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diff --git a/scratch.txt b/scratch.txt index fc78462..712e968 100644 --- a/scratch.txt +++ b/scratch.txt @@ -1,83 +1,74 @@ The energy of chaos is required to change the existing order. -# Scratch - -It began the way all Travco adventures should. After the last things were stowed securely away, I fired up the engines, which roared the life. I sat down, grabbed the shift handle, put my foot on the brake... and it went straight to the floor. No brakes at all. Perfect. Travco brakes. You either hate them, or you don't have a Travco. - -Actually they aren't that bad, but they do require regular attention. I knew what was wrong. Whenever I park with the wheels angled too sharply to the right, the driver's side wheel leaks brake fluid[^1]. We'd been sitting like that for five days. I opened the master cylinder reservoir and sure enough, it was basically dry. I refilled it and started pumping the pedal. Still nothing. - -I had to run the last of the trash to the dump (where we lived there was no trash service), so I did that and used the time to think about the brakes. Probably just need to pump them some more. I got back and did that. Still no brakes. And it was past departure time. Well. Shit. It was raining by now. The yard was getting muddy, especially right around the bus. - -I pulled out the service manual just to make sure there was nothing unusual about bleeding the brakes in this thing. There didn't seem to be. So I grabbed a strip of sockets and a socket wrench and got down in the mud. Corrinne pressed the pedal, the kids fetched my tools when I forgot them back at the previous wheel, and together we bled the lines all the way around. I got back in and fired it up again. Nice strong pedal. Perfect. We hit the road. - -I've had people ask if I am really as calm and collected in these situations as I write them and the answer in the past, was, not always. I do have a natural tendency to remain calm in stressful situations, and in fact I get calmer as tension increases, which even I don't understand. Whenever something goes wrong, the stress for me isn't that something went wrong, it all comes down to -- what is the problem? I used to get very frustrated because I wouldn't know what was wrong with the bus. - -When we left on this trip originally I knew very little about how an engine works and even less about the nearly infinite number of things that can go wrong. I still don't know everything, but after three years of keepin' on keepin' on, I've figured out a few things. Thanks to my uncle Ron, a mechanic in New Orleans, some YouTube channels, and the powerful motivating factor of, I HAVE TO FIGURE THIS OUT, I know more about what might be wrong. Whether or not I can fix it is a different story. Not only are my skills limited, the tools I can carry and the places I have to work are also limited. I'm probably not going to be replacing a cam shaft at the side of the road. Things I can't fix will probably still go wrong, but at least now I'll know when those situations come up. In hindsight, of the four major mechanical repairs I've hired out in the first three years we traveled this way, today I would only hire out one of them. Even though one, I'm not sure I'd hire out. I might at least try to convince a Walmart to let me spend a few days in their parking lot redoing a head gasket. - +# Stories to Tell +- ice storm, staying longer in one place, snow storm +Long time readers may have noticed we've been moving a little slower than we once did. This was partly a conscious decision on our part, and partly a consequence of needing to stay south until it warms up. And it has not warmed up yet. +I like the slower pace most of the time -- we've ended up spending about two weeks everywhere so far -- but one unintended consequence of both moving slower and making reservations is that you really can't dodge the weather. In the old days I used to study wind and weather maps to figure out where we should go to stay warm or cool, but when you have immutable reservations, and everything else is booked solid for months anyway, the weather becomes something that happens to you. -[^1]: This is something that needs to be properly addressed at some point, but it's been doing this for over three years now, so I don't worry about it too much. In a campground site the wheels usually end up straight, it's only boondocking that sometimes the wheels end up cockeyed and I forget to spin them straight. +Our first week at Huntington the weather was beautiful. Warm enough to spend some time out on the beach, though not quite warm enough for bathing suits. -# Stories to Tell -- Packing up chaos, pairing down, getting rid of -- Drive down, perfect beginning, solving problems -- Edisto and birthday +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-26_175623_huntington-beach.jpg" id="image-2779" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-24_164914_huntington-beach.jpg" id="image-2778" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-23_170931_huntington-beach-sp.jpg" id="image-2777" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-23_165640_huntington-beach-sp.jpg" id="image-2776" class="picwide" /> -"It