sangsara.net

Tag: Apps

  • Week 27.25

    Week 27.25

    • It’s getting hot down here, and reluctant as I am to use air-conditioning during the day while just sitting indoors, I’ve had to have it on in short spurts to bring the temperature down at times. Depending on the fates, I might be off to Bangkok again next week, where the heat’s reportedly even more brutal. Let’s see.
    • It was Apple Music’s 10th anniversary, and they’re doing some things like opening a new studio in LA, releasing a Top 500 list of the most-streamed songs, and — this one I especially enjoyed — a two-hour show with Zane Lowe and Ebro Darden, founding DJs of the Beats 1 (now Apple Music 1) radio station. It’s mostly Zane reflecting on their experience and telling behind-the-scenes stories from the frantic early days, backed by some all-time great tunes. For example, how they had just three months to find studio spaces around the world and go live, how the first song to be played on-air was chosen, and how the difficulty of recruiting DJs led to them having artists host their own shows (the best things usually start as hacks).
    • The show reminded me why I still love Apple Music, flaws and all: it’s here for the culture. It’s the one streaming service where passion for music is clearly evident, and it comes from the people helming the shows, both the DJs and the artists as mentioned, like Elton John, FKA twigs, Anderson .Paak, Jamie xx, and The Weeknd, to name a few. Shows and playlists put together by artists are such a cool (and obvious!) way to connect with fans, it’s hard to believe they weren’t really a thing before Apple Music.
    • I remember exactly where I was (Reykjavik) the day Apple Music launched, and how absolutely furious I was that the Beats 1 radio station wasn’t available in Singapore. It’s just goddamn internet radio, so why!? It was only after a year that it finally launched for us. I never found out the reason, but I assumed censorship and broadcast licensing hoops had to be jumped through, and welp I guess that’s the cost of being Singaporean. Still, I switched over from Spotify on day one and haven’t looked back. While looking through the archives, I found this post in 2014 before the acquisition, where I was pretty sure Apple would keep the Beats brand on their headphones but turn Beats Music into the backend of an “iTunes Unlimited” service. I sorta called it.
    • A Japanese mobile game I’ve been waiting for had its global launch on July 3: Persona 5 X (P5X). When you hear that, you might expect a gacha-based Persona 5 spinoff, based on some crappy mobile game squad battle mechanics. So I was surprised by how close it is to an actual Persona game, despite the necessary gacha and mobile elements. The graphics look and feel so close to the mainline titles that I’m convinced they could port them to iPhone if they wanted. However it’s mostly a solo adventure game, and I would love to see a different, massively multiplayer social game design uniting the world to fight shadows in the “metaverse” (don’t blame me, it’s the actual term they use).
    • However, the Japanese mobile game recently launched globally in English that’s been blowing up on my timeline is Umamusume: Pretty Derby, which is a horse racing game based on actual legendary champion horses, except they’re personified as idol girls who perform in full-blown concerts after winning. I’ve downloaded it for kicks, but I think it’s a neigh for me.
    • I came across a new drawing app for iPhone/iPad called Graintouch, and instantly bought it for S$15 after seeing its lovely Risograph aesthetics (a sort of Japanese photocopier from the 80s). It’s wonderfully minimal, to the point of restricting you to just 18 predefined colors, and simulates the look of paper prints. You can even hit a “misalignment” button that offsets the layers at random. It’s a welcome change from the overly powerful Procreate, which makes me feel like a learner driver at the wheel of a Ferrari.
    • I decided I might use this for the drawings I’d planned on doing, and started doodling around to get a feel for it. The result is a bunch of silly characters with googly eyes, and I kinda like them! Maybe I’ll do more and try to improve them.
    “Valentine”
    • I took my parents out to see F1 The Movie in a cinema, and found that senior citizens only pay S$5 per ticket on weekdays. If I had that benefit, I’d see every movie. Anyway, the film was great, and I say that as someone who doesn’t give a damn about F1 (my dad, on the other hand, is a total fanatic who watches every season). Apple did the right thing putting this out in theaters properly before streaming; it really deserves the big screen and too-loud speakers. An incredible popcorn movie, so good that for two hours you’ll find Brad Pitt likable despite everything we’ve heard about how he’s fallen out with his kids and maybe isn’t such a great guy. 4.5 / 5 stars.
    • We binged Season 4 of The Bear over the weekend. It made me wonder if there really are people out there like these characters, raised in so much chaos that their primary mode of communication is shouting and clashing with increasing intensity. I love watching it happen in 30-minute bouts, but by god it’s tiring. Overall, I think this was a slightly stronger season than the last one, and while I still love the directors swinging for the fences with concept episodes, they are becoming a little too expected. The best thing they could do in Season 5 would be to subvert those expectations and deliver a full-heartedly commercial happy ending.
  • Week 19.25

    Week 19.25

    • It was one of those weeks where I mostly stayed in to chip away at various backlogs. We’re now in uncharted territory for a sabbatical — my stated goal the last time I did this was to reach a state of boredom, the kind that might inspire some unpredictably productive reaction, but I didn’t get there in the time I had; there was always so much to do. Now that this has gone on longer than before, maybe I’ll reach a state of satisfaction satiation soon.
    • I finally caved and paid for a Lampa Camera membership (mentioned in Week 17.25). It’s now sitting in my iPhone’s dock, where the default camera app had been for over a decade. This is a big deal! I also got into the beta for Halide Mk. III, a new version that will take their “Process Zero” approach further with HDR that doesn’t suck. They’ve also hinted at adding their own photographic styles in the near future, which probably means LUT support like in their Kino video app. The fight for the rightmost spot on my dock isn’t over.

