The Nikon Z7II Reviewed in 2026: Here’s Why I Bought Mine

Over the past couple of years, The Phoblographer has gone back into our archives and personal gear to determine if a camera that we’ve reviewed long ago (and sometimes not all that long ago) is still a camera we’d recommend or more importantly something we’d still buy. Whe…

NPR’s Planet Money recently did a show on tariff refunds...

NPR’s Planet Money recently did a show on tariff refunds and interviewed Panic’s Cabel Sasser about how they decided to refund their Playdate-buying customers for the tariffs surcharge they paid.

Do you believe in life after death? This is a great...

Do you believe in life after death? This is a great interactive piece by Alvin Chang about people’s beliefs about the existence of an afterlife and how those beliefs change over the course of our lifetimes.

Cluesdays

Riding wide On the road for a while. Above is a storm coming over Elk Country in north-central Pennsylvania. After that, Elk Country, Ohio, and back to Indiana, by RAV4. Didn’t know there was one, but yeah Chick-fil-A takes a stand against fast-food drive-thru AI trend. Maybe…

A Tiny 24 FPS E-Ink Game Boy Emulator

This is really impressive: a software engineer got a Game Boy emulator running at 30 fps on a tiny e-ink screen. If you’re familiar with e-paper, you know that they normally refresh much slower (2-3 times a second), not nearly quick enough to play even a simple video game…

A 24-minute video tour of the Krasner and Pollock: Past...

A 24-minute video tour of the Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous exhibition at the Met. I hope I make it to NYC to see this before it closes in January.

From File to Print: The Phoblographer Membership’s Discounts for Getting Your Work Off the Screen

Two of the less talked-about Phoblographer membership perks are worth a closer look: 20% off MPIX printing services and 10% off film developing, printing, and scanning at Blue Moon Camera and Machine. Neither gets the attention the ad-free pitch does, but both solve a real, comm…

Towers of Babble is a game that mashes up word games and...

Towers of Babble is a game that mashes up word games and tower defense games. “Nouns make buildings and other parts of speech make modifiers that you can add to a building to improve its stats.”

Hyperland, a Prescient 1990 TV Show by Douglas Adams

I’d never heard of this before: in 1990, the BBC aired a program created by and starring Douglas Adams called Hyperland. It begins with a frustrated Adams throwing his TV out (too linear, too non-interactive) and Tom Baker (from Doctor Who) popping up as an intelligent inte…

Lane 8 has released his Fall 2026 Mixtape, 4 hours,...

Lane 8 has released his Fall 2026 Mixtape, 4 hours, recorded live at SF’s Castro Theatre. This one’s going straight into the earholes. Soundcloud, YouTube, and elsewhere.

Won’t Someone Please Stop Me, Dr. Frankenstein, from...

Won’t Someone Please Stop Me, Dr. Frankenstein, from Building the Creature? “These are serious concerns. And I think we should all stop. Me, especially. Can anyone make me stop doing the thing I want to do? Apparently not.”

Fujifilm Quicksnap Black and White Review: You can Skip This

The Fujifilm Quicksnap Black and White is a camera that takes black and white film, gives you 27 shots, and then that's the end. Despite its very simple use, it leaves a lot to be desired because in a world with so many good black and white film emulsions, I don't really underst…

Fusion Device

Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Consequence of Donald Trump

Writing for Vanity Fair (archive link), Ta-Nehisi Coates says that Donald Trump is the most visionary politician of his era. Through a mix of moxie, cynicism, and misanthropy, Trump has made himself into the dominant American of our age. Sometimes a man meets his moment, and T…

nikitonsky is being grumpy

nikitonsky: Action or state is a tricky problem in UI design. What should be written on a button? Current state of the system or a state that it will switch to when clicked? Why not both? Audible’s Preview button shows state in its icon, but action in its label ¯\_(ツ)_/¯…

By 2026 Standards, the 5D Mk II is a Great Camera

Do you vividly remember the last photo shoot you did with a camera that you loved before it died? That's me with the 5D Mk II -- arguably the camera that helped me build this website and this publication into what it is today. I was testing the Phottix Indra 500 strobe and the h…

Ranking proposals for Interop 2027

The Firefox team are asking us to weigh in on proposals for Interop 2027—what features should browsers be concentrating on implementing or improving. Here are my top five: Web app installation via and navigator.install(). Prompts the user to install a progressive web app.…

The Tusks Of Extinction by Ray Nayler

Hot on the heels of reading and enjoying The Mountain In The Sea, I picked up Ray Nayler’s next work, this tightly constructed novella. Once again it deals with inter-species communication. This time it’s de-extincted mammoths. Once again, it’s set in the relatively near…

The Mountain In The Sea by Ray Nayler

Back in 2019, I read the book Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith and said: I really enjoyed this evolutionary tale. It’s equal parts biology and philosophy. I will never look at cephalopods quite the same way agai…

Recently

September was another big month for my life, mostly for me offline. Another good month for bicycle riding, seeing more of the trails on Randalls and Wards Islands. The New York area has taught me a few things about islands and one of them is that they're very fungible. On a map,…

Is the Sony A6500 Worth Your Time in 2026?

Sony has some wonderful cameras for various genres of photography. The company's APS-C range has been particularly great for young image-makers. The Sony a6500 is a decade old camera which turned heads upon its launch. But will the camera work for photographers today? Let's take…

From Studio to Street: Our Analog Film Presets Hold Up Anywhere

We already showed what our Analog Film Presets Pack does to a studio portrait, so this time we took the same set of presets outside. Street and candid photography ask for something different from a controlled portrait: the grain and color response need to hold up in changing lig…