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I have failed, and that is exactly what I had hoped for a few months ago in this blog post. This is a good failure. It has taught me things, lessons I can use in the future to avoid failing this way again. But first a bit of context. What did I fail at? In February of 2024 I decide to try my hands on my first “Indie Hacker” hustle, something that would make me money on the internet without having to trade my time for it. A product instead of consultancy services that I usually provide. I had seen a number of people on Twitter (X) rave about how well their bootstrap templates were doing; and I had just gotten out of a consultancy project where I needed to connect a Next.js frontend to a Django backend. I thought it was the perfect project to start my indie hacking journey. I put up a launch post and started working, updating a build log as I went along. I gave myself until 28th March 2024 to finish it. That of course did not happen. Let’s talk about why I failed and what I learned. Episode 1: The one where I don’t understand the meaning of MVP My initial plan was to build a Django+Next.js boilerplate template the provided all of these: the base template that provided a Django backend & Next.js frontend working authentication b/w the backend & frontend Dockerfile that would create the backend & frontend containers for deployment Terraform scripts to setup an infrastructure on AWS Celery + Redis for background task processing TailwindCSS for the frontend (comes mostly for free with Next.js) social auth This looks like something achievable in a week or two of work - but only if you’re working full time on this. I failed to consider that I have a day job and a life. I was barely able to tick of the first two of these deliverables by the time my 6 week deadline came up. As a good friend told me later, I should have focused on the minimum amount of value I could deliver. Just having the first two things on my list be done would have been enough. I couldn’t charge the $20 I had planned for, but I could have charged $1-$5 for just that. And if no one was interested in spending the cost of a coffee on the MVP of the template, that would have been a good signal that this wasn’t going anywhere in it’s current shape. Instead, by focusing on building something much bigger, I robbed myself of the ability to validate the idea quickly. I spent all my available time coding the template instead of trying to talk to potential customers about it. Lesson 1: Scope down aggressively. Episode 2: Where I jumped on the hype-wagon I settled on building a boilerplate template because that’s what I had seen a lot of people on Twitter/X doing lately; I’m chalking this down to recency bias. I had no personal interest in a boilerplate template. It’s also not a product that I would personally use. I have so far made one project that uses this tech stack. Most of my other projects are Django, and Ruby on Rails. The most successful boilerplate templates I come across are from people who made a bunch of projects in 1 tech stack then realized they needed to do the same thing over-and-over again; which they then packaged into a template they could use. Selling to others was a bonus at first I guess. I was very enthusiastic about the project at the start, but as time went on I had to force myself to work on it. My lack of interest in this type of project was a big factor. Another factor was there being no way to see the fruits of my labor. I am currently working on an analytics dashboard for another client (a RoR project) and every time I build a feature, I love to play around with it in my free time. I test how it works, make sure the UX is a good one, and just play around and admire the app I’ve made. Without me using my template to build new projects, I lacked that feedback loop. Without the loop, I quickly lost interest. Lesson 2: Build something I can use myself. This isn’t a job I’m getting paid for, so the only motivation I have initially until it starts generating money is to build something interesting for myself. Episode 3: Where I had nothing for potential customers to play around with This is related to the 1st lesson. Because I didn’t have a path to quickly get something out there, there was no way for me to get my “product” into the hands of people who could test and provide feedback. I think the problem with a boilerplate template style of product is that you can’t give people a half-backed thing and ask them to test it. Unlike other SaaS apps, there’s no mid-way version of a template. Customers have to “buy-in” to use your template with any project they are starting. With SaaS, users can sign up and test, and then leave if they don’t like it. There’s no easy way of testing with a template. Lesson 3: Build something that can be tested by potential customers easily. For now, I’m going to stick with SaaS style web apps. Conclusion Moving forward: I’ll be working on web app products that users can sign up for and test very quickly. My next few experiments/products will be things that I can use myself as well. I’ll post what I’m going to work on next when I decide and have some time away from my job & freelance projects that are currently in progress.