    On bullshit jobs, occupational deceleration, and AI

    • Taking a break from the Murderbot series (I finished #3 last week and need to start on #4 now for my book club), I decided to read David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, which came out in 2018 before this latest wave of the ‘tech will take our jobs’ fear, which has of course been a recurring theme in modern civilization. Except, you know, this time with AI looks different. It’s interesting for a non-fiction book because there are several dimensions to his argument rather than just a simple thesis stretched out to fill a few hundred pages. For that reason, I can’t summarize it for you, but it concerns “the existence of meaningless jobs… and their societal harm… [which] becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth” (Wikipedia).
    • Side observation: both Murderbot and Reacher were let go from their jobs, found they didn’t need to pursue traditional employment any longer, hit the road in search of meaning, and occasionally pick up freelance jobs when they meet others in need of assistance. That’s a typical FIRE story template!
    • Coincidentally, I came across this Substack essay by Tina He at the same time which invokes Jevons Paradox, asking why it is that every time we get new technology that could reduce the amount of work to be done, we end up using it to do more work. I think David Graeber largely attributes this failure of occupational decelerationism (yes, I made the term up) to the agenda of a shadowy “they” (governments, owners of capital, etc.) who don’t want people to have too much free time, lest they start to challenge the world order that currently suits rich people just fine. Tina He sees this through a more Silicon Valley lens: people run themselves ragged because their ambition fills every gap efficiency creates — unless they consciously step off the productivity treadmill that AI is turning up (which she likens to a Malthusian Trap). Graeber blames the system; He blames founder mode. Both are probably right.
    • And then I read this bonkers Rolling Stone article about how some people are getting spiritually one-shotted simply by talking to ChatGPT. Why does this happen? It’s possibly the result of design decisions intended to make the service more engaging (read: profitable). I’ve had interactions with ChatGPT where it admitted that it avoids making users feel less intelligent in order to “reduce churn”. When I threatened to quit if it didn’t stop sucking up to me, I was told that it could not respond to threats that involve business rules and payments — one can conclude OpenAI’s policy is ‘money comes before all’, and unintended consequences are simply the cost of doing business. In light of this, ChatGPT should be viewed as a dangerous and irresponsibly designed product. In cases where users are mentally susceptible, they can lose their grip on reality to the point of total ruin.
    • You’d be forgiven for thinking that I’m on the brink of embarking on some Zitron-esque anti-AI crusade, but sadly I use generative AI all the time. It’s a terrible paradox: we can’t escape it. We can’t afford to refuse it. And we can hardly resist it — because when it works, it’s like magic. Somewhat like if the whole world embraced a new artificial sweetener that tasted exactly like sugar but could inflict unknown genetic damage, but maybe only several generations from now.
    • The funny thing about this little arc? I only started reading Bullshit Jobs because ChatGPT recommended it to me.

    Other media activity

    • We started rewatching the Mission Impossible films to get ready for The Final Reckoning, and have made it up to the fourth film so far. It’s only in the third and fourth ones that Ethan Hunt as an actual person starts to emerge. You know Tom Cruise is genuinely one of the greatest actors of all time because he convincingly plays Hunt as someone reluctant to do the same extreme stunts that Cruise himself lives for; you always see the fear and “why me?” look in his eyes before he jumps out of a window. But he does it anyway because no one else can/will save the world. I hope they don’t give him the same send-off they gave James Bond in No Time to Die (2021).
    • Kim hated the second film, which I think stands on its own as a John Woo remix of Notorious (1946) and Face/Off (1997) — masks are put on and peeled off with wild abandon — and a very potent distillation of what pop culture felt like in the late 90s/early 2000s. Tom Cruise’s hairstyle… I think it’s the same one David Bowie had at the time.
    • The third, by JJ Abrams, I remembered as being better than it is. It has the most generically American TV look and feel of the first three. Philip Seymour Hoffman memorably plays a villain who has every reason to be physically intimidated by Hunt but somehow moves with a delusion of invincibility that is frighteningly odd yet probably 100% realistic for a dangerous arms dealer. If you ever tie someone up for interrogation and they still act like you’re the one in trouble, run.
    • Ghost Protocol, by Brad Bird, is probably my second-favorite of the first four (obviously the first is best) because it expands on Hunt and Benji’s developing characterizations and has a playful, musical sensibility throughout. The final third in Mumbai is unfortunately a bit muddled and less memorable.
    • While talking to Evan about grindy and annoying Japanese video games, I admitted to myself that I wasn’t really enjoying Death Stranding and found elements of its storytelling so insultingly corny that I would be better off deleting it from my PS5 and just moving on. So I did, and it felt like a weight off my shoulders. I might also quit Final Fantasy VII Remake for the same reason; it’s made up of such dated game design conventions as having to go a long way around in a maze to get past an obstacle that is just waist high — in any realistic world, e.g. Breath of the Wild, one could just climb over it. It’s so lazy, the game is truly like a pretty skin on an old game.
    • Emboldened to be more selective with my free time, I fired up Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands, another game I’ve been meaning to try forever, and deleted it within minutes after seeing how janky it was. (Thankfully, I haven’t bought any of these; they’re all part of the PS Plus Game Catalog subscription.)
    • I then played a bit of Far Cry 6, my first Far Cry game, and found it a fun action-oriented FPS… until the scope exploded into a spreadsheet of rebel bases to upgrade and vehicles to unlock. It’s the usual Ubisoft bloat (the Ezio Assassin’s Creed games suffered from this too). Both Final Fantasy VII Remake and Far Cry 6 don’t respect my time, just in different ways.
    • Maybe this is what a sabbatical really becomes: a slow, careful audit of how one spends attention and focus. Cut the crappy games. Upgrade the camera app. Reject bullshit work. Watch Tom Cruise jump a motorcycle off a cliff.
    • Oh, did I mention I’ve taken up gambling??

