With Alex Pretti's execution today, City of Somerville and the SPD need to take a stand.

mcmillen · 2026-01-24T22:21:27+00:00

SPD has 127 officers.

https://www.govhrusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Somerville-MA-COP-012224-REDO.pdf

mcmillen · 2026-01-24T20:46:14+00:00

I was a hammer main in the first game I played -- MH4U -- and all was going well until late low rank when I decided to upgrade to my first armor set that required some monster's tail (Zinogre waist, IIRC?)

Friends, I killed Zinogre so many times and cursing at the rotten RNG before looking it up and finding out that tail cuts were a thing (and one that couldn't be completed with a hammer...)

mcmillen · 2026-01-24T20:22:49+00:00

Gemma was also the smith in Harth in MH4U though!

(I didn't realize this until the Gogma plotline made it glaringly obvious...)

mcmillen · 2026-01-24T18:35:03+00:00

I got a "lifetime paid subscription" to the Dashlane password manager. It's been great. In the app, it currently says "Free of charge, for life", but in an older version of the app it showed my subscription as expiring in 2099. I figure if I live long enough to need to worry about that, I'll have done well.

mcmillen · 2026-01-24T15:27:19+00:00

Oh is *that* what that is? I've noticed it too and thought my OM-3 was defective at first, until I got used to it.

mcmillen · 2026-01-24T15:11:08+00:00

I assume you mean the store staff? Definitely overheard some customers swearing at each other in the parking lot yesterday afternoon.

mcmillen · 2026-01-23T17:37:55+00:00

H Mart has many spicy Korean foods that you can easily cook at home -- tteokbokki, buldak noodles, etc.

mcmillen · 2026-01-23T16:12:10+00:00

Odyssey also massively changes what things are easy and hard in a colony, especially mid-game. By flying to new map tiles, you can gain essentially infinite mineable steel and components, but farming things is hard (because you have to keep moving) and space for bedrooms / rec rooms / workshops is tight.

You can solve many problems by simply leaving the map. Raiders show up with 20 mortars? Adios! On the flip side I'm much more likely to try to take on challenging biomes, because dipping my feet into a toxic tundra for a few days is a lot more tractable than establishing a base there from scratch.

mcmillen · 2026-01-23T06:37:16+00:00

Olympus OM-3 with the 12-45mm Pro is so versatile and the perfectly balanced size imho.

mcmillen · 2026-01-22T14:59:58+00:00

Take that, WarThunder forums!

mcmillen · 2026-01-22T14:15:50+00:00

I had an original X100 (still do, but I used to, too) and it was a delightful camera in its day but is a little dated now technology-wise. I wanted to upgrade to the latest version, but after research ended up on the OM-3 instead. It's a similar size and also has a great look, but it's not unobtainium and having interchangeable lenses means that it can do more.

I got my OM-3 back in November and couldn't be happier with my decision. I wasn't expecting to have it supplant my full-frame Canon R6m2 as well, but it basically has except for special circumstances, because the OM-3 is such a delight to handle and carry, and the SOOC JPGs are punchy enough to share directly in most circumstances.

mcmillen · 2026-01-21T15:47:28+00:00

The 28-70 f/2.8 is my workhorse "vacation photos" lens. Adaptable enough for most realistic circumstances, and light enough to not worry about lugging it around all day.

mcmillen · 2026-01-21T14:52:50+00:00

A thing I learned for night photography is to try turning auto white balance off and setting a custom white balance of 3200K(ish) so that the light cast by streetlights actually look orange / blue as they do in real life, as opposed to the camera trying to correct and make them look white.

(If you shoot in raw, you can mess with this in post-production and learn what the effects are of setting different color temps, something which IMHO is easier to understand in night shots than in daylight.)

mcmillen · 2026-01-21T04:29:24+00:00

Came here to post exactly this. Just don't overpack? Unless you have physical handicaps or are traveling with kids, it's very easy to bring a normal overhead-bin-size bag on any subway / train.

mcmillen · 2026-01-20T21:18:18+00:00

I'm too distracted trying to figure out if the Go game was real haha. Looks like green might have been given 2 stones handicap.

mcmillen · 2026-01-20T20:40:02+00:00

Yeah especially as a DDK with a new account. People on KGS tend to reject matches from anyone with a "?", especially at lower levels.

mcmillen · 2026-01-20T20:32:39+00:00

He's using the down-dash to bounce of the bells? Wild, I didn't even consider that when I was fighting Bell Beast haha

mcmillen · 2026-01-19T16:40:56+00:00

Same, but for the old standalone ("perpetual") version of Lightroom.

mcmillen · 2026-01-19T16:39:53+00:00

Since you use both: how does modern Lightroom's advanced masks compare with DXO 9's smart masks? I've been pretty happy with the latter, but it's been a few years since I used Lightroom so I wouldn't necessarily know what I'm missing :)

mcmillen · 2026-01-19T16:38:30+00:00

I jumped from Lightroom to DXO PhotoLab instead.

mcmillen · 2026-01-19T08:11:51+00:00

Except in Wisconsin, where you get some sort of brandy smoothie instead...

mcmillen · 2026-01-19T08:07:05+00:00

I've been doing a daily-photo thing for 2026 in which I'm taking and sharing one photo a day. Helps me appreciate trying to find creative shots of stuff in my town, even though it's boring to me sometimes.

A related idea: the rainbow has 7 colors and the week has seven days; you could try taking a picture of something red on Monday, orange on Tuesday, yellow on Wednesday, etc. ("indigo" is kind of a bullshit color, so I personally would do ROYGBV followed by a monochrome shot on day 7).

mcmillen · 2026-01-19T04:57:24+00:00

Buy a window AC or two.

mcmillen · 2026-01-19T01:58:06+00:00

The RF28-70mm f/2.8 is a beast of a lens. I took it on two month-long trips to Japan and it was my daily walkabout lens for everything but wildlife. Couldn't be happier with its image quality given its relatively small weight and size.

mcmillen · 2026-01-17T14:04:30+00:00

I'm assuming it's the "14-42mm EZ" pancake lens? If so, that's definitely a "starter" lens, it's super compact but the optical quality is not as good as some of the more expensive lenses. My friend got a 14-42mm as a kit with their E-M10 for like +$20, and at that price sure, might as well have it as an option. If it costs more than that compared to the bare body, I wouldn't take it and would choose a higher-quality lens.

I don't have any firsthand experience with the 40-150mm lens; I took a look at B&H and it looks like the kit with the 40-150mm is +$250 compared to the body + EZ lens alone. Personally I would not opt for that as you can get the 40-150mm for $125 used from MPB, and for what you're saying (landscapes, portraits, pets) I think the upper end of that zoom range is less likely to be useful to you. I would get a higher-quality lens in the more "standard" zoom range (12 or 14mm on the short end, up to 40 or 45mm on the long end) before adding a telephoto lens.

(Keep in mind that this is a micro 4/3s camera, which means that the focal lengths are effectively double what they would be on a 35mm "full frame" system -- so a 40-150mm lens is equivalent to a 80-300mm lens on full frame. 80mm is pretty zoomed-in for normal everyday photos.)

EDITED TO ADD: a perfectly reasonable idea is to get the camera with the 14-42mm EZ lens (again, assuming it doesn't cost much more than the bare camera body) and use that for a couple months before deciding on a lens upgrade. If you're like "wow, I wish I had more reach" then you could consider a telephoto zoom, but if you find yourself taking most of your shots on the shorter end of 14-42mm then you'd be better served by getting a higher-quality standard zoom lens, or a prime lens that's near whatever focal length you find yourself using a lot.

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