The start of a week and a half off begins with the delivery of my new iPad Pro (2024). The screen is just phenomenal and I can’t believe how much faster and lighter it is compared to my 2018 iPad Pro.
Waiting this many generations means I can really tell how much nicer this one is to use!
Really looking forward to the new iPad I’ve ordered. Went with the 1TB/16GB RAM iPad Pro, with a new pencil and folio case. Delivery date is Wednesday! (I expect I’ll end up buying a keyboards, too, in a few weeks.)
My primary use case is editing photos and doing light writing. And my 2018 iPad Pro is starting to show its age on some tasks, like editing large photo files. I’m looking forward to this big step up.
I have to wonder: what will the next iPad I buy, in 5-6 years, be like or include in excess of the current ones?
There are lots of ‘best of’ lists that are going around. Instead of outlining the best things that I’ve purchased or used over the year I wanted to add a thematic: what was the best ‘photography stuff’ that I used, read, watched, or subscribed to over the course of 2023?
90-95% of the photographs that I made over the year were with the Fuji X100F. It’s a spectacular camera system; I really like how small, light, and versatile it is. I created a set of recipes early summer and really think that I dialled in how to use them and, also, how to apply my very minimal editing process to the images. I’m at the point with this camera that I can use it without looking at a single dial, and I know the location of every setting in the camera that I regularly use.
I do most of my writing on my well-used iPad Pro 11” (2018). It’s a great device that is enough for 99% of my needs.1 However, I have to admit that I’ve long missed owning an iPad Mini because they’re so small and light and portable. I do pretty well all of my reading on the iPad Mini these days. My partner purchased me one this year and I’ve fallen in love with it again. I’m using it everyday for an hour or more, and ultimately I now pull out the iPad Pro 11” just when I need to do longer-form writing.
Finally, though I haven’t had it all that long, I really do enjoy the Leica Q2. I’m still getting used to the 28mm focal length but deeply appreciate how I can now shoot in bad weather and low light.2 The in-camera stabilization is also letting me experiment with novel slow shutter speeds. I remain excited, however, for what it’ll be like to use the camera when I haven’t been in persistent cloud cover!
I have kept using Glass each and every day. Does it (still) have problems with its AI search? Yes. Does it have the best photographic community I’ve come across? Also yes. You should subscribe if you really love photography and want to contribute to a positive circle of practice. And if you’re watching a lot of photography-related materials on YouTube I cannot recommend a Premium subscription highly enough!
I also am deeply invested in Apple’s services and pay for Apple One. This gives me access to some things that I care about, including a large amount of cloud storage, News, customized email, Apple Music, and Apple TV. I find the current costs to be more than a little offensive–Apple’s decision to raise costs without increasing the benefits of the service was particularly shitty–but I’m deeply invested in Apple’s ecosystem–especially for storing my photographs!–and so will continue to pay Apple’s service tax.
I use lots of apps but the best ones I rely on for photography include:
Most of the non-fiction books that I read throughout the year were focused around photography. The two best books which continue to stand out are:
The best photography-related movies that I watched were all classics. They included Bill Cunningham: New York; Gary Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable; The Jazz Loft According to W. Eugene Smith; and Ordinary Miracles: The Photo League’s New York. Combined with written history and photo books they helped to (further) reinforce my understanding of how and why street photographers have made images.
I watch a lot of photography YouTube. The channels I learn the most from include those run by James Popsys, Tatiana Hopper, EYExplore, Alan Schaller, Pauline B, aows, Aperture, and Framelines. My preference is for channels that either provide POV or discuss the rationales for why and how different images are being (or have been) made.4
I tend to listen to photography podcasts on the weekend when I go out for my weekly photowalks. The two that I listen to each and every week are The Photowalk and The Extra Mile. It’s gotten to the point that it almost feels like Neale James (the host of the podcasts) is walking along with me while I’m rambling around taking photos.
Aside from those, I’ll often listen to A Small Voice or The Candid Frame. These are interviews with photographers and I regularly learn something new or novel from each of the interviews.
For the past year I’ve trimmed and managed the number of my RSS feeds. I keep loving the work by Craig Mod, Little Big Traveling Camera,5 and Adrianna Tan’. They all do just amazing photoessays and I learn a tremendous amount from each of them in their posts.