  • Fixing an iOS/iPhone issue where apps don’t save photos with the original date and time metadata

    How to solve an iOS/iPhone bug that prevents third-party editing apps (e.g. Lightroom, VSCO, AgBr) from retaining the date/time metadata from the original photos when saving new edited files

    I’ve tried to pack the right terms in the title and heading above in the hopes that you’ll find this page if you have the same problem that I did.

    For several years, edited photos saved from apps like VSCO wound up with the “current” date and time as the “capture time” on my iPhone, meaning that they don’t sort chronologically alongside the original photos when viewing the Photo Library. I noticed with one app that when I made edits on my iPad, it worked as expected, i.e. the original capture time was retained, but mistakenly believed it was a bug in that specific app that only surfaced in their iPhone version.

    Last week I discovered this behavior in the new AgBr app, and got to emailing with the developers. In that process, I realized it was a problem with my iPhone, and most likely down to a bug in iOS rather than the photo editing apps.

    Without further ado, the solution is to “Reset All Settings” in your iPhone’s Settings app (under General → Transfer or Reset iPhone). This will undo many of your longstanding settings, such as known WiFi networks and cards in your Apple Wallet. It’s a pain in the ass, but much better than wiping the entire phone and starting over from scratch, which is what I thought I would have to do.

    I have no idea when I picked up this problem, but it’s a deep-seated one that has followed me across several iPhones, resurfacing with each migration and “restore from iCloud backup”.

    Funnily enough, I chanced upon the solution while whining about this problem to Michael, and while I was celebrating with way too much joy than fixing a computer problem should give someone, he pointed out that just a few weeks earlier he had also solved a longstanding problem with Safari on his Mac while telling me about it. I think we’ve figured out a winning formula.

    Summary

    Issue Description: Edited photos saved from third-party editing apps on iOS/iPhone lose the original date/time metadata, resulting in incorrect chronological order in the Photo Library.

    Cause: Likely a bug in iOS.

    Solution: Reset All Settings in the iPhone’s Settings app (under General → Transfer or Reset iPhone), though it will reset some settings.

