‘Conan’ To Air New Shows Beginning March 30 – shot in his iPhone:
”The new shows will be shot remotely on an iPhone, without an audience and with guest interviews being filmed via video chat, according to the network. O’Brien’s production staff will remain working from home.”
Has anyone seen any reporting on how the anti-vaxxer communities are reacting to the pandemic?
So, I’d like to apologise for wishing to spend more time with my family, whilst holding the monkey paw.
My bad, everyone.
Why Coronavirus social distancing is negatively impacting social media content moderation.
Facebook’s moderation problems last night - what you need to know.
This is a sobering, but thoughtful, read:
We’re not going back to normal.
No, I don’t think we are.
Twitter’s role in a time of global pandemic,
I’m struggling tonight, as I read about the people who are looking at this period of social distancing and self-isolation as a special, cocooning time. I know that they are seeing it as a rare chance to invest time in themselves and their family as an antidote to the fear and uncertainty around us all. I do get that. But I’m jealous.
Those of us who earn our living in face-to-face situations — training in my case — just don’t have the luxury of doing that. For me, it looks like it will be the period where half my income disappears - possibly for over a year. I have good friends whose income is dependent on the events industry in the same boat.
I don’t have the luxury of viewing this as special cocooning time. This will be have to be the period where I have to make memberships work on One Man & His Blog, or manage to sell my training as online courses instead, or get more consultancy work, or something…
In a matter of weeks I’ve gone from a financially comfortable situation to a perilous one. That’s not a time for cocooning. I love my family. And I need to keep them clothed and fed.
My daughters are currently in the bath pretending to be antibodies attacking a virus as it binds to cells. 😶
I suppose this is what happens to children with a molecular biologist as a mother…
Video from my wife of Victoria Station this morning at around 10am. She estimates it was 80% quieter than normal…
25% of UK shoppers polled by RetailX have reduced or completely stopped shopping ‘in person at physical stores’ while 5% report a temporary increase
Online grocery deliveries are now fully booked for over two weeks in many parts of the UK. If we’re expecting whole families with symptoms to self-isolate for a fortnight, they’re going to need find ways of upping availability of delivery slots.
Hard to disagree with the last line of this, although I hope we’ll see better behaviour, too.
Behaviour change is hard. But if we don’t evolve - we suffer the consequences.
Social distancing at my local coffee shop.
I have no words for this:
Well, things are getting a little, um, motivating.
I’m self-employed, and make the major part of my income from face-to-face training. Looks like I need to find a way to replace that income stream for some months.
I have ideas. But this is going to be challenging.
Good day on the hagstone front.
Rustic.
My January in one second everyday. (I always seem to be playing catch-up with these.)
Pleased with this one. The print is long gone - it was in display in a photo cube and was bleached out years ago. The negative was loose in my parents' junk drawer for decades, and was badly scratched up.
One scan, an hour’s work on retouching, and this is the result:
So. After supper Iris gets down, grumbling a bit. And then sits in the corner assiduously writing.
This is what she hands to me.
“I have just eetn (eaten) the yoyos and I am still hungree”.
4 years old and issuing her first letter of complaint.
I am so proud.
Trying to amplify signal, not noise.
Let this destress you in the midst of the current mess: A Joyful Flash Mob Plays Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9
So, based on what is emerging from my scanner as I work, I was quite a cute toddler.
Unexpected.
I’ve been taking photographs for a long time. I was a photographer as a primary school child, using the cheap cameras of the 70s that my parents would buy me. And that means I have a lot of negatives from very long-gone formats. In particular, my earliest photos are on Instamatic film, of the 126 and 110 varieties. You can see examples of both below:
I’ve been progressively working my way through my much larger 35mm neg collection, but up until now, I’ve lacked a good way of scanning these older formats. I could scan the photo prints, but some of them are faded, and what’s the point of hanging onto these negs for decades if I’m not going to use them?
I did buy a cheap Veho scanner a couple of years ago that claimed to be able to do scan the negs, but the results were not good. I knew I could get better results from these negatives. I was contemplating sending them off for professional scanning, but the quality of the photos, in many cases, did not seem to justify the cost. Surely there must be a way I could use my existing film scanner?
Thankfully, when searching around the subject, I found a supplier of negative adapters for a variety of film scanner brands, including the Plustek OpticFilm model I use.
I put in an order, and waited impatiently for 10 day until they arrived. (They were shipped from the west coast of the US.) Here they are:
I scan using VueScan software on my Mac. It is also available for Windows.
I put the scans into cloud storage, and then edit on my iPad Pro, using a mix of tools. I start with Pixelmator Photo for tweaking colour, levels and so on. I then clean up the dust and scratches using the healing brush in the iPad version of Adobe Photoshop. I used to do both stages in Pixelmator Photo, but I recently discovered that Photoshop’s healing tool works much faster, saving me significant amounts of time.
Here’s some early results from the 126 film:
And a first example of 110 film:
None of these are great photos. But they’re some of the only images I have from this period of my life, and so it’s great to have access to them digitally, at last.