I moved to Japan in 1989, and the person who met me at the airport in Tokyo was Krish Kulkarni, a graduate student at Tokyo University, and the twin brother of Ram Kulkarni, my best friend at my own graduate school in America. I had most recently met both of them a year ago in Tokyo, and last week met Krish and his family as they vacationed in Japan.

Climbing Mt. Fuji was high on the list for Krish's 19-year-old son Vishnu, and they kindly invited me along.

Krish's back was bothering him, and despite a massage in Kyoto from [...]

Over the years I've reported on informal tests with satellite-tracking location-logger units ("GPS trackers"), such as "More GPS Cycling Tests" from three years ago, and from six years ago, "Another Informal Location-Logger Test" (itself a followup to "iPhone 4s GPS is Shockingly Good").

When cycling, I try to record my ride on at least three different units, because they tend to fail in the middle of a ride a lot more commonly than one should think, and the data geek in me doesn't want to risk losing data on the ride. I've recorded every one of the 23,827 kilometers I've [...]

I'm very surprised to find that I prepared this article last year but didn't actually post it. It's the final followup to "Minh and Nghia Photoshoot Preview", its Part 2, and wigglegram.

We'd left off while at the Murin'an gardens, so we'll continue with a few more shots from there...

A photoshoot at the Nanzen Temple must include a visit to the old (but still functioning) aquaduct.

After this shot, I bade them farewell, and they continued on with their Kyoto sightseeing.

I recently went to an amazing art exhibition at the Takashimaya department store in Kyoto. It's now moved on from Kyoto, currently showing in Yokohama for a couple of weeks. Highly recommended for kids and adults alike. Fumie had brought Anthony earlier in the week, and loved it so much that they'd recommended it to me.

It's a selection of the prolific art by Tatsuya Tanaka, the guy behind the 2,500 works at Miniature Calendar, works which are amazing both for their simplicity (we all could have thought of that), and for their level of wit, which (in my case) [...]

Lightroom 7.2 introduced an entirely new version of its "Auto Tone" feature, a one-click adjustment of photo brightness and contrast to hopefully-pleasing results. The prior version of Auto Tone used what might be called a "stupid, brute force" method that merely adjusted tone ranges to try find a numeric balance. It wasn't very useful.

The new Auto Tone, however, is fantastic, being powered by an artificial-intelligence engine trained with thousands of hand-tweaked photos from highly-regarded artists. It does a sufficiently-good job that I now use it as part of my new-photo workflow, to give me a better starting point for [...]