About…
Me
I’m a hobbyist interested in Macintosh, web development and photography. And thank goodness I don’t have to make my living at any of those!
I’m a hobbyist interested in Macintosh, web development and photography. And thank goodness I don’t have to make my living at any of those!So I dabble in and out of those things whenever I have some free time. Macintosh, for me, goes way back to my first Mac 128K that I had upgraded to 512K with a friend’s careful soldering. With just a few short detours, one via a NeXTStation and one via a Dell running Windows 95, I’ve been using Macs for a long time. That also means I have owned quite a few, starting with that Mac 128K, including a bronze keyboard PowerBook G3 and a G4 Cube, up to my current MacBook Pro 15" and Mac Pro cylinder.
And then there’s the iPhone (since the first) and the iPad (also since the first). “He who dies with the most toys, wins.”
Photography came along later, but I never really got into the Canon film SLR I had. Digital really changed photography for me and I’ve been shooting DSLRs since my Nikon D70. Not long ago I completed my transition from a Nikon D3 (and a mess of nice glass) to a Fujifilm X-T1 (and a growing collection of glass). There are many advantages to mirrorless interchangeable-lens cameras and I find that they outweigh the strong points of the bigger DSLRs.
Light duty web development is my most recent hobby. And so there is this site and my photography site, both self-developed. And self-designed, as you can tell (sadly, design is not one of my strong points).
The Site
This domain, and web site, have been around for a while now. And it’s been based on WordPress for most of that time (not counting a year over at SquareSpace). The trouble, for me, is that WordPress is somewhat unwieldy and there are layers and layers of stuff piled on. But that was the CMS behind the site and there’s a bunch of posts accumulated over the years. Time for a change.
Today it’s running on the PHP framework Grav. I like it. It’s light, hugely customizable, well supported and is completely file-based. Which means there is no database backend at all; just text files for the content (Markdown Extra), design (HTML), styles (Sass) and function (PHP).
Today it’s running on the PHP framework Most of what you’ll read here are my musings and experiences from my hobbies. Some of those musings (rants?) will be helpful to others, so I encourage you to share a link if you find some of that. This site will also serve as a test bed for learning web development techniques; and I can’t rule out another switch in platforms. It has run on at least WordPress, Kirby, Perch and Statamic; I have local development sites set up for it running Laravel, concrete5, Meteor and SilverStripe. See what I mean about a hobby?
The key software allowing me to develop web sites, besides Grav, are Coda, Codebug, CodeKit, Dash, Kaleideoscope, MAMP Pro, Tower, and Transmit. Now what did I forget? And don’t get me started on just how good some of those tools are.
The key software allowing me to develop web sites, besides Grav, are The Hardware
There’s a little geek in every computer hobbyist. Admit it. So here’s the obligatory tour through some of my hardware toys.
Mac Pro (late 2013)
- 3.5 GHz 6 core Xeon E5
- 32 GB RAM
- 2 AMD FirePro D500 GPUs
- 1 TB SSD
Fujifilm X-T1
- Fujinon 60mm f/2.4 Macro
- Fujinon 23mm f/1.4
- Fujinon 18–55mm f/2.8–4.0 OIS
- Fujinon 55–200mm f/3.5–4.8 OIS
- Fujinon 18–135mm f/3.5–5.6 OIS WR