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bazkie 👩🏼‍💻 bitplanes 🎵 reshared this.


Nothing makes you hate cars more than living on a busy street, forced to listen to their din day in and day out. >:(

Cities Aren't Loud: Cars Are Loud — Not Just Bikes

Urban noise is a common problem, and the vast majority of it is created by motor vehicles. Noise is far too often dismissed as a minor nuisance, rather than the legitimate health issue that it is.

The book "Curbing Traffic" has a chapter about the health impacts of noise pollution. I explore the research in the book, and visit Delft, the city that is highlighted in the book as being a shining example of what can happen when noise pollution is taken seriously.

This video explores the problem that farting cars, farting motorcycles, and farting mopeds create in our cities.

#FuckCars #urbanism

in reply to Neil E. Hodges

every time I contemplate "upgrading" the stock exhaust on my bike, I remember it's already louder than a car exhaust.

Most car exhausts, anyway. Not the M3 that my neighbour across the road drives.

in reply to Neil E. Hodges

The last place I lived was originally on a country road and was generally pretty quiet. But growing up population of the nearby city meant more and more traffic, and subdivisions (one was which ended up against my back property line). By the time I moved, the area had become solidly suburbia and the road became a major secondary road and quite noisy

bazkie 👩🏼‍💻 bitplanes 🎵 reshared this.


From here:

There is no 'free' market, and there never has been. The 'free' market is predicated on the belief that all players will act honestly, and make informed choices based on available information. This is a completely false assumption, and has been proven so time after time.

It completely ignores human nature whereby someone will always lie, cheat, and steal to achieve their own ends -- this is what we see here.

Industry players will always form cartels and collude in anti-consumer behavior -- price fixing being the prime example.

Without someone to keep corporations in line, the market would steadily skew to all of the power being in the hands of a few.

There is no such thing as a 'free' market, and there simply never has been. It's a utopian myth which can never be true.

People who go around spouting about the 'free' market are either naive, self deluded, or actively lying.

#capitalism

in reply to Neil E. Hodges

damn, so we've had 11 years of this very thing getting worse.

when will people get it?! people keep voting for these pro corporate parties and it's depressing

in reply to bazkie 👩🏼‍💻 bitplanes 🎵

Said parties have both rigged it to be this way and have convinced the people that this is the only way it can ever be. :(
in reply to Neil E. Hodges

well, the same is happening here in the Netherlands. people have been voting the neoliberals into power for decades, despite things going to shit, and other parties being available here.

it's the propaganda that's working; most people still believe that free market capitalism is great, and it will take a lot more downfall before they understand it's shit.

Neil E. Hodges reshared this.

in reply to bazkie 👩🏼‍💻 bitplanes 🎵

@bazkie same in UK, but I think its also because neoliberalism provided short term gains - a young adult working in the skilled trades or the remaining middle level office jobs which exist and haven't been outsourced/replaced by AI can afford to get a used Audi on finance and just about run it - they get scared of green/left parties as they think "tax will go up and petrol will be £2/2€ a litre again" and that's a powerful paranoia (especially if they are in a long term relationship and have now got kids to feed/fund through school)
in reply to bazkie 👩🏼‍💻 bitplanes 🎵

@bazkie about 10 years ago when I had learned just enough Dutch to read sites where younger folk hung out (and chat to them) I learned a fair few thought all the bicycles, good public transport (which folk in UK often envy!) and the high cost of learning to drive (which is same as UK) was imposed by "big government/EU" and they wanted to have cars just like young people in UK, enjoyed watching Top Gear and thought folk in UK and USA had more "freedom" (and those youths would be 30-40+ by now, many with families of their own)

At least you are highly unlikely to get Nexit as everyone can see the mess the UK is now in 5 years later..

in reply to Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK

@vfrmedia UK has been a lovely warning sign for us indeed!

..tho people have been voting far right the past few years despite Trump, so maybe most people don't really understand warning signs 😅

and about that dutch youth; keep in mind we've had neoliberal rule for decades now, so the whole "free market good, nationalization bad" has been really hammered in.

not sure if we'll get rid of it in my lifetime tbh. but most of the lovely social policies we have left stem from the more progressive governing we had before I was born 😅

btw why did you learn dutch? (maybe I asked before)

in reply to bazkie 👩🏼‍💻 bitplanes 🎵

@bazkie I moved to Suffolk, which is not /that/ far from the Netherlands (especially at the point of Lowestoft which is the furthest Eastern part of England) and has many cultural and trade links with NL, also I am a former radio pirate and was always curious about the pirate radio scene there and started listening to the stations and wanted to learn the language (piratenzenders are quite surreal, with 3 different languages of music and songs which are a mix of synthpop/disco, country and western and seashanties 😁 )
in reply to Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK

@vfrmedia ohh right I think you mentioned that before! those piratenzenders sure are something else :D it's funny how it combines, eh, "rural culture" with everything else!
in reply to Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK

I love pirate radio!

