I took an impromptu hike to the top of Kyoto's Mt. Hiei (比叡山) yesterday, about exhausting myself to death in the process. I'm much less in shape than I thought. I tagged along with Stéphane Barbery, who has done it several times of late.

I made the half-hour walk from my place to his, then we walked for another half hour or so to get to the trailhead next to the Baptist Hospital in eastern Kyoto....

The kind of Kyoto hikes I've done before have all had steep slopes, such as Daimonji, the local Higashiyama trails or other short hikes, [...]

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Two months I posted the report "Adding a CPU Chip to a Nikon-Mount Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 Lens", using a "Dandelion" CPU.

After posting the report, I spent some time actually using the lens, and could not get a consistent exposure. I thought that perhaps the aperture was not linear (that is, when the camera moved the aperture arm half way, the aperture closed something other than half way), so I re-programmed the chip so that it told the camera about the focal length and maximum aperture, leaving the actual control of the aperture back on the lens, as it was [...]
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(The photos on this post, from my first visit earlier today to the small but elegant Koumyou-in Temple (光明院) in eastern Kyoto, have nothing to do with the prose of the post. They're just pretty pictures.)

The Problem

Historically in Lightroom, when uploading one's photos to an online service such as Facebook, Flickr, etc., one sees a little progress bar in the upper left that chunks along with each picture, such as the one shown at right. With my plugins, the progress bar makes two steps for each image, one after Lightroom has rendered the copy to be uploaded, [...]

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Why is it that no matter what kind of special lens-cleaning this or expensive micro-fibre that that I buy, the most lint-free and absorbent cloth for cleaning my lenses remains my T-shirt?

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I'm happy to have the later sixth edition because, according to "Treaty Limits" on page xiii of the first edition, which talks about where foreigners are allowed to go in Japan, it's noted that Kyoto is off limits:

" Kiôto... which city is not to be approached nearer than 10 ri (25 miles) "

However, in the cloth-bound sixth-edition I have from 20 years later, there's plenty about Kyoto and its temples and shrines and palaces and attractions that I look forward to diving into. The book's 600 pages covers "the whole empire from Yezo to Formosa", and then there's [...]
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