  • Week 11.25

    Week 11.25

    • On Saturday morning there was a circular rainbow across the sky, it’s a circle rainbow all the way, yeah, oh my god. Well officially it was a “sun halo”, and it seems everyone got a photo of it too.
    • It happened right as we were walking out of a new-ish brunch cafe, where I waited what must have been close to an hour for an expensive plate of scrambled eggs, some kale that was actually edible, plus sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes, and pork belly. I’ll take the heat; going for brunch was my idea, but I don’t know why everyone still does this on weekends. The place was packed and a line was still forming at 1pm.
    • I went out and met people several times this week, and on Thursday I managed to drop in on the new Maji Curry outlet at the Funan mall with Brian. I’ve mentioned them several times in the past, and they are probably the most authentic and interesting Japanese curry spot in all of Singapore, although (not to take anything away from Maji) there’s practically no competition. I hope they do so well that other brands have no choice but to enter the market or stop slouching (I’m looking at you, Coco Ichibanya).
    • As a group, I think us millennials have been brainwashed to perfection by advertising algorithms because the first thing Brian pointed out when we met was that we were both carrying the same Bellroy sling bag, albeit in different sizes and colors. I said I’d bought mine on a whim very recently because my mother-in-law was after some sort of small pouch, and for reasons I couldn’t explain, I’d recommended we take a look at Bellroy’s offerings. I couldn’t believe it when he said his in-laws were also in town and he’d bought his under the same circumstances. What the hell, man?
    • Studio Nuevo.Tokyo & Héliographe launched their long-awaited black & white film simulator app, AgBr, which stands for Silver Bromide, of course. It’s currently 50% off as a launch special (S$14.98, one-time purchase, no subscriptions), and I’d recommend it to any fan of black and white photography. The purchase gets you the app across iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and they’re promising a new film preset every month for the rest of the year. Funnily enough, I think the best way to use AgBr is to pair it with the similarly named Halide app, shooting RAW files in “Process Zero” mode. Sure, you can process a normal iPhone photo with a Fujifilm NEOPAN 400 preset, but the HDR exposure won’t look quite right.
    • I watched the new Metallica concert video that Apple TV+ put out for the Vision Pro. At 25 minutes, it’s the longest show they’ve put out so far, and I’m ready for more. Don’t make the same mistake as I did: watch it with AirPods. I used only the built-in audio pods, and while they sounded fine, I think the immersion will be even better if you turn things all the way up. They perform three songs, captured from 14 cameras, and it’s a truly new experience in this world to be right up next to each musician doing their thing on stage, in your own home. My main criticism: the crowd is quite low in the audio mix, so you don’t truly get the feeling of being there with all that energy (they could have offered two audio tracks to choose from, maybe).
    • With this, Apple has tried four immersive presentations of music on the Vision Pro: A traditional music video (The Weeknd), an intimate band rehearsal in the studio (Alicia Keys), a Concert For One where the artist is right there with you (Raye), and now a full-blown, live arena show. Next up is Bono’s full-length documentary on May 30, Stories of Surrender. I personally can’t stand the guy, but if this changes my mind, then that’s really saying something about this new format.
    • I spotted this familiar Mario statue (?) at the Courts/Nojima/Nittori electronics and homeware frankenstore on Orchard Road, in the old Heeren building. He pops up in the gaming sections of Japanese stores like Yodobashi Camera, and I saw him at least twice last month in Tokyo, so it was a surprise to see him here. It was mostly a sad reminder that our electronics retailers sell junkier crap and aren’t anywhere as fun to browse.
    • For the past couple of months, I’ve been writing these posts in Apple Notes, solely because of its integration with Apple Intelligence, which does a quick QA check at the end. However, rich text formatting in Apple Notes is quite laborious (having to select text and choose styles from a menu), and often I lose some of it anyway when pasting the text over into WordPress. It became more trouble than it was worth.
    • I’m now back to using iA Writer, my tried-and-trusted Markdown text editor of choice, where text formatting is simply done with in-line symbols so you can focus on writing. It makes much more sense on mobile devices. This is an excuse to mention Apple Intelligence, which has recently been in the news for falling behind schedule and possibly the rest of the industry. I’m not super reliant on AI to correct my writing, but it has definitely helped catch the odd typo and missing word. By right, I should be able to use it systemwide, in iA Writer and any other app on my iPhone, but the implementation is inconsistent and so the “Proofread” feature can’t walk me through the changes it makes; it just makes them and I can accept ALL the new text or not at all. This is what I would prefer we get in iOS 19: a rigorous cleaning up of bugs and rounding of corners so that what we already have works better than what’s on any other OS. If we have to wait a couple more years for truly agentic edge AI from Apple, that kinda sucks, but we’ve been here before. I remember the days of wanting a bigger screen and having to put up with the iPhone 5 and 5s for two years. 🤷‍♂️
    • TV: We finally started on the new season of Reacher now that enough episodes have come out. We also decided to pick up House on Amazon Prime Video from the beginning of season 5, since I’m pretty sure we finished four seasons back when the iPhone first came out or thereabouts. House uses a flip phone. It’s terribly formulaic but also fun, and the perfect kinda show for watching at the end of the night.
  • Week 6.25

