The other day we were out at a brew-pub getting our dose of good fish and chips... and we sat next to a guy who had what looked like a large 1960s reflex camera - and it was, but a modern 6x7 reflex camera - not digital, but a real film camera.

I mentioned that my wife loved her 6x6 Rollie - and the guy reached into his backpack and pulled one out!!!

A few months back I needed a passport photo - and there is still a shop here that does that kind of thing.... and I went in: It was filled with people, the shelves had all kinds of film, and they even had developing/stop/fixing chemicals.

I took a peek at the photo lab at our very good community college - and they had darkrooms and enlargers that I once would have dreamed of having access to.

B&W film and cameras are alive here in Santa Cruz!

It's the backlash against the AI craze in the industry.

I've been using an e-reader of sorts for years... because of my eyesight issues (book publishers NEED to use bigger print if they want sales from the folks that read on paper! They are losing customers by not adapting.

Fred's nephew is very low tech and I agree @Joseph Teller it's part of a response to AI. Kids are growing up with all this and it doesn't impress them, it's more like a tool.

Those remarkable tablets are expensive @Carsten Raddatz and not something I would have use for. My Palma2 seems to be the ereader I was looking for.

Not interested in going back to expensive, slow, hit-or-miss film, but I loved my little Kodak digicam. Sadly the battery door broke, and that was the end of that. I'm sure the pics from my phone are miles better, but I do miss having something that was actually comfortable to hold while snapping. The slim phone with the thumb-based shutter is still awkward after all these years.

You mean like the commencement speech at ASU where? Eric Schmidt got booed when he mentioned AI.

ooh another one? UCF students let rip on an Ai shill as well

#MoreOfThisPlease

e-reader of sorts for years… because of my eyesight issues

same with Mr. Stranger
neither one of us likes the aspect of never truly owning what you paid for tho
(he got burned when one of his "purchased" movies disappeared from the fascist book site)

refurbished laptops returned from lease are now stripped of ram and storage

what the hell good are they then??

Well, back in the day I used to run the B&W darkroom for my local newspaper during summer breaks from college. I learned to use the standard Pentax cameras that all the reporters had and to develop my own film and print my own pictures. Not sure I'd ever want to go back, though it was an art.

One of the big problems with printed photos is storage. I have huge tubs of family photos because I took pictures, my parents took pictures... Digital is just fine with me these days, though I don't do a lot of editing or ask AI for enhancements. I totally understand the backlash.

Same with books. I will buy them mostly for my e-reader. Now I buy very few physical books, only if they are not available as e-books or if they have lots of pictures and I want to spend time with those. The issue again is storage.

emergingvisions.blogspot.com/ emerging visions visionary art zine

f5archive.org/

I forgot to mention that the guy we met who had nice film cameras had never seen the movie Blow Up.

In case anyone needs a reminder Blow Up is a quite good 1960's film about photography, a possible murder, and a very unsympathetic protagonist who seems surrounded by skinny women.

@Griff Ferrell "You mean like the commencement speech at ASU"

YAY students!!!

For portable I use an aging Dell XPS 13 laptop for portable Linux, but I'm mainly on reasonably new Apple Macbook Pros.

I used to use Thinkpads for Linux. I liked 'em.

I've split the case and gone inside the Dells and Thinkpads - but after a couple of experiences cracking the case on a Macbook - that's scary.

@Carsten Raddatz - I also like the NUC form factor - except that I often need at least three copper/RJ45 ethernet ports rather than the typical one.

So I'm using NUCs that have real thunderbolt 4/5 ports to attach external 2.5Gbit or SFP+ based network interfaces. My main complaint is that when using Thunderbolt or USB based network interfaces Freebsd is not very good about assigning fixed names (I suspect Linux is better about that.)

I'm deep into the Redhat/Fedora camp. Debian drove me crazy with its seemingly political based technical decisions. I did find that Debian had done a nicer job than Red Hat with regard to a lot of the configuration files. And I tend to use everything as a standard, compiled a.out file-based process rather than any of the things like flatpack or snap. I do use QEMU/KVM rather frequently, but those contain my build machines, typically FreeBsd or some ancient flavor of Linux - I still have a VM running Fedore 7 (Fedora is up to 44 or 45 now.).

(I've also got a VMware Esxi box that I use to build images for some of our customers who are locked into VMware. I personally much prefer QEMU/KVM, although VMware is much better about attaching raw ethernet hardware to a VM.)

I've kind of settled on NUCs from ASUS and Geekom, although I have some slower/cheaper ones that I use as test drivers that use AMD processors.

I am finding that a lot of fairly new machines have trouble when attaching to a 4K (or higher) resolution monitor via HDMI. LG monitors seem to be the worst in this regard. Display Port seems to work better for those. (I really like that DisplayPort can be carried over a USB-C or Thunderbolt cable, often along with power for the monitor.)

As you can tell, I've become a fan of Thunderbolt rather than USB 3.x) (even though both use the same physical USB-C socket.) However, I have noticed that some NUCs can't do both USB-3.x and USB-C at the same time even though they are on different physical sockets. Grrrrr.

I am doing a lot of my external storage via widgets that hold an M.2 NVME/SSD and attach via Thunderbolt.

@Carsten Raddatz - I've never encountered an NVME performance issue. That sounds really strange.

I massively prefer Intel NICs, but the Realtek ones are improving. On our products, except for one ethernet we use for control, we need to turn off all of the offloads and all of the protocol processing - between systemd and network-mangler those monsters keep trying to take over network interfaces. So one of the things we need to do when installing our code is to try to dredge through the interfaces on a machine and figure out which ones we want to turn into raw interfaces without being touched by systemd, network manage, dhcpd*, NIC offloads, or any other such stuff. It can be really hard to do that, especially as IPv6 tries to turn itself on and autoconfig on everything.