If you’re just looking for implementation instructions, skip my ramblings and go straight to the code here. I’m currently working on my first project after deciding that I needed to fail more and practice finishing projects instead of abandoning them midway once they got “boring”. Anyways… This one is till in it’s interesting phase, so here’s a blog post with some things I learned yesterday while working on it. The project is a boilerplate template that should make it easy for devs. to start a new project with a Django backend and a Next.js frontend, something I had to struggle with recently. The problem The first thing I’m looking to solve is authentication. That was my biggest challenge when working on the contracting project that inspired this template. While there are a number of good posts around how to setup authentication b/w Django & Next.js, nothing “definitive” came up and I had to cobble together a weird mess of Django+DRF (Django Rest Framework) and Next.js+NextAuth, sharing a token from Django that was masquarading as a JWT token for Next.js. It wasn’t pretty and I knew I could do better. The options I considered 2 options for authenticating the Next.js frontend with the Django backend: Token based auth. On logging in, a user receives a token that is stored in local storage by the frontend and send with every request to the backend. Session/Cookie based auth. This is how authentication works in Django by default and is very easy to get started with - it basically comes for free out of the box when you start a new Django project. While token based auth. is what almost everyone suggests to use when using a Next.js frontend with any backend technology, I wanted to give session based auth. a try. I was curious what it would take to make it work - if it was even possible. tl;dr: It was possible to use cookie/session auth. b/w Django & Next.js - though with a few constraints which make it less appealing than the token based solution What follows are my notes on how to set it up, the problems I faced, and why for the template I’m going to go with token based auth. instead. Learning how CORS & Set-Cookie works It took me a few hours to get my head around how cross-origin requests and cookies work together, but the actual implementation was surprisingly straight forward. This “mini-quest” gave me a chance to learn a lot about how CORS and cookies work, and I’m happy with the time I spent on this. These are the resources which helped me the most (all are from MDN): Cross-Origin Resource Sharing Same-origin policy Using HTTP cookies Set-Cookie And finally, there was a surprise waiting for me! Browsers are almost universally making changes to restrict 3rd party or cross-domain cookies because of their privacy implications. Here’s a nice article from MDN about it: Saying goodbye to third-party cookies in 2024. This is the reason why; while this approach works, I won’t be using it in the template. More on that later. Implementation Implementing the session based auth. b/w Django & Next.js is pretty simple. Django configuration Install the django-cors-headers Python package. Add "corsheaders", to your INSTALLED_APPS. Add the "corsheaders.middleware.CorsMiddleware", middleware, right above the existing CommonMiddleware. Set CORS_ALLOWED_ORIGINS = ["http://localhost:3000"], replacing the URL with your frontend URL. Set CORS_ALLOW_CREDENTIALS = True Configure settings.py to allow cross-domain access for the session cookie. Set SESSION_COOKIE_SAMESITE = "None" Set SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE = True Next.js configuration No configuration is needed on the frontend. However, you do need to use the credentials: "include", option when using the fetch() API to access your backend. Here’s a minimal example. "use client"; import { BACKEND_URL } from "@/constants"; async function signIn() { const loginData = new FormData(); loginData.append("username", "admin"); loginData.append("password", "admin"); return await fetch(`${BACKEND_URL}/accounts/login/`, { method: "POST", body: loginData, credentials: "include", }); } async function whoAmI() { console.log( await fetch(`${BACKEND_URL}/accounts/me/`, { method: "GET", credentials: "include", }), ); } export default function Home() { return ( <main className="flex min-h-dvh w-full flex-col justify-around"> <h1 className="text-center">Home</h1> <button className="" onClick={signIn}> Sign In </button> <button onClick={whoAmI}>Who Am I</button> </main> ); } That’s it. That simple piece of code & configuration took me hours to find. Hopefully you can use this example to skip all that time spent trying to figure things out. Side quest log: Initially, I was not using the credentials: "include" option in the signIn() function above; thinking that I didn’t need to send any cookies with the login call, only the second API call to the /accounts/me endpoint. That mistake cost me about 2 hours of debugging time. If I had RTFM correctly the first time, I would have seen this: include: Tells browsers to include credentials in both same- and cross-origin requests, and always use any credentials sent back in responses. The credentials: "include" not only controls if cookies are sent, but also if they are saved when returned by the server. Why I won’t use this solution in the template Browsers are phasing out 3rd party cookies (Saying goodbye to third-party cookies in 2024) and adding features to work around that restriction where needed. The simplest way that doesn’t require much change is to use Cookies Having Independent Partitioned State (CHIPS). To enable CHIPS, you simply put a Partitioned flag on your Set-Cookie header, like so: Set-Cookie: session_id=1234; SameSite=None; Secure; Path=/; Partitioned; Unfortunately, there’s no straight forward way to do this in Django for now. There’s an open issue to resolve this, but looking at the comments, it won’t likely be solved anytime soon. Considering this, I opted to use the token based auth. method for my template. I’ll write a blog on that once I get it working over the next few days.