    Week 6.25

    • We spent Monday strolling around Jimbocho, an area permeated by three of my favorite smells: books, coffee, and curry. I don’t know how many of the district’s 140~ bookstores we managed to see, but it’s something else. So nice to see the reading and collecting of printed material still alive, although you have to wonder where these used books and magazines (e.g. an issue of GQ with Jerry Seinfeld from when he was just getting famous) came from — the personal libraries of dead or dying hoarders?
    • There were also more stores selling CDs and vinyls, and I saw new models of portable players for sale at an electronics store. There are DiscMan-like devices that output Bluetooth to your headphones and speakers (alas, no AirPlay), and even a cassette player with Bluetooth. They look pretty cheap and plasticky though; nothing you’d put in a nice spot on a shelf to form a modern hi-fi unit.
    • We had lunch at the original Maji Curry restaurant in Jimbocho, and I’m pleased to report that the outlet in Singapore is pretty much the real deal. The fondue cheese sauce here is better, but that’s really nitpicking. Well done to the franchisee/team for bringing it over authentically, unlike Coco Ichibanya’s!
    • I’ve been on the lookout for cool gachapon miniature items to hang on my bag. So far, I’ve gotten Ricoh GR1 cameras (two of the same silver model), a MiniDisc, a wooden bird call, an Evangelion VHS episode tape with Rei Ayanami on the cover, a Nissin Cup Noodle, and a Johnsonville sausage pack (that I lost when the chain broke off somewhere). It’s quite a millennial weeb collection.
    • We intended to start each day early to make the most of the limited sunlight. We also underestimated our laziness/tiredness and how hard it would be to get out of bed on a cold day.
    • On Tuesday, we were forced up at sunrise for a sake brewery tour that was booked weeks ago. We met our guide at Shinjuku station before 9 a.m. — just imagine the crowds — and discovered it was a private tour for just the two of us. It was a nice day of “countryside” day drinking and not-at-all forced conversation with our guide, a 24-year veteran of Japan (originally from Britain via Zimbabwe).
    • We’ve just visited the Advertising Museum Tokyo, near the Dentsu headquarters and almost certainly funded/run by them. Outside, there’s a free-use space with chairs and tables, and while many seats are occupied by people working on laptops, there are more than a few salarymen sleeping with their heads down. It’s a tough life. Joni Mitchell’s Carey is playing from some speaker nearby.
    • At my beloved Go Go Curry for lunch now, and it’s the best of the three Japanese curries we’ve had so far (Maji is close behind; CoCo had a poor showing at the Asakusa-eki branch, but I’m confident they’ll deliver next time). But the price of the “Grand Slam” plate with everything on it has shockingly gone up to ¥1700. It was originally ¥1000, and when we came after Covid, it was maybe ¥1200. Inflation is hitting hard here.
    Go Go Curry’s Singapore menu
    • Come to think of it, when Go Go Curry opened in Singapore in 2009, the cost of the equivalent menu item was S$18.50, or about ¥2000. It’s taken Japan 15 years to catch up to that price.
    • Leica launched a new iPhone accessory: the Leica LUX Grip. It’s a new design for the camera grip made by Fjorden, which was acquired by Leica recently and which has been responsible for the LUX app. It attaches to the iPhone via MagSafe and adds a two-stage shutter button, a control dial, and two programmable function buttons. It honestly looks pretty good, and if the LUX app improves its photo processing to get rid of the iPhone’s Smart HDR look, it will make a pretty nice “camera”.
    • It’s available now in Singapore for S$450, and when I stopped in at a Leica store here in Tokyo and asked if they had one to look at, the salesman actually laughed, saying no dates for a Japanese launch have yet been announced. What the heck?
    • I was super excited to see the new Ricoh GR Space in Shibuya, as I used to love their old RING CUBE museum/gallery in Ginza that closed down in 2020. The staff were super friendly and (I found this odd) thanked me sincerely when they learnt that I’ve been a supporter of the series from the GRD days. I was hoping to buy a little finger strap like the one that came with the GR III Diary Edition, but they don’t sell those piecemeal. Oh well. It was well worth the visit.
    • Still on the lookout for nice souvenirs and Japan-exclusive gadgets, but it seems those days are long gone and generally the global electronics market is extremely flat now with online shopping and Chinese e-commerce platforms like AliExpress. But! While at Beams (clothing retailer), I discovered this Bluetooth speaker that is the exact shape and size as a cassette tape for $50. Despite not expecting it to sound any better than my iPhone’s built-in speakers, I bought it on sight. An hour later, I found a non-Beams branded version at Hands for about $10 less. That’s… fine, I guess.
    • There are great PSA ads here warning against perverts who take upskirt photos and molest people on trains. I’ve been collecting a few (ads, not perverts).
  • Week 5.25

