Q: What's the best reason to get an enlarger now? A: Mike Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Ass … | Continue reading
It's frustrating for me when I want to talk about a picture but it doesn't have its own URL. I'm not allowed to reproduce it; and then I'm not able to link to it, either. I found some larger JPEGs of this picture, but I can't direct you to them. Grump. Anyway, here's the closest … | Continue reading
The key insight is that women have always been more [economically] left-wing than men, but that women were also more religious (both vs today and vs men) and that this was a moderating force against those left-wing views. With religion in retreat, those views now take voice. pic. … | Continue reading
1. “Europe regulates its way to last place” (WSJ). 2. “Throughout the twentieth century…graduate-educated women married poorer spouses than college-educated women.” With smaller family sizes, this no longer seems to be true. 3. “The Poem/1 clock dreams up a new poem every minute … | Continue reading
Along the way, folks have talked about “niching down” as a way to help a project find focus. But that’s backward. When we identify and embrace the smallest viable audience, we’re moving up. Up the quality hierarchy. Up in responsibility. Up in the likelihood that we’ll make an im … | Continue reading
This is a rather odd fact. Despite having worked in some nice professional, studio, and school darkrooms, and having had many darkrooms myself over the years, I never had a single nice darkroom of my own in my whole life. They were all makeshift, many small and a few tiny, some l … | Continue reading
It's now been almost a quarter-century since I regularly worked in the traditional darkroom, and I admit I haven't kept up with...developments. (It was also customary in the old days to apologize for the pun whenever one used any form of the verb "develop" when talking about film … | Continue reading
If we’ve got tenure, a lifetime appointment or simply a really secure gig, what should we do with it? One option is to race to the bottom, to chase short-term self-focused outcomes and to see how much we can get away with. (Probably, quite a bit). The other is to take this rare c … | Continue reading
I walked by a psychic’s storefront studio. The window said that this person had been reading palms and predicting the future since 1989. It was a large space on a vibrant New York City corner. The rent must be astronomical. Or else the purveyor owns the building. Given that this … | Continue reading
At first, this stop sign sign makes a lot of sense: Lives are at stake. Break the rhythm, turn something ignored into something noticed. The challenge with “highlighting” is that it fades. When everything is in all caps, nothing is. Exclamation points are like salt. When people a … | Continue reading
Speaking of Ansel Adams, as we were the other day...isn't it interesting that he was so interested in nature and wilderness, from intimate views of flowers on the forest floor to magisterial vistas encompassing miles of scenery, while at the same time having no detectable interes … | Continue reading
For those of you still reading, I'd just like to thank you sincerely for your patience over the past few months! Life—and work—got difficult for me starting in November, when this bout with heart failure kicked in. It's amazing how many health issues a sick ticker will cause. I w … | Continue reading
Learn to convert a long value to a date in Java using the Java 8 Date-Time API, the legacy Date API, and the Joda-Time library. | Continue reading
Learn how to use a regex for Java-based password validation processes. | Continue reading
Shoplifters lurk in the shadows. They realize that they will have an easier time if they quietly steal stuff, because speaking up about it won’t help their cause. Sometimes, though, some people seek to change the culture in a way that celebrates taking. “I own this jetski and I c … | Continue reading
Explore a common N+1 problem while using Spring JPA and Hibernate. | Continue reading
Learn how to obtain Unicode characters from their code points in Java. | Continue reading
Explore various ways to convert a Gregorian date to a Hijri date. | Continue reading
Learn how to have more control over the environment variables, especially for test scenarios. | Continue reading
Learn how monkey patching can be used in Java, when to use it, and its drawbacks. CommentsThanks for the concise post ! by Sandeep | Continue reading
This time of this year marks ten years for me without a TV. It wasn't a momentous decision; I moved in 2014 and just never hooked up the TV in the new house. I got resentful of the fake culture of advertisements—the insincere bonhomie on the surface and the cutthroat competitive … | Continue reading
Engineers can optimize a bridge. There are some bridge designs that satisfy aesthetic, financial, durability, safety and efficiency needs better than others. The work of optimization is finding the best set of tradeoffs. Maximization, on the other hand, seeks the solution that ra … | Continue reading
