photograph people and places without perspective becoming strange.

It’s a fairly large lens, but just short enough to balance nicely on the camera. It feels like it’s simply going to get on with the job—and it does. The bokeh is beautiful, and the autofocus is instantaneous. I couldn’t ask for more from a lens (aside from it being half the size and weight).

I’m shooting with the A7CR, which reminds me fondly of my old NEX-7 from about fifteen years ago.

It’s funny—when I looked through my photos from the summer, most were taken with the 90mm. Most of my “keepers” came from a focal length I rarely use. But there are times when it’s clear: a 24mm shot can simply feel better. The 90mm has that “pro camera” look, but the 24mm often feels more natural.

So, there are some photos from the summer—taken at 24mm.
I’ll follow up this post with a look at the season through 90mm.

Thanks for dropping by!

In any case, I have a major update in a life achievement: I’ve now learned 2300 Kanji! I will write this up properly, as there isn’t time now, but wanted to share this huge milestone.

I’ve been meaning to keep up with blog posts, but I’ll keep this one relatively short. Things are busy at the moment, but in a good way.

In the back of my mind, I’ve been thinking about which lenses and gear to take on this year’s trip to Japan. The itinerary is Tokyo, Himeji, Okinawa, and then back to Tokyo. I’m leaning towards bringing the 20–70mm f/4 — a great all-rounder that’s not too heavy. I’m also tempted to bring some primes along to make things a bit more interesting. One option is my rarely used 15mm f/4.5 — Super Wide, as its namesake. Then there’s the Sony 28mm f/2, which is decent enough (though it doesn’t seem to get much love online), and possibly the 55mm f/1.8, which is both sharp and renders fantasticly.

35mm has long been my favourite focal length, but I’ve got the Voigtländer 40mm f/1.2, which I picked up last year. It’s a stunning lens. I could pair that with the 28mm — a more distinct combo than 28mm and 35mm, arguably. 24mm is another great focal length and would also pair nicely with either the 40mm or the 55mm…

Option 3(?) could be: to take 20–70mm, 15mm, 40mm, and then (maybe) picking up the lovely Sony 24mm prime…

Thoughts?

• we are hiking more than ever, and will indeed hike Mt Rigi tomorrow
• I have now learnt 1620 kanji (chinese characters) and have the aim of completeing the course of 2300 before the end of August. A tall but realistic challenge, that requires daily study and dedication. Read more about that journey, here.
• changes on the work front - more on that another time perhaps

I am making use of the Adobe Lightroom package for my iPad and Mac Mini, but I am considering getting rid of the iPad and either getting a MacBook Air M4 or just sitting it out. The iPad does do a great job, but the Adobe subscription is pretty expensive.

I’ll throw in some photos from the last hike, up Mt. Rigi a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t get around to publishing a post, but finally, here we are.

Enjoy the photos, and see you soon.

I have added a new page (not yet indexed) on the site called “Japanese”. You can go (take a look) at it and see what I’m up to. In short, I am documenting my Japanese reading learning abilities over the next months. I’m using an app called Anki (AnkiWeb), which is Japanese for “memorisation”. I originally used this in 2006 or 2007, when it was first created… then I basically forgot about it and stopped using it. However, for the last months, I use it daily to learn Japanese “kanji” (the Chinese characters) that I do not know. I only knew 50-100… and at the time of writing I have surpassed 1000 studied. I have a goal of just over 2000, which will make reading Japanese far easier that it is for me at present.

That’s essentially it, right now. There are a few other things barely worth mentioning, such as the new V90 SD card I bought for my camera which is significantly faster at saving files and transferring them than my old SD card. It’s always interesting to me when form factors remain the same and performance gains are all “under the hood”.

I had a couple of comments that my last B&W shot was appreciated, so here’s another.

Have a great weekend!

P.S. Click the image to see it larger!