Summer

What You Actually Get With a Phoblographer Membership

A Phoblographer membership costs $25 a year, and while the headline benefit is an ad-free reading experience, that's not the only thing members get. We've been rolling out additional perks over time, and it's worth laying them out clearly for anyone who's been on the fence.

Genius Design Details: Pips and Nubs

The gang from Craighill explains the origins and uses of three seemingly small design details that show up everywhere: pips, nubs, and the very useful union of pips and nubs. You’ve seen pips on dice and dominos, nubs are used for Braille text, and the pips/nubs combo is us…

Usenet-Rewind : search over 1 billion Usenet text posts...

Usenet-Rewind: search over 1 billion Usenet text posts from 1981 to the present.

“ Figures show Japan is now home to 107,677...

“Figures show Japan is now home to 107,677 centenarians, the highest number in the world, of whom 88% are women. The oldest woman is Kishimoto Fuyo, a 114-year-old from Kyoto City and the oldest man is Kato Hikaru, a 112-year-old from Kumamoto.”

Best Concert Photography Lenses for Shooting in Low Light

Music events, such as festivals and concerts, are a pretty impressive opportunity for photographers. One can get some really creative images, thanks to the mixed lighting set-up, and some truly impressive moments in the crowd. However, concert photography lenses have one thing i…

Why Charlotte Should Build a Museum of Broadcasting in the Antenna Age

In the foreground are three towers standing on nineteen acres in Charlotte’s south side. They transmit the signal of WBT/1110 AM, a 50,000-watt giant, with a signal that stretches from Canada to Cuba at night: WBT was born 104 years ago and is about to die, because the land un…

Danny MacAskill Plays in the Endless Light of Norway

Scottish trials rider and mountain biker Danny MacAskill, who I first featured on the site more than 17 years ago, recently took his Santa Cruz eMTB north of the Arctic Circle to Narvik, Norway. He rode three different mountains and the result is this incredibly beautiful vid…

Hidden in Pieces: Live at the Royal Albert Hall . A live...

Hidden in Pieces: Live at the Royal Albert Hall. A live album from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs? Hell yes yes yes! 13 songs are available now plus 9 more tracks when the full album drops in October.

Paul Ford: Aided by LLMs, people & companies are...

Paul Ford: Aided by LLMs, people & companies are producing lots of software. But where are the AI-coded killer apps? “[AI is] very good at reproducing things that look and feel like what came before.”

Panasonic LUMIX 20mm f2.5 Review: The Lens You’ll Want to Bring Everywhere

The Panasonic LUMIX 20mm f2.5 is a fantastic lens not just for the LUMIX S9, but for any full-frame LUMIX camera you may use. And it's not just because of the image quality as there's a lot to love about this thing. Looking back at my time with the Panasonic LUMIX 20mm f2.5 duri…

Size-Specialized Memory Allocation

The Go Blog Size-Specialized Memory Allocation Michael Matloob 16 September 2026 Go 1.27 includes faster memory allocation for allocations of fewer than 80 bytes. Allocations can be up to 20-30% faster, making allocation-heavy programs up…

The All of the Above Trail Fest is “deconstructing...

The All of the Above Trail Fest is “deconstructing the very definition of a trail race, refiguring it into something more expansive and inclusive”. There are no gender divisions and winners are decided by who gets closest to their predicted finish time.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 2027 Brings New AI Tools to Make Editing Easier

Today, Adobe announced the latest update to its Photoshop Elements software for Mac and Windows PCs. The latest version of Photoshop Elements brings over AI tools, like Generative Expand and Generative Upscaling as well as additional filters, search and editing assistant. While…

The Powerful Connection Between Smell & Memory

One thing I didn’t get a chance to work into my post about the unexpected memory bomb triggered by my spice drawer was the tight, deep connection between smell and memory. I first learned about this relationship in college when I read A Natural History of the Senses by Diane A…

We Must Create the Shit Machine . “I asked...

We Must Create the Shit Machine. “I asked everyone I know at the BIG TECH HUMAN CENTIPEDE ROUNDTABLE, and we all agreed that UNCONTROLLABLE SHIT-RAIN IS USEFUL AND GREAT, and that EVERYONE WANTS IT.”

The frontier Anthropic & OpenAI models are only ~4...

The frontier Anthropic & OpenAI models are only ~4 months ahead of open models — at 5x the price. “Most organizations should ideally be using open models as the default for the majority of their work, according to [a report] from Mozilla…”

Last year in Ireland, a bouncy castle infested with a...

Last year in Ireland, a bouncy castle infested with a “hypervirulent, multidrug-resistant pathogen” infected almost 50 children. Reality: always weirder than the weirdest sci-fi.

Naomi Klein : “Extreme wealth has a deranging...

Naomi Klein: “Extreme wealth has a deranging effect. It turns you into a supremacist.” Klein’s new book, End Times Fascism, written with Astra Taylor, is out today.

Taryn Simon’s Father Country I Do Love You

Father Country I Do Love You sounds like a doozy of a new exhibition from photographer Taryn Simon. The project focuses on the life and work of an unnamed, retired FBI agent. From the NY Times: She Spent Years on a Giant Project About One Man. The Result Is Monumental. As i…

The Tube Computer was recently constructed from...

The Tube Computer was recently constructed from hundreds of 1950s vacuum tubes sourced from Eastern Europe. “The Tube Computer has a pleasant homely aroma from the hundreds of double triodes, all quietly burning off their dust.” It heats the room too.

Is the Canon R6 Still Worth Buying in 2026?

When the Canon R6 was launched, a lot of competitors thought it would live under the shadows of Sony's mirrorless offerings. The Canon R6 is a serious enthusiast camera with a lot of positive features. For example, good autofocus and some amazing image quality, amongst other thi…

Linkalongday

War prep redux Given the size of my corpus here, most visiting to it, on most days, is to old stuff. One currently getting some action is Desert warfare training in live ghost towns, seen from the sky, which I posted ten years ago. I've shot its scenes (five of them) often since…

Tycho’s Burning Man Sunrise Set for 2026

For the 93rd year in a row or something like that I didn’t check the math, Tycho has released his sunrise set from Burning Man. I am not a Burning Man person but I always enjoy this set. See also a playlist of every 2026 Burning Man set on Soundcloud, currently 147 tracks…

Alex Gibney’s documentary reveals that Elon Musk has...

Alex Gibney’s documentary reveals that Elon Musk has always been a racist, sexist fraud. “Musk’s ex-wife Justine, whom he married in 2000 and divorced in 2008, says the man the world began to see in 2020 was the one she’d always known.”

With a new installment every seven years since 1964, the...

With a new installment every seven years since 1964, the Seven Up series has followed a group of 14 British schoolchildren from adolescence to adulthood. The final installment, 70 Up, directed by Asif Kapadia (Senna, Amy), is out this week.

The Spice Drawer

Over the past six months (leisurely) and in the past three weeks (intensely), I’ve cleaned out and packed up my entire house where I’ve been living for the past 10 years. I went through every bit and bob of what I owned and either: gave it away (fiddle leaf fig, grill, ch…

A declaration signed by 25 Fields medalists : “The...

A declaration signed by 25 Fields medalists: “The goals of the AI companies and the goals of the mathematical community are severely misaligned.”

Affinity (Version 3.3) Review: Better for Photographers, Still not Replacing Capture One

Since the release of Affinity 3.0, one of my biggest gripes with the software has been the unshakable feeling that this was at best a piece of software that was largely incomplete and at worst not made with photographers in mind. The latest release, Affinity 3.3, changes a lot o…