Links: Gumroad page Build Log My accidental new years resolution was to work on the 1 problem that has plagued me for my entire adult life; failure to commit and focus. I decided to work in 6 week “sprints” (inspired by Shape Up) and complete the projects I start - for some known definition of complete. This is the 1st project I have decided to work on. I’ll work on this from today (15th Feb 2024) to (28th Mar 2024). I’ll follow-up then with another post talking about how it went. The project The goal is to make & sell a Django + NextJS boilerplate template. What’s a boilerplate template? It’s the source code for a project that’s already setup with many things that are needed in a new project; for example: Stripe subscriptions functionality Background jobs CSS framework User/team management A great example is Saas Pegasus, which seems like an amazing boilerplate loved by many people. My boilerplate is going to be much simpler - and also much cheaper. SaaS Pegasus comes with so many features that it’s worth the $249 starting price. I’m aiming for $5-$10. Goals My goal is to sell this boilerplate to at least 10 people - and have them be happy using it. This means: talking to prospective customers and seeing if this can be useful to them. People will have the option of scheduling a 15 minute pre-purchase call with me for $5 to see if this would be useful to them. The payment is purely to make sure that I only spend time talking to people who are somewhat serious about purchasing. providing excellent after sales support. I’ll include a 60 minute setup call with me for any purchase. While a 60 minute call for a $10 sale isn’t scalable, it’s a great way for me to talk to customers at the start. having a no questions asked refund policy. My experiences with running an e-commerce store in the past tell me this is an amazing way to build trust. provide on-going support, updates, and fixes over email. build a mailing list of people interested in my work who I can email when I launch my future projects. The deliverable The boilerplate will allow developers to quickly start a project that uses Django for the backend and NextJS for the frontend. My recent experiences with another project in this tech stack required me to spend significant time on: figuring out how to setup authentication b/w Django & NextJS (this took the most time & effort) setting up Django Rest Framework so I could write APIs that would be used by the frontend writing Docker files that would build 2 containers - backend & frontend writing Terraform scripts to deploy those containers to AWS ECS writing config & scripts to run the project on Gitpod so it could be easily worked on by my team members My plan is to build a boilerplate that already has most those features built in, plus a few extras: Celery with Redis for background task processing Tailwind CSS for the frontend (in my project I used ChakraUI but Tailwind would be a better option for a boilerplate) If there’s demand for it, a stretch goal is to include social auth (sign-in with Google/Apple/etc) Once complete, I’ll put this on Gumroad and create a landing page there. From then on, it’s all about marketing it; that’s the part which I have no experience with and hope to learn the most from. The marketing plan This is the area where I lack any experience; so I’m not sure how I’m going to market this. Some ideas I have: build it in public on Twitter. I have a tiny Twitter following (312 followers) so not sure how useful this could be. But I have to try something. share it with people asking how to setup Django & NextJS on forums like Reddit, Stackoverflow, and others. maybe write a blog post on how to setup Django & NextJS and then link to the boilerplate from there. The blog post would provider all the steps necessary for the basic setup and the boilerplate would go beyond that with something that’s ready to use. The build log I’d also like to create a build log with this project. This will be a daily note of what I did for this project. I’ll keep it in my notes app Reflect and periodically put it here in this blog post. These daily notes might also serve as content for my build-in-public marketing strategy.
