Via Jack Baty, here’s Om Malik on “What’s Wrong with Leica Q3,” which, okay: “introducing the flippy-tilty screen takes away from Leica’s uniqueness. The company has been able to charge more for offering less.” Citing their monochrome cameras as an example of that is … a take.

Tilting screens add to the versatility of the device. That’s all. They make certain situations easier to manage, especially with the kinds of things you want to shoot macro, and they give you more flexibility in street shooting situations where you don’t want to have a camera up to your face.

A camera like a Q3, I’d argue, should be making some concessions on design austerity, because the machines themselves exist for the times you can’t take everything with you that you wish you could, so you’re compromising and taking just one thing.

Now, he goes on to point to the Verge review, where it sounds like the implementation is lacking:

“… the worst part of the screen, aside from it looking like it’s just been grafted on and makes the camera appear and feel bulkier, is that there’s no groove or grip on its left side to dig your nail into or grab with your finger. It has grooves on its top and bottom, meaning you have to make a much bigger reach to move it.”

That doesn’t sound great. I do like the way the Fuji X100V and X-T5 are built. It’s a simpler, easier motion, sort of planting your thumb and kind of twisting each hand to get the screen undogged and moving. I don’t like anything I need to pry open.

Om’s concern that the Q3 “design disaster” is going to infect other Leica product lines didn’t ring great with me because I don’t like the button layout on the Q2 as well as I like it on an X100, or X-T. The Q3 looks more like a Fujifilm camera in that regard this time around (well, now the Leica people are really gonna hate it). Yeah, you have an extra target to distinguish when the camera is up to your face, but you figure it out.

I’ll also admit that when it comes to a Q-series camera – $6k just to get in the door, then close to another $1k to get it fully provisioned – it’s a little harder to smile and say “well, they’ll get it right in the next rev.” I did that with three generations of Fujfilm X100s, but they hold their value about as well as a Leica (I checked a few generations and used street prices for my last post on the Q3) so that’s less of a sting.

Anyhow, I welcome the addition even if it sounds like it’s imperfect.

Every time I’ve tried to compare the Q-series to the X100-series, I walk away with a sense that the X100s are inferior on every spec (except the hybrid viewfinder), but manage to stay in the ring because they’re scrappier and looser cameras.

The thing that blunts my joy about the Q-series is pretty similar to what makes me unhappy about very early Apple products and tools: There’s a bias toward the austere that sometimes stifles. It was an easy matter for me, for instance, to perambulate between OS X and Linux for a period, because Apple was doing the “slow layering” thing and the customization ecosystem hadn’t caught up yet. Once people figured out how to leverage the BSD userland and third party people began to figure out the new APIs, we were off and running.

Even a not-perfectly-realized tilt screen, and a reconfiguration of the control scheme to introduce more flexibility and easier one-thumb use while shooting, feels less to me like Violation of Holiest Ascetic Precepts and more like an opening up and loosening appropriate to a camera that manages to be both shockingly expensive and be the thing you shrug and grab when you can’t take everything you’d like, or make up your mind about what you need.

Succession ended with integrity

Spoiler culture is out of control, but … spoiler.

I wrote that Succession was a tragicomedy and therefore needed to end a particular way to keep its integrity. It ended about the way I felt it should have, and even smeared a little spit on the rims of select audience brandy snifters with its elevation of the closest thing to a lens character had to a kind of hollow power that nonetheless commands deference from people newly laid low.

Tom Wambsgans disgusted you all along? You felt a warm glow when Shiv perforated him with as a grasping climber? Reminded you of that one VP you worked for who never fooled you but somehow fooled everybody else? Well, he’s here to put a sticker on your forehead, and he doesn’t need you to mean it when you hold his hand.

Who will win? The cockroach won. But it isn’t even winning.

A reviewer referred to Roman’s final little smile as “twisted.” I think he was the only one of the three who knew enough to feel liberated. The other three siblings were clowns masquerading as serious people. Roman was the clown who knew better than any of it. He drives Kendall to rip of his own mask, then quietly declares them all shit. His comedic aspect is reunion with himself. His tragic aspect is the relationship he lost one of the few times he tried to play things straight.

With a good ending, it joins The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Justified, Halt and Catch Fire, Six Feet Under, and The Sopranos in the “stuck the landing” club.

Denote just makes sense to my brain

Well, after a few days of fiddling and trying this and that, I think I’m all in on Denote:

• No external dependencies
• Convention-based naming
• Portable
• Simple

… and an ecosystem is forming around it that respects its conventions but smooths out its UI. So if you want to just manage Denote via dired, you’re welcome to do that. The fontification of Denote directories is enough to make the titles and tags clear when you’re looking at a simple directory listing.

But there are also packages like denote-menu and consult-notes that provide light wrappers and convenience functions if you’d like a cleaner view, where, for instance, the title, keywords, and date are all displayed in their own columns; and there are features that help quickly filter down your view based on keyword, etc.

I sort of want to compare it to what I admire about Markdown: Fine on its own, able to support more, probably you could go a little nuts trying to do more with it. I appreciate that it participates in the broader org ecosystem, and equally admire that you’re welcome to use Markdown/YAML if that suits you.