seems to me that we all look at nature too much, and live with her too little." -Oscar Wilde, De Profundis +Then, the day we were supposed to leave an ice storm rolled through. Judging by the way the chain stores around town shutdown early you'd have thought it was the end of the world. Most of the locals seemed imperturbed, but for some people these days any slight inconvenience seems to be the end of the world. What actually happened was that overnight the world was coated in a thin layer of ice. Beautiful, cold, and windy, but hardly the end of the world. It was all gone by the afternoon. -The average person spends 87% of their time indoors and another 6% in enclosed vehicles https://indoor.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/lbnl-47713.pdf +We got up early to see the rime of ice on the marsh, the trees. The birds were imperturbed, picking in the shallows for food as they always do. -## birds to write about: +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-22_105735_huntington-ice-storm.jpg" id="image-2793" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/IMG_20220123_094515.jpg" id="image-2784" class="picwide" /> +<img src="images/2022/2022-01-22_105425_huntington-ice-storm.jpg" id="image-2775" class="picwide" /> -- carolina wren -- tree swallow -- black capped chickadee -- cedar waxwing -- kingbird -- that hawk on the ground -- willet -- gold crowned kinglet -- blackthroated green warbler -# In Progress -## Essay on Will -If you want control over what you consume, you're going to have to strengthen your will. So long as you are surrounded by signals that are trying to get you to spend money on crap, it is going to be an uphill battle. If you can I strongly suggest removing yourself from the signals -- think about where your attention is going and how you can redirect it to craft rather than stuff. -but there are things more powerful. The most important of those is your will. -If, like most people, you can't pick and move to foreign country for a month then you're going to have to try to change in the midst of the battle so to speak. While possible, this is much much harder. And again, while I like to think I have mastered this, my spreadsheet says otherwise, so take this advice with a grain of salt. Chances are good that this actually much harder than you or I think and you're going to need to put in more effort than I'm suggesting. +## birds to write about: +## Carolina Wren +I have so many Carolina wren stories it's hard to know where to start. +If you're ever in the eastern woods and you hear a bird singing and you think *that's beautiful, what bird is that?* there's a good chance it's a Carolina wren. +These little gregarious, brown, slightly hook-billed birds are champion singers and, insatiably curious. According to my kids we've had about ten birds come in the bus in five years of traveling. Nine of them have been Carolina wrens[^1]. Several of them have ended up having to be rescued by hand. +<img src="images/2022/wreninhand.jpg" id="image-2792" class="picwide" /> -The most important thing is to develop your will. I am serious. Start doing exercises to develop your will. For example, force your self up out of the chair right now, turn away from the computer and walk to the nearest wall. Touch it. Come back and sit down. Repeat this at random during the day. Is it pointless? Absolutely. So is lifting weights. The principle is the same. So choose a deliberately pointless thing to do, and do it. Then do another one. Then do the same thing every morning for a week. +Before that they used to come in our house in Athens from time to time. This one would sit on the corner of the roof singing every morning for years. -One will-building exercise I do periodically is what I call, for lack of a better phrase, micro travel. It works like this: pick a place at random in the city you live, somewhere you've never been. Choose a time and make an appointment with yourself. Now go work out all the details of getting there, if possible use public transit or walk. Then meet yourself there and make sure you're there on time. Now enjoy a few minutes exploring the area and head home. +<img src="images/2022/bird-feeder_2015-01-10_112302_01.jpg" id="image-2774" class="picwide" /> -I'll leave thinking up other exercises to you, but the point is to develop your will, to have control over your life. It takes a little time to see and feel the effects of this, it's quite subtle, but it will cascade throughout your life in a number of interesting ways, I promise. One will be better control over your impulses. When you walk into, say Target, to buy a new toothbrush your newly developed will will make it easier to walk past everything else and only buy the toothbrush. +Well, it seemed like the same bird, but who knows. Birds do have individual songs, especially Carolina wrens, so