I somehow managed to break the hood that I’d had attached to my Fuji X100F in the fall and decided to get what seemed like a cool square hood to replace it. It was a really, really bad idea: the hood was a pain to screw on so that it wasn’t misaligned and, once it was aligned, was on so tight that it was very hard to remove. I would avoid this particular hood like the plague.
I also bought a Ricoh GR IIIx and while it’s a fantastic camera I just haven’t used it that much. I didn’t take as many images with it as I’d hoped when I was walking to or from work, and really ended up just using it when I needed to go out and take photos in the rain (I kept it safely hidden under my umbrella). Also, the camera periodically just fails to start up and requires me to pull the battery to reset it. Is it a bad camera? Nope, not at all, and I did manage to capture some images I was happy with enough to submit to Ricoh’s photography contest. But it’s not a camera that I’ve really fallen in love with.
Finally, while I use my AirPods Pro all the time I really don’t like them because I cannot get them to stay in my ears unless I purchase third-party foam tips. And I need to keep purchasing new sets of tips because they wear out after a couple of months. Are they good headphones once they stay in my ears? Yes. But the only way to accomplish that is becoming increasingly costly and that’s frustrating.
Anyhow, that’s my list of the ‘best photography-related stuff’ I’ve used in the course of 2023. What was your top stuff of the year?
Apple has announced it will begin rolling out new data security protections for Americans by end of 2022, and the rest of the world in 2023. This is a big deal.
One of the biggest, and most serious, gaping holes in the protections that Apple has provided to its users is linked to iCloud. Specifically, while a subset of information has been encrypted such that Apple couldn’t access or disclose the plaintext of communications or content (e.g., Health information, encrypted Apple Notes, etc) the company did not encrypt device backups, message backups, notes generally, iCloud contents, Photos, and more. The result is that third-parties could either compel Apple to disclose information (e.g., by way of warrant) or otherwise subvert Apple’s protections to access stored data (e.g., targeted attacks). Apple’s new security protections will expand the categories of protected data from 141 to 23.
I am very supportive of Apple’s decision and frankly congratulate them on the very real courage that it takes to implement something like this. It is:
It’ll be absolutely critical to observe how quickly, and how broadly, Apple extends its new security capacities and whether countries are able to pressure Apple to either not deploy them for their residents or roll them back in certain situations. Either way, Apple routinely sets the standard on consumer privacy protections; others in the industry will now be inevitably compared to Apple as either meeting the new standard or failing their own customers in one way or another.
From a Canadian, Australia, or British government point of view, I suspect that Apple’s decision will infuriate law enforcement and security agencies who had placed their hopes on CLOUD Act bilateral agreements to get access to corporate data, such as that held by Apple. Under a CLOUD bilateral British authorities could, as an example, directly serve a judicially authorised order to Apple about a British resident, to get Apple to disclose information back to the British authorities without having to deal with American authorities. It promised to substantially improve the speed at which countries with bilateral agreements could obtain electronic evidence. Now, it would seem, Apple will largely be unable to assist law enforcement and security agencies when it comes to Apple users who have voluntarily enabled heightened data protections. Apple’s decision will, almost certainly, further inspire governments around the world to double down on their efforts to advance anti-encryption legislation and pass such legislation into law.
Notwithstanding the inevitable government gnashing of teeth, Apple’s approach will represent one of the biggest (voluntary) increases in privacy protection for global users since WhatsApp adopted Signal’s underlying encryption protocols. Tens if not hundreds of millions of people who enable the new data protection will be much safer and more secure in how their data is stored while simultaneously restricting who can access that data without individuals’ own knowledge.
In a world where ‘high-profile’ targets are just people who are social influencers on social media, there are a lot of people who stand to benefit from Apple’s courageous move. I only hope that other companies, such as Google, are courageous enough to follow Apple at some point in the near future.
Trying out the new AirPods Pro 2 and the fit with the smallest sized earbuds is far superior to the previous version. I still need to assess if they’re going to work longer term but I can’t manage to shake them loose, they don’t fall out when I’m eating something, and they don’t dislodge after walking outside for 20 minutes or so. My longer weekend photowalk will probably help clarify if I’ll keep them or return them.
