Sweet Seals For You, Always
RMH
Misplaced Lens Cap
if i look back, i am lost
izzy's playlists!
ellievsbear
Mike Driver
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wallacepolsom
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DEAR READER
taylor price
Cosimo Galluzzi
JBB: An Artblog!
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
No title available
occasionally subtle
art blog(derogatory)
tannertan36
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
seen from United States
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@blech
distance, by Kohei Takada.
Commentary by the student's professor, quoted in a university article on the poster as it won a gold prize (via machine translation):
Using the impersonal object of a bank passbook as a motif to represent "money," the artwork also includes silhouettes of the father and mother and heartfelt messages. A positive aspect is that it directly captures the feelings of a student thinking about their parents who live far away.
I keep a running list of phrases that would make good album titles and I just realized what else they're good for
Some (but not all) of these would make good Culture ship names. Neither Animal Nor Vegetable should be a GSV. Free Maps To God's House, a GCU. And d(ROU) Everything's Wrong Nothing's Fine, perhaps?
Ferrari Luce
Unlike the ersatz combustion sound favoured by companies as diverse as AMG, Abarth and Dodge, Ferrari has developed a system that works a little bit like an electric guitar pick-up, with an accelerometer on the axle picking up the ‘dynamic texture and vibration of the rotating components’. This signal is then filtered and amplified, depending on the drive mode, and can be heard inside and outside the car, with the interior system providing a bit more detail and grain depending on throttle response and driving mode.
I generally dislike cars, even electric ones, but the details of the low-speed sounds (mandated in many countries, and so now basically standard) are always interesting (albeit rarely discussed, sadly).
From the V&A's upcoming exhibition on Lost Music Venues,
Letraset dry transfer, used as flyers for the club Plastic People, designed by Ali Augur, 1998, London, England
Foto: Wolfgang Krolow
Kreuzberg, Berlin, in the 1970s.
A photograph by René Burri of a replica of the Fat Man atomic bomb at Alamogordo White Sands missile range, New Mexico. 1992.
From Magnum's page, René Burri on the Nuclear Highway.
Coyote diets in different parts of San Francisco, all of which are heavily anthropogenic - meaning, they're eating human leftovers, basically.
From SF Gate, San Francisco’s coyotes are going after an unexpected source of prey, new study shows, January 2025, and the original paper, Impervious surface cover and number of restaurants shape diet variation in an urban carnivore, Tal Caspi et al.
WhatCable
Or: Playing Nicely With Others
A couple of weeks ago, a new project on GitHub was mentioned on the Infrastructure Club Slack: WhatCable, with the word "YES" being followed by a bunch of discussion. It solves a problem that many of us have: knowing what a USB C cable can do.
USB C is the ubiquitous connector, which is great, but the actual cables can support anything from USB 2 speeds (480 megabits per second) up to Thunderbolt 5 (one direction can go up to 120 gigabits per second), and power from just 5 watts up to 240. In other words, one cable will charge the beefiest gaming laptop and copy data to your external SSD in seconds; another will not stop the battery from draining and take hours to back up.
WhatCable lives in the menu bar (or Dock, as a standard app), and tells you what cables and devices are plugged into your computer; how fast they are; and how much charge is passing through them. It's focused, and useful.
I had a quick look at the project, and realised that pressing ⌘, opened a blank window, rather than the settings pane (which could be accessed from an icon). A quick look at the list of issues showed a few more Mac native expectations were missing, so I thought I'd ask Gemini to look. (Why not Claude? I'm cheap, basically. Gemini isn't as good, but it's free, and the usage limit is generous enough.)
One huge help is that Swift apps have a command line only build process. This was news to me, but it's great - I've never got to grips with XCode (or, to be honest, any other IDE) - so it opens up the world of Swift (and hence macOS, iOS, and so on) development. Being able to kick off tests, and both debug and production builds, from Terminal - or coding agents - is great.
That meant I could, with help, prepare branches for the command key shortcut, and another for various menu and shortcut changes; build and test locally; and then push and create pull requests with some confidence, despite my lack of experience.
I also made changes to read the data for M1 and M2 Macs, since that's what I had. Returning a day later, there was an alternative implementation in another PR; a quick check and Gemini comparison of the code made it clear that the other change worked, and was better architected, so I made sure to close my PR and say the other would be a better candidate.
In the end, my preferences and "Macishness" changes did get merged, although from edited code rather than as simple merges. (In retrospect, I should have asked the coding assistant for reviews, to improve the PRs. Something to remember for next time.)
Nonetheless, I'm happy to have been able to contribute, and I'm grateful to the maintainer, Darryl Morley, for looking at my code and taking the time to accept it.
Hatton Cross Underground station, Piccadilly line by J Wender, 1976, from the London Transport Museum's collection.
Ralf Obergfell - Photographer - both the fountain and the Routemasters are gone now. Photo from the Last Stop section (I’d link to it directly, but there’s some boneheaded JavaScript that goes into an infinite redirect loop…)
The link in my original post doesn't work any more, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that not only is the page still there, just at a different URL, but that it contains PDFs of the book, split into five sections: Intro, Depot, En Route, Aboard, Last Stop.
As someone who lived in Islington, and who photographed the 19 and 38 during their last weeks in service, it's nice to have a collection of other photos to remember them by.
