@molly0xfff ooh, new space opera for me!

Because someone said the words, I'll recommend my favorite space opera: The Hellflower trilogy by Eluki Bes Shahar (or Bes'Shahar or Bes-Shahar; I've seen it spelled all those ways).

Elevator pitch: Han Solo as a world-weary, nonwhite middle-aged woman eking out a living after escaping oppression. She ends up entwined (not like that) with a young, naive, confused (because events) super-assasin-type guy from a super-assassin-type genetically engineered lineage. She tries to keep his culture of honor and temper from getting him (and her) killed. Also she is carrying around a piece of "pain-of-death-illegal" tech from the Before Times.

Bes-Shahar created an entire slang/dialect for her main character, and everything is in first person, so there's a little learning curve. It's worth it!

The slang/dialect feels a lot like 1930s gangster-speak sometimes, but you gotta believe me it works.

Another take on AI that (at least for now) kinda nails it.

@briankrebs I've felt that frustration. Hand in pocket (e.g., for keys or something) pauses my tracking. At the same time, when I'm biking I always *forget* to pause it. I bike to the store, leave it running for 45 minutes while I shop, then bike home, and curse myself for now having a record of a 2.5-hour ride with an average speed of 5 kph.

Nextcloud, this is kind of assholey. No, I don't "value low cost over root access to the machine." I value my time and my data. I don't have the knowledge to manage security threats to my own machine (therefore pretty much all of my family's data), opened to the Big Wide Internet, and I enjoy the fact that the environment (e.g., SQL+nginx etc.) is set up and managed by my host, so I don't have to become a sysadmin to have a low-budget, self-hosted dropbox.

*Edit*: Nextcloud has been great and also a huge hassle. Upgrading is always (ALWAYS) a multi-hour or multi-day process for me, and there are constant headaches with little things that don't work (e.g., authentication with my mobile sync app, for some reason). I'm already considering paying #proton for some stuff, so I think in about February, if I can't get my major NC hassles fixed, I'll just ditch it once and for all and use Proton Drive, which seems secure and easy to use, even though it's not #FOSS. I really don't have time to go get a second degree in systems administration right now.

#nothelpful #nextcloud #selfhosted

@paultk @yurnidiot Yeah, I worry about this. I want more people to use decentralized, democratized social media. As soon as they do, however, we've got some issues.

@linux_mclinuxface Macro photography: there are (I think) two main ways to go about this, hardware-wise:

1. Actual macro lenses (tend to be expensive, but sometimes there are nice bargains)

2. Expander tubes that push a non-macro lens farther away from the camera body so that the light image on the sensor is heavily cropped.

#2 sounds sketchy, but there's just an awful lot of light per square mm in the world, most of the time. Cropping a photo already taken always means you lose a lot of info, but "cropping" with an extension tube is a surprisingly effective way of doing macro photography.

That said, a dedicated macro lens (or even a combo, like a zoom with macro at the extreme end of zooming) will usually offer advantages. IDK about photo quality, but the dedicated macro will give you far greater depth of field, for instance.

Anyway, I like talking about stuff like this, as I'm sure many others on mastodon do.

@linux_mclinuxface I'd say get one or two or three lenses (if you can afford that) for your body, and use them a lot until you feel like you know what kinds of photos they take for you. I often use a "normal" length lens (e.g., 50mm on a film SLR which looks, because of cropping, more like 20-30mm or something on a DSLR or digital mirrorless with 4/3 sensor size--smaller than 35mm film size). I use something like that a lot. Prime (i.e., not zoom) sometimes gives you better optical quality, but there are some great zooms, too.

I also often want a 100-200mm zoom or telephoto, and a wide angle (that tokina is maybe a 20mm lens?). I rarely need anything more.

For lots of $$ you can get zoom that will do many of those things pretty well. For less $, you'll get a zoom that does none of those things particularly well.

@linux_mclinuxface OMG I'm happy to talk about this. I'm not really an expert, but I started from where you are, many years ago.

Get mirrorless or DSLR. The former is smaller. The latter is maybe easier to find, and possibly has more options available (depending on the brand, etc.). I shot Canon DSLR for many years--an EOS Rebel. The EOS system for Canon is a bunch of interchangeable stuff, and there is a lot of it.

About 2 years ago I switched to mirrorless (for the slightly smaller size, largely) and concluded that Canon didn't do great at that format (from reviews, etc.). I switched brands to Fujifilm. I lost a lot of money and time accumulated in Canon lenses and accessories over 30 years. My kid uses my old Canon from time to time.

[Edit: Thinking about it, it's more accurate to say I failed to get some extra use/time out of my Canon equipment; I didn't really lose anything, because I got many years of enjoyment from that equipment; I got what I paid for and more]

Me, I want a system that gives me lots of options, and a company that will be around a while. Fujifilm, Canon, Nikon, and a couple of others are in that category. There are lens adapters, as you mention, that allow you to use one camera's lenses on another camera (though often with loss of functionality).

Some of the "kit" lenses don't take great pictures. Online reviews can be really helpful. I can't always put a finger on why, but the photos I take with a manual-focus Tokina (I think) lens just pop and zing much more than those with the kit lens or even a much better one on my newer camera.