Woke up to more snow this morning. In March. And it was gone before midday.
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March Snow
Tag Archives: Winter
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Klein Pulse
Not a German Whip. Klein made the coolest, wildest, most expensive mountain bikes back in the ’90s, eye-bleed paint jobs on oversize aluminium tubing. Utterly desirable and mad collectable today. Total shock to see one turned into a pub banger with front rack and riser bars. Other than that it looks in fairly good condition, thrashed but loved. I almost wanted to stick a note on it offering to buy it.
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Länderdreieck From Görlitzer Brücke
I’ve lived in Berlin how long and never walked the old elevated train line from Görlitzer Park almost all the way to Treptower Park? Over the Görlitzer bridge on Treptower Kanal and it’s just all trees and unpaved paths. It’s an absolute gem and once again Berlin pulling up her skirts to show a bit of ankle it’s Berlin, upper thigh. Even in winter.
Fuck the Berlin and German political parties (allll of them) for ramming a massively expensive and useless dildo of Autobahn all the way through the east end. What this stretch should be is a connection over the Ringbahn line and into Treptower Park and Plänterwald, through to Königsheide and south through Wasserwerk Johannisthal and out of the city along Teltow Kanal, or east through the old rail yards of Johannesthal and out of the city along the Spree. That would be excellent. And would also end up with wild boars and foxes hanging out in Görlitzer Park.
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The One Snow of Winter (So Far)
Waking up to Berlin looking winter pretty for the first time this year.
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Koksijde
One of my all-time fave races. I love the sand chaos of Koksijde and I love the intense racing period over this time of year. And I also love deeply Ceylin del Carmen Alvarado slowly coming back to her best after a very long illness and injury. With all the young ones coming up, she does not get enough love. UCI World Champion, European U23 Champion, Netherlands Champion, 1st in DVV Trophy and Superprestige, and 2nd in UCI World Cup, all in the same year and all when she was twenty-one.
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Tempelhofer Feld, March 16 2022
Another afternoon wandering Tempelhofer Feld with my camera. After yesterday’s messing around, I did some reading the fucking manual to remind myself how to use an expensive camera and lens. And I learned the 16-80mm F4 lens can also do passable macro at the zoomed end. Which obviously I like, especially if I ever go back to a museum and shoot art.
First stop, the skate park, for some boyz and lads doing ollies and kickflips. And took probably the photo of the day: someone doing a 360. Bit of a walk, bit of a sitdown to work out what buttons I’d pushed and why camera was being weird (accidentally nudged the dial to HDR), shot some cyclists in full aero TT mode. More walking and almost stomped on spring flowers being highly ostentatious, which is where I tested out exactly how macro can I go? Actually very, and the detail is mad.
More walking and got told to smile by some gormless wanker. Joke’s on you, dickhead, I already was.
More walking and these Skylarks were getting well rowdy. And fully not afraid of people, so I just stood there while one came right up scratching for a feed. Photo wasn’t so good though, but once again, yay zoom. And then took a photo of the almost full moon, which I looked at when I got home, and insane detail zooming in in the raw image, the mare are clearly visible, as are the bright craters and rays of Tycho, Copernicus, Kepler, and even Aristarchus. That’s hand-held auto-focus, in daylight with a heap of haze and high cloud, and the moon about 25° above the horizon.
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Tempelhofer Feld, March 15 2022
Getting my arse back to Tempelhofer Feld for an arvo stroll. Haven’t been there since mid-December apparently. This time with my still-new FujiFilm X-T4 camera, despite the absence of sun and blue sky. Training my fingers and brain for where everything is amidst all the dials and buttons, and learning what kind of photos it takes.
Besides changing the auto-focus, I’m still shooting very default at the moment. Having a proper zoom lens is by far the one thing I’ve been missing, as well as the combo of substantial slabs of glass and sensor allowing me to shoot zoomed in with low light and still get sharp images at an acceptable exposure time. Actually playing around with ISO, aperture, exposure, and all, as in actually using an expensive camera properly, is somewhere in the future.
As for the photos, all but the last are the jpg versions of the raw photos the camera creates. I find them a little over-exposed (not so much the dim ones here) and flat compared to the raw originals, but I can’t be arsed spending time making them pretty. Except the last one, which I needed to rotate a little and the jpg really looked average. I also need to learn Affinity Photo, which I started using when I ditched Photoshop. The photo is far from great, but it is movement and one of the reasons I bought this camera was to shoot movement – dance, cycling, sport, motorsport, people moving.