If you don’t realize that you have power, you might not be able to exercise it. The power to speak up, to participate, to invent, to lead, to encourage, to vote, to connect, to organize, to march, to write, to say ‘no’ or to say ‘yes’. It’s tempting to imagine we have less power … | Continue reading
Photo by Richard Byrd, 1972 St. Ansel the Energetic - Photographer, mountain climber, printmaker, teacher, writer, environmentalist, activist, pianist, partier, [alleged] philanderer, good friend to his friends, and the all-purpose paragon of what an art photographer could be, c. … | Continue reading
CountDownLatch, primitives for pattern matching, eBPF for Java, soft assertions, and 2FA vulnerabilities! | Continue reading
A quick and practical guide to gRPC with Spring Boot. | Continue reading
A quick and practical guide to finding the URL of a service in Kubernetes. | Continue reading
Discover how to utilize Spring Modulith's features to listen to Spring application events and publish them to a Kafka topic. | Continue reading
One way to look at power is “you get to tell people what to do.” But an alternative is that the most powerful institutions, brands and people are the ones who are in alignment with their audience. Trust and the benefit of the doubt are more powerful and resilient than command and … | Continue reading
Learn how to use Spock's data feeds in a where block. | Continue reading
I can't find the comment, but Kye Wood suggested a topic for discussion the other day: How do you carry a camera with you at all times painlessly? There are two things I think are worth working out to a fare-the-well, and (even) practicing till you have them down pat. The first i … | Continue reading
Why isn’t this enough? There are plenty of good ideas, easy to learn from and copy. There are countless projects, well executed, with the steps on display. Any entrepreneur could find a local business and bring a version of it from over here to over there. And a social change mak … | Continue reading
All went well during my big adventure. We were gone for 11 1/2 hours overall on Tuesday (big thanks to my neighbor and friend Ilene Wexler, my most excellent support person for the day) but nothing about the day was very difficult, even the waiting. Generally it was easier and sm … | Continue reading
For everyone on the team… Do you care enough to do great work? Can we agree on what great work looks like? When the world changes, do we have a process to redefine great work? Do you have the tools you need to reach your goals? How could we create a system where great work […] … | Continue reading
Explore different scenarios of date range overlap and dive into various approaches and formulas to check for overlaps | Continue reading
In this tutorial, we explore effective methods for applying a bold font style to entire rows in Excel sheets using the Apache POI library. | Continue reading
Learn about Spring-Kafka's RecordDeserializationException. | Continue reading
Learn the key differences between mvn install and mvn verify. | Continue reading
A quick tutorial on the Java Flight Recorder view command, available in Java 21. | Continue reading
Explore the various ways to reset a ListIterator to the beginning of a list in Java | Continue reading
Learn how to enable SSL Debug Logging in Java to enhance visibility into your application's SSL-related activities. | Continue reading
In this article, we will learn various approaches to using the current time as a filename in Java. | Continue reading
Attention is scarce. Decisions are difficult. Searching takes effort. For thirty years, texting has been a powerful medium. It’s the thing that vibrates in our pocket. It promises something urgent, and a reply that’s demanded equally urgently. “I’m running ten minutes late,” is a … | Continue reading
Learn how to configure Gradle dependencies to write specification tests with Spock and Spring. Related StoriesUsing Groovy in SpringHow to Remove a Prefix From Strings in GroovyGroovy Variable Scope | Continue reading
Learn how to translate from English to Morse code and vice versa. | Continue reading
Okay, I'm going to be off for the next few days getting a new ticker, literally—just the bit that ticks and turns the motor over. It's been immensely satisfying hearing from so many people who are willing to school me about pacemakers! Among other things, I heard from an engineer … | Continue reading
Okay, I'm going to be off for the next few days getting a new ticker, literally—just the bit that ticks and turns the motor over. It's been immensely satisfying hearing from so many people who are willing to school me about pacemakers! Among other things, I heard from an engineer … | Continue reading
A lot shifted when the Apple Macintosh was introduced, and it wasn’t about the RAM, the chips or the processor speed. Our world changed forty years ago today. Marketing, technology, commerce, luxury brands, communities, communication and our expectations for how we might spend ou … | Continue reading