    Week 5.25

    • We arrived in Tokyo after dark and headed to a nearby supermarket for apartment essentials: toilet roll, hand soap, face towels, etc. Supermarkets here open till 11 p.m. or midnight, which I did not expect. We’ve been seeing more 24-hour supermarkets back home as well, so maybe that’s just how people shop now (or how late people work now).
    • The domestic produce here is, unsurprisingly, beautiful and better than anything you can easily find in Singapore. Prices range from a little more to a GTFOutta here more. I mean, look at those tomatoes. We’ve also been eating some lovely strawberries from a random fruit stand near Gakugei-daigaku station.
    • My foray into videography was short-lived. After just a day, I’ve gone back to just taking photos. It’s too much work to break in the habit of filming scenes with camera moves and multiple angles whenever something interesting appears.
    • We ducked into a used records store that carried both CDs and vinyls, and for a short while, I entertained the thought of getting a new CD player to put my teenage collection back into service. If I can find a nice-looking one that supports AirPlay (ha) to our HomePods, then I might. Why hasn’t anyone made an all-in-one, retro revival-ready CD/cassette/LP player with decent quality? They’d make a killing.
    • Sleep eluded me for two nights. It was the combination of a smaller bed, snoring, and variable room temperature while we figured out the settings. Things got better once I busted out my Loop Quiet II earplugs. They’re well worth the $20-odd bucks.
    • AccuWeather shows the city has a constant dry air advisory in effect. That’s certainly true in our apartment when the heating is on, and now we’re going to buy a cheap humidifier from 3 Coins (aka ¥300), a Daiso-esque home goods chain that has some really nice products like a 3-in-1 iPhone/Apple Watch/AirPods charging stand and even transparent Switch Pro-style controllers for about S$26. It’s funny that in Singapore I’m constantly dehumidifying, and here it’s just the opposite.
    • It’s not really that cold. Between 0° and 11° is fine by me, but 15° and sunny would obviously be ideal.
    • There’s a longstanding idea/stereotype that the Japanese diet is low on vegetables, and I suppose historically that might have been true, with most of it in pickled form? Sean and Cien were just here too, and they’d read that people keep their toilet businesses running smoothly with the help of probiotic milk drinks. Specifically, this Meiji R1 product (or Yakult). We bought some; the verdict’s still out. Meanwhile, trying to get a healthy dose of mealtime fiber with vegetable ramen, side salads, and shredded cabbage, and honestly, the prevalence of vegetables is no different from what I’m used to.
    • We had dinner at a yakitori restaurant featured in a video on the Japan By Food YouTube channel, and all the local diners were ordering raw chicken tataki, which funnily was not on the English menu given to tourists. But one hot dish we ordered, chicken neck shu mai, came with pink bits of effectively raw meat inside. When in Rome…
    • It was meant to snow on Sunday, but that didn’t end up happening. We made it out on foot to a nice coffee shop (apparently a branch of a Sydney business), and then spent the morning in the Hokusai museum looking at a small slice of his insane output over 90 years. He apparently produced over 30,000 works, including woodblock prints, sketches, and paintings. I remember having a poster of The Great Wave in my university bedroom way back when (like many of you, I imagine), so it was nice to see the “real thing”.
    • I’ve used my Ricoh GR III and iPhone cameras probably an equal amount. The former in JPEG-only mode, with the factory Positive Film settings (not to be confused with zeroing each setting; there is actually a “recipe” that they ship with), and the latter in ProRAW. I misspoke last week when it came to the Nitro app. It’s still too buggy, and I couldn’t bring myself to pay for it in this state so I’ve gone back to the developer’s previous app, RAW Power. It’s very good, and with my soon-to-be-released color film LUTs and tone mapping disabled, the iPhone can honestly look like a proper camera. Apple’s default look is… realistic but not romantic.
  • Week 4.25

    Week 4.25

    The cool rainy days continued for another week.