Heidi Tworek has a good piece with the Centre for International Governance Innovation, where she questions whether there will be a sufficient number of faculty in Canada (and elsewhere) to make use of information that digital-first companies might be compelled to make available to researchers. The general argument goes that if companies must make information available to academics then these academics can study the information and, subsequently, hold companies to account and guide evidence-based policymaking.
Tworek’s argument focuses on two key things.
On this latter point, she writes:
If the companies have far more researchers than universities have, transparency regulations may not do as much to address the imbalance of knowledge as many expect.
I don’t think that hiring people with PhDs necessarily means that companies are addressing knowledge imbalances. Whatever is learned by these researchers tends to be sheltered within corporate walls and protected by NDAs. So those researchers going into companies may learn what’s going on but be unable (or unmotivated) to leverage what they know in order to inform policy discussions meant to hold companies to account.
To be clear, I really do agree with a lot in this article. However, I think it does have a few areas for further consideration.
First, more needs to be said about what, specifically, ’transparency’ encompasses and its relationships with data type, availability, etc. Transparency is a deeply contested concept and there are a lot of ways that the revelation of data basically creates a funhouse of mirrors effect, insofar as what researchers ‘see’ can be very distorted from the reality of what truly is.
Second, making data available isn’t just about whether universities have the professors to do the work but, really, whether the government and its regulators have the staff time as well. Professors are doing a lot of things whereas regulators can assign staff to just work the data, day in and day out. Focus matters.
Third, and related, I have to admit that I have pretty severe doubts about the ability of professors to seriously take up and make use of information from platforms, at scale and with policy impact, because it’s never going to be their full time jobs to do so. Professors are also going to be required to publish in books or journals, which means their outputs will be delayed and inaccessible to companies, government bureaucrats and regulators, and NGO staff. I’m sure academics will have lovely and insightful discussions…but they won’t happen fast enough, or in accessible places or in plain language, to generally affect policy debates.
So, what might need to be added to start fleshing out how universities are organised to make use of data released by companies and have policy impacts in research outputs?
First, universities in Canada would need to get truly serious about creating a ’researcher class’ to analyse corporate reporting. This would involve prioritising the hiring of research associates and senior research associates who have few or no teaching responsibilities.1
Second, universities would need to work to create centres such as the Citizen Lab, or related groups.2 These don’t need to be organisations which try and cover the waterfront of all digital issues. They could, instead, be more focused to reduce the number of staff or fellows that are needed to fulfil the organisation’s mandate. Any and all centres of this type would see a small handful of people with PhDs (who largely lack teaching responsibilities) guide multidisciplinary teams of staff. Those same staff members would not typically need a PhD. They would need to be nimble enough to move quickly while using a peer-review lite process to validate findings, but not see journal or book outputs as their primacy currency for promotion or hiring.
Third, the centres would need a core group of long-term staffers. This core body of long-term researchers is needed to develop policy expertise that graduate students just don’t possess or develop in their short tenure in the university. Moreover, these same long-term researchers can then train graduate student fellows of the centres in question, with the effect of slowly building a cadre of researchers who are equipped to critically assess digital-first companies.
Fourth, the staff at research centres needs to be paid well and properly. They cannot be regarded as ‘graduate student plus’ employees but as specialists who will be of interest to government and corporations. This means that the university will need to pay competitive wages in order to secure the staff needed to fulfil centre mandates.
Basically if universities are to be successful in holding big data companies to account they’ll need to incubate quasi-NGOs and let them loose under the university’s auspice. It is, however, worth asking whether this should be the goal of the university in the first place: should society be outsourcing a large amount of the ‘transparency research’ that is designed to have policy impact or guide evidence-based policy making to academics, or should we instead bolster the capacities of government departments and regulatory agencies to undertake these activities?
Put differently, and in context with Tworek’s argument: I think that assuming that PhDs holders working as faculty in universities are the solution to analysing data released by corporations can only hold if you happen to (a) hold or aspire to hold a PhD; (b) possesses or aspire to possess a research-focused tenure track job.
I don’t think that either (a) or (b) should guide the majority of the way forward in developing policy proposals as they pertain to holding corporations to account.