I don't know if it's actually a pirate station, here's an FM broadcaster near Quinault Lake here that plays all kinds of odds and ends with weird stuff in between. It might fall under LPFM, but I doubt the FCC would hassle them anyway since it's in the middle of nowhere and low power.

in reply to Neil E. Hodges

@vfrmedia what's LPFM?

I wonder if maybe the FCC is a bit more relaxed these days since people listen to FM radio less (or well, I imagine that they do)

in reply to Neil E. Hodges Neil E. Hodges reshared this.

the "free market" is to economics what the frictionless spherical cow is to high school physics.

The very existence of corporations means there is no free market. Corporations are a legal construct of governments that grants a business (and later even a mere collection of assets) status as a district entity separated to some degree from the owners and workers within.

As such, there is no choice between "government vs corporations" because they are *two sides of the same coin*...it is all one big hegemony.

We have all been thoroughly conditioned to think otherwise for a couple of centuries now. It is thoroughly ingrained the minds of everyone in the "free world" that corporations are the capitalist free market and government is the socialist planned economy but that is pure BS.

The biggest economies in the world have arrived in the same place from two different directions...the US being a corporatocratic regime and China practising state capitalism.

As such deregulation just means re-regulation.


in reply to Neil E. Hodges

≠ PHYSICAL REMOVAL WILL BE REQUIRED ≠ is ignored

Neil E. Hodges doesn't like this.


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Found these cute old sheds (still in use!) in Woodland Park while exploring a new route with the knobby-ish gravel tires on my Soma Stanyan. (1)

Definitely getting better with the color calibration tool in #Darktable. Having the flexibility to pick any hue for the illuminant is very nice! :)

#photography #photog #photos #photo #mywork #Seattle #seabikes #cycling #bicycle #mastobikes #biketooter


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This might sound stupid, but can you just shoot at D60 and then set a #Darktable style that does the white balance based on that? Is there a way to manually adjust the white balance of the entire collection you're editing? 😅

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Just had a #Darktable epiphany: when the color balance RGB module's saturation results in far too much tint, it means that it's blowing up the color of an incorrectly chosen illuminant. 0_0 #photography #photog
in reply to Neil E. Hodges

Honestly, that's my relationship with #motorcycle riding, too. I've learned what works for me and can fire it off without having to think about it. 👍

Neil E. Hodges reshared this.


Was having a lot of trouble with white balance in #Darktable, but this post and this post helped a lot. #photography

The way to deal with colour balances that are far from daylight is to use the "custom" settings where you have a hue and chroma sliders. It's often easiest to use the colour picker on something you want neutral (it defaults to the whole image - the edges, which usually works for me), or one of the auto modes to choose an initial starting point and then adjust from there.
And just to expand on bloodyTribology's excellent answer, when adjusting the hue and chroma, you are trying to match the colour of the illuminant (light source), not the colour/tint you want for your image. So, if you took a shot in a room with a tungsten bulb, which is a very warm yellow, you could use the custom setting to set the hue and chroma sliders to match the warm yellow cast of the bulb, which would then make the image more blue. It might seem a little counter-intuitive if you're used to warming up an image by moving the temperature slider to a warmer shade, for example.




I thought I was saving time by not doing manual white balance calibration before taking photos (using automatic white balance), but the white balance (both color temperature and magenta-green tint) are much worse in #Darktable without that calibration. :( #photography #photog


I made a discovery while doing #photo editing today: the red from having the color temperature adjustment's set too high registers with my eyes more than the yellow does. If I lower the color temperature until the weird red tint goes away, the result is better than trying to focus on the yellows. #darktable #photography #photog


Hey @dieter_wilhelm . I was wondering what you would suggest to make this edited photo look better. The original photo was of a storefront with a strong Sun behind the clouds (way too much contrast between the sky and subject), and this result feels far too either blue or or green (hard to tell for me) around the ground and buildings (aside from the obviously green primary subject).

I would typically use different exposure settings on the bright versus dark stuff, but I'm trying to figure out tone/base/RGB curves to see if they could also be used. Maybe the right thing to do would be apply the different exposures to even out the foreground and sky, followed by using one of those curves to fine-tune? I'm not sure.

Thanka in advance for any feedback.


#photography #darktable

This entry was edited (2 years ago)


Just got a new #trackball. Switched from a Logitech Trackman Marble to a Kensington Orbit.

I'll miss the extra buttons, but the scroll wheel will be far more useful with #Darktable. At least I can emulate the middle button easily.


Do any # users know how to adjust the size of a circle without a wheel mouse? # #


Been playing around with RAW photo editing in #Darktable for the past week. I have a lot of it down, but I could really use a tool for checking the tint of grey surfaces. (1, 2, 3, 4) #photography #photog #photo #photos

The photos here are from my usual route through Woodland Park by #bicycle , which I discovered by old-fashioned wayfinding. #cycling #seabikes

Unknown parent

Neil E. Hodges
Having something familiar in the shot that you know should look a certain way certainly does help!


Unknown parent

Neil E. Hodges
Thanks for all the help with this.