RIP Mr Om Malik

I learned of Om Malik’s passing last night when I got back to the apartment through a short message from Manton Reece. What sad news. I had noticed recently that the frequency of his posts had changed and become irregular. He had some health issues and shared a few words about it in the past.

I had been following Om Malik for a few years and appreciated his perspectives on Apple and technology in general. He knew how to read the nuances and contrasts of Apple much better than other bloggers I won’t name here. He was a great tech journalist. Finally, I was a big fan of his photographic style. I had the pleasure of following him on Glass and regularly showed him my appreciation for his unique style, full of nuance. He will be missed by us all.

Om Malik was one year older than me.

I read his last post dozen of times. This feels surreal.

A Different Type of Project

I chose to postpone purchasing the $1,500 Nikon 24-120 F4 lens to prioritize upgrading my home networking setup. This change is driven by my plan to turn the unused fireplace in the living room into a home theater space with related equipment. As shown in the photo, the items on and inside this small piece of furniture will be moved into a new structure to be built on the left, where the fireplace now is. Additionally, my Ubiquiti Wi-Fi router will be replaced with a ceiling antenna connected to a hub housed inside the new installation. More details about this coming later this summer.

You do what you want but using Substack for photo sharing…? I don’t get it. Yet, I do follow a few really impressive photographers there even if I don’t visit Substack often, when I do, I’m always delighted. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Now that my Mailbrew account is closed, I have moved many of my Brews1 to my RSS Flow web app. This is my home page with many photo-heavy sources. Pretty nice, enh!

  1. Mailbrew objects for configuring a set of RSS sources that form a newsletter. ↩︎

Flickr’s URL Scheme:

Flickr deserves a lot of praise for a number of technical advances that I wish had seen wider adoption. Their API was one of the first and honestly still one of the most enjoyable to actually use as a developer. It’s still full of incredibly interesting API calls that you wouldn’t expect from it unless you read carefully. Did you know, for example, that flickr API will provide you with the bounding box co-ordinates of different types of places? From a neighbourhood all the way up to a continent?

Maybe one day, Glass will add these, too?

I found a video of mine in my archives showing a full edit session with Snapseed on my iPad. The resulting image was part of an old blog posts collection called The Perfect Imperfection series initially on Instagram and later on Exposure. Sadly, this photo collection no longer exists because I closed both my Instagram and Exposure account. You’ll understand why I chose this naming when you see the resulting image. Enjoy the short ride here in the video below.

When posting a new photo on Glass, I always look at my previous posts on my profile page to see my previous posts. I like to create a nice visual rhythm in my feeds for those who follow me.

Here is a strange issue in Photomator: during photo editing, an .XMP file is created, which likely contains the editing steps applied to the photo. Additionally, a Photomator native file is also generated. Some of these files are very small, while others are quite large. For example, one file is less than 300 KB, while another is nearly 120 MB. Despite using the same editing process, the file sizes vary significantly. These files aren’t package files, it’s impossible to peek inside them. This is strange.