Sigma lens compatibility with the Nikon Z7

Sigma just released an updated Z7 compatibility study, which thankfully is mostly just “everything works as it should”, though there four exceptions, and one which is pertinent to me: 50mm F1.4 DG HSM | Art:  When starting to shoot with the subject completely out of focus, the response to the AF operation is intermittent. It… Read more

Nikon Z7 second impressions

I’ve had much more time, since my first impressions posts, to use the Z7.  I’ve used it for studio portraiture, wildlife (albeit at zoos mostly), hiking, around the house (kittens for teh win!), and more.  A pretty wide range of scenarios.  The scenarios I haven’t yet explored with it, but really want to soon, are… Read more

tmutil is broken by SIP in Mojave

A diskutil bug unceremoniously erased an entire hard drive of mine a few weeks back.  While I was able to successfully (AFAICT) restore the drive’s contents to it from various backups, the erasure gave the drive a new identity (UUID, specifically).  The next time Time Machine ran, it compounded the diskutil bug by also unceremoniously… Read more

Nikon Z7 second first impressions

Having spent a week or so using the Z7 – though still not as much as I’d like, given the continued need to work for a living – I have some further thoughts, beyond / expanding upon my very first impressions. Autofocus Photo mode Autofocus is a problem. It is very clear that the Z7’s AF… Read more

ffmpeg can produce pseudo-corrupt audio when ‘copy’ing to an MP4 container

I’ve been using ffmpeg to trim clips from a trail camera, as most of the time there’s only a few seconds of anything interesting in frame out of the 30+ seconds of video it records each time, but I don’t want to re-encode them and lose video quality as a result (or balloon file sizes… Read more

Apple Mail crashes on launch if connection logging is enabled

This was a fun one.  Mail started crashing on launch for absolutely no apparent reason – nothing had changed to its config or similar in a long time.  The crash logs were all fingering an identical culprit – -[IMAPTaskManager secondaryIdleMailboxName] called on the wrong GCD queue: Process: Mail [19884] Path: /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/MacOS/Mail Identifier: com.apple.mail Version: 11.3… Read more

‘Fake error’ about immutable values when using popFirst() on Array

It’s been a while since I wrote any meaningful Swift.  How I didn’t miss the Swift compiler’s bullshit error messages. That yields, on the popFirst() method: Cannot use mutating member on immutable value: ‘someArray’ is immutable. No it’s not.  It’s simply not. For whatever reason, if you instead call popFirst() on ArraySlice – ostensibly indistinguishable from… Read more