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Even The Rubbish Bins in Neukölln Roll For Ukraine
Repping the blue and yellow.
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MacBook Pro!
😱😭😍
Currently writing this on old MacBook Pro which has done 8 hard years under my fingers, and had the entire top case, keyboard, and battery replaced. And is running a tiny bash script which keeps the CPUs ticking over at a minimum of 5% so they don’t decide they’re asleep and randomly shut down.
New MacBook Pro is currently updating itself.
New MacBook Pro is a 16” M1 Pro with 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD. Which is kinda insane.
I took a few weeks last year to make a decision. More RAM? M1 Max? Bigger SSD? What combo of what? And most importantly, what colour? Which was Taner’s call. “You sure you want Space Grey?” Turns out I wasn’t. Silver it is.
I picked it up from Katrin and Taner a week ago, left it unboxed until yesterday when I had some calm, and now doing the massive migration.
Things I really like: Return of MagSafe! Which is Apple’s best invention. Braided power adaptor cable with plugs at both ends! I love braided cables (not sure how dirty it will get though), and hopefully it solves one of Apple’s biggest downers — the frayed cable at the MagSafe or adaptor ends — with a replaceable cable instead of trashing the whole thing. Return of the original TiBook blocky style. Tasty.
Obvious things I really like: Fuck me that’s a big, bright screen. Very different keyboard not requiring me to retrain my finger habits. Massive trackpad (requiring … finger habits). Touch ID. Which I don’t use for critical things like logging in but there’s plenty of other situations where it’s useful as fuck.
Things I have no idea about yet: How fast is it, actually? I went for 32GB of RAM over M1 Max because my current laptop was almost top of the line back in late-2013, and 16GB of RAM has held up well (even with terribly coded ‘modern’ websites and browsers). The 500GB SSD always felt kinda tight when my previous, 2008 MacBook Pro had a 1TB spinny drive. Battery life is supposed to be ‘up to 21 hours’, but realistically getting a day’s work out of it without a recharge, or an evening’s series binge, would be awesome.
And the big thing: How many years is it good for? 8 years on my current one and the main reason I bought a new one was I needed to get rid of some money. High on the list of other reasons were: it’s feeling old and a little creaky and slow, and it might decide to actually die at any time — or keep running for years. Dasniya has my 2008 laptop which still does occasional work and it’s still running slow but ok. Also high on the list was ditching of the Touch Bar, return of MagSafe, and arrival of M1. But I’ve spent on average 4–500€ a year across 4 laptops since 2002, and while they last a lot longer now, they’re also a lot more expensive. So, is 8 years realistic? Especially on the whole M1 hardware.
Somehow I’d like to not have to buy a new laptop again. I have no idea what my life might look like where I’m doing the work I enjoy and have no need for a laptop though. Being a poor who has very carefully balanced a shite household budget for decades means while I might be able to afford to pay for this, I never know if I’ll be able to afford having it. And yes, for anyone who thinks buying this does not equal poor: it’s a very large work expense, it’s one of a number of large expenses I had to choose between — including those trans expenses which I don’t know if I’ll ever fully cross off — and for most of the last decade I’ve been wearing the same clothes and cheap underwear. It’s beautiful and a little intimidating, and I’d love to enjoy it fully without worrying about how near-future me might be in a situation where I can’t afford the basics again.
Yah, so, obligatory unboxing photos, which are not especially aesthetic but I took as I was seeing it for the first time.
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First Light FujiFilm X-T4
Something telescopes do, the first image.
I know! It’s been a month since I haemorrhaged 💶💶💶 for a fancy new FujiFilm X-T4 camera, and now, thanks finally to Berlin backing off on the shitful dim grey and showing some sun (after snowing, which means funtimes on the shitful Berlin sidewalks which are fully glassy with ice), I point-and-clicked.
To be fair, I have spent a few afternoons and evenings without the lens attached going through settings and dials and reading the manual and connecting camera to phone, so it’s not like I stuck it in a drawer and forgot about it. Though I did forgot everything I learned and was feeling like a child playing with a very expensive racing car.
Previous cameras also had their first light’s blogged, my Panasonic LX3 in 2009, and Panasonic LX7 in 2014.