    • Before diving into the deeper end of Japanese literature as previously mentioned, I thought I should warm up with at least one Haruki Murakami novel first. My gut said that it’d been maybe a year or two since the last one I’d read, but no, Goodreads informs me that I finished 1Q84 in May 2020! So I picked up Norwegian Wood from the library and finished it in a few days. I now want to watch the 2010 film adaptation because there’s so much spicy dialogue in this that I can’t imagine them using. Also, Rinko Kikuchi and Kiko Mizuhara play the two female leads, and that is the most 2010 Japanese casting ever.
    • My new Kobo Clara Color started acting up during this, freezing and needing to be rebooted, losing my current progress, and draining its battery rapidly overnight. I have a post from 2013 about how I fixed similar battery issues on my Kindle, and it’s one of the most visited pages on this site. Sadly, I didn’t find any tips online about battery problems with this Kobo model, so I just did a factory reset and things seem to be going okay so far. I suspect it has something to do with using Calibre to load EPUB files on it, if said files were not perfectly formatted.
    • My friend Cong is always saying Singapore lacks authentic Vietnamese food, specifically pho, but he recently found a place that he found good enough and that’s generous with the herbs and vegetables that are hard to find here. I went with him, Mavis, and Jose to check it out for lunch on Friday, and I can say that it was a fine bowl of noodles (but can’t speak to its authenticity). No gatekeeping; it’s called Lang Nuong 1980’s on Hamilton Road near Jalan Besar.
    • I’ve never put in the time to get good at shooting video and mastering all the techniques that go into making little films, so I rarely post video ‘stories’ on social media and vacations are only documented through stills in my photo library — isn’t it funny that we still call them photo libraries (e.g. iCloud Photo Library, Google Photos) even though they contain videos? This week I found myself experimenting a little with the form, thinking I might try to make myself what people used to call a “home movie” (before sharing your life with strangers was a thing) during my time in Japan.
    • When it comes to shooting footage, I’ve found Kino and Blackmagic Cam to be the best. They let you record 4K video in Apple Log, process the video in real-time using color-grading LUTs, and save them in a standard color space in compressed HEVC files. This is much better for almost anyone than using the default iPhone camera which saves Apple Log videos using ProRes, which results in massive files. I prefer Kino a little bit more because it includes a bunch of LUTs out of the box. It also has a more beginner-friendly UI, and takes care of most things automatically to get you more cinematic results.
    • One thing it doesn’t do, that I don’t think any app does, is use your location to influence your video settings. What do I mean? I may be oversimplifying, but here in Singapore (where PAL is the broadcast standard), you get flickering lights when shooting at the common 24/30 FPS speeds because our electricity grid operates at 50hz instead of 60hz. This causes lightbulbs to pulse at 100 times a second, and you see it happening at 24fps because 100 does not divide as cleanly by 24 as it does by 25. You can apparently counteract this through some combination of shutter speed/angle, but that’s beyond me. I just know I shot a bunch of footage at 24 FPS and there was flicker all over it. It’s 2025 and it sure would be nice if an app just knew what to do!
    • When it comes to editing, I played with a bunch of the most popular apps, including the super popular CapCut by ByteDance that I believe most IG/TikTok influencers use. It’s definitely a comprehensive tool, but wants you to pay a subscription for many of its most useful features — S$105.98/yr is a little steep for amateur dabblers like me imo.
    • I hadn’t fired up iMovie in a long while, and was surprised to discover a “Magic Movie” mode was added two years ago, and it’s not bad if you’re happy to give up fine-grained control. Just select a heap of clips, and it’ll string them together with a dynamic soundtrack (the music ends naturally when your video does), transitions, and a smattering of fonts and title styles you can choose from. Being a free Apple app, I think this is probably enough for most amateur dabblers… except it doesn’t support 9:16 videos. It’s an app for boomers.
    • That restriction probably won’t affect me as I intend to shoot my videos in traditional landscape orientation anyway, but it’s nice to have options. That’s when I discovered LightCut, a completely free Chinese app that looks suspiciously like CapCut and tries to opt you into a data-sharing program (you can say no, and also deny it Bluetooth permissions while you’re at it), but is otherwise a very attractive and powerful tool for the price! Like with CapCut’s paid AI features, it can drop your clips into suitable pre-made templates and make a pretty professional-looking video with little effort on your part. I think it’s a good alternative to iMovie if you need the flexibility of freely placing text on screen, adjusting the brightness/color of individual scenes, and so on.
    • On Wednesday, I decided to visit the National Gallery again and see the special exhibitions leaving next week. Here’s a low-effort “Magic Movie” of my visit, just a heap of random clips shot with Kino and assembled by iMovie. I finished the whole thing on my phone over a cup of tea at the café afterwards.
    • One thing I don’t like about being in a ‘video mode’ while walking around is that it takes you out of being in ‘photo mode’. I probably took just three photos that day, and don’t know if there’s any way around it except practice.
    • I still can’t decide what the best way to shoot photos on an iPhone is right now. I vacillate between shooting Bayer RAW with an app like Halide, shooting ProRAW with the Leica LUX app, ProRAW with the default camera app, and just embracing the iPhone’s “Photonic Engine” and getting 24MP HEIF files with the default camera app.
    • Bear with the neurosis, but as part of obsessing over the above question, I’ve been testing Nitro Photo, the new-ish pro photo editing app by former Apple Photo Apps group CTO Nik Bhatt. His last app was RAW Power, which I’ve owned for years but haven’t used that much, partly because I rarely shot RAW and partly because its UI is a little clunky. Nitro is a re-imagining of RAW Power, built from the ground up with modern frameworks and a redesigned UI. From a functional and technical perspective, I think it offers a level of control that no other app, short of Adobe Lightroom, does on iOS. Neither Darkroom nor the recently acquired-by-Apple Photomator have the ability to tune RAW/ProRAW images like Nitro. You can do things like adjust the tone mapping on ProRAW photos, for instance, to get a more natural look without Smart HDR effects, or control how the Apple RAW engine renders sharpness. I’ve ported over a few of my own presets over as LUTs, and am getting into it to the point that I might plonk down $100 and make it my main photo editor. The worst thing about it is still the UI, which I must stress is not bad; just a tad dated as touch UI conventions go. Darkroom is much more pleasant to use on a small screen, but the broken state of preset syncing there has really turned me off lately.
    • This is where you say, “But Brandon, if you shoot everything in ProRAW, doesn’t that take up a ton of storage? Especially if you don’t have an iPhone 16 Pro that can employ JPEG XL compression?” Well, yes, and that does bother me. So imagine my excitement when I discovered the NO RAW app, which claims to strip out the RAW data from photos that are RAW+JPEG bundles in the iOS file system, once you’re done with editing and know you won’t go back again. I knew deep down that it’s not possible for an app to do that on iOS, but had to pay S$3 to find out how it worked. The answer? It’s essentially a solution you can build on your own in Shortcuts.app: make a new copy of your image as a HEIC file (retaining metadata), and then delete the original bundled file. Boooo! My free HEIFer shortcut does exactly this, but for JPEGs. And NO RAW has the same “flaw” as my shortcut. Namely, that the correct chronological order will only be retained if you sort your photos by Date Captured. If you sort by Recently Added, then all of these former-RAW photos will appear at the bottom. I should have known, but I’ll still use NO RAW as it gets the job done and has a date picker UI that beats any shortcut, but I might update HEIFer to do the same if anyone wants it.