Windsor Road / East Tyndall Street
Caerdydd / Cardiff
Tagging Tumblr Likes
One of the main features I wanted for the ffffound archive serving site was automated tagging, because it was missing entirely on that site (as it is on Pinterest and others that followed it). That's great for simplicity in saving, but it's not so good for discovering what's in there.
Tumblr does have tagging, so it's tempting to think this isn't as important for the likes archive. It's true that tags are possible, but not everyone uses them, and what the reblogger (or creator) tags something could be very different from the tags I'd choose. So I set out to apply a similar process.
This time, I decided to use a local model instead of Gemini. It was almost embarrassingly easy; install Ollama, download gemma:26b, and point at it via a REST API. The only trick was to make it callable from other machines required starting with a OLLAMA_HOST environment variable to get it to listen on 0.0.0.0 rather than localhost.
One drawback of this is that it's slow - it's taking up to a minute per post. On the other hand, it's free. Since the images aren't going anywhere, I'm happy to let this process be a trickle. Initially I concentrated on images without any post tags, and I've left the prompt fairly open, but I think I need to revisit that - there are too many overlapping tags (Gemma is much happier to use the word "monochrome" in preference to "black and white", which is the reverse of the standard in post tags) - but that can come as a later refinement, along with extending tags where they don't exist.
Otherwise, I've made some progress with deploying the Tumblr version of the site, adding faceting for the various Tumblr-specific user info (like creators, curators, and sources), as well as some visual tweaks.
Maybe this time next week I'll have a repo I can open, along with a URL you can visit. For now, a screenshot.
Two screen prints by Gerd Winner: Underground Holborn and Underground Highbury and Islington, both from 1972.
I promised you a little more from the marvellous Gerd Winner. Here’s Red Arrow Bus from his seven-strong 1970 ‘London Transport’ series at Tate Britain.
That full series at Tate's website.
I’ve posted one of Gerd Winner’s New York views here before, but I didn’t realise that he has also produced a large body of London work too. Very good it is too. Above, Thames Sunday Afternoon I from 1972 and currently for sale here, and below, from Tate Britain and a year earlier, London Docks II: Metropolitan Wharf.
Another winning Winner to follow later.
Containers - four from a series of (at least) five screen prints by Gerd Winner.
A Viewer For Tumblr Likes
A couple of years ago, I wrote some code to display my archive of images from ffffound, an image bookmarking site, with the ability to filter by date and generated tags. That's not the only place where I have a huge archive of images, though - among them, there's also Tumblr.
Of course, Tumblr has fairly decent archives and tag navigation pages, so it's not a problem for my main blog. What it is lacking, however, is any sort of similar interface for likes - the FAQ page says so explicitly.
Likes can be viewed in a list or grid format on the web, but cannot be sorted or filtered
Luckily, there is an API, and it does expose likes. I use a Python package called tumblr-backup to back up this site, and it has an option to copy likes the same way. So, instead of only being able to look at likes on the Tumblr dashboard, twenty at a time, I now have a directory full of about sixteen thousand posts - in JSON - and their associated media.
This is, of course, roughly where I started with my archive from ffffound. Around the same time that I wrote up image tagging, I was already extending the web app to serve Tumblr images. As personal projects often do, it sat for months with very occasional pushes, until the last couple of weeks have seen some solid work to extend it.
Although the underlying problem is similar - I want to be able to navigate by date and tags - there are also lot of differences. Obviously, Tumblr likes aren't all images; there are multiple post types, so I opted to ignore the others. That said, the New Post Format sends everything as a text post, and the client has to determine from the content whether it's really an image. (At the moment, I'm cheating a little and looking for figure tags.)
Another issue is that Tumblr supports multiple images; text (and tags) on posts; and, with NPF, those can be interleaved. Initially, I just pulled out the first image for both the grid view and the details, which gave me a good idea of what I was looking at, but the recent coding burst added much better details page display. If a post has multiple images in a block, they're displayed as a JS powered slideshow. For legacy posts, they're followed by a caption; for NPF, the entire post body (which may include further image blocks) is shown.
The concept of reblogging means that Tumblr posts also have more, and richer, metadata than ffffound did - and certainly much more than my scrape managed. That includes the user whose post I liked; the user they reblogged; the user who posted the root post of the reblog chain; and the source site from which the post was saved. Although I already had "site" support as a filter for ffffound, this gave me up to four facets to filter on.
All in all, I feel like I've got a nice little app here. I can view likes back to December 2011. (I'm pretty sure it was a feature before that, but maybe the API can't surface them?) I can see who I've liked most frequently, and the ultimate source of those posts. I can see all the Flickr images that I ended up finding on Tumblr instead. I'm sure there's much more in those 10,000 odd image posts to dig up - and probably find I've found over and over again.
Unfortunately, one of the tasks that's still on the to do list is deploying this, so for now, you'll have to take my word for this. Ideally it'd be deployed as part of notes.husk.org, but that subdomain's managed by Tumblr, so I'll have to figure out another place. It's also probably time to open the code - although this is still a very niche project (and one which will take a bit of skill to set up), I'm sure I can't be the only person who wants to be able to look over this facet of their life on the site.