I was recently listening through the How to succeed at failing series on the Freakonomics podcast and started to think about how often I had failed in the past few years. The first answer was - not too much. I couldn’t think of too many instances of where I had “failed”. This was not a good thing. It was very much a sad thing that I couldn’t quickly think of many things I had failed at. Why is not failing bad? I realized I didn’t fail a lot because - I didn’t try a lot. I didn’t fail because I didn’t have good goals. Sure, I have a folder full of projects I thought of, researched, some that I even started working on; that I gave up on pretty soon after starting. But those don’t count as failures right? I was just playing around, not really aiming for anything. It was just a fun side project. That’s why I didn’t fail a lot, and that’s also why it’s not a good thing. I need to fail more Which means that I need to set goals and work towards them. Without goals to aim for, I keep spending my time in the same unproductive loop. Think of a shiny new project. Play around a bit, maybe learn a few things. Give up when things get hard or boring. Repeat While I do learn some things, I don’t really learn new things. Picking up another web backend framework when I’m very good at 1 already (Django if you’re looking to get something built 🙂) is very small incremental progress. I should be learning about running a business, marketing, sales, how to talk to people, cold calling, etc. Instead I’m playing around with NextJS/Remix because it’s easier to do and there’s very little chance of me failing at it. What I’m planning to do Any new project that I start, I will have an achievable goal for it. Something that can be called “done”. Achievable is different for everyone. Creating a small SaaS and have 5 people pay for it might be childs play for some, it’s my Everest for now. The plan is to aim for things just outside of my reach – to work towards those and grow in the process. Have a deadline. For now I’m starting with 6 week cycles of project work. In order meet deadlines, I need to have a clear picture of the goal. Goes back to the first thing on this list. Having a clear definition of “done” is important. But being able to cut scope to achieve some version of the goal is also important. - I’ve just finished reading Shape Up by Jason Fried and I like the Basecamp approach of deciding on an appetite (time commitment) to a project and cutting scope to meet that appetite. - That’s my plan moving forward. Each project I work on will be “shapped” into an achievable outcome and will have an allocated appetite - when I want to launch it or decide to abandon it. Continuing it for the next 6 week cycle will be another option but should be done sparingly. This approach of timeboxing projects and having an achievable goal is also discussed by Zack Freedman in this video Here’s what’s preventing you from finishing projects. See it when you get the chance. This wasn’t supposed to be a new years resolution I started thinking about this over 2 months ago and have been planning to write a post on it. Today seemed like a good day for it. So I guess this is my new year’s resolution. Fail more, fail better.
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After a write-up in the New York Times, Mommy Bloggers had two options. Either lean in, or step back. Given how popular it became after that, it's not hard to guess which option they chose. The post Mommy bloggers react appeared first on The History of the Web.
I'm quite a bit late on this one, but Haunt version 0.4.0 was released released back in July. I haven't had much time for blogging, but I'm catching up now! This release contains a small set of improvements and bug fixes since the 0.3.0 release in 2024. About Haunt Haunt is a static site generator that uses the Guile Scheme as its configuration language. It aims to be simple, functional, and extensible. Features include: Easy blog and Atom/RSS feed generation Markdown post support Simple development server for viewing edits before publishing Purely functional build process User extensibility Notable changes Added support for HTML in Markdown documents. This was a long time coming because guile-markdown did not support it and the library was abandoned by the original maintainer. As part of my work at Spritely, we forked it, implemented the relevant portions of the CommonMark specification, and released it. Spritely's guile-commonmark fork is now considered to be the official upstream by Guix and others. A further consequence of this is that guile-lib is now a required dependency for building Haunt as we need the (htmlprag) module to parse Markdown documents with embedded HTML. html->shtml from guile-lib's (htmlprag) module is now used instead of xml->sxml in the HTML reader. It was silly of me to use xml->sxml for this purpose years ago, but at the time I wanted guile-lib to be an optional dependency. Added haunt new subcommand for creating a new site. Added default directory, template, and prefix arguments to flat-pages procedure. Added support for index metadata flag to flat pages for pretty URLs. Flat pages now receive all page metadata, not just the page title. This is a breaking change from 0.3.0. Added .scm as an additional extension for sxml-reader. make-file-extension-matcher now supports multiple extensions. Fixed emission of <script> and <style> elements. Fixed handling of no available reader in flat pages builder. Fixed unreachable error handling clause when a reader is not found for a post. Fixed default blog theme template missing an <html> tag. Fixed overloaded -h option in haunt serve. Deprecated post in Skribe reader in favor of document. Download Haunt 0.4.0 is already available in Guix: guix pull guix install haunt See the Haunt project page for information on how to build from source. Thank you to Camilo Rodrigues, Noé Lopez, jgart, Jakob L. Kreuze, and Daniel Meißner for their contributions to this release! Happy haunting!
