Dry end of summer
The land a dusty grey-brown
Then, wild flowers come!
photos
There are 8 posts tagged photos (this is page 1 of 1).
Diary
I’ve booked a ticket to Istanbul for August 1. I want to get away for August, and wasn’t sure whether to go east or west. But, from a journey I made almost forty years ago, I know that I like the city, and it serves as a hub, so I will decide what to do when I’m there; either spend a couple of weeks and come home, or, indeed to extend my journey. If D decides she wants to join me, it will probably be to Europe; otherwise I may decide to go to India.
Spent an hour trying to get an old Rapoo bluetooth keyboard working properly in Linux. It disconnected every few seconds, and I was thinking I’d need to buy a new keyboard. But the problem seems to have been solved or mitigated after uncommenting a couple of lines in the bluetooth configuration files.
Demonstrations against the judicial reform shook the country and scores of people were arrested for blocking city streets, highways and the airport. As for me, I was at home, pottering around the house and playing with a new pen that just arrived from China.
The afternoon walks around here are pretty boring actually; maybe even in the best of seasons. A monoculture of pine woods, and fields. But when I go with a camera, I begin to see things that I wouldn’t normally notice. That seems to be the beauty of photography – to help us to train the eye to see what’s out there, and to find new ways of looking at it. I’m having a lot of fun with this.
Not many wild flowers to look at in this season, other than these globe thistles.
More in the photoblog gallery.
Links
The collapse of insects Well-made and invested piece from Reuters
Is China really leading the clean energy revolution? Not exactly
The country generates more solar energy than all other countries combined, but burns half the planet’s coal. There are lessons here for the rest of us, though.
Jerusalem – Ramparts Walk
While out on my morning walk, I had a spontaneous decision to take the bus to Jerusalem. So I walked down and got coffee at the Latroun petrol station. I then took the new minibus service bus 430 from the junction to its end stop at the National Insurance Agency.
I walked from West Jerusalem through the Nachlaot area and down Jaffa Road to Jaffa Gate, the entrance to the old city. At the gate I noticed a sign “Ramparts Walk”, so I paid 12 sheqels for a ticket and walked all the way around the walls to Lions’ Gate, where the walkway ends.
So I descended and took the via Dolorosa back towards Jaffa Gate; I more or less know how to negotiate the maze of streets by now, so that wasn’t too hard. On the way I sat down for a pizza; quite a good one, in a tiny restaurant that reminded me a little of the Blue Lassi place in Varanasi.
Once back on Jaffa Road I took the tram, or light rail back to the bus station, returned to Latroun and walked back up the hill towards home.
———-I was not overly tired, but had a shower and a good rest. Thanks to D for hanging my laundry – I had dropped it into the machine before deciding on the day’s adventure. All along the way I was taking pictures – a couple have been included. The rest are here.
Links of the Day
Jewish settlers erect religious school in evacuated West Bank outpost after Israel repeals ban
Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank said Monday they erected a religious school in a dismantled outpost after Israel’s government lifted a ban on settlements in several evacuated areas in the northern part of the territory.
Government members praised the new construction. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a key government member and a settler himself, said it was “an exciting historic moment.”
The fediverse in Hebrew: a good explanation, with important links and servers: digitalwords.net/tech/fediverse
Photos
I purchased an e-book, “X series Unlimited” by Dan Bailey and spent a few hours reading that today. I didn’t learn a lot from it so far, maybe because my particular X series Fujifilm Camera is one of the oldest and simplest among them. But I did learn a couple of things, all the same. On my afternoon walk I made some new experiments with settings, and I think I got some slightly better results.
Here are a few of the photos (the rest are in my photoblog).
I’m fascinated how some plants send out leaves that are initially red, and only later change colour.
I took a few like the above while playing with the settings for enriching shadows and increasing the exposure, while staying with an f11 aperture setting for good depth of field.
The above is a nest of the pine processionary caterpillar – characteristically in a young Canary pine.
I slightly edited all of the above in LightZone – a free open source photo editing program. I am beginning to like this program. One thing I notice is that, unlike in Darktable, the styles or presets are arranged in a logical order, and it’s also possible to modify the style’s effect on an image manually. It is simpler to use and it is easier to create a workflow. Of course, it is by no means as powerful as Darktable.
