Observationer

A glorious Instagram

by jem

I logged into Instagram and it was fantastic. I scrolled through photos uploaded by friends or photographers that I followed, there were no ads, no recommendations, nothing, just the photos I wanted to see.

And yes, this actually happened.

Let me explain, over time, Instagram has become less and less interesting/useful to. This is, of course, by design, it’s exactly how Meta has planned it. So, I used it less and less. About a year ago, Meta required that users in the EU either agree to being tracked and shown too many ads, or pay a ridiculous expensive subscription. So, I stopped using Instagram. I still had access to Instagram through an organisation, so I could see how the feed looked like … and to be honest, it was both amusing and crazy to see how many ads and ”recommendations” that were shown.

Anyway, a few days ago, I decided to see if I could log into Instagram and check a few things. I could log in without problems, I checked what I wanted to check, and then I thought ”ok, since I’m already logged in, I might as well check my feed”.

I did and after 20–30 seconds, I realised that there was some was something strange going on. It took me a few seconds before it hit me, there were no ads, and no ”recommendations”. Just photos from the people I followed, and it was really, really nice. I could just scroll and see updates from friends, etc.

This made me realise that the basic idea behind Instagram is great, and the implementation is also good (let’s forget about the bloat, etc.). In short, Instagram is wonderful … without the ads, and the ”recommendations”.

Of course, this was a temporary thing. The next time I opened the app, I was met with ”ads or pay” choice, so I closed the app and will not be opening it again for the foreseeable future.

But Instagram is very enjoyable, and I would actually be willing to pay for it, but not the amount of money Meta wants. There is of course one additional reason not to use Instagram. I have zero trust in Meta, and even if they introduced a reasonable subscription fee, I wouldn’t subscribe. I would expect Meta to do all kind of shady stuff … and when they are discovered doing this, they would just say ”opps, there was a bug in the app. We’ll fix it” and then we start over.

Observationer

Students who cheat

by jem

Sigh, here we go again. It’s time to look at what some students have done (a possible case of plagiarism), try to decide if I should make an official case of the whole thing and send it to the Disciplinary Board, or just tell them to avoid doing this again. Every so often I get the feeling that they time these things deliberately, just so I have more to do when I’m already really busy.

But these things make me sad. Allow me to explain: One part of my job is to handle all cheating cases at my department. This means that:

  • I need to get the course responsible teacher to lay out what has happened in a way so that I understand what has happened.
  • review the evidence
  • interview the students, and get their explanation of what has happened,
  • decide if this is a case of actual cheating or just some kind of mistake,
  • in some cases, document what has happened and hand it over to the Disciplinary Board.

What makes me sad is that the students don’t seem to understand the consequences of being discovered cheating. During my interviews, they usually explain the entire thing with ”We were collaborating to finish the assignment before the deadline, then we made individual solutions based on our discussions”. These individual solutions frequently contain the same texts with the same formatting, the same spelling errors, code that is all but identical, solution design that are exact copies of each other, etc., etc. In short, to meet the deadline, they take the decision to cheat. But they fail to consider the following:

  • The university-wide rule is that you can do every test three times, this includes assignments, written exams, or anything else that is a part of the examination. This means that they can just say, ”Opps, I can’t hand in this before the deadline. OK, I do as much as I can, and then finish it before the next deadline”.
  • If they get caught cheating, they will be temporarily suspended from any kind of course work at the university. This might result in missing exams, missing a whole course, missing assignments, etc., etc. This in turn will affect the number of ”course points” (ECT) they get, and this might have consequences for student loans, etc. It might also influence if they can follow the suggested course work for their program, or if they have to wait a year before being able to complete a course. All this can delay their graduation!! In short, a minor problem suddenly coursed some real problems for the students.

So, while the sentencing might seem ”lax”, the ripple effect might cause real difficulties in the future. Fortunately, this is a worst-case scenario, the usual result is that they will be temporarily suspended, and then they have to do spend extra time catching up.

And yes, we try to explain these things to the students, but unfortunately not all of them seem to listen/understand.

Observationer

Ledsen blir jag

by jem

Det är lite trist att knata runt i skogen, komma fram till en skogsväg och hitta en … f.d. husvagn. Jag förstår inte vitsen med att göra på det här viset.

Foto

Going wide

by jem

No, I’m not talking about my stomach … although it’s also widening … unfortunately … I’m talking about lenses. It appears that the older I get, the wider I go.

When I bought my first SLR as a teenager, I considered a 135 mm a wide lens and preferred a 200 mm or 400 mm. When I bought my first DSLR I used something like a 24-120 zoom for almost everything, later I’ve become fond of prime lenses, first a 90 mm, then 85 mm, then 50 mm, then 40 mm and the latest lens I bought was a 28 mm.

