robotmay

Yeah I'm really excited to try this lens - sounds like it'll be optically similar to some film-era 1.4 lenses and they have lots of character. I have a Minolta 50mm f/1.4 I use all the time because it just has a look that I can't get from modern perfect glass.

This is it for me. I don't want phone technology or operating systems anywhere near my cameras - I need them to be reliable and predictable.

The Fp L was great for landscapes because it was so ridiculously tiny for a 61MP camera that you could just chuck it in a waist bag instead of a backpack.

For the lower-resolution versions, they're very popular with video people from my understanding. The Fp was in particular popular with directors for test shots and framing, and they've leaned into that use-case with this new one I believe.

This uses a partially-stacked bayer sensor, same as that in the Nikon Z6III and Panasonic S1 II (most likely, or very close to it).

Yeah some people focus too much on the people rocking about with Swarovski spotting scopes. I’ve met teenagers down my local reserve who were spending their school lunch break watching the birds. Bird watching is essentially free, providing that we don’t manage to destroy what little is left of our wildlife in this country and limit it only to reserves. Serviceable binoculars can be had on the cheap too. It’s a very accessible hobby.

I sell vintage cameras in an antiques centre, but only 3 days a week. I’d like to sell online too but I have no ability to put aside stock for that, and similarly I only have access to the stock a few days a week, which makes shipping awkward. Pretty much every item is unique and needs listing separately, which is a pain. This is probably doable on some existing POS but it’s almost certainly much more expensive than just building my own (I think Shopify starts around £40 per month for what I’d need, then still require a lot of customisation). A major aspect of my business is buying stuff in the stall and tracking its eventual sale price, which tends to be a pain on other systems when it’s all one-off unique items.

I also do repairs and so I recently added a job management system into the POS, which has been really useful so far. Next step is to sort out the online store/eBay integration aspect!

I've hit a weird point myself. I'm not overly interested in building software for other people now. What I'm able to do is build all my stupid hobby project ideas for my very specific use cases and not have to worry about making them profitable in order to justify the time spent on them. I just built my own point of sale system because nothing on the market meets my needs, and my needs are extremely niche.

On a tangent: this is a really good website. I understood what you do and how you do it by reading down one page. There's a lot of projects/companies I immediately tune out from because I can't actually figure out what they do amongst all the buzzwords, animations, and excess scrolling in every dimension.

I slopcoded my own forum software in Elixir/Phoenix recently, starting from my memories of phpBB and SMF forums I used to run. I’m using it as a forum for my vintage camera stall as I have a lot of people who enjoy hanging out at the stall, and it turns out they enjoy hanging out on a retro forum too.

I do want to add some stupid forum features I remember from the 2000s. An RPG mod is definitely on my mind.

Ooh that’s fun! I’ll have to add some stats like this to mine too. Anthropic keeping connections alive for 2 hours is wild. I don’t think they fall into my trap as I believe they respect robots.txt, which is at least an improvement on Meta.

I should probably put together some actual stats at some point, but from what I see in the live logs you'd be shocked - some of them will happily sit there for over 5 minutes being drip-fed packets!

Looking at you, Meta.

I do still get some requests going up to 15 minutes which is quite ridiculous, though those don't seem to be super common (maybe they're learning).

I think the shortest timeouts I've seen are between 2-5 seconds, but they're surprisingly infrequent and actually that's still a massive inconvenience for them. I did at one point just drop any request I couldn't keep open for more than 5 seconds but it actually caused more server load. I'm essentially inverting the server load by making slow requests more efficient, which is counter to everything I ever learnt about performance for web serving :D

I think the average I see is probably somewhere between 15-30 seconds. I'm guessing many crawlers don't want to go too low because they'll be trying to fetch large files like images, or perhaps they know they'll be slowing servers down and want to ensure they get the response. Most likely, the majority of crawler authors aren't expecting some arsehole to exploit this and they've just left the setting as the default.

Yeah maybe I've just become used to how much I can use Flash 3.7/3.8 but on the less expensive Ultra plan I basically never exhaust my quota even when working over multiple projects, but this was pretty much immediate. I did ask it to audit a project but still, I do that in Flash regularly and it's not especially costly.

Honestly not even that is enough, I exhausted the limit within 5 minutes of trying to use it. I'll stick to Flash I think.