This is a transcript from a talk I gave at the German Perl Workshop earlier this year. If you'd prefer to watch the video recording, you can find it here. I have lots of photographic projects on the go. Lots of these being on film, as some of these I started shooting a long time ago. I don’t have any particular loyalty or attraction to film, it’s just that I started shooting many of these projects before affordable medium format digital was available. Since I mostly shoot medium/large format film I never really jumped to digital until recently, so film has continued to feature heavily in my workflow. That said, it’s a pain in the arse to shoot film now given the spiraling costs, limited availability, and issues around traveling with it: modern airport CT scanners, being rolled out across many airports, are much more convenient but will fog film. Asking for a hand inspection often comes down to arbitrary timing - how busy the security is, how experienced the operator is, or if you’re lucky/unlucky. I’ve had film forced to be scanned (and fogged) and politely argued with security on more than one occasion. I don’t want to deal with that so don’t travel with film anymore, thus I am shooting less of it and have mostly moved to digital. I still have a tonne of film I need to scan and process however. Here’s just some of the binders and files of film. I don’t plan to scan all of this, but I do plan to scan the ones I need to. Probably in the region of a couple of thousand frames. I want to scan to the highest possible quality (within reason) for archiving, book projects, and large prints. If you’re wondering how large I print, it can be up to 160x60cm panoramics for selling. This is restricted by the size of my printer (that’s another story). Three Years Ago Three years ago I almost bought a scanner. I ended up blogging about it and the post got a bit of traction on Hacker News (HN). I’m never quite sure which posts I submit will pique the interest of the users. I’ll spend months chipping away at a draft and when I post it it tanks. Or I’ll cobble something together in twenty minutes, like the linked one above, and it gets 440 points and over 300 comments… The thread had some useful suggestions and some not so useful ones, the not so useful ones being effectively “buy an Epson”: I’ve had one for fifteen years and it’s not good enough for large prints or archiving. It’s passable for web stuff and smaller prints, but for my recent use cases? Not even close. Ten years ago I had negatives scanned with a high resolution scanner for the first time and recently, wanting to scan my archives for various projects, I decided I should invest in one of those scanners. The Original Plan The plan, back in 2023, was simple: Buy scanner (at significantly reduced rate) Scan all my film Sell scanner Profit! And I mean profit - the scanner that I almost bought was being offered to me at about 2/3rd of the price they usually sell. And they’re becoming harder to find in working order so the prices are going up. Or profit in not having to pay > 25.- CHF per frame to have someone else do this. You can see the pricing from The Film Lab. You can read the original blog post to find out more about the scanner in question, so I won’t repeat it here. Other than the parts being relevant to the rest of this post, namely that the scanner was showing hard and soft problems. The software that drives the scanner was last updated in 2012, it’s proprietary and closed source, requiring 32bit architecture and no third party drivers or software exist. So you are stuck using old software/computers to run it. Or maybe you could use emulation / virtualisation? The problem there is that the interface is firewire, or SCSI on the even older models, and firewire is known to be problematic on these scanners as the controllers start to go bad after a decade of continued use. That’s a risk, and the scanner was very much EOL as the firewire controller was dying: both ports were bad that suggests controller, not ports. The scanner would have been €5,000 to purchase and then €3,000 (ish) to repair. Or, as HN suggested - just open it up and use a soldering iron. I’m not going to drop 5k on something and then start poking it with a soldering iron. I’ll pass on that thanks. Camera Scanning In the meantime I’ve been camera scanning, which you can read about in another blog post. But how does that compare cost wise? It’s expensive because you’ll need a high resolution camera, a macro lens, copy stand, negative carrier/holder, and quality light source. You’ll look to spend anything from three to five thousand Euros on everything. Camera scanning does actually work well, in that it’s close to a high resolution dedicated scanner. But you have to setup the entire thing every time you want to use it, including ensuring everything is straight and parallel. It also suffers from the same weakness as most other scanning methods. What do you think that is? Film Flatness Or lack thereof: Film is rarely flat, especially so with 35mm. These are pretty mild