FeedCity: My Feed Title

Photographic Fixer

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my photographs, why I take them, why and where I share them, and how to do that from now on. One trigger has been Instagram’s slow slide into irrelevance. I regularly miss photos from the people I follow, and vice versa, plus if I wan...

My Feed Title
22 Oct 07:44

Gel on Salt-preserved Lemons

A couple of days ago I tackled some salt-preserved lemons I had made about a year ago, just my terrace-grown lemons and salt. I had failed to notice that the air-trap fell out some time ago and the top layers, where more oxygen was available, had played host to a grey-green ...

My Feed Title
21 Oct 09:28

I Can See Clearly Now

“It’s a lot like the old days of trying to get a good colour print at home,” was the best I could come up with. “You print one of those test images that came with the printer, with all those different skin colours, and you discover that the pretty pink baby actually has a sl...

My Feed Title
16 Oct 16:56

The Quartiere Coppedè

Since June, I have had occasion to visit a part of Rome I barely know, way on the other side of town, literally. Coming back on the bus one time I happened to glance up at the buildings and was absolutely amazed. Decorative friezes, fancy brickwork, ornate balustrades and ba...

My Feed Title
10 Oct 13:21

Is Histamine Intolerance a Thing?

Marieke Hendriksen, of the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam, told me in a recent conversation that her new junior researcher had “got an allergic reaction and ended up in A&E” as a result of eating too much fermented food. In the past, Marieke added, “beca...

My Feed Title
09 Oct 16:28

Monthly report: September 2025

I thought I might get this done two days ago, and then yesterday arrived with an onslaught of Russian spambots abusing the comment form. I think that’s fixed, at least enough to recall the glories of September. Highlights of the months: Got back into the podcast season Loc...

My Feed Title
08 Oct 14:55

Attacked by the Evil Empire

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...

My Feed Title
07 Oct 08:45

TIL: sips for Image Manipulation

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.

My Feed Title
06 Oct 13:31

Printed is not the Point

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...

My Feed Title
22 Sep 13:23

Notebooks Need Follow-up

“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...