if I had been paying attention I might know if it really was the same bird, but I didn't pay that much attention back then. Life before the road tended to run together, I lacked focus and attention. Which isn't to say the days don't sometimes run together on the road, or that I live in a state of constantly heightened awareness, just that there are more markers by which to measure on the timeline of our travels. -Eventually your will may help you recognize that stores that have everything are too much for your will. It would be cleverer to buy that toothbrush at a smaller store with fewer things, because it's easier to remove temptation than resist it. Think of it like dieting. If you're trying to eat less ice cream it's much easier to not walk down the ice cream aisle at all than it is to walk down it and without buying anything. +To tell the truth I didn't pay much attention to Carolina wrens until we started to travel. They were so ubiquitous I found them overwhelming. I've always thought of wrens as the more solitary creatures of the desert southwest, where canyon wrens are a familiar sound in the red rock country of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado. But they're a familiar sound you usually hear by itself, not a chorus like you get with the Carolina wrens. -This also leads into my second suggestion for buying less stuff: change your habits. It's convenient to go to Target and get everything you need in one place, but chances are you're going to spend more than you intended without realizing it. In fact the entire experience of being in Target has been engineered to increase the chance you'll spend more than you intended. Every time you enter a store you are entering a hostile environment designed to extract your life energy from you. +It wasn't until they started flying in the bus that I really started pay attention to the Carolina wren. -Oh sure it's all abstracted so you don't have think of it that way. Still, strip the abstraction and relationship is pretty clear, you trade hours of your life for shit you buy at Target. You get up the morning and go to work. That's a day of your life you just traded for paper tickets. Why do you need those tickets? To put a roof over your head and food in your stomach. Pretty much everything after that is not strictly necessary. So once those basics are met you're in th realm of swapping your existence on earth for stuff. +[^1]: Regardless of the actual number, only one has not been a wren, that much I know. It was a chickadee. For whatever reason, all these happened on the east coast. Perhaps western birds are more wild? -The less stuff you buy, the less you need to work. By extension, the less time you spend in places designed to extract money from you, the less of your life you'll have to trade for stuff. +- tree swallow +- black capped chickadee +- cedar waxwing +- kingbird +- that hawk on the ground +- willet +- gold crowned kinglet +- blackthroated green warbler -That's a habit you can break -- going to all-in-one-place stores -- but there are other habits you can build that will help immensely as well. +# Scratch -One of the things I've been at pains to avoid is making it sound like we don't like the United States. In fact we do very much, it's one of the most beautiful places in the world and has some of the wildest and safest wilderness you're ever going to enter. +"It seems to me that we all look at nature too much, and live with her too little." -Oscar Wilde, De Profundis -Unfortunately, the United States is not the best travel value for us. Without an income we'd have to dip heavily into savings to travel the states in the bus. +The average person spends 87% of their time indoors and another 6% in enclosed vehicles https://indoor.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/lbnl-47713.pdf @@ -99,7 +90,7 @@ Ways to reduce travel spending: * no more lenses, amazon orders, ever. * use local libraries * have corrinne get meds down here. - * start with forays into mexico, but gradually reverse -- here becomes our home base with forays into the states + * start with forays into mexico, but gradually reverse—here becomes our home base with forays into the states * how much less? Don't know but I think we could do - $1200/month groceries @@ -129,7 +120,7 @@ The other major task in midlife is to recognize the ciclical nature of, well, na You learn to live your life on the margin, that strange zone between what is known and what is not. There are some answers here, but not many, and you have to make that place your home. -The margins are where you want to be though, this is where everything happens, it's where life is, where growth is. Go deep in the forest and everything gets soft and quiet, but come out to the edge and you'll find the berries and the birds and the deer and all the rest of life -- inhabiting the margins. In ecology this is sometimes called a liminal zone. It's where life is in transition and biodiversity is greatest. It's where the action is and it's where you want to