This is occurring to me because I spent a bunch of time fiddling around with a few Denote wrappers over the weekend and ended up in that weird “why did I do this” state of mind where all the single-minded optimizing and tweaking felt sort of like a high-carb meal. Then I just opened up my notes directory in dired and realized Denote is great at its most basic.

If you use zsh, this will give you a colorized ls for a Denote directory, btw:

dls() {
    ls -1 | GREP_COLORS='mt=1;32' egrep --color=always '[0-9]{8}T[0-9]{6}' | GREP_COLORS='mt=1;34' egrep --color=always '__.*$'
}

keycast

While I was watching Prot’s Denote demo video I noticed his keystrokes and commands were echoed to the modeline, which seemed pretty cool, and was also helpful to me trying to figure out what on Earth he was doing. Then it occurred to me this afternoon that one thing I’ve been struggling with as I try to untangle what’s going on in Doom with some of the stuff I’ve wanted to fix, has been what’s going on in Doom when I use certain commands.

Like … previewing a file under point, which you invoke with CTRL SPC.

The sort of low-rent debug method I’ve observed is that people just ripgrep their ~/.emacs/ for any mention of C-SPC to see what’s bound to that.

Well, joke was on me:

Maybe it was ivy-call-and-recenter, maybe company-complete-common, prolly not org-agenda-show-and-scroll-up. PROBABLY +vertico/embark-preview, but who can say in these troubled times?

So I went looking for whatever it is Prot was using, and found something called keycast.

Its obvious utility is for screencasting, but it also has keycast-log-mode, which sends all your commands to a buffer, and which helped me establish it was, indeed, +vertico/embark-preview.

To get it to work in Doom Emacs you need to add something to your config:

(use-package keycast
  :config
  (define-minor-mode keycast-mode
    "Show current command and its key binding in the mode line (fix for use with doom-mode-line)."
    :global t
    (if keycast-mode
        (add-hook 'pre-command-hook 'keycast--update t)
      (remove-hook 'pre-command-hook 'keycast--update)))
  (add-to-list 'global-mode-string '("" keycast-mode-line)))

There are a bunch of issues mentioning problems with Doom and Spacemacs all over the place, but this is what worked for me, here in late May, 2023.

DPReview’s initial review of the Leica Q3 says:

• Tilt screen
• Actual ports (USB-C, micro-HDMI)
• Bigger sensor
• Some rearranged buttons
• Option for wireless charging
• Hybrid AF
• $5995

They stuck with the previous 28mm lens and are standing by digital crop if you want to get to tighter focal lengths. I’d still prefer a native 35mm, but you’d lose a little “take anywhere” versatility.

Anyhow:

The tilt screen is very welcome, and will make the lens’s macro mode more useful/practical.

The rearranged buttons caught my eye, because the Q2’s arrangement felt pretty unergonomic, and it was easy to accidentally press them with your face when shooting in portrait orientation. DPReview says it helps:

In addition to the new tilting touch panel, the buttons for ‘Menu’ and ‘Play’ and a custom function button have been moved, now appearing on the right to join the four-way controller. Having used both cameras, within a few hours of shooting the new one I found the layout to be a marked improvement that let me reach all the buttons with just my right thumb while the left hand stayed on the lens ready for the next shot. It’s a much faster and less cumbersome arrangement that let me get in and out of menus quicker.

Having a USB-C port is welcome. The wireless charging part sounds like a nice-to-have that makes it a little nicer to just keep near the door.

All in all, sounds like a nice step forward for the Q series, and with the tilt screen it sort of does become the $5995 Fujifilm X100V you always wished would happen, with its 35mm digital crop still outresolving the X100V by a few megapixels.

Speaking of the X100V, I did compare it with the Q2 a few years ago:

I don’t think the Q2 is four times the camera an X100V is, and I can’t think of anyone I’d be in the position of recommending a camera to for whom I’d recommend it as the better choice: Dollar for dollar, the X100V is a much better camera for almost everybody interested in a premium compact camera. At the same time, now that I own the Q2 and have not returned it or sold it in a fit of guilt, I wouldn’t easily part with it: I love shooting with it, love what I get out of it, and expect to keep it for a long time. The only reason it is not my only camera comes down to its fixed, very wide lens, which makes portraits and some outdoor photography a relative challenge.

One thing that changed a lot for me since writing that up was the arrival of IBIS in the Fujifilm ILC lineup. It wasn’t something I weighted as heavily then, but definitely started weighting more heavily as I learned how much it expanded my horizons. With the changes showing up in the Q3, I’ll just say that the gap between the X100 series and the Q series has narrowed. There’s still 4,200 actual dollars of daylight between the two to account for, but the Q3 is a more flexible camera than its predecessor.

So:

• A bit shy of 2x the resolution, uncropped sensor
• Faster, more versatile lens
• Image stabilization

I’m not sure how to go about doing a parts list that would account for the differences and leave me with some objective calculation of the brand tax you’re paying, but it’s easy to imagine an X100 Pro series because we have that in the form of an X-Pro3 with the 23mm/f2 Fujicron, and MSRP on that rig is around $2,300. So, following this reasoning, we’ve got about $3,300 to account for. You’re still a stop shy on the lens and don’t have a macro mode, you’re still trading away depth of field and resolution thanks to the sensor difference, you still don’t have image stabilization.