examples of curl. It tends to be flatter in the larger formats but then you get into flatness issues due to it sagging. The smallest difference in the film plane can cause major issues in sharpness due to focus fall off (film scanning is essentially macro photography). Any workflow or solution that does not take this into account is significantly compromised. And the workflow is only as good as its weakest part. This is the biggest problem in scanning film - all other considerations are more than adequate these days: resolution, dynamic range, etc. However, most negative carriers don’t keep the film perfectly flat. This has always been a problem - this is from a book called “Edge of Darkness” which is about traditional analog photography and printing, and summarises the problems of negative carriers thusly: “if you use a glassless negative carrier, you might as well just buy the cheapest enlarging lens you can find. You are simply throwing away the money and sharpness you paid for it in your enlarging lens, and also in your fine camera and the expensive lenses you bought for it… No film will lie flat in a glassless carrier. That’s right, none… There is no avoiding this issue. Use glass.” So you have to use (anti-newton ring) glass, which introduces other issues - you’ve now got extra glass in the transmission path, and dust (which isn’t a massive problem, but a pain nonetheless). You could use drum scanning, which is absurdly impractical from a cost and operating point of view. Or you could use a Flextight, the scanner I almost bought three years ago. Interim Solution I stuck with camera scanning, but wasn’t happy though, because of film flatness and the setup faff. So of course I started looking for another scanner. I was idly browsing near the end of 2025 and came across this one. It’s exactly the same spec as the one I tried three years ago, except SCSI not Firewire so less prone to failure. It just predates Hasselblad buying Imacon (so is pre the rebranding, etc). It was in Switzerland so I could inspect and pick it up. It was also significantly cheaper than the previous one I had looked at, so worth a punt even if I needed to take a soldering iron to it. We went to St Gallen for a weekend and I picked it up. Here’s the software interface back in my studio. Look at that marvelous interface! None of that liquid glass bollocks. The first scans were promising, but I had the sense things needed some TLC. The first thing was calibrating the focus, which the software can do in combination with a focus slide. I was lucky that the focus slide was included with the scanner and I’m not sure what I would have done otherwise. Probably paid a fortune for a replacement? Possibly a lot of manual trial and error with the software? After doing that I scanned images of the 1951 USAF resolution test chart (taken on ultra high resolution 35mm film): That’s what the resulting scan looked like. Notice that it’s sharp from edge to edge, corner to corner. At 100% crop we can resolve around 110 to 123 line pairs per mm, which equates to about 5,600 to 6,300 DPI. This is beyond the limit of most 35mm lenses, but importantly - exactly to spec for this scanner. So I was happy the focus was calibrated. If you’re curious this is the same target with the camera scanning setup. It’s close, but we’ve got another variable in the workflow, several even, and that impacts the results. It’s not as sharp, and the extra glass in the transmission path causes aberrations. Another thing that needed attention was the power supply. The seller mentioned that “sometimes it takes five minutes to warm up”. Sometimes it was more than five minutes, and the power supply would click click click away. So that needed fixing and it was easy enough to find a compatible new replacement, however it cost 200 Euros. Expensive! The third problem I noticed was that some of the scans were coming out stretched. Often about 10% too wide/long, sometimes more than that. My panoramics looked panoooooooramic. I did some research and someone suggested this might be a “buffering issue”, which I thought was nonsense. Doing some testing I heard slipping sounds when the scanner was pulling the film into the body. After more research I stumbled on a post that suggested the belts need replacing. I opened the scanner up, and sure enough: A ha! You can’t quite see that the one on the back is even worse. I replaced those with compatible belts: 535 synchroflex t 2.5/245. Problem solved. The fourth problem was that the film holders were old and/or had been mishandled. They were falling apart and held together with electrical tape or glue, which didn’t seem optimal. Replacements cost 350 Euros in total for the four I needed. They’re now available cheaper from China, since the patents have expired. Or, you know, China. They used to cost about 200 Euros each from Hasselblad. The fifth problem, which is a potential one and hasn’t manifested yet, is that the lamps may eventually need replacing. I picked up a couple for 25 Euros. That seemed like a reasonable thing to do while they’re still available. Success? Let’s add up the costs of acquiring this scanner and renovating it: Scanner: 1,750.