Open Mic Aid (external)

Hello, my tiny audience. I’ve been teleworking for… three weeks now? I think? I don’t know, I’m not trying to keep track. The reality is that we are all cooped up, likely for months, for good reason. Maybe some of us will find time to do things, maybe some of us will lose time. It’s… new. And hard. Really, really hard. For the time being, I’m financially secure. But a lot of people aren’t.

Cats, dogs, and birbs (according to my phone)

2021-02 update: Because the turds at Viacom have removed all of the cross-posts of Garfield comics from Garfield.com, I have changed the link to the Garfield comic in the birds section to point to GoComics. This is bullshit.

I’ve never really used iOS’s automatic thing-detection for photo categories before, but I was looking for a specific picture of a dog from my ~8 years worth of photos, so I gave it a shot.

The 231 photos my phone thinks are of cats include:

The 214 photos my phone thinks are of dogs include:

The 76 photos my phone thinks are of birds include:

NIRB, Birb don’t want nirb scirbs a scirb is a birb that can’t get nirb lirb from birb!


Telephoto

As is to be expected whenever Apple announces something new, a lot of shit is being flung around in the tech sphere over the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. One particularly fun nugget is that the secondary camera lens on the 7 Plus’s dual-camera system is not, despite what Apple says, a telephoto lens. This is based on a few mixed-up notions from people who know just enough about photography to think they know a lot: namely that ‘telephoto’ is synonymous with ‘long’, and that 56mm (135 equivalence, when will this die) is ‘normal’ (and therefore not ‘long’ ‘telephoto’). 50mm was standardized on the 135 format because Oskar Barnack said so, essentially. Different versions of the story say that the 50 was based on a known cine lens design, or that glass to make the 50 was readily available, or that it was necessary to fill the new large image circle, but whatever the original motivating factor was – the original Leica I set a new standard with the 135 film format, and a new standard somewhat-longer-than-normal focal length with its Elmar 50/3.5. The idea behind normalcy is matching our eyesight. This, conveniently, tends to match up with the length of the diagonal of the imaging plane; √(24²+36²)≅43mm. 50 is already noticeably longer than this, and 56 even more so. There’s a reason 55-60mm lenses were popular as more portrait-capable ‘normals’.