I thought the white flowers were all waterlilies.

A frost-covered morning at Millstone Park brought sparrows, a stunning red-tailed hawk, and light that turned the Indian grass to gold.

Sunday Paper shares links and ideas that caught my attention, with brief personal reflections.

I felt a pang of panic when I turned on the Fuji X-T3 and I was prompted to choose my language. Not the date. Not the time zone. My language. That's when I knew I was properly screwed. Every custom button assignment, every autofocus preset, every carefully configured menu setting—two years of refinements—gone. Vanished. My Fujifilm X-T3 had somehow reset itself to factory defaults. I have no idea why that happened, and honestly, I don't want to know. Some mysteries are better left unsolved, like why one neighbour insists on leaving on the front door light on all night long.

A failed search for Monarchs led to something better.

Before sunrise at Carnegie Lake Dam, fog softens the world and familiar birds emerge from the mist.

A cold Veterans Day walk around Millstone Park in Rocky Hill.

Wine tourism feels like church service whilst brewery culture offers the warmth of a neighbourhood pub where conversation matters more than ceremony.

I almost missed the juncos scratching through pine litter on my midday walk.

This week’s links explore creative software loyalty, eye-watering AI infrastructure spending, sensible security principles, and a rare dose of honesty about AI’s uncertain future.

Cherry blossoms brought beauty and brutal allergies during a Washington spring break fifteen years ago.

Fifteen years ago, a night visit to the Lincoln Memorial.

Sometimes the best photographs happen when you're too tired to think about composition.

I photographed the Library of Congress without knowing what it was.

These Supreme Court images sat in my Lightroom catalogue for fifteen years before I truly saw them.

This past summer, American Goldfinch discovered my nyjer feeder, bringing brilliant yellow plumage and nervous energy to my backyard.

Each Sunday Paper shares links and ideas that caught my attention, with brief personal reflections. “Finally, You Can Now be Ubuntu Certified Linux User” — Canonical has rolled out Canonical Academy, a hands-on certification track that runs in cloud test rooms rather than PDF cram sheets. The first stop is System Administrator: modular exams, badges as you go, mapped to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, with a 26.04 refresh promised later. I like the move away from trivia quizzes; prove it on a terminal or don’t. Vendor certs can slide into paywall theatre, but if pricing stays sensible this could help newcomers show real competence.

Even with 900 millimetres of reach, sometimes the bird stands exactly where you can't photograph it properly. That's the honest truth of wildlife photography.

After a difficult morning and limited options at Triphammer Falls, I almost skipped Ithaca Falls entirely.

When the clouds cleared at Beebe Lake, I took a chance at Triphammer Falls on Cornell's campus.

Chasing the perfect waterfall photograph rarely goes to plan.

This week: Caribbean parrots facing extinction due to laughably small fines, Apple possibly overpaying for a mediocre F1 streaming deal, Seth Godin on creative collaboration, and the surprising complexity of keeping the AWS cloud running.

I've used 1Password since 2008. When they released the SSH Agent feature, I ignored it for years. Not because it looked bad, but because I didn't trust it. This sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud. I trusted 1Password with my bank passwords, my email passwords, my entire digital life. But SSH keys? Those felt different. More critical somehow. I worried about getting locked out of servers. I worried about the integration breaking. I worried about problems I couldn't even name clearly. So I kept generating SSH keys in Terminal and managing them manually, the way I'd always done.