be. +The margins are where you want to be though, this is where everything happens, it's where life is, where growth is. Go deep in the forest and everything gets soft and quiet, but come out to the edge and you'll find the berries and the birds and the deer and all the rest of life—inhabiting the margins. In ecology this is sometimes called a liminal zone. It's where life is in transition and biodiversity is greatest. It's where the action is and it's where you want to be. I've learned that the future will get here at the same steady pace as it always does whether you worry about it or not. @@ -251,7 +242,7 @@ Now the evolutionary threat is largely gone though novelty becomes useful. It a ## Maps -“Some for one purpose and some for another liketh, loveth, getteth, and useth Mappes, Chartes, & Geographicall Globes.” -- John Dee, +“Some for one purpose and some for another liketh, loveth, getteth, and useth Mappes, Chartes, & Geographicall Globes.”—John Dee, source: https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2019/oct/20/the-perfect-combination-of-art-and-science-mourning-the-end-of-paper-maps @@ -349,7 +340,7 @@ After all, we’re really dealing with two separate things: The purpose of work is to create. It is to fuel your soul. -Whereas the purpose of earning money is to have enough of the stuff. How much is enough? Whatever you need to max out your happiness potential. After that, more money will not make you any happier." -- MMM +Whereas the purpose of earning money is to have enough of the stuff. How much is enough? Whatever you need to max out your happiness potential. After that, more money will not make you any happier."—MMM Greek Proverb which says, “A society grows great when the old people plant trees, even when they know they will never get to enjoy their shade.” @@ -375,7 +366,7 @@ Who were the friends of a long year? What were the friends of a long year? When It was a hard time. My wife took a job teaching English to Chinese five year old. It was a degrading business for someone with a master's in education, dancing like a monkey (I mean that literally) for tech companies whose "training materials" had more typos than a teenager's messaging logs. It was a dark time, but one you have to put somewhere else so your children don't realize how thin the line between having food and not can be because that's stress you try to keep your children from, even if you ultimately can't. Better your child be hungry than be hungry and have to wrestle with why. There's a surface level of why, the obvious, the because we have no job, that's easy enough to explain and we did, what's harder is to look the whole system in the eye and consider it, this thing humans have built where in fact there needs be nothing of the sort. Why force people to earn paper tickets, really electronic tickets these days, not even real tickets, that can be exchanged for food, shelter, etc. Why allow such a small number of humans to own all the land? Why allow anyone to own the land at all? These are much harder questions for children to face, for anyone to face. The rest of us have time and effort already invested in ignoring these questions, in pretending that the way things are is the only way they could be, that we don't have to face them the way children do, we simply look the other way and hang our heads and dance like monkeys for the foriegn kids and collect our digital tickets and buy food for our children, or try anyway. -The stupid thing is we know this isn't the only way. The status quo only seems inevitable if it's all you know and we, creators of a culture that is obsessed with past cultures, know for absolute surety that there are other ways. Pretty much any tribal society for instance -- which is a huge negative value judgment in that phrase that I'll be coming back to -- +The stupid thing is we know this isn't the only way. The status quo only seems inevitable if it's all you know and we, creators of a culture that is obsessed with past cultures, know for absolute surety that there are other ways. Pretty much any tribal society for instance—which is a huge negative value judgment in that phrase that I'll be coming back to -- @@ -396,7 +387,7 @@ The ability to think deeply and purposefully is one of those skills that, once y ## family in mexico -I've never lived in a culture that was so hard working an so devoted to family. These are things that I grew up hearing people talk about -- hard work and family -- but I've never actually seen it like I see it here. Which is not meant to denigrate people in other places, hard work is not a zero sum game, but here work and life flow together with no real strong boundaries like you'd find in the States, for example. +I've never lived in a culture that was so hard working an so devoted to family. These are things that I grew up hearing people talk about—hard work and family -- but I've never actually seen it like I see it here. Which is not meant to denigrate people in other places, hard work is not a zero sum game, but here work and