It’s pretty widely understood that photography doesn’t do a very good job of representing objective reality. Choices of cropping, exposure, color balance, saturation, etc, all can be used to project a specific narrative. That being said, I (for the most part) try to do minimal processing beyond those adjustments on most pictures I share.

However, I do digitally alter some photographs for aesthetic purposes. I try to be up front about it when I do (for example, see this picture).

This picture, taken at Descanso Gardens on April 11, 2026, and without any post-processing at all tells a bunch of lies.

What lies does it tell? It hides the crowds, for one thing. The field is flattened, making the roses appear to be almost a hedge. Here’s a more honest view of the scene:

So, by standing over where the guy in the pale blue shirt is taking a picture, and holding my camera low to the ground, I could capture that image above. Then, because I let the camera determine the exposure, the original image underexposed the foreground in order to preserve the cloud details. The color balance was for cloudy skies, and I wanted it to look sunnier. So I punched up the shadow exposure, tweaked the color temperature a tiny bit, and increased the vibrancy by a about 10% percent. Because the overall exposure was increased, I had to adjust highlight settings to pull the cloud detail back in.

Since I was already in fantasy land, I decided to improve it even further by getting rid of those unsightly power lines. Here’s the final result:

In southern California, with judicious planting, it can be flower season year ’round. But even so, Spring is special.

I keep all my old scanned records in encrypted APFS disk images, one disk image per year. I do have my Mac filesystem encrypted too, which protects against unauthorized access if the machine gets lost or stolen. However, by keeping these records on encrypted disk images that I only mount when they’re in use, I add a bit of protection against rogue software exfiltrating the data.

It’s probably absurd to use this kind of protection for simple stuff like old utility bills, but a little paranoia can prevent a large headache, as the saying goes^*.

Today, I wanted to look at an old file, and was getting “Permission denied” errors from the Preview app. Looking at the file information from the finder (and then from the terminal) showed permissions were fine. I tried double clicking on the file, and got the permission denied message — including the name of a different file than the one I was trying to open. [o.shit.emoji]

I ran Disk Utility’s “first aid” on the image, and that said everything was fine, but I continued to get the error. I ran fsck_apfs on the image too (specifically, hdiutil attach -nomount /path/to/my/file and then fsck_apfs -y /dev/disk6s1). That’s probably what Disk Utility was doing under the hood, but I figured I’d try it anyway. Same error.

Then I said “[bleep] it!” and rebooted the system. Mounted the disk image, and everything’s fine. Computers suck 🙁

^* It does go like that, doesn’t it?

I clicked on a link to a web page I host on a Rocky Linux 9.7 VPS, and my browser stalled. That seemed strange, so I ssh-ed in to see if the web server was running correctly. ssh timed out.

So I used the VPS provider’s web-based console to log in, and found the networking was all dead. That was unexpected. After trying to remember the service name in this flavor/version, I executed systemctl restart NetworkManager.service and it was back … until I did a dnf update. Then it locked hard, and even the web-based console couldn’t log in for a while.

Tech support helped me track down the problem.

The VPS “only” had 2G of RAM, and that’s not enough on a modern Linux system to run a web server, database, and package manager. The dnf package manager subsystem was consuming all available memory when computing dependencies, and being killed by the oom-killer, leaving the system in weird states.

I ended up resizing the VPS to a mighty 4G RAM. It’s a few bucks more a month.

Makes me think of my first Linux box, which ran Debian Hamm in what I seem to think was 6M of memory.