- CHF Power Supply: 175.- CHF Belts: 25.- CHF Film Holders: 350.- CHF Lamps: 25.- CHF Total: 2,325.- CHF (c. 2,500 EUR) In the last year (since acquiring the scanner) I have scanned: c. 250 panoramics frames (~ 6,000 CHF) c. 2,500 medium format frames (~ 80,000 CHF) c. 200 large format frames (~ 9,000 CHF) The figures in parentheses are what it would have cost me to have that number of frames scanned by a third party. That is, er, quite a saving. Also quite a lucrative business model perhaps? I think I can argue the cost of the scanner was a very good investment, and I haven’t finished using it yet. Even if it were to stop working tomorrow, it has already paid for itself many times over. Could it stop working tomorrow? Yes, because of other issues that will be harder to solve. The Bigger Issue(s)? A Power Mac G4 (discontinued in 2004). This came with the scanner, the necessary hardware and software to drive it, and is almost certainly living on borrowed time. Spinning metal is never good in the long-term. I’ll maybe purchase a backup soon, as these can still be found for a couple of hundred Euros. The key thing though, is that this very expensive, very high quality scanner, will at some point be rendered useless by the upgrade treadmill because the software required to run it will be increasingly difficult to run. A scanner that is still used by businesses, educational institutions, and individuals like me. A scanner that originally cost tens of thousands of Euros less than a decade ago. The upgrade treadmill is constantly whirring away. This is from the top of the Seattle Space Needle. “Do not upgrade anything on computer”. Clearly that notice speaks of someone being bitten by an upgrade at some point. I wonder is anyone else feeling the fatigue? Security updates, sure I can understand. But feature creep and trivialities? No! What tangible benefits have the last ten, fifteen, or even twenty years of OS updates brought? Other than security, and compatibility with newer hardware? New hardware is great, really, but by association forced deprecation of older hardware. No! It feels like the upgrade treadmill gets faster and steeper every year. Add to that subscription lock-in and dead endpoints: “I couldn’t vacuum my house because an SSL cert had expired” is what someone told me earlier this year. Fortunately this person is a software engineer so ended up man-in-the-middling the network traffic to get the vacuum cleaner to work again (no SSL-pinning it seems). “GoPro is announcing the end of life of the GoPro Quik app for macOS, effective at the end of 2024”. They discontinued the former in favour of their mobile app, which requires an account, login, subscription, and so on. I just want to transfer the videos from the hardware, I don’t need any of this crap (I don’t need any of that crap, it turns out GoPro haven’t locked the device down enough to prevent using third party apps to access the files. Yet). And, of course, software has to be in everything. These days the scanner would/could have an embedded Raspberry PI? Just a keyboard and mouse input, monitor and USB output would reduce the surface area, connectivity issues, and software dependency. Or software is never done? Because: externalities. I guess software is “done” when it’s no longer supported? Marciano Planque has a good piece on this: When hardware products reach end-of-life (EOL), companies should be forced to open-source the software. I think that’s a fair thing to say. I suspect Hasselblad/Imacon never open-sourced the software due to licensing issues. Or they just lost the source. Or they just don’t care, I don’t know. Maybe some combination of the three. And, inevitably, discontinued hardware like this scanner. Or, that is to say, discontinued parts? What about regulation changes? The panoramics I shoot are with a camera that was discontinued in 2004 because EU regulation banned lead solder in circuit boards. The company decided redesigning the parts wasn’t worth it. Old hardware has new exciting ways to fail. As time goes on components will fail or loosen - components that were expected to last decades. Then that results in tribal knowledge, or worse link rot and QR code rot. A lot of this stuff is hidden in walled gardens. There’s a Facebook Imacon group, for example. Why in the ever-loving fuck is a group for technical people, by technical people, on Facebook? Then there’s misleading AI. “My flextight scans are coming out stretched, what might the problem be?” LLM’s have gobbled up all the right information, and all the wrong information. Or information that is massively out of date. Nowhere in the suggestions here does it mention the belts might need replacing, which, according to my own research, is the most common reason these days. Legacy Software A decade ago I wrote an essay that also hit the front page of HN: All Software is Legacy. I think it is still relevant today, some