Do faculty have a role in holding companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, or Netflix to account? You bet. But if the university, and university researchers, are going to seriously get involved in using data released by companies to hold them to account and have policy impact, then I think we need dedicated and focused researchers. Faculty who are torn between teaching, writing and publishing in inaccessible locations using baroque theoretical lenses, pursuing funding opportunities and undertaking large amounts of department service and performing graduate student supervision are just not going to be sufficient to address the task at hand.
I recently moved a self-hosted WordPress website from a shared hosting environment to WordPress.com. The migration was smooth: I had to export the XML for the self-hosted WordPress installation and import it to the WordPress.com CMS, and then fix a few images. The website is functioning well and the transition was smooth.
However, shortly after doing so I started having issues with receiving emails at my custom email which was set up with Apple’s iCloud Custom Email Domain. Not good!
I changed the name servers with the domain registrar (e.g., Bluehost or Dreamhost) so that my custom domain (e.g., example.com) would point to the WordPress.com infrastructure. However, in doing so my custom email (user@example.com) that was using Apple’s iCloud Custom Email Domain stopped sending or receiving email.
This problem was surfaced because email could not be sent/received and, also, I could not verify its domain in Apple’s “Custom Email Domain”. Specifically, iCloud presented the dialogue message “Verifying your domain. This usually takes a few minutes but could take up to 24 hours. You’ll be able to continue when verification is complete.” The “Reverify” button, below the dialogue, was greyed out.
When you have registered the domain with a registrar other than WordPress (e.g., Bluehost, Dreamhost, etc) and then host a website with WordPress.com you will have to update the name servers the domain uses. So, you will need to log into your registrar and point the name servers at the registrar to NS1.Wordpress.com, NS2.Wordpress.com, and NS3.Wordpress.com. In doing so, all the custom DNS information you have provided to your registrar, and which has been used to direct email to a third-party email provider such as Apple and iCloud, will cease to work.
When transitioning to using WordPress’ nameservers you will need to re-enter custom domain information in WordPress’ domain management tabs. Specifically, you will need to add the relevant CNAME, TXT, and A records.1 This will entail the following:
When setting up your custom domain with Apple you will be provided with a set of TXT, MX, and CNAME records to add. Apple also provides the requisite field information in a help document.
While most of these records are self evident, when adding the DKIM (CNAME record-type) record in WordPress.com, the Host listed on Apple’s website is entered in the “Name” field on WordPress’ “Add a Record” page. The “Value” of the DKIM on Apple’s website is entered as the “value” on WordPress’ site.
| Type | Name | Value |
|---|---|---|
| CNAME | sig1._domainkey | sig1.dkim.example.com.at.icloudmailadmin.com |
Note: Apple will generate a new TXT record to verify you control the domain after pointing the name servers to WordPress.com. This record will look something like “apple-domain=[random set of upper/lower case letters and numbers]”. You cannot use the “apple-domain=“ field that was used in setting up your custom email information with your original registrar’s DNS records. You must use the new “apple-domain=“ field information when updating your WordPress.com DNS records.
Once you’ve made the needed changes with WordPress.com, and re-verified your domain with Apple’s iCloud Custom Domains, your email should continue working.
It would be great if WordPress actively and clearly communicated to users who are pointing their name servers to WordPress.com that there is a need to immediately also update and add email-related DNS records. I appreciate that not all customers may require this information, but proactively and forcefully sharing this information would ensure that their customers are not trying to fix broken email while simultaneously struggling to identify what problem actuallyy needs to be resolved.
When you set up a custom iCloud email domain you have to modify the DNS records held by your domain’s registrar. On the whole, the information provided by Apple is simple and makes it easy to set up the custom domain.
However, if you change where your domain’s name servers point, such as when you modify the hosting for a website associated with the domain, you must update the DNS records with whomever you are pointing the name servers to. Put differently: if you have configured your Apple iCloud custom email by modifying the DNS information at host X, as soon as you shift to host Y by pointing your name servers at them you will also have to update DNS records with host Y.
Now, what if you don’t do this? Eventually as DNS information propagates over the subsequent 6-72 hours you’ll be in a situation where your custom iCloud domain email address will stop sending or receiving information because the routing information is no longer valid. This will cause Apple’s iCloud custom domain system to try and re-verify the domain; it will do this because the DNS information you initially supplied is no longer valid.