life flow together with no real strong boundaries like you'd find in the States, for example. My favorite example of this is bus drivers. In the United States if you drive a bus, you wear a uniform and, aside from your face and body shape, you are largely indistinguishable from whomever is driving the next bus. Chances are, when you get off you park the bus and go home. It's not in any meaningful way, your bus or even your work, you are by design an meaningless cog in a profit wheel where most of the profits go to someone other than you. I could make a good case that this is an awful way to live, severely limits your humanity, leads to depression and dissatisfaction with your work and life, and is one of the more profound and overwhelming problems in American culture, but we won't get into that here. @@ -572,3 +563,124 @@ we could manage cocktails out of ice and water I wouldn't want to be faster or greener than now if you were with me O you were the best of all my days + +# Essays + +## Buying Used + +I can't recall the last time I bought something new. We almost always buy electronics used, mostly off eBay. We also rarely buy new books. We generally pick up books at used bookstores around the country, but when we can't find what we want we use Thriftbooks. + +Buying used has several advantages over buying new. The obvious one is that it's almost always cheaper. But beyond that there are other appealing aspects. Buying used means you're not contributing as much to the waste stream of modern economies, and you're (potentially) removing things from that waste stream by finding a use for them. Used items, especially electronics, tend to be functionally superior to new ones[^1] both because they are farther back on the curve of [diminishing returns](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/law%20of%20diminishing%20returns) and because they have stood the test of time. There are exceptions of course, but buy and large last year's model is as good, and sometimes better, than this year's model. + +Buying used also enables you to take advantage of little curiosities of time. For example all the really good low-noise sound recording devices seem to have been made between 2007-2016. Why? No idea. But everyone who needs low noise recording seems to agree, and high end recorders from that era sell for more than they did when they were new. Which is to say that buying used isn't always cheaper, but when it's not it generally means you're getting something superior. And not something that the manufacturer thinks is superior, but something the people using it the most think is superior. + +This is why the only affiliate links on luxagraf.net lead to either eBay or Thriftbooks, my two preferred marketplaces for buying used stuff. + +Anyone using affiliate links is trying to sell you something -- that includes me -- and you should always be suspicious about that. I know my motives are simple, to make some money to pay for this website and maybe some tea for myself, but you have every right to skeptical. Really though, I don't want you to buy anything you don't need. But if you do need something, please buy it used. And if you're going to buy something I've recommended based on my experiences with it, then the affiliate links will help support this website. + +[^1]: The odd mixture of capitalism and our culture's worship of "progress" means that new things must constantly be released, but the law of diminishing returns suggests that newer/bigger/better/faster eventually fails to deliver any meaningfully improvement. This is most obvious in software, where the most feared phrase in any software user's heart is "please restart to update", but this lack of improvement over previous versions is increasingly painfully obvious in hardware as well. +## Essay on Will + +If you want control over what you consume, you're going to have to strengthen your will. So long as you are surrounded by signals that are trying to get you to spend money on crap, it is going to be an uphill battle. If you can I strongly suggest removing yourself from the signals—think about where your attention is going and how you can redirect it to craft rather than stuff. + +but there are things more powerful. The most important of those is your will. + + +If, like most people, you can't pick and move to foreign country for a month then you're going to have to try to change in the midst of the battle so to speak. While possible, this is much much harder. And again, while I like to think I have mastered this, my spreadsheet says otherwise, so take this advice with a grain of salt. Chances are good that this actually much harder than you or I think and you're going to need to put in more effort than I'm suggesting. + + + + + + +The most important thing is to develop your will. I am serious. Start doing exercises to develop your will. For example, force your self up out of the chair right now, turn away from the computer and walk to the nearest wall. Touch it. Come back and sit down. Repeat this at random