parts not so much given we are now in The Age of Prompt, but mostly it’s still true. Nicholas always said “legacy software is the ugly stuff that makes you money”, which I think is true. But now it’s the stuff that surrounds us, like when I want to withdraw cash (guess what software most cash machines are still running?). Or when I want to take a train - when I gave this talk in Germany I had to get from the airport to the city centre. The ticket machines were disabled with a sign saying “no longer in use, download the app”. Then register. Then buy the ticket. I just want to give you money. Or when I wanted to pay for parking while stopping off at some random town in the UK - the same situation as with the ticket machines. “Download the app, register, pay”. Fuck that, I went and parked somewhere else. I just want to park, I don’t want to fight with software. Or if I want to hire a bike (not pictured: the half dozen apps on my phone to hire a bike). And when I want to buy stuff from a shop… One of the self-checkouts crashed recently in the coop, rebooting into a version of SUSE Linux from well over a decade ago. We’re collectively creating more and more of this everyday, letting it out into the world where it becomes a future liability for someone or the death knell for something. A pile of bikes, an unplugged ticket machine, a top of the line but no longer driveable scanner. References Imacon Users Group (the non-Facebook group) The state of Hasselblad Flextight scanners (2019) 1951 USAF resolution test chart Vlads Test Target Printer Story Original Scanner Blog Responses to HN Camera Scanning All Software is Legacy Repair Cafe
The Tetris effect is one of psychology’s most easy to reproduce experiments. Simply spend a bit of time playing the eponymous game every day for a few weeks. After a little while, you’ll start recognizing familiar Tetromino shapes in clouds, buildings, and everyday objects. You might even see them appear before your eyes when you start falling asleep. Tom Tang Attention hijacking There’s one lesson the Tetris effect teaches us: whatever you focus on long enough will end up shaping your thoughts. This can be a good thing since it’s how we learn new skills and discover new ideas. Sadly, less and less of our attention is focused intentionally. Instead of picking what we want to see we let other people decide what is supposed to be good for us. Do you want to watch a video? YouTube knows you like cooking and art streams. But why not also recommend a few clips about the stock market bubble, global warming, and the war in Iran. Doomscrolling will make you stay longer and click on a few more ads. Do you want to listen to music? Just open a Spotify playlist and let the algorithm figure out what you like. Please ignore the AI slop they will insert in between real songs to avoid paying royalties to real artists. Do you want to know how your colleagues are doing? Too bad, LinkedIn will bury any relevant career news between the opinion of complete strangers. It is surely just a coincidence that those strangers happen to be shilling whatever Microsoft is invested in at the moment. Do you want the opinion of strangers on a product? Well those Redditors you wanted to ask are probably just a bunch of LLMs talking to a bunch of Russian trolls now. I hope you didn’t value their opinion too much. If, like me and most people, you spend the major part of your day focused on your device, there’s no doubt it’s affecting you. And when you let someone else dictate what appears on your screen, it’s the same as giving them the key to your brain. New York Said Back to an intentional internet The internet wasn’t always like that. Before recommendation algorithms where a thing, you had to decide what you would be doing on the computer. You didn’t really have one big app that you could open and order it to entertain you. Instead, you had a few dozen of bookmarks to websites, each with a specific idea in mind. A site for video game news, that one website with lots of tutorials, a blog about anime that didn’t update often enough, a wiki about a TV show from the 90s… Of course awful things existed on the web. We had Encyclopedia Dramatica and Rotten.com, but you actually had to put the effort to go there if you wanted. Nobody was going to put pictures of dead kids and far-right propaganda as a suggestion after a pancake recipe or a cat video. The good thing is that this intentional internet is still around. It has just been a bit buried below the corporate web, but it’s not very hard to find. After all you’re on this blog, so you probably already have a good idea about it. The main difference between this time and now is you. When you want to get back to reading blogs, RSS feeds, and finish that tutorial instead of doomscrolling shorts, you have to get used to a slower internet. One where content is not infinite and doesn’t get updated every click. But like every habit, the only thing you have to do is to keep at it. And if you pay enough attention to it, something will click in your brain.