Should you run into this issue you might, naturally, first reach out to Apple support. You are, after all, running your email through their servers.
Positively: you will very quickly get a real-live human on the phone to help you. That’s great! Unfortunately, however, there is very little that Apple’s support staff can do to help you. There are very, very few internal help documents pertaining to custom domains. As was explained to me, the sensitivity and complexity of DNS (and the fact that information is non-standardized across registrars) means that the support staff really can’t help much: you’re mostly on your own. This is not communicated when setting up Apple custom email domains.
In a truly worst case scenario you might get a well meaning but ignorant support member who leads you deeply astray in attempting to help troubleshoot and fix the problem. This, unfortunately, was my experience: no matter what is suggested, the solution to this problem is not solved by deleting your custom email accounts hosted by Apple on iCloud. Don’t be convinced this is ever a solution.
Worse, after deleting the email accounts associated with your custom iCloud domain email you can get into a situation where you cannot click the re-verify button on the front end of iCloud’s custom email domain interface. The result is that while you see one thing on the graphical interface—a greyed out option to ‘re-verify’—folks at Apple/server-side do not see the same status. Level 1 and 2 support staff cannot help you at this stage.
As a result, you can (at this point) be in limbo insofar as email cannot be sent or received from your custom domain. Individuals who send you message will get errors that the email identify no longer exists. The only group at Apple who can help you, in this situation, are Apple’s engineering team.
That team apparently does not work weekends.
What does this mean for using custom email domains for iCloud? For many people not a lot: they aren’t moving their hosting around and so it’s very much a ‘set and forget’ situation. However, for anyone who does have an issue the Apple support staff lacks good documentation to determine where the problem lies and, as a result, can (frankly) waste an inordinate amount of time in trying to figure out what is wrong. I would hasten to note that the final Apple support member I worked with, Derek, was amazing in identifying what the issue was, communicating the challenges facing Apple internally, and taking ownership of the problem: Derek rocks. Apple support needs more people like him.
But, in the absence of being able to hire more Dereks, Apple needs better scripts to help their support staff assist users. And, moreover, the fact that Apple lacks a large enough engineering team to also have some people working weekends to solve issues is stunning: yes, hiring is challenging and expensive, but Apple is one of the most profitable companies in the world. Their lack of a true 24/7 support staff is absurd.
What’s the solution if you ever find yourself in this situation, then? Make sure that you’ve done what you can with your new domain settings and, then, just sit back and wait while Apple tries to figure stuff out. I don’t know how, exactly, Apple fixed this problem on their end, though when it is fixed you’ll get an immediate prompt on your iOS devices that you need to update your custom domain information. It’s quick to take the information provided (which will include a new DKIM record that is unique to your new domain) and then get Apple custom iCloud email working with whomever is managing your DNS records.
Ultimately, I’m glad this was fixed for me but, simultaneously, the ability of most of Apple’s support team to provide assistance was minimal. And it meant that for 3-4 days I was entirely without my primary email address, during a busy work period. I’m very, very disappointed in how this was handled irrespective of things ultimately working once again. At a minimum, Apple needs to update its internal scripts so that their frontline staff know the right questions to ask (e.g., did you change information about your website’s DNS information?) to get stuff moving in the right direction.
Apple’s Word Wide Developer Conference starts tomorrow and we can all expect a bunch of updates to Apple’s operating systems and, if we’re lucky, some new hardware. In no particular order, here are some things I want updated in iOS applications and, ideally, that developers could hook into as well.
Of course, I’d also love to see Apple announce a new MacBook Air. I need a new laptop but don’t want to get one that’s about to be deprecated and just don’t need the power of the MacBook Pro line. Here’s hoping Apple makes this announcement next week!
I’ve been doing my own IT for a long while, as well as small tasks for others. But I haven’t had to do an email migration—while ensuring pretty well no downtime—in a long while.
Fortunately the shift from Google Mail (due to the deprecation of grandfathered accounts that offered free custom domain integration) to Apple’s iCloud+ was remarkably smooth and easy. Apple’s instructions were helpful as were those of the host I was dealing with. Downtime was a couple seconds, at most, though there was definitely a brief moment of holding my breath in fear that the transition hadn’t quite taken.
Excited Pixels