during the day. Is it pointless? Absolutely. So is lifting weights. The principle is the same. So choose a deliberately pointless thing to do, and do it. Then do another one. Then do the same thing every morning for a week. + +One will-building exercise I do periodically is what I call, for lack of a better phrase, micro travel. It works like this: pick a place at random in the city you live, somewhere you've never been. Choose a time and make an appointment with yourself. Now go work out all the details of getting there, if possible use public transit or walk. Then meet yourself there and make sure you're there on time. Now enjoy a few minutes exploring the area and head home. + +I'll leave thinking up other exercises to you, but the point is to develop your will, to have control over your life. It takes a little time to see and feel the effects of this, it's quite subtle, but it will cascade throughout your life in a number of interesting ways, I promise. One will be better control over your impulses. When you walk into, say Target, to buy a new toothbrush your newly developed will will make it easier to walk past everything else and only buy the toothbrush. + +Eventually your will may help you recognize that stores that have everything are too much for your will. It would be cleverer to buy that toothbrush at a smaller store with fewer things, because it's easier to remove temptation than resist it. Think of it like dieting. If you're trying to eat less ice cream it's much easier to not walk down the ice cream aisle at all than it is to walk down it and without buying anything. + +This also leads into my second suggestion for buying less stuff: change your habits. It's convenient to go to Target and get everything you need in one place, but chances are you're going to spend more than you intended without realizing it. In fact the entire experience of being in Target has been engineered to increase the chance you'll spend more than you intended. Every time you enter a store you are entering a hostile environment designed to extract your life energy from you. + +Oh sure it's all abstracted so you don't have think of it that way. Still, strip the abstraction and relationship is pretty clear, you trade hours of your life for shit you buy at Target. You get up the morning and go to work. That's a day of your life you just traded for paper tickets. Why do you need those tickets? To put a roof over your head and food in your stomach. Pretty much everything after that is not strictly necessary. So once those basics are met you're in th realm of swapping your existence on earth for stuff. + +The less stuff you buy, the less you need to work. By extension, the less time you spend in places designed to extract money from you, the less of your life you'll have to trade for stuff. + +That's a habit you can break—going to all-in-one-place stores -- but there are other habits you can build that will help immensely as well. + + + +One of the things I've been at pains to avoid is making it sound like we don't like the United States. In fact we do very much, it's one of the most beautiful places in the world and has some of the wildest and safest wilderness you're ever going to enter. + +Unfortunately, the United States is not the best travel value for us. Without an income we'd have to dip heavily into savings to travel the states in the bus. + + + +# Pages +## Technology + +The less technology your life requires the better your life will be. That's not to say technology is bad, but I encourage you to spend some time considering your technology use and making sure you *choose* the things you use rather than accepting everything marketed at you. + +This is not my idea. I stole it from the Amish. The Amish have a reputation for being anti-technology, but they're not. Try searching for "Amish compressed air tool conversion" if you don't believe me. The Amish don't rush out and get the latest and greatest, that much is certainly true. They take their time adopting any new technology They step back, detach, and evaluate new technology in a way the rest of us seldom do. + +That's what I try to do. There's very little latest and greatest on this page. I am always trying to get by with less. There's no affiliate links here and I'd really prefer it if you didn't buy any of this stuff, you probably don't need it. Again, I could get by with less. I should get by with less. I am in fact always striving to need less and be less particular. + +Still, for better or worse. Here are the main tools I use. + +## Writing +### Notebook and Pen + +My primary "device" is my notebook. I don't have a fancy notebook. I do have several notebooks though. One is in my pocket at all times and is filled with illegible scribbles that I attempt to decipher later. The other is larger and it's my sort of captain's log, though I don't write in with the kind regularity captains do. Or that I imagine captains do. Then I have other notebooks for specific purposes, meditation journal, commonplace book, and so on. + +I'm