Yesterday arrived with an onslaught of Russian spambots abusing the comment form here, and nothing seemed able to stop them. Cloudflare worked, then it didn’t. Slightly panicked here, I might have slowed the flow by adding a block on 11 IP ranges. And still they seemed to ke...

I’ve been helping the Squeeze update her website to show new work, a lot of which requires me to rightsize the image files she produces as part of her practice. Normally not much of a problem but occasional enormous TIFF files cause all the tools I have to stutter and fail. Fearing I might have to install ImageMagick or similar, I cast around online and found Use sips to quickly, easily—and freely—convert image files. Bingo!

I did one run of a straight TIFF to JPEG conversion and it worked, but the JPEG was still too large. So I actually read sips help and discovered the -Z option to specify a size in pixels for the largest dimension.

sips -s format jpeg -s formatOptions 80 -Z 1920 "input.tiff" --out "output.jpeg"

Took me down from 251Mb to 862Kb in no time flat. Very good to know.

Naomi Duguid is just one of the writers I enjoy who has succumbed to the lure of Substack. I’ve made my brief pitch to each of them to consider some other place, which generally falls on almost-deaf ears because of the supposed network effects: “the building of visibility an...

“I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.” The famed Field Notes tagline is all very well but what if, even having written it down, you fail to remember it? Quasi-disaster ensues, if you’re me. As usual, the culprit is past me not...