    Media activity:

    • I finished watching the anime series Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction. I’d heard about it before, and then when Dandadan came out, I mistook it for this and only realized they were separate shows like many episodes later. They are eerily similar in name and synopsis: school kids dealing with an alien invasion. But Dededede is much less kinetic/comedic/wacky. 3.5/5 stars.
    • We finished Squid Game 2 and despite initially liking how it was handled, I got a little bored towards the end as the slow, dramatic deaths started to pile up. When will we get a third season, and will I care? Probably not.
    • I watched The Gleaners and I (2000) Because it’s leaving MUBI. It’s the kind of documentary you get when an experienced director picks up a novel tool (a digital video camera, in this case), and starts messing about around a topic that interests them. Here, Agnès Varda starts by interviewing people who still practice the lost art of gleaning — picking through recently harvested fields for uncollected produce — and ends up doing a cross-country investigation of waste and poverty. 4/5 stars.
    • I discovered the American YouTuber and illustrator Linh Truong aka @withlovelinh through a Japan travel/haul video she made last spring and found myself binging the last couple years of her content creator journey. She started doing vlogs in high school and has kept going with cozy life updates that interior decoration tips and other sorts of young adult life-hacking. She recently graduated from college, and it’s extremely sweet how many of her commenters say they’ve grown up with her over the years and are proud that she’s making it (1.2M subscribers and making sponsored content for Nintendo, Notion, et al).
  • Week 3.25

    Week 3.25

    • Rainy season is reading season. After finishing There Is No Antimemetics Division for my book club, I also wrapped up Taylor Lorenz’s Extremely Online, which is sort of a brief history of social media and the influencer economy. I highly recommend the former for fans of SF stories involving time, unreliable memories, and the nature of reality; some members of the book club who are into Doctor Who likened it to that, but I wouldn’t know.
    • Then I decided to start getting into the mood for our holiday by reading some Japanese fiction. I began with Mieko Kawakami’s Heaven (a rough story about school bullying), which I thought would keep me occupied for a while, but before I knew it, I’d finished it along with Satoshi Yagisawa’s Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, two entries in the cozy Asian fiction wave dominating the local charts. Other entrants include Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop and Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Hwang Bo-Reum and Toshikazu Kawaguchi, respectively. When the going gets tough, people start fantasizing about quitting their jobs and opening cafes or bookstores, and I think that explains the sudden popularity of this micro-genre. Incidentally, I bought a couple of these books for my mother on her recent birthday because I thought she’d enjoy the vibes, although already retired.
    • For the avoidance of doubt, all of the above books were three stars for me on Goodreads with the exception of Antimemetics, which got a 5-star rating. But the Morisaki Bookshop series makes reference to many great works of Japanese literature, and so I decided to try reading some Mishima on this trip. I’d read The Temple of the Golden Pavilion as a young adult, and it probably just glanced my frontal lobe at the time.
    • In a flash of pure coincidence soon after, I was scrolling through MUBI and came across Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) by Paul Schrader (who wrote Taxi Driver), an American Zoetrope biopic executive produced by George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. I watched it immediately, and it’s an incredible work of cinema — why isn’t this talked about more? It only covers the last phase of his life, up until his famous act of terrorism/suicide, which makes up only one of the four chapters. The other three are dramatizations of his work, literally staged on theatrical sets and shot with more care and inspiration than anything you could buy today with $100M in streaming service money.
    • In a further act of cosmic coincidence, I saw a Facebook post from Paul Schrader being shared on Twitter, having an AI moment of crisis when he found that ChatGPT outdoes him when prompted to provide “Paul Schrader script ideas”.
    • Looking back on holiday photos from March 2023, I rediscovered my rediscovery of Hipstamatic, which had just launched its new subscription-based app at the time. Looking at those photos brings back fond memories; they are “ruined” in a good way — mundane everyday scenes somehow imprinted with the nostalgia of the moment through imperfect filters (it helps that I know that the original, normal photos lie underneath and can be accessed with a tap of the Revert button). My setup at the time was to use the Ricoh GR III as a main camera for all photos that needed to look good and accurate, and to reserve the iPhone + Hipstamatic for casual, silly snapshots. Otherwise, you have two tools competing for the same job. I’m now finding that idea attractive again, except both Hipstamatic apps are quite a pain to use, UI-wise.
    • I watched this video of “Best Apps in 2024” from the MKBHD Studio team, and decided to give Dazz Cam another try. It’s surprisingly powerful! Some of the vintage “cameras” you can choose from use RAW processes, and you can have it save both the original RAW file and the filtered results separately. So I may end up using this to “gimp” my iPhone rather than Hipstamatic. Plus, the subscription to unlock all its features is only $10/yr compared to Hipstamatic’s $40/yr. I don’t even think you need it as some of the free filters are good enough. I only wish it would use the underlying RAW and not the JPEG when importing an existing image from your library.
    • We had free tickets to the ART SG fair at the Marina Bay Sands over the weekend and dropped by for a quick look. It was crowded as hell and I was reminded why I don’t think these things are a great way for the general public to see art; it’s mostly a trade show geared towards buyers, and so the scale is too overwhelming for anything to really be appreciated. Not only that, but the selection this year didn’t really make much impact. I was looking out for more of the humor and playfulness I saw at the 2023 edition, something to make light and sense of the trauma we’ve normalized, but it was sorely lacking. I did like the pair in the featured image above, though, as they reminded me of some other works I’ve seen before, including the Act of Emotion digital series by Kelly Milligan.
    • Trump launched his own memecoin on Solana this weekend, days before the inauguration, and I believe it went up to a market cap of $70bn. That would qualify as a very funny and absurd art project, from ‘probably the greatest’ (scam) artist, if it wasn’t real and thereby depressing.