A follow up of a post I did four years ago... I'm back in Tokyo again, and I thought it would be fun to share my current bag setup and see how it differs from back then...

Let's see what I've got now:

• an ultra light backpack (Osprey Daylight or optionally the larger Osprey Escapist 18): in general, I've basically switched completely from shoulder bags to backpacks... much more ergonomic. These ones are also water resistant;
• two main cameras (Fujifilm X100T and Fujifilm X-T10): I used to have 1 main camera and a smaller backup one, but over the last year or so, it seems better for me to have two equally capable (slightly smaller) cameras instead. I will always prefer rangefinder type shooting though;
• a 27mm lens (Fujifilm);
• a 24mm pinhole lens: I use this by far most of the time;
• a 35mm 1.4 lens (Leica - I'll never part with this wonderful lens) with a Fuji adapter. Just for this lens I wish I had a full frame sensor again;
• iPhone (not shown here, usually in my pocket): my iPhone has de facto become one of my standard cameras. Yes it's that good;
• my trusty notebook, by far the heaviest individual item in my bag :)
• pens and pencils, and a sharpener;
• audio recorder & little tripod;
• external flash (FujifIlm EF-X20): fits both cameras, even though they both have built-in flashes already, this little baby is extremely capable;
• small zipped bag with cables, medecine (eye drops, paracetamol, band-aid, ear plugs, ... the usual stuff), iphone accessories, and a battery pack;
• tissues (i love them with Aloe Vera);
• passport and credit cards;
• extra memory cards (I've recently switched from 16 to 64GB, but I'm not convinced yet... 64 takes a long time to fill and to copy over, and I think I would feel safer to have 2 x 32GB instead of 1 x 64GB, just for redundancy's sake. But we'll see. I've never ever had a card fail on me in the past (fingers crossed);
• a little pink microfiber "wonder cloth" to clean lenses or other sensitive stuff;
• spare batteries
• battery chargers: these chargers are the only optional thing in the bag: if I'll just be out for the day, I know my 3+2 spare batteries will be able to last;
• my worry dolls;
• (not pictured) a standard Crumpler insert (L size).

There you go.

Looking back at my previous setup, it seems I'm still basically doing the same... just a few things have changed:

The way I carry everything now: in a backpack as opposed to a shoulder bag, mainly for superior ergonomics. Plus I've been able to reduce weight even more still, as the backpack weighs next to nothing.

Also, it seems I am more happy/at ease with two smaller main cameras + an iphone, instead of one large main camera + a small spare camera. However, learning a new camera's ergonomics is a huge deal, as I used to be able to do everything by feel on my Leica. For now, I definitely lose more time with the general "looking at the menu fiddling with controls" type of thing (also because the controls on both cameras differ slightly), but it might just be me that needs to adapt: the cameras are both really extremely well thought out regarding handling and ergonomics... they are super fast, and the raw files are very very good. what more does one want?

Anything I've missed?

cheers,

anton

Wired:

This story is being previewed exclusively on Apple News until Tuesday, September 22nd. Please check this page again at that time.

To view this story in the Apple News app on your iOS 9 device, follow this link: https://news.apple.com/A-oPQmJNfTyi9oHKs1xCY3w.

Interesting. I wonder what they’re getting from Apple for this? Cash? Is anyone else doing this?

You can’t even read this on a Mac until Tuesday, because Apple News is (for now) iOS-only.

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In this industry, you gotta be tough.

I’m just kidding. We’re a bunch of literates who enjoy reading so much that we built our own news readers. But when a behemoth like Google makes a call that places you at the business end of 100,000 frantic power users, reminding yourself how tough you are is one way of dealing with the madness.

Google announced Reader’s sunset at 4pm on March 13th, 2013. At that point I had spent three and a half years building my vision of a better news reader. I clearly wasn’t doing it for the money, since my paltry salary didn’t even cover my market rate rent in San Francisco. RSS was a decidedly stupid technology to piggyback off of to try and cover that financial disconnect.

Take a look at this graph. It shows NewsBlur’s income versus its expenses for the past 16 months. Just look at those few months before the Google Reader shutdown announcement in March 2013.

It was never hard to justify to others why I worked on a news reader for three-some years, partially because I’d been justifying it to myself for so long. I had the delusion that it would all work itself out in the end, so long as I kept pushing my hardest and shipping features users wanted. And, at the time, with 1,000 paying subscribers, it certainly felt like I was getting somewhere.

If you’re curious about why expenses are so high, think about what it takes to run a modern and popular news reader. This graph breaks down expenses for an average month from the past year.

Why spend all that money on subcontractors and new tools? Because I’m investing in building an even better news reader.

Fast forward a year and let hindsight tell you what’s what. I was irrational to think that I could make it on my own in a decaying market, what with all the air sucked out by Google. But that three year hallucination kept me persevering to build a better product, which positioned NewsBlur well as a strong candidate for a Reader replacement. When the sunset announcement dropped, it didn’t take long to fortify the servers and handle all the traffic. NewsBlur permanently ballooned up to 20X the number of paid users. People flocked to NewsBlur because it was among the furthest along in creating real competition. As we say on NewsBlur, the people have spoken.

The post-Google Reader landscape

I run a very opinionated news reader. If you think somewhat like I do, you couldn’t be more pleased with the direction NewsBlur goes. But this is still a power tool, and in a world of casual readers who don’t care where their news is coming from so long as it’s in their interests and matches their biases, NewsBlur is the coffee equivalent of the AeroPress. Most people want drip coffee and they don’t bother wasting mental energy on caring about the difference in taste or quality. It’s a binary to them: coffee or no coffee. There’s nothing wrong with that, they just choose to focus on other things more important to them than the sourcing or control they have of their coffee.

Many competing news readers are visual and offer a similar experience. When you want to give up control in exchange for the digested output of sophisticated and heartless algorithms, they’re your best bet. When you want to exert control and know what you want and from which sources, NewsBlur is the only option. No other reader gives you training, statistics, and sharing in one multi-platform app. Nobody else cares so much about RSS as to work on a news reader when it was still a financial inevitability of failure.

Future work on NewsBlur

If the past is any indication, NewsBlur is going to continue to see many more improvements. This graph of contributions from the past 365 days shows my level of unwavering dedication.

One way people speak is by committing code to NewsBlur’s GitHub repo. Try developing your own pet feature. I’ll even do some of the hard work for you, so long as you give it a good try and submit a pull request.

Meanwhile, I’m using the windfall to develop a secret project that will complement NewsBlur in a way that hasn’t been tried before with any reader. And if that fails, I’ll find an even better way to make my users happy with their purchase. If you thought I was relentless before March 13th, 2013, just wait until you see what I’m capable of with the finances to build all the big ticket features I’ve been imagining for years.

And while you’re here, do me a favor and tweet about NewsBlur. Tell your followers, who are probably looking for a better way to read news, about how much you rely on NewsBlur. Reading positive tweets about NewsBlur every morning (and afternoon and evening and before bed) make this the best job I’ve ever had.

Kurt Andersen, Kurt Anderson, writing for Vanity Fair:

David Hockney and others have speculated — controversially — that a camera obscura could have helped the Dutch painter Vermeer achieve his photo-realistic effects in the 1600s. But no one understood exactly how such a device might actually have been used to paint masterpieces. An inventor in Texas — the subject of a new documentary by the magicians Penn & Teller — may have solved the riddle.