Going into Photography

Sunday, June 29, 2025. Sunny.

After picking up my grandfather's gift for me --- a Panasonic Lumix LX10, I became interested in taking photos.

The LX10 was manufactured in 2016. Its specs are not that impressive ---

However using it is so much fun! It is really different from using your phone to take photos. Although I've never compared side-by-side, I'm pretty sure my phone can take "better", higher quality photos. However, the "quality" is not the best nor the most important thing about photos to me. Using LX10 has been a pleasure. Something about holding a neatly-crafted device in your hand that feels intentful just elevates photo-taking experience. I've took a lot of photos with this camera over 2 weeks using it, and it actually motivated me to start going outside and explore more and more.

Howeover, the camera is without drawbacks, of course. Notably, the lack of image stabilization made taking photos at darker environments unpleasant. So I made a real upgrade, to a Fujifil X-S20.

I love the film simulations and built-in stylistic settings, which have almost eliminated the need to post-process. They just look so good. Fuji is apparently not the most technically impressive camera brand, but from my experience of using Apple products, I understand that specs are way overrated.

Kobo Disappointment

Recently I've been transcribing a book with CJK characters into an EPUB so I can read it on my Kindle, when I noticed a problem with highlighting texts. When I'm moving the selection handle, it moves three to four character at a time instead of one at a time. I suspect it is since pure Chinese/Japanese text does not use any kind of whitespace to delimit the words or sentences, (The word boundaries, can be and is often only, determined semantically) hence Kindle doesn't know what "blocks" it should select. This bothers me a lot since it means I cannot highlight a sentence from its beginning.

Having heard of the other side of the E-Reader faction --- Rakuten Kobo, supposedly having 'native support' (I will explain the quotes later) of EPUB and boasts a more 'customizible' OS, I've decided to get it a shot. So I excitedly visited my local Best Buy in the morning, and got myself a Kobo Sage for CA$300 --- the best offering without a coloured Kaleido E-Ink display. (Whatever is the point of those? We are blessed to live in a world with OLED. )

300 dollars just for highlighting?

No, 300 dollars for my stubborn perfectionism and a plastic nugget worth $3.12 (how much it probably cost to manufacture in China).

The box and the device itself are nice. It's made of soft-touch plastic similar to my Paperwhite and most Thinkpads. The device is noticeably heavier due to its 8" Carta 1200 screen. Nevertheless, it's nice to hold, nicer than Oasis since the back isn't as slippery and the "handle" protrusion isn't as sharp. The setup process went very smoothly.

Little did I know that The Disappointment is on its way. Apart from page turns, the system feels very slow, and Kobo's partial refresh strategies often leaves visually long-lasting artifacts. (Do not blame this on the e-ink technology as Kindle's interface is much more pleasant to use, due to what I assume to be wiser design choices. ) Speaking of page turns, the hardware buttons on the side are just stiff enough to be annoying to press. Surprisingly, the famed "native EPUB support" doesn't even support footnotes. Clicking on footnote labels does nothing. For that, you have to convert your books to KEPUB, another format due to Kobo.

The conversion process is easy. However, it renders my custom CSS completely useless as the formatting seems to just disappear. The footnote works, but it just jumps to the footnote section at the end of each chapter, instead of the helpful pop-ups I'd find on the Kindle. Without a back button, this made accessing footnotes unpleasant. But here's the kicker --- my preferred CJK font doesn't work. Even though the font file covers the required glyphs, Kobo keeps forcing the backup font on me. It's worth noting that the entire process is extremely slow as Kobo struggles to replace the "missing" characters.

After testing different fonts, (Source Han Serif crashes the Kobo --- it freezes for about 30s before reloading the system, how delightful) I found out some fonts do not have this issue, just not the fonts I want to use. I assume this is because some metadata in the font file isn't correctly filled. However, my Kindle is optimistic enough to just load the required glyphs without first consulting to whatever metadata dictated to be there by evil typography megacorps like Microsoft and Adobe, as is the expected behaviour. There are also other issues with fonts, such as the slightest mismatch of metadata within a font family will result in them not being recognized as a single family, causing Kobo not using the correctly weighted fonts for bold texts.

Promptly, I returned the disappointment of a product in the afternoon. Having learned my lesson, I've vowed to cherish my Kindle Paperwhite forever.

Update: Disabling custom CSS fixed my Kindle highlighting issue. Happy happy happy.

Typst is Cool

I've been using typst for a while now. I've typeset my notes and assignments with it using a local template in which I've customized fonts, page setup, margins, et cetera, and I'm enjoying it so far.

As a side rant, OpenType math fonts are rare. Of those, aesthetically pleasing pairings with document fonts are even rarer. I will definitely need to learn more about it, and perhaps make my own font one day!

