Hi all! It’s been a while since my last status update on Bridgy Fed, its upcoming Bluesky/AT Protocol support, and the resulting firestorm.
It’s coming along! It’s not launched yet, I still have a number of things to build and tests to run, but it’s getting there. Also, Bluesky’s current federation test is limited to 10 users per federated server. We can’t launch until they lift that limit. I don’t know when that will happen, but I’m confident it will. Continue reading
Tamagotchis sure have come a long way. Kid proudly informed me just now that she doesn’t need to bring hers with us running errands because she hired a babysitter for it. 🧐
One of our cats purrs so loudly that it’s a running joke in our family. It makes her fur vibrate. We have to turn the TV volume up when she sits with us. Once, she was in another room, and I heard her purr through the wall. No joke.
Love this account of taking one of the first photographs in history.
Everyone is acquainted with the beautiful effects which are produced by a camera obscura, and has admired the vivid picture of external nature which it displays. It had often occurred to me, that if it were possible to retain upon the paper the lovely scene which thus illumines it for a moment, or if we could but fix the outline of it, the lights and shadows divested of all colour, such a result could not fail to be most interesting. And however much I might be disposed at first to treat this notion as a scientific dream, yet when I had succeeded in fixing the images of the solar microscope by means of a peculiarly sensitive paper, there appeared no longer any doubt that an analogous process would succeed in copying the objects of external nature, although indeed they are much less illuminated.
Not having with me in the country a camera obscura of any considerable size, I constructed one out of a large box, the image being thrown upon it by a good object glass fixed in the opposite end. This apparatus being armed with a sensitive paper, was taken out in a summer afternoon and placed about a hundred yards from a building favourably illuminated by the sun. An hour or two afterwards I opened the box, and I found depicted on the paper a very distinct representation of the building, with the exception of those parts of it which lay in the shade. A little experience in this branch of the art showed me that with smaller camerae obscurae the effect would be produced in a smaller time. Accordingly I had several small boxes made, in which I fixed lenses of shorter focus, and with these I obtained very perfect but extremely small pictures; such as without great stretch of imagination might be supposed to be the work of some Lilliputian artist. They require indeed examination with a lens to discover all their minutiae.
In the summer of 1835 I made in this way a great number of representations of my house in the country, which is well suited to the purpose, from its ancient and remarkable architecture. And this building I believe to be the first that was ever yet known to have drawn its own picture.
- Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, or the Process by which Natural Objects may be made to delineate themselves without the aid of the Artist’s Pencil, Henry Fox Talbot, 1834
“Papa, will I need to know how to get the circumference of a circle if I want to be an author?”
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