not all that picky about notebooks, if they have paper in them I'm happy enough. I used to be very picky about pens, but then I sat down and forced myself to use basic cheap, clear black ink, Bic-style ballpoint pens until they no longer irritated me. And you know what? Now I love them, and that's all I use -- any ballpoint pen. Ballpoint because it runs less when it gets wet, which, given how I live, tends to happen. + +### Laptop + +My laptop is a Lenovo x270 I bought off eBay for $384. I upgraded the hard drives and RAM, which brought the total outlay to $489, which is really way too much to spend on a computer these days, but my excuse is that I make money using it. + +Why this particular laptop? It's small and the battery lasts quite a while (like 15 hrs when I'm writing, more like 12 when editing photos, 15 minutes when editing video). It also has a removable battery and can be upgraded by the user. I packed in almost 3TB of disk storage, which is nice. Still, like I said, I could get by with less. I should get by with less. + +The laptop runs Linux because everything else sucks a lot more than Linux. Which isn't too say that I love Linux, it could use some work too. But it sucks a whole lot less than the rest. I run Arch Linux, which I have [written about elsewhere](/src/why-i-switched-arch-linux). I was also interviewed on the site [Linux Rig](https://linuxrig.com/2018/11/28/the-linux-setup-scott-gilbertson-writer/), which has some more details on how and why I use Linux. + +## Photos + +### Camera + +I use a Sony A7Rii. It's a full frame mirrorless camera which makes it easy to use the legacy lenses I love. I bought the A7Rii specifically because it was the only full frame digital camera available that let me use the old lenses that I love. Without the old lenses I find the Sony's output to be a little digital for my tastes, + +The A7 series are not cheap cameras. If you want to travel you'd be better off getting something cheaper and using your money to travel. The Sony a6000 is very nearly as good and costs much less. In fact, having tested dozens of cameras for Wired over the years I can say with some authority that the a6000 is the best value for money on the market period, but doubly so if you want at cheap way to test out some older lenses. + +### Lenses + +All of my lenses are old and manual focus, which I prefer to autofocus lenses. I am not a sports or wildlife photographer so I have no real need for autofocus. Neither autofocus nor perfect edge to edge sharpness are things I want in a lens. I want, for lack of a better word, *character*. I want a lens that reliable produces what I see in my mind. + +One fringe benefit of honing your manual focus skills[^1] is that you open a door to world filled with amazing cheap lenses. I have shot Canon, Minolta, Olympus, Nikon, Zeiss, Hexanon, Tokina, and several weird Russian Zeiss clones. + +These days I have whittled my collection down to these lenses: + +* Minolta 50mm f/2 +* Minolta 55mm f/1.7 +* Minolta 100mm f/1.7 +* Olympus 50mm f/1.8 +* Olympus 100mm f/2.8 +* Pentax 35 f/3.5 +* Pentax 20 f/4 + +Yes, that's a lot of lenses. I used keep the Minolta 50 f/2 on there about 90 percent of the time, but these days I actually change things up quite a bit more. I'm all over the place. None of these lenses are over $200. + +I also have a Tokina 100-300mm f/4 which happens to be Minolta mount so I use a Minolta 2X teleconverter with it to make it a 200-600mm lens. It's pretty soft at the edges. That's a nice way of saying it's utter garbage at the corners, but since I mostly use if for wildlife, which I tend to crop anyway, I get by. I also have a crazy Russian fisheye thing that's hilarious bad at anything less than f/11, but it's useful for shooting in small spaces, like the inside of the bus. + +## Video + +In addition to the photo gear above, which I also use for video, I have GoPro Hero 9. I mostly use it while driving the bus and have yet to actually make a movie out of any of the footage I shoot. But it piles up on my hard drive and I keep telling myself, one of these days. + +## Audio + +I like to record ambient sound. I use an Olympus LS-10 recorder, which has the lowest noise floor I can afford (it was $100 on eBay). I use a couple of microphones I made myself and occasionally a wireless Rode mic. + +--- + +And there you have it. I am always looking for ways to get by with less, but after years of getting rid of stuff, I think I have reached something close to ideal. + +[^1]: If you've never shot without autofocus don't try it on a modern lens. Most modern focusing rings are garbage because they're not meant to be used. Some Fujifilm lenses are an exception to that rule, but by and large don't do it. Get an old lens, something under $50, and teach yourself [zone focusing](https://www.ilfordphoto.com/zone-focusing/), use the [Ultimate Exposure Computer](http://www.fredparker.com/ultexp1.htm) to learn exposure, and just practice, practice, practice. Practice relentlessly and eventually you'll get there. |