Okay … so maybe we stick the newer Fujiflm XF23mm/f1.4WR on our theoretical X100 Pro. That’s $500 over the 23/f2. We’re down to $2,800 difference. We’re still contending with the sensor difference and IBIS. Tough to call.

On IBIS, the Fujifilm X-T4 was an incremental change over the X-T3, and it came in at $200 more MSRP, with IBIS being one of the larger differentiators. The X-T5 introduced a much larger (but still APS-C) sensor, but kept the MSRP. So … we’re down to $2,600 difference, and still have to account for the sensor, which sort of throws the math on the lens, too. I’m not sure how to square that. Call it $500.

So, we’ve found about $1,300 in component differences (IBIS, lens, sensor)? Leaving us with around $3000 to account for.

I am assuming the red dot involves pigments mixed from the blood of unicorns.

I kid.

Silos and Denote

Last night I was finishing up some note cleanup in Denote and realized that a lot of the stuff I’d atomized from my job search was sort of interesting and useful, but not in a day-to-day way. And that I wanted to have some way to segregate, eventually, “work” from “personal.”

Denote has a siloing feature that lets you keep separate directories of Denote notes that can’t see each other. If you operate in one of those directories, all your Denote activities (creating a new note, etc.) treat that directory as home. Outside the context of any particular directory, your default Denote directory is home. There are a few other features related to suggested keywords in those silos, but for now it’s enough to be able to make broad distinctions.

There’s also a useful function for pre-selecting a silo then running a Denote command targeted at it, so you can be out and about elsewhere in the filesystem and dispatch information to different silos as needed.

For now I’m siloing by default/personal and “career,” which is what I am calling all the interview notes, work-oriented biographical stuff and generic management writing I’ve had to do. I’ll probably put my job search log, interview notes, and other stuff that’s currently all in a monolith into that directory as well, for long-term storage. And eventually there will be a “work” silo for day-to-day work stuff.

I vacillated about the segregation of big-picture career-related writing from day-to-day work writing, but realized most of that career stuff is a prompt. Interesting to read through, and good grist for first-30-day planning and thinking, but not pertinent to the day-to-day. If I end up feeling like some part of it is, I’ll just pull it into a metanote as a link.

I guess the other Denote thing of, er, note, was that Prot’s whole “this is also a good way to just learn Emacs” direction with Denote got a workout tonight. I watched his demo video, where he marked a selection of files by regexp in dired, then made the unmarked ones disappear from view in the directory. It took three or four scrub-throughs to catch which commands he was using to make that happen, because he was just doing it the way you do when something is deep in your muscle memory. But eventually I caught it all – %m to mark by regexp, t to invert the selection, then k to “kill” the lines (but not kill kill them, just hide them). It sounds like a lot, but most of my Doom menus are two or three keystrokes deep. Once I had it, it was a lot easier to narrow and triage my collection and get everything dispatched into a silo.

Update on that …

One thing I didn’t like so much about that “just use the native commands” approach was that in Doom, you’ve got to switch in and out of evil mode to use all of dired’s keystrokes. I ended up grabbing dired-narrow, which dynamically narrows a dired buffer, and then recorded a quick macro to restore the buffer view (using the native dired command, which would need a shift out of evil mode):

(defun mph/dired-unnarrow ()
  (interactive)
  (evil-emacs-state)
  (execute-kbd-macro (kbd "g C-z")))

Then I added dired-narrow and my new macro to my Denote menu structure:

(map! :leader
      :nv "n d" nil ;; Doom has deft here, so we have to nil it out first
      (:prefix-map ("n" . "notes")
      (:prefix ("d" . "Denote")
         :desc "ripgrep" "/" #'mph/denote-rg-search
         :desc "Backlinks" "b" #'denote-link-backlinks
         :desc "Move subtree" "c" #'mph/denote-org-copy-subtree
         :desc "add keywords" "k" #'denote-keywords-add
         :desc "remove keywords" "K" #'denote-keywords-remove
         :desc "Move subtree" "m" #'mph/denote-org-move-subtree
         :desc "New note" "d" #'denote
         :desc "Rename with frontmatter" "r" #'denote-rename-file-using-front-matter
         :desc "Pick silo, then command" "s" #'mph/denote-pick-silo-then-command
         :desc "Narrow dired view" "n" #'dired-narrow
         :desc "Unnarrow dired view" "u" #'mph/dired-unnarrow
         )))

Technically I guess those narrow/unnarrow commands belong in some other hierarchy, but I will tend to use them when I’m doing stuff with Denote, and they can live in more than one context if I wish.

I have the sense there are other things I could be using, like Embark, but I am still struggling with the whole Vertico ecosystem, so one thing at a time.

Update to the update

With Vertico/Embark on Doom, I don’t need dired narrow to get what I was after:

• SPC . to start finding files
• Once things are narrowed, C-c ; moves all the candidates into their own buffer
• Do stuff
• q to quit the transient buffer