I don’t understand why this has happened, but I find it interesting that this happened. I still use my zoom lenses a lot, but I’m increasingly drawn to prime lenses. Currently, my favorites are the 85/1.8 + 28/2.8 for my Nikon, and the 40/2.8 on my Ricoh IIIx.

I wonder what I will be using in two-three years 🤔

Observationer

Completely blown away

by jem

I’m a big tea drinker, so I was pretty happy when they bought one of these ”fancy water boilers” at work. This makes it much quicker to prepare a cup of tea, and as you can see, I have a pretty big cup to fill.

There is only one problem, to fill the cup I need to hold down the lever until my cup is full. As you might guess, it takes some time to fill the cup, and standing there holding down the lever is pretty boring. It has happened that I’ve boiled some water in the regular way, so I’ve had the chance to do something else while waiting.

So imagine my big surprise when I saw a colleague filling up a big tea pot without touching the water boiler … WHAT ????!!! MAGIC !!!!

— H … Ho … how did you do that?

— What do you mean? Just put the cup there and flip the lever.

— FLIP THE LEVER, WHAT??????

Stupid me, I had never realised that it was possible to flip the lever in the other direction and that locked it in place.

My mind was completely blown away … I was just standing there in chock over this revelation. Do I need to mention that my colleague was smiling at me?

Foto

My new wide-angle lens

by jem

Yesterday I got my new wide-angle lens, new and new … it’s an old second-hand lens (14-24/2.8) from [MPB](https://mpb.com), and it’s a giant piece of glass. Compared to my other lenses it’s ”silly big”, I’m starting to get a bit worried if I can fit it in my rucksack!!

Anyway, I went out today to test it and here is my first shot … and it’s going to take some time to get used to this lens. When I took this photo, I could almost touch the sign—I’m _not_ used to that.

I then tried to take some more ”open landscape” photos, and it’s really different from my other lenses. I was standing right beside a tree, not visible in the photo, and the branches from it were visible in the frame, so I took a step forward and made a second attempt … and the branches were still there. Not until I walked up to the tree you see, it’s almost within touching distance, I was able to get the branches out of the frame.


This photo is more the kind of photos I expect to take in the future. This one has an obvious flaw … the branches melts together with the background. But what really amazed me was that it felt like I had the camera below the tree … I still got the whole tree in the frame with room to spare.

The final photo was taken with me crouching down right beside the track and the snowmobile passing me just 20-40 cm away.

It was fun to take it out to see how it works, I really need to practice a lot, to learn how to best use this lens. It’s quite different from the other lenses I have for this camera.

Foto

Being an idiot

by jem

Every so often, I wonder if I need a larger working memory. A couple of days ago, we went on a short trip to visit family, since it was a short family trip, I decided not to bring any serious photo gear. Instead, I would just take the GR IIIx (almost always in my pocket) and the Lumix GM5 with the small 12–32 and 35–100 zooms (fits easily in a pocket). My idea was to take a walk or two and try to capture three landscape photos.

Right before we were leaving home, I realized that I had forgotten the 35-100 and ran in to fetch it. Then we left home and after a couple of hours of driving we arrived at our destination.

After eating lunch, I decided to take my walk before the sun disappeared, and I started to dig in my bag to get the GM5. After about 30 seconds, I realized that I had forgotten to pack it … what an idiot I am!!!! So I had the tele zoom but no camera, great !!

Fortunately, I had the GR IIIx in my pocket, so I was able to capture some photos … but not what I had planned.

Foto

Older computer

by jem

This isn’t as much about photography as it’s about post-processing. Some time back, I discovered that Lightroom Classic on my desktop didn’t display all the options that the program has. When I looked closer, I discovered some small text that basically said, ”your computer is too old and feeble, so you can’t use the fancy stuff”. Yep, my computer isn’t the latest model, not even the previous model … or the one before that … in fact, they are probably right. My computer is a bit old and feeble, it works quite nicely for anything else than processing images.

To be honest, I get the impression that it spins up the fans if I hold up a memory card from my Nikon Z7 in front of it 😁.

Anyway, yesterday I started to play with ON1 Photo Raw and experienced lagging, we are talking about 1–3 seconds when I try to create a mask using the brush. So, I sent in a support request asking if there was something I could do to improve the performance. The answer was something like ”you have an older Intel chip set (hey, at least it isn’t a 68K processor 😁) with not enough graphics memory”. They didn’t write it, but between the lines you can read ”get a new computer”.

My wife has been saying the same thing for quite some time now. It feels like the whole world is conspiring against me 😜.

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