I'm adamant about keeping my blog content what  I  want to share; I hope others will happen to like it, of course, but I don't "pander for pageviews",* despite having been called an attention whore by a random Internet anonymous coward the other day. 🙂  So, I don't often pay much attention to my blog's pageview statistics, and I often go months without even seeing them, but I've looked at them this past week, and the results are interesting.

The photos on today's post, by the way, have nothing to do with the text; I just wanted to include some [...]

I used to enjoy reading about cool photography-related things on Fstoppers.com, but that was before I realized that their business model is apparently built on systematic wholesale copyright violation. They regularly publish large numbers of copyrighted photos without permission from the photographer. They just take what they want to pad their site, building their user base and, presumably, their revenues.

For Example...

When this issue surfaced a couple of weeks ago with one article filled with copyright violations (more on that later), I was shocked that a photography site as respected as Fstoppers could allow such a slip, but [...]

I got myself a GoPro HERO3 camera, and I've got to say, I'm solidly unimpressed with GoPro (the company, Woodman Labs) so far.

You have to access their web site before you can use the camera, but the web site is mostly down.... server doesn't respond for most requests.

[There's an update below on this...]

The web site, when it loads, is one of those flashy "form over function" sites that looks good (for some definitions of "good"), but difficult to actually use, and the incessant animations are annoying. A search for "manual hero3 black" produced no usable results.

The [...]
View full post »

This post continues the story started in "A Somewhat Lackluster Day of Photography at Kyoto’s Shouzan Resort", last touched upon yesterday with a bunch of wigglegrams from the garden.

The only other time I came (as seen two years ago in "Photo Shoot Among the Fall Colors at Shouzan"), I hadn't realized that it was just a small part of a larger resort complex. This time I did, so did a bit of exploring.

The path from the main part of the "resort" (which dates from 1948) is through a heavily wooded and freely-accessible park, beautiful in its own right [...]

Time Machine backups fail if you replace a symbolic link to a directory with an actual directory. (In my case, the symbolic link was to a directory on another disk.)

The solution is to perform a Time Machine backup after deleting the symlink, then create the actual directory. Time Machine backups will then work.

Prior to finding this solution, I had tried visiting the mounted Time Machine backups in Terminal to delete the old symlinks, but the deletions always silently failed. Trying to remove the ACLs ("chmod -N") also silently failed. It was very frustrating.