Trying Typst in place of LaTeX

Typst is a markup language used for generating documents, which is significantly faster than LaTeX when it comes to compile time. So far, I like it a lot! This is not my first attempt of using it over LaTeX, although I do not remember why I gave up last time.

In a typst document (suffix .typ), content are displayed by default, just like LaTeX. However, scripting is made much simpler. On top of that, typesetting math is streamlined, without TeX's myriad of different environments one must master. It feels closer to markdown and might even better than markdown! Defining new commands, modifying document appearances and scripting are much more simpler as well. I look forward to using it to do my next assignment!

Rant about macOS's Privacy Measures

After discovering the wonderfully designed Arc, I stopped using even though I really liked it. The reason of stopping is that it just consumed too much energy compared to the good ol' safari. I know I'm spoiled by WebKit's efficiency, but it's very noticeable.

Going back to Safari definitely wasn't easy. I miss all the fun colours, the easy-to-switch profiles, and the ability to customize fonts.

Oh boy, do I regret this part. Let me tell you a story. I like to type out sentences when I'm bored. Not being a writer, I type on MonkeyType. I'd like to use Pragmata Pro on it, since I liked it so much I purchased it at a hefty price.

Well, Safari doesn't like that. To be more specific, macOS doesn't like that. After careful tinkering and looking up things, I've came to the conclusion that it is impossible to use user-installed fonts, or more specifically, non-system-installed fonts on Safari. The anti-fingerprint measures implemented by Apple prevents websites from accessing user-installed fonts, that is, those located in the directory ~/Library/Fonts for specific users and those located in the directory /Library/Fonts for all users. Through testing I discovered that only the system-installed fonts located in /System/Library/Fonts are exposed to websites.

At this point you might be thinking: what's the big deal then? just move your fonts into that directory! Oh, you sweet summer child. The folder is protected by System Integrity Protection. Even after disabling it from the startup utility, it is impossible to move files into it even with root access, since it is part of the OS and is read-only when users are logged into the system. There might be a way to access the actual hard drive in startup utility, however I'm not a UNIX wizard and did not find a way to. Very sad. Hopefully I'll get used to Menlo.

Graduate Application Fun

I'm near graduation! This is my second last term. It should've been my last term, but unfortunately I still have to take one more course to graduate, due to my poor planning (insert smile emoji with a teardrop).

Well, I'd like to go to grad school. To do combinatorics. Combinatorics are great! The more I've learned about it the more I enjoy it, thought the closer I am to graduation as well. This meant that I'm not as prepared for graduate school applications that I would've been.

Graduate applications sure are neat. You fill out pages of information, write some paragraphs convincing them you know what you're doing and what you're gonna do, pay a hefty application fee and that's it, right? Right?

No, you also need the wonderful reference letters! Your profs will provide them if they like you and you ask nicely :) probably. Hopefully, hmm, no profs would actually not give you the reference after gladly agreeing to it. Especially not the prof whose course you enjoyed the most and did the best in. Surely not! *sigh*

Back at Lean

After dropping CO 739, I saw Lean pop up somewhere when I was browsing the web. I can't deny that it is cool and very useful, and I want to learn it and be good at it, so I've decided to give it another go.

I found this free online course made by ICL, and I've been working through it. The learning curve is steep, as anticipated, but I think it will work out just fine. I look forward to actually using it in my studies.

I Miss Small Phones

I miss my iPhone 13 mini and I regret giving it to my grandpa (although it seems like he is enjoying it).

A few months ago I grew a sudden disdain to my current phone --- the iPhone 15 pro. Truly a giant phone with a 6.1" screen (sadly not even close to the market's largest offerings).

I think we have forgotten that a phone is a personal item and a tool rather than just being an interface for contents and games. Everyday whenever I hold this phone in my hand I'm filled with this deep sense of loss and anger --- this device, supposed to be the best modern technology has to offer, is not designed to be used comfortably with one hand.

By the way the market is going, I doubt small phones are going to come back. The last offerings are iPhone 13 mini and Asus Zenfone 10. Special mention to Sony Xperia 1, 5, 10 mark I to V for being narrow enough to be comfortable in the hand.

Small phones are going extinct.

Colour and Font

The greenish teal colour all over this website is my signature colour. I favour monospace fonts, and the one you're seeing is one of my favourites. Another font I very much like is Drafting* Mono Please go show the designer some support if you like it too :)

One of the reasons that I like monospace fonts is that it has formatting builtin. No more justifications, alignments, kerning, different character widths, just put them characters on a grid! Of course, this advantage is slightly diminished on the web.