Afternoon walk
On my afternoon walk today I wore for the first time a pair of multifocal glasses that I just had made and picked up today. As anyone who has such lenses will be able to attest, the initial experience is a bit disconcerting, so walking out with them for the first time across uneven ground gave me a slightly drunk and giddy feeling. In addition, I was trying out some of my camera’s special colour effects and filters, so it was a special kind of walk.
Further along, I came across a lovely stand of wild fennel, with its wonderful golden yellow colour.
Independence Day Evening in Tel Aviv
Tuesday was my last day at work, so I’m now officially retired. I sat with Ira again, explaining a few more of the responsibilities and departed the office in the early afternoon.
This was also Israel’s Memorial Day, which precedes its Independence Day which, because the Jewish Holidays extend from evening to evening, began at sundown. We currently have a foreign guest, so we took him to Tel Aviv to see the part celebration / part demonstration happening there, and were joined by H., first for a meal in an Italian restaurant.
It’s the first time in memory that I’ve visited any kind of celebration for the Independence Day, and H said it was the first time for her too. It wasn’t a pretty sight. Lots of children spraying foam at each other from cans that they later discarded in the streets, among other garbage left there – I guess there will be a massive clean up operation on Thursday morning.
This year the event was combined with the protest events that have been taking place for the last 3 or 4 months. Walking around Tel Aviv and joining the crowds, there were lots of opportunities to take photos, and I’ve already uploaded some of these.
My afternoon
In the afternoon I picked up from the local junction a Glaswegian photographer and sangha member doing a project over here (she sent the photo below from the bus stop at Latroun to make sure she was at the right one)
She joined us for lunch, while our grandchildren’s TV programs blared out from different screens. Then D took her to Hares (West Bank village) – a bunch of Israelis, most of them Buddhist practitioners, went there to join Palestinians for the evening iftar meal. They do this every year. It was kind of the last moment in Ramadan, since the moon has been sighted and Eid al-Fitr will begin tomorrow. I decided not to go this time – I generally feel uncomfortable on such occasions, for some reason that I don’t fully understand myself. I also didn’t go for the iftar celebrations here in our village. This was one:
Instead I went for a long late afternoon walk in the woods and fields.
On my walk I continued listening to David Graeber & David Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything”, which I find really interesting. A completely different look at some of the same history and pre-history covered by Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens.
(wild mustard flowers growing by side of the dirt road going down the hill)
I covered a lot of ground, both in the book and on my feet, and arrived home after dark at around 8:30, eating the leftovers from lunch time instead of the rich iftar fare: bit of salad, broccoli florets, half a pita, ball of labaneh with za’atar, and beetroot soup.
Photos | Big Tech | Registration Walls | Telegram
Channel 11 ran an article on the Big Tech companies that focused on several aspects: that they don’t pay taxes in this country; that they are virtually unreachable if they happen to close your account; that they invade privacy; that they are anticompetitive; that they manipulate the government and the legal system to insure their monopolies are not threatened, etc. It managed to get through all this material pretty well.
I’m beginning to think website “registration walls” are almost as bad as paywalls. They are just as effective at locking me out anyhow, because I usually refuse to register. I just tried to read an article on The Intercept and hit one of these. I’m more and more convinced that piracy is the way for those of us who value our privacy and are too poor to subscribe to umpteen journals. It feels scrappy, and it deprives journals of their incomes, but if they can’t honour our privacy and set up a sensible system for donations or occasional payments, I think it isn’t our problem.
The EFF has posted information (in English) intended to help Ukrainians and Russians use Telegram more safely: Telegram Harm Reduction for Users in Russia and Ukraine . It is kind of a shame that Telegram itself doesn’t do more to make this information available to its users. Telegram is not private by default and does not do enough to make its privacy features easily available. Durov, on his own Telegram channel, just wrote a long post describing his tribulations with the Russian government and his family connections with Ukraine:
Some people wondered if Telegram is somehow less secure for Ukrainians, because I once lived in Russia. Let me tell these people how my career in Russia ended.
It could have been an opportunity to address users in Ukraine and Russia in a similar way that the EFF has just done.
US accused of hypocrisy for supporting sanctions against Russia but not Israel https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/07/us-sanctions-against-russia-but-not-israel The war